With stone tiles spread like farm crops on a whitewashed Cycladic stairway and with its tables starting at the top of the stairs and reaching almost to the middle, Cavos Sunrise may not have an original name, but it has grace. Broken clay pots for ashtrays, rags laid for people to sit on the white terraces and a mountain of empty Havana Club bottles are prominent in the courtyard. Below, the cliff and the sound of the waves rising from the beach “Seralia” duetting nonchalantly with the Latin melodies.
Welcome to Cuba. This is what you feel when you enter the bar, which looks like a secret crypt and throws you somewhere between the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea. Its walls are covered with slogans, racing greetings and hymns to freedom from travelers who arrive here in the summer with guides in hand. Not only to taste the strong mojito, but to also meet the owner of the bar, Sifnian Costas Georgoulis, one of the few people who can support the designation sui generis. Here, on the edge of the Castle, Costas has set up something like an improvised museum for his two heroes: Che Guevara and Castro.
Books, newspaper clippings and magazines and photos of the two protagonists overflow from every corner of the bar. In the background, Costas stoically prepares drinks, mainly based on rum. I assumed that his unconventional clothes would act as a shield, that he would be distant. But he was not. “Why Che and Fidel?” I asked him. “Because Che died for what he believed in and Fidel lived for fifty years for what he held most important in his heart”, he replied.
During his student years, when he was majoring Political Science and Sociology at Panteion University, Costas managed to make a life journey with his fellow students. Where else, in Cuba. “I raised money from construction and work in the fields and left. We stayed there for a year and picked cane. In return we had food and hospitality. There I learned to live simply and celebrate every moment of life. The state supports all people, they may not have much, but they do not dream of the Big Deal. “We saw where that led us.”
After this trip he returned to the island. And since then he has never traveled again. Never and nowhere. Here, in Kastro, winter-summer. “You know when history repeats itself it looks like a cartoon, so I did not want to go to Cuba again. But I advise you to go now, as long as Fidel’s regime exists. Then there will be a raid, then it will be just a green island, for example like Corfu. It seems to me that you need a little Cuban therapy”. Cuban therapy, I learned, consists in concentrating in the present, in the moment, listening to Latin and not jazz (“What are you saying? Do you hear that chick that sings Blue Moon? Why would you hear sad songs like this? I will give you a cd to take home with you”) and one more thing: to take a cold shower all year round, not turn the radiator on and eat once a day. You do not earn apprenticeship that easy.
Something like the Karate Kid. Except that Costas does not know Karate Kid, because he does not watch movies or television and generally hates everything that has to do with invention and the imaginary. “Experience is what matters. It must be engraved like a tattoo on the mind”, and continues: “I have no curiosity. I like it here. I like to observe, to learn how to read nature, to know what the weather will be like tomorrow. To see the landscape change day by day and hour by hour. When I like something, that’s enough for me, so did the Indians”.
Thus, Kostas’s summer is full of people from all over the world, visitors who even bring him cds with Cuban songs (of which he plays his music in the store), he has people and a party and a lot of work. Winter means fishing and working with the land, the estates, the olives and the animals; it also has reading and music, from Greek rebetika and Theodorakis to Cuban. “Have you come here in the winter?” he asks me. “No” i reply. “It’s, how can I explain it? As if you were on the moon.” The cat bag that seems to leave the quarrels for a while and comes to rest on our feet seems to agree with his observation. “Who is he again?” I ask him. “Che.”