JUMPING
JAC
FLASH
“
So, if it isn’t you who’s getting
married Geoff, whose wedding
is it?”
After a few glasses of rum
it didn’t matter that I’d met
neither the bride nor the
groom. I had mistakenly assumed
that when he’d said, “Sissy wants
a Cuban wedding. Why don’t you
come?”, he meant his Cuban partner
Sisella. Only after I’d booked the
flight, did he explain that it was her
daughter, Sissy, who I’d never met,
who was having a beach ceremony
near Havana.
In 2006, when on my way up
through Central America on my
Enfield, I considered a detour to
Cuba but had a different agenda
then. Now, aware that Cuba might be
changing and wanting to see it as the
Fidel-run communist regime it had
been since the 1959 ‘revolutionary
awakening’, I asked friends who had
been if it was possible to hire motor-
bikes in Cuba.
TRAVERSE 57
Geoff, a fellow Enfield rider who I’d
met on Pakistan’s Karakoram High-
way in 2000 and was a long-standing
friend, had been a few times and
lived with his Cuban partner, Sisella,
in Bradford, England.
Another travel-mate I’d met in
Syria who also became a good friend,
put me in touch with his friend who
lives and works in Cuba. He had a
motorcycle and generously offered to
lend it.
“Hector isn’t very reliable, but if
you’re willing to take the risk ... ",
Chris enthused. "By the way, I can’t
get anything here, could you bring
some spare parts?”
It was the least I could do. Taking
a couple of sprockets and a bearing
or two was more than a fair ex-
change for use of his motorcycle. But
alarming numbers of things started
arriving from places as far apart as
China and Derby. A metal mountain
blocked the view from my floor-level
window. An overhead valve-spring