The Land of Bananas and Boom-Boxes

Mixed Blessings and Everyday Ironies

Just under 1,000 people — from African and mestizo backgrounds — call Cabo San Francisco home. As do the residents of most regions of the Esmeraldas province of Ecuador, which sits on the Pacific Ocean just underneath Colombia. The villagers eek out a meager living mostly from sea fishing, with a bit of cacao farming and shrimp harvesting inland. They enjoy very limited access to proper modern medicine (the nearest functional hospital is many, many miles away), and local educational options are grotesquely basic; consisting of a single, intermittently held elementary school and a badly-equipped agricultural training center.

Decades ago, Cabo and most of Ecuador enjoyed a fairly stable if not exploding economic existence due to the staggering production of bananas on plantations throughout the tropical forest. The story goes, though, that the spread of agricultural disease and political bumps led multinationals like United Fruit to pull out of direct banana production in the ’60s and ’70s, leaving a scattering of financially-insecure contract farmers and independent peasant growers in their wake. On the national level, Ecuador turned to oil after the termination of the “banana epoch”, and during the oil export boom suffered economic exploitation by international corporations that exacerbated domestic crises. Today public services are on the verge of collapse throughout the country, and many citizens can barely feed themselves on their newly dollarized incomes (Ecuador’s currency was switched to American dollars several years ago in the midst of political and economic turmoil).

In the absence of access to oil resources, residents of the Esmeraldas province have been forced to make ends meet as best as they can. Of course, big business from “outside” has swooped in on much of the fertile northern Ecuadorean coast, poisoning rivers to facilitate large-scale shrimp farming and chopping down whole forests to export timber. Luckily, the sheer difficulty of access to Cabo San Francisco has spared the village from meeting the more disastrous fates of nearby regions, where locals have been forced to abandon their deforested, dead villages in search of still fruitful, livable land. The lack of a proper paved road through the forest to the west has also meant that Cabo, cut off on the north by the rocky cape and on the east and south by the ocean, has not been touched by that strange beast, tourism, that has washed up on other shores throughout Ecuador like a slick of coconut suntan oil. Thus, beach shacks hawking $1 caipirinhas topped with gaudy paper umbrellas and hordes of European college students parasailing in bikinis are noticeably absent from the village’s wide strip of shoreline, as are rows of local businesses advertising overpriced horseback rides through the forest under the misleading title of “ecotourism”. Still, these blessings are mixed — for although Cabo has been spared excessive corporate exploitation, its agricultural productivity has suffered considerably from the flooding and other climatological effects that have been the legacy of El Niño in recent years, and farmers and fishers still remain without the access to wider markets that would facilitate real revenue generation from their labor.

But enough history lessons, enough about economic contexts. What, in immediate terms, is living in Cabo San Francisco like? What kind of an everyday existence do a people who are connected by a very thin thread to the rest of the world, who live in one of the poorest regions of the Americas, actually enjoy?

To begin with, let’s talk about basic facilities. The first time I entered the village I immediately noticed several crooked, half-functioning street lamps leaning crazily over the dirt paths organized in a semi-legitimate grid. I later learned that these “streets” — lined with houses constructed of varying combinations of cement brick, wood, corrugated metal and palm fronds that must have been brightly colored before their paint started chipping — turn into small rivers during heavy rains. The street lamps, which stand out so in this landscape for their incongruity with the rural setting, don’t always function. Nevertheless, Cabo San Francisco is in fact connected to the national electricity grid; and though lighting is dim, sporadic, and scarce; it still exists, most of the time.

In any case, the electricity situation is superior to that of even rudimentary water services. Thanks to an installation made possible by the Fundacion CSF with financial support from the Swiss Red Cross, the village has technically enjoyed a potable water system since 2000. In actuality, though, nowadays the theoretically running water doesn’t really run — but the irony of living in homes with showers and sinks, yet having to dip into outdoor storage tanks for water, is just an accepted part of everyday life in Cabo.

Another irony is the ubiquitousness of large piles of plastic bottles, waxy paper wrappers, and all kinds of trash strewn across the otherwise pristinely virgin natural haven in which the village sits. Several homes double as simple general stores selling a small inventory pf products ranging from lollipops and crackers to bread and beer, and though packaged supplies are funneled in by delivery vehicles that occasionally brave the ranchera’s “road”, the waste generated by them does not yet have a garbage disposal system into which it can disappear. So much for infrastructure.

But Cabo is so much more than its architecture; I remember the village best for the personalities of its inhabitants. Cabo’s “thoroughfares” are never empty or lifeless. Amidst the beer bottles, candy wrappers, grassy weeds, and mudhills that line the paths between houses flows a perpetual stream of chickens, turkeys, pigs, cats, cows, horses, mules and donkeys — all rather mangy and scraggly-looking. And, of course, their human owners are never far behind. The men usually spend their days working outdoors, shirtless and outfitted in flip-flops, save for those who venture into or live in the tropical forest; they must don tall mud boots and pants to wade in the shallow waters of the river, to fend off the deadly bites of the poisonous snakes slithering about. The women with babies — most females over the age of 18 — usually spend their free time around the home, chatting with friends in doorways and on makeshift porches. And the often haphazardly clad younger kids (an oversized hand-me-down tee shirt here, a ripped pair of shorts there) amuse themselves by splashing in the waves, scraping themselves on rocks in the tidepools, catching beetles, and play-wrestling each other on the grassy field in the center of the village. The common thread between them all is this: no matter who you are, if you live in Cabo you know your neighbors like family, you always greet everyone you pass, and you never forget that you are part of a community.

Bathroom Spiders, Boogie Nights, and (Almost) Everything In-between

During my stay in Cabo, I lived with the family of Enrique Cobena, president of the San Francisco junta parrochial, or local government council. Short, slight, endlessly enthusiastic, and given to frequent off-pitch outbursts into sappy pop ballads, Enrique lives with his plump and soft-spoken wife, Miriam, and two of their daughters, outgoing 13-year-old Viviana and moody five-year-old Breni (the girls’ three older siblings have moved to regional cities to pursue further schooling and steady work). The Quito-based director of Fundacion CSF arranged for me to sleep in an informal third-room addition to the tiny Cobena house, in a little box-shaped area with abbreviated walls, a single bed and A creaky dresser. The geography of the house was such that my doorless, makeshift room was located directly behind the “counter” that served as a small general store at the home’s entrance, and directly beside an area comprising the main living space. In other words, much like everyone else in the village, I had little privacy.

Not that I minded so much. Rather, I grew to appreciate most of the reminders of the lives around me that at home in New York I would consider intrusions into my personal space — lives of all sorts. At night when I brushed my teeth at the cement washing block behind the house, I did so fully aware of the shuffling and breathing of the animals around me, occasionally catching a glimpse of the beady, unblinking eye of a chicken beside my foot. In bed, tucked under the silky screen of a tent-like mosquito net, I’d listen to the buzz of frustrated insects and the muted conversation of Enrique and his wife, dreamily watching lizards flick across the ridges of the tin roof above me. The 5am cacaphonic symphony of Cabo’s roosters always initially stirred me, partially, but it would be a couple more hours before I would fully awaken to the human activity of the home-front store, Senora Cobena’s fiddling with breakfast, and Breni’s morning temper tantrum. And every time I used the bathroom I encountered a hairy, fist-sized spider that hovered ominously in a corner of the wall in that cramped space. Somehow I eventually learned to overcome my intense arachnophobia to accept that other member of the house, too.

The Cobena family were not my only hosts. Three times a day I would visit the shack of a gregarious elderly woman named Senora Felisa where I would take my meals (usually consisting of the staples of the coastal diet: rice, fish, and plantains) and chat. Senora Felisa’s ramshackle kitchen effectively became a second home for me, and my meals often stretched on for hours as she regaled me with village gossip: “so-and-so got in an argument about money owed to so-and-so last night”, and often tragic tales of her past: “my late husband, well, he was a womanizer”. Such conversations were interspersed with episodes of small scuttles with the stubborn, hungry chickens and dogs in search of crumbs that frequently invaded her house through large gaps in the rotting door: “out, you greedy pests!”, as well as exchanged greetings and casual banter with whomever happened to be passing by the open window: “what’s the price of papayas today?”

The Senora’s home was also a haven for loose gangs of young children who would loaf about as their older siblings, working as hired assistants, helped in the kitchen. These wiry, bouncy kids became some of my best friends in Cabo, readily schooling me in village essentials like the fine art of catching crabs on the beach, or guiding me through hidden trails winding beneath the dense green cover of the whirring, breathing forest. “Tell me about the United States”. they would exhort me, and I would oblige. In return, I asked them to teach me games and show me around, and thus learned how to invent complex sports requiring only an old bike tire and some imagination, and I figured out the shortest route from the Senora’s house to the river. It is largely thanks to these children that I learned how to pass time in a world without the Internet and crowds and options of my other world.

Of course, I did have some work to do. Enrique arranged for me to gather data for my survey by interviewing local midwives, or parteras, who delivered the village’s babies in the absence of Cabo’s easy access to any sort of meaningfully functional modern medical center. These women, most of them grey-haired and thoroughly wrinkled, taught me volumes about the enormity of possibilities for traditional medicinal usage of naturally-growing forest plants. My favorite partera was a cheerful and toothless compulsive exaggerator named Eufemia, who whispered theatrically to me in unnecessarily hushed tones about the pain-relieving powers of water boiled with crushed ruda and poleo leaves, and boasted proudly of her success record with head-first deliveries.

Though these sessions with parteras and several other curanderas, or healers schooled in traditional plant-based medicine, occupied some of my time, like the villagers my days always had a lot of empty, wide open hours to fill. And I could only spend so many of those hours tagging along with my younger, seven-year-old buddies. But it didn’t take long before I created a whole repertoire of ways to spend my days. I began to accept men’s often flirtatious invitations to drink coconut water in the shade with them, laughing through their suggestive queries about my love life. I formed a close and trusting relationship with Senora Felisa’s son, Claudio, who sneaked me cigarettes and borrowed rickety canoes to row me down the river. Viviana Cobena, her teenage girlfriends and I spent afternoons braiding each others’ hair and discussing which pop singer we preferred — Shakira or Thalia? An kind older man offered to act as my guide on tours of the forest, leading me on all-day treks through overgrown former banana plantations and introducing me to cacao farmers.

When low tide rolled around, I would head out to the mouth of the river with Claudio to lounge in the bathwater-temperature waters and laughingly dodge the hordes of four year-olds that would crawl all over me when I tried to swim, gleefully giggling and occasionally chanting, “La gringa! La gringa!” When I needed peace I would lay upon a log-like piece of washed-up driftwood on the beach and daydream, facing the softly crashing waves or gazing at the fishermen’s boats. In the evenings I usually planted myself along with other spectators beside the large, scraggly field in the middle of Cabo to watch barefoot young men show off their futbol skills. And like everyone else, during the sporadic but intense thunderstorms I always retreated to shelter, from where I watched the sky split open to drop millions of fat, driving raindrops onto the earth, reveling in the sudden coolness of the air.

Such is the nature of entertainment in the village, with a few exceptions. The Cobena family was lucky enough to own a television that gets reception for two, occasionally three channels. However, the apparatus, as the few others of its kind in Cabo, was more of a radio than a visual instrument; the screen was perpetually an endless mist of gray dots. Nonetheless, the significance of the presence of television in the village cannot be underestimated — it is one of the few mediums connecting this isolated spot on the Ecuadorean map with the rest of the country and even the world, whether through soap operas or generally bombastic news specials or international sports matches. And in my experience the semi-functional television set formed a central part of life in the Cobena home. Every long, sleepy afternoon, Miriam would recline on the bed in her dim, windowless room, listening vaguely to the melodramatic dialogues of the telenovelas crackling out from the set while waiting for store customers to announce themselves. At night the national news formed an unlikely soundtrack to our pre-turn-down routines. And on one more than one occasion I caught Viviana and little Breni surreptitiously flicking the set on to listen to vulgar talk shows, mocking the voices of the trashy woman who was cheating on her husband, or the aspiring model who claimed she looked like Jennifer Lopez.

A few other families were lucky enough to possess perhaps an even more valuable entertainment system than a television: a stereo. It took a while for me to get used to walking into a house and finding myself in a room entirely bare except for a couple of plastic chairs, a kitschy poster of a Swiss landscape or a once-discarded ’80s beer advertisement tacked on the wall . . . and a huge, obviously somewhat expensive stereo in the center of it all. Another irony of Cabo San Francisco is precisely this: the seemingly inexplicable proliferation of audio equipment in a place where people sometimes go hungry.

But soon it made sense to me. Music is important to the life of the village — more important, perhaps, than the scarcity of refrigerators or sometimes even the food to put in them. From the strains of salsa tunes that float from awakening homes at sunrise to the cloying melodies of Chayanne ballads that filter through the evening air, recorded popular music infiltrates almost every aspect of everyday existence in Cabo. Stereos make their way to the village in the hands of those returning or visiting from Atacames or Muisne, as do CDs. The latter, culled from the hundreds of pirate CD stalls that crowd commercial streets, tend to be of the “#1 Cumbia Hits!” or “Hottest Ballads of 2003!” flavor; mishmash genre-based compilations of popular hits. The fact that five-year-old Breni knew half the words to Puerto Rican band Latin Dreams’ reggaeton single, “Quiero Una Chica” and that the old man who lived next door to the Cobena house often hummed East L.A.-based Los Lobos’ “Cancion del Mariachi” testifies not just to the familiarity of Cabo residents with popular Latin music, but to the importance of music as another one of the scare links between the village and the world beyond.

And this music isn’t just for listening, either. On Saturdays almost everyone in Cabo dons their best clothes (a pair of newly washed pants here, a shining white blouse there) and gathers in front of the shabby but sufficient village discoteca, from which party music blares from dusk until dawn. Discoteca Saturdays are a well-respected, hugely important, and rather magical institution in Cabo — young couples merengue the night away on the dancefloor, little kids wiggle their small hips to the music spilling out into the street. And, not surprisingly, clusters of men downing cana gather in the corners and mouth the words to all the songs — notwithstanding Miguel, the village idiot, who also shows up to shake his booty. Even the more reserved types come out to enjoy the scene, selling and eating cheese empanadas with morocho, gossiping and tapping their feet on benches a few doors down from the discoteca. The trials and travails of life in this poverty-stricken corner of the globe dissolve and vanish to the rhythms of the latest reggaeton hits, at least for a few hours during the humid night.

Sunday morning, though, inevitably brings back sobering realities. The alcohol-infused bodies of semiconscious men lie scattered in the dirt in the shimmering eleven o’clock sun, their spanking clean threads of the night before now splattered with beer and mud stains. Mothers worrying about their drunken sons and the nonexistent virginity of their young daughters seek refuge in the pastorless local church to pray. The village heaves a collective sigh as the smoke and mirrors of Saturday night’s party morph inexorably into mouths to feed, sicknesses to overcome, financial headaches to face, the everyday crises of boredom, and dreams of glamorous and wealthy existences somewhere, anywhere else, deferred.

I remember encountering a group of men clustered outside Senora Felisa’s door on my first Sunday in Cabo. Bare-chested and sweating, they sat in a semi-circle passing around a small cardboard box of the sugary rubbing alcohol-like liquid that passes as “wine” in this part of Ecuador, staring at the early afternoon with the glazed, unblinking eyes of those who have been intoxicated for more than 12 hours. All of them fathers of children at least my age, they catcalled me as I walked by, slurring their words. I stopped briefly to acknowledge them with a forced smile, not wanting to appear distant or haughty early on in my stay in the village, not sure of standard etiquette in such a situation. When I did so I remember that one man looked deliberately into my face and then gazed into the sky, crossing himself and fumbling through a showy mock thanks to Jesus in my honor. Five minutes later I entered Senora’s kitchen and was listening to her complain about the lack of religious discipline in Cabo as she began another one of her sad stories about how her alcoholic, unfaithful late husband mistreated her. To say the least, the whole episode left me a bit depressed.

I later realized that there was nothing particularly unusual about my experiences with the men of Cabo. Beginning as young as age 13, females in the village have to deal with often unsolicited and sometimes violent attention from men in a culture of rather unbridled machismo. The evidence of this fact lies in the existence of at least a few adolescent girls saddled with a child but no man willing to own up to fatherhood, and the considerable number of women who “share” a single, promiscuous man.

To be fair, though, the scene I encountered that first Sunday morning not only attuned me to the travails of villagers of my gender, but also revealed to me the tragic tinge that colors the lives of Cabo’s men. The flip side of a macho culture, of course, are the heavy burdens and weighty expectations placed on males to unilaterally support and protect their families. The rampant alcoholism I constantly stumbled across in Cabo stems, I’d venture, not in small part from the fact that economic circumstances preclude most village men from meeting these entrenched cultural demands to act as financial providers and sustainers. They turn to alternatives like cana and beer, perhaps, to escape from the metaphorical castration that reality inflicts upon them.

No Matter the Pace, Life Moves

As time passes and my stay in the village recedes into the past, Cabo San Francisco inevitably blurs and softens in my mind. Every day my memory tends to bathe my time there in a more flattering and forgiving sepia-tinged hue of nostalgia. When I consider my concrete-bound, constantly-rushed urban lifestyle in the United States I am sometimes tempted to romanticize the unhurried, “natural” lives of the villagers. At such moments, though, I remind myself of the Sunday scene I have just described, as well as something that my friend Claudio, impatient to leave home to pursue work in a city in the Ecuadorian sierra, asked me during one of my first meals in his mother’s kitchen: “What do you think of it here?” I explained that I found Cabo to be beautiful and peaceful, and that part of me almost wished I could stay. He made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a laugh and informed me, sagely, “That’s how it always is. People from outside always like it here, but the people who live here all want to leave.”

There is an undeniable amount of truth to Claudio’s somewhat bitter reflection, and so many of my conversations with Cabo residents confirm his sentiments. Though the village contains a number of self-pronounced content young people who laugh at the mention of leaving Cabo and can’t imagine living elsewhere, there is also a large contingent of restless, bored, curious, dissatisfied kids who yearn to get out into the rest of the world.

That much could be said of any place on the planet, be it tiny village or stifling suburb or mega-metropolis — after all, youth is youth, people are people, right? But the difference of Cabo is this: the majority of both those young people who would elect to make this place their home and those who cannot wait to escape this little corner of Ecuador, will probably end up having to leave the village at some point. Why? The reason is quite simple. Even if the really ghastly lack of access to proper medical care or the joke of an educational system in the village doesn’t get to them, the utter lack of any source of livable income will.

I spent my first few days in Cabo wondering where all the young twenty-something folks were, only to quickly discover that most of them had left — they were scattered around urban Ecuador in cities like Guayaquil, Quito, Ambato, Santo Domingo de los Colorados, Esmeraldas — working in convenience stores, factories, restaurants, who knows what. A few had even headed off to Venezuela or Panama, and I even heard of one or two cases where villagers ended up as far away as the city I call my own, New York. The recent dollarization of the Ecuadorian economy has not augmented the already flagging buying power of rural Ecuadorians; thus while the older denizens of Cabo ride out the perilous bumps of real poverty because of that most human quality of inner inertia, the younger folk would be foolhardy to stay.

A microcosm of the fragile condition and rapidly changing context of rural places and peoples in much of the global South, Cabo San Francisco today seems to be somewhat in a state of limbo. On one hand, the underdevelopment of the region renders the geographically isolating physical barriers impeding access to the village as potent, powerful, and real as ever. Yet on the other hand new patterns of domestic and even international labor-driven migration are more subtly eroding the distance between the small, quiet universe of Cabo and the great beyond.

These contextual contradictions manifest themselves in the staggering variety of worldviews I found among the villagers. Upon introducing myself as a visitor from the United States to one older woman at a general store where I bought my drinking water, I was greeted with her perplexed expression and this question: “Is the United States the same country as Spain?” And I cannot even count the number of times I forgot myself and casually mentioned to some villagers that I had taken a trip to Atacames for the day to email my family in the US, and then was forced to attempt the impossible task of explaining the Internet to people who had never touched a calculator, let alone a computer.

At the same time, though, there were the kids who sang Ricky Martin lyrics and demonstrated to me the broken English phrases they had picked up from their visits to their older siblings in nearby cities. There were the traveling salesmen that would occasionally pass through the village to hawk clothing or sombreros, who transmitted the news they learned from the European tourists who bought from them in sierra towns. And there were the other two Western volunteers for Fundacion CSF and a couple of Peace Corps members that had preceded me with similar stays of their own in Cabo. I even remember meeting a burly man on the beach during Easter weekend and learning that he had been working illegally as a truck driver in New Jersey for the past 17 years, though he hailed from the southern port city of Guayaqui. He married a woman from Cabo who now lived with him and their children in the US. They came back to the village to visit her family only for a few days, to be home for the holidays.

Thus while the Cabo of today is in many ways still notable for its distance from the urban, hi-tech, networked, all-access world that I enjoy back in New York, it will not be so forever. Changes are happening to this pocket of the northern Ecuadorian coast, albeit slowly. Aside from the steady emigration of young people from Cabo, there are the so-called “ecotourism” companies that have their eyes on the coastline surrounding the village, along with the lumber companies eager to penetrate into new forest territory after they have plowed through other regions.

I’m not sure what the village of Cabo San Francisco will be like 10, 20, 30 years from now. Will all the young people have left to try their luck in the more promising job markets of the urbanizing great beyond? Will the magnificent coastal tropical forest, one of the most biologically rich areas of the world, still stand, or will it have disappeared under the sharp saws of the short-sighted timber industry? Will a functioning health clinic with a trained doctor exist in Cabo at last, and if so, will the wise old curanderas still be called upon to treat illnesses and injuries with their traditional medicine? Will Fundacion Cabo San Francisco have succeeded in fostering local economic opportunities in the form of artesania (arts and crafts made from wood and natural materials to sell in cities like Quito) and alternative crop farming cooperatives? And, perhaps most importantly: will a paved road be built through the forest or a bridge be erected across the ocean separating the village’s peninsula from connected Muisne?

I spent a good deal of my stay in Cabo reflecting upon these questions, including during my long, blissful walks on the beach when coming and going from the boat launch that led out of the village. Perhaps the real reason I always preferred the long, roundabout ocean-front route to Atacames than the more direct option through the forest in the ranchera is that I wanted to take time to savor the transition from Cabo’s self-contained universe to the big, bad, outside world; I wanted to spend my time in transit thinking hard about where I was coming from and where I was going. I liked the contradictions, the extremes of the journey, the enormity of the sea stretching into seeming infinity before me, the minuteness of the hundreds of miniature orange crabs skittering across the sand at my feet. The life of a villager, my life. The sputtering, weak motor of the rickety boat that would pick me up from the quiet, empty sandy spot beside the mangroves on the peninsula, the roaring engine of La Costenita that would careen at alarming speeds out of Muisne. The planet, Cabo San Francisco.