01
Stop one
Plaza Mayor of Trinidad
Yonex Exone 100 SL 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Founded in 1514, practically the day before yesterday, by Diego Velazquez de Cuellar, as one of the first Spanish settlements in Cuba. The mansions ringing this square went up during the sugar boom of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and one must be perfectly clear where that money came from: dozens of mills in the surrounding Valle de los Ingenios, worked by tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. Then the sugar collapsed after competition and war, the town was left economically stranded, and being stranded is precisely what preserved it. UNESCO inscribed the town and the valley together in 1988. The streets are still cobbled, unmolested by modern surfacing, and horses are still used. Mercifully.
02
Stop two
Museo Historico Municipal and the Cantero Palace tower
Yonex Exone 100 SL 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Built in the 1830s for the Borrell family and afterwards owned by one Justo German Cantero, a doctor who married into sugar wealth and then published an illustrated survey of Cuba's sugar mills, which is a very particular way of admiring one's own fortune. The rooms are neoclassical, with frescoes and trompe-l'oeil of genuine quality. There is a legend that he acquired the estate by poisoning a rival; it is not documented, and I decline to repeat gossip more than once. Since 1980 the house has been the municipal history museum, covering the sugar economy, slavery and the wars of independence. Climb the lookout tower for the finest view over the tiled roofs to the Caribbean. The courtyard is exactly as a courtyard should be.
03
Stop three
Valle de los Ingenios and the Manaca Iznaga tower
Yonex Exone 100 SL 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Around fifty sugar mills stood in this valley at the height of Trinidad's prosperity in the early nineteenth century, worked by an enslaved population that at times exceeded thirty thousand people. The tower on the Manaca Iznaga estate, raised about 1816 and rising some forty-five metres, was no folly and I will not hear it called one: it was built to watch over the enslaved workers in the fields and to signal with its bell the beginning and the end of their labour. Local legend attributes it to a wager between two brothers. The record says otherwise. The ruined mills, barracks and houses form part of the UNESCO inscription, and a tourist train runs out from town along the old sugar railway.
04
Stop four
Iglesia y Convento de San Francisco
Yonex Exone 100 SL 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: The yellow bell tower is the one silhouette everybody in the world knows, and quite rightly. The Franciscan friars founded the convent in 1813; it later served as a parish church, and from 1930 as a garrison and a school, which is something of a descent. Since 1986 the surviving buildings have housed the Museo Nacional de la Lucha Contra Bandidos, devoted to the campaign against the armed groups that operated in the nearby Escambray mountains between 1959 and 1965 in opposition to the revolutionary government. In the cloister, the cloister, one finds the fuselage of a shot-down aircraft and a boat used in a landing. A cloister was designed for silence. I am adjusting. Slowly.
A good box is cedar, thin, light, and holds its shape for decades without being heavy about it. That is me. Two hundred and seventy grams unstrung, 285 strung, a 100 square inch head, a 16×18 pattern and 27 inches of length. Super light, which is what the SL stands for, and light is not the same as flimsy — ask anybody who has dropped a cedar box down a staircase in Trinidad and picked it up intact.
The wide 16×18 bed lets the strings move, so the ball leaves with spin you did not have to generate yourself. That helps everywhere from a first competitive season to a Sunday afternoon against someone twenty years younger. It is also perfect for the hot slow courts you find in Trinidad, where a heavy frame will simply drain you by the third set and a light one keeps arriving on time.
Trinidad was built on sugar money and nobody here pretends otherwise. The mansions on the square, the marble and the Bohemian glass inside them, the tower out in the valley that existed to watch enslaved people work. A box maker learns to look at beautiful joinery and ask who cut it. Look at Trinidad the same way and the town gets larger, not smaller.
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