Slow Train to Guantanamo (26 page)

‘Trains go to Guantánamo every three days,’ she says, adding the disconcerting rider: ‘Usually.’

I opt on the spot for a ticket to Guantánamo. But she’s not sure now she wants to sell me one.

‘This train is not going to Santiago. You should get the next train. Tomorrow.’

I assure her rapidly I want a ticket to Guantánamo – right now I’d take a ticket to anywhere – and with a frown that suggests she suspects I am trying to buy a ticket under false
pretences to somewhere I don’t want to go to, she reluctantly hands it over, counting out my CUCs to the last hard currency centavo. And then smiles.

Not a moment too soon. Suddenly things start to happen with remarkable alacrity. At precisely 9.20 we’re all ushered out onto the platform. Amongst my fellow passengers is a man in his sixties whose only luggage, tucked under his arm, is a car tyre with so little tread remaining that in Europe it wouldn’t be remotely legal and probably wouldn’t have enough substance to it to be used for a retread.

The other factor which strikes me for the first time amongst this bunch is that for an island which, despite the serious lack of prescription medicines, boasts an excellent free health service, the same obviously doesn’t apply to dentistry. Almost everybody over 30 is missing a few prominent teeth. That is yet another contrast to the old Soviet Union where dentistry was not exactly brilliant but not only did few people actually lack teeth, amongst the wilier peasantry it was quite the thing to have one or two made of gold. Silver teeth were also not uncommon. It was one of those examples, in a country where freedom of speech was non-existent, of people physically putting their money where their mouth was. The difference with Cuba, I suspect, may have been that during the ‘special period’ after the Soviet collapse, all they may have had to eat was surplus sugar.

The carriages on this train are unquestioningly Chinese, to match the locomotive, with bright red plastic seats. But this is a train clearly more suited to crossing the dusty plains of Tibet or northern China than dealing with the tropical humidity of Cuba. For a start, this is the first train – the first vehicle of any sort – I have been on which has windows that don’t open. Several of the others – trains, cars, buses – didn’t necessarily have windows at all, but this has a full set. And,
apart from a few small vents on every other row of seats, they don’t open.

They aren’t supposed to, because from the roof of each carriage a bulky air conditioning unit is suspended. Which would be all well and good if any of them actually worked. They don’t. The result is an atmosphere more akin to a sauna than a train carriage and an ever more exotic, not to say
risqué,
attitude towards clothing. Almost everyone on the train under forty – and quite a few above – are dressed in a style I can only describe as rainbow-metal-punk. T-shirts are bright red, bright yellow or purple, invariably printed with some outlandish usually motorbike or rock band-branded logo, often, particularly but not exclusively on the girls, picked out in silver glitter. Jeans, whole or cut-off, are skin-tight – it is one of those accidental blessings that rationing and the Cuban inattention to food means there aren’t many fat people, though those there are wear the same stuff – while belts, particularly the blokes’, are big, brash metal-buckled affairs with the more studs the better.

But without air conditioning or open windows, absolutely every one of us is bathed in sweat. So when we come to a halt at a village of sorts and vendors with iced mango juice and cold water come on board, they are stormed and sold out within seconds. I opt for the water. I’m not sure that thick mango juice, however cold, would make its way down my throat. I could do with something to eat too, but all there is on offer is thick slabs of something vaguely green and definitely gelatinous which I’m told is guava jam. I decide to pass.

The village where we have stopped – little more than a few tin-roofed shacks – is called Mir, which has to be another of those throwbacks to the old alliance with Moscow.
Mir
is Russian for both ‘the world’ and ‘peace’ – a dual meaning which is based deep in the roots of Orthodox theology – but
was mostly used during the Soviet period in the expression
‘mir y druzhba’
– peace and friendship – the all but ubiquitous politically correct toast when representatives of different nationalities gathered together.

There is then a 20 minute delay because the unimaginable has happened: a group of ticket inspectors has joined the train. This ought to seem reasonable enough, although in most other countries they would travel with the train for a stop or two rather than halt it to carry out their checks. But somehow here it seems peculiarly pointless; apart from me, almost everybody on the train has paid virtually nothing for their tickets. I have to pinch myself to remember that it is not actually nothing, and that Cuban wages are extremely low. But even in that scheme of things the ordinary Cuban – if he or she can get a ticket at all, which is mostly down to the incompetency of the bureaucracy – can travel the entire 1200-kilometre (750 miles) length of the island for little more than the price of a can of beer. It is one more example of how an economy in the absence of market forces totally loses track of its own purpose and effectively ceases to be an economy at all in any meaningful sense of the word. There is no way in which these ticket collectors can be earning the cost of their salary, which is any case paid by the government, which not only pays to run the railway but pays the salaries of everybody (except me!) travelling on it. The whole thing is one never-ending circle which serves only to achieve a semblance of full employment. It reminds me of the little old ladies who used to sit at the bottom of every escalator on the Moscow metro for no other purpose than, in the event of an escalator failing, to tell people they would have to walk.

The only obvious purpose the ticket collectors are serving is to delay our journey. In fact, they have delayed it so much that we now have to back into a siding in order to let a goods train pass. The heat is rising and so is the volume of chatter,
a now incessant cacophony of gesticulating, improvised fan waving, chaos. For a country with one of the highest literacy rates not just in the Caribbean but the entire world (98 per cent), almost nobody has brought a book or newspaper to read. It’s shocking but not really surprising. Before the revolution in 1959 some 22 per cent of Cubans were illiterate, and 60 per cent (the rural population) only semi-literate. Cuba’s communist regime has seen to it that virtually every man, woman and child can read and write, but it has also seen to it that there are limitations on what people dare write and even stricter limitations on what there is available to read. The result that there is almost nothing published that anybody wants to read.

Eventually we start moving again, after a fashion: stopping, starting, stopping. Sometimes violently. It feels like being trapped in a wheelie case being dragged upstairs. At one stage nearly everyone facing forwards is shunted to the edge of their seats. Then we stop again, for good, it seems. A glance out the window reveals that this is one of the few sections of the line where the track is double. We are almost certainly waiting for another freight train to pass. People are hot, tired. Some of them have come non-stop, if you can use that word in Cuba, from Havana and been on this train for more than 18 hours already.

Suddenly a more than lively discussion breaks out between two young men in the centre aisle. An earnest-looking young man with short curly hair and glasses is arguing loudly with a guy in baseball cap and sleeveless vest across from him. Bizarrely it seems the argument grew out of a discussion about blood transfusions, but has developed into a wider debate about religion and even politics, about the poor state of services generally, about how people have a right to expect more. The earnest young man is running down the list of things that people in capitalist countries can
do that are illegal in Cuba, from buying and selling houses
⁸
to employing staff, things that would stimulate the economy, make things work properly. And the argument is spreading, taking in the whole carriage. This is genuine popular, political debate: if anyone in office was listening to them (in the sense of paying attention rather than identifying dissent) it would be democracy. Far from everyone is for change, but the remarkable thing is that this sort of debate happening at all, and nobody seems to be scared of the consequences. Not one person is looking around in terror for the Stasi or KGB man. Cuba may have its share of jailed political dissidents but it has no secret police in the same sense as the old East European communist states. The government relies on the local Committees for the Defence of the Revolution to report any persistent dissent in a neighbourhood, while it is the responsibility of the Interior Ministry to prevent political assemblies – which is precisely what this almost looks like turning into.

Almost. Then there is a loud rumble as indeed a freight train passes us and we start moving again and people quieten down. It occurs to me that this is why dictatorships so famously pay attention to getting the trains to run on time. There is no greater way to start a revolution than by massing a load of people together for hours on end and then deliberately frustrating them.

Slowly, excruciatingly, we inch our way along towards a stop labelled, improbably, Costa Rica. I notice a strange, sweet, almost putrid smell in the air and put it down to the presence outside of some rubbish tip until I notice with a shock that the woman two seats away is changing a baby’s nappy on her lap. She finishes and flings the dirty nappy out the window. Nice.

On an island where almost every modern convenience is scarce, everybody uses disposable nappies. It is one of those quirks of what passes for Cuba’s economy. A bit like the glut of eco-friendly light bulbs. But then even in the old Soviet empire the availability of everyday commodities under communism lurched between feast or famine. And you never knew which was coming next.

Costa Rica is the end of the line for the earnest young man in glasses, who is getting up and struggling with a mountain of luggage. I notice one large item is wrapped in the bright orange bubble wrap I spotted in the window of El Telégrafo, the Harrods of Las Tunas. I wonder which of the exotic items offered he might have bought: a shovel perhaps, or the crockery, maybe a machete or two to arm the intellectual shock troops of the new revolution. But no, and I can hardly suppress a giggle as, sweating and panting, he manoeuvres his purchase towards the door and I realize that it is, with the inevitability of divine intervention, the kitchen sink.

As the train pulls out of Costa Rica there is a collective sigh of relief mingled with despair: we’re on our way again, but for how long? In the sweltering sauna of this train carriage designed for the Chinese steppes, necessity has become the mother of invention with bits of cardboard to the rescue, mostly to be used as makeshift fans. Those lucky enough to be seated near the small vents have wedged strips of cardboard into them to deflect as much air as possible into the train. Which might work better if we were moving at any speed.

On the other hand too much speed might not be advisable as the train is now canting at perilous angles as we round bends. Guantánamo really is the end of the line. At San Luis, I firmly decide not to get off the train and change for Santiago. It looks like little more than a truck stop with an industrial plant in the background and an endless train
of rusting oil tankers parked in a siding. Given that waiting for the next train could be a matter of days if not hours, I stick with the one I’m on. At least this way I can be sure of getting to Guantánamo. I’m still not sure about getting back (though that’s more than some residents of Guantánamo can say – the ones that live in the camp on the bay, beyond Cuban jurisdiction).

By now it is 4.30 in the afternoon and I have been on this hot, sticky Chinese train with its red plastic seats for more than seven hours, in which time we have covered a distance of just over 250 kilometres (150 miles). The Flying Scotsman it is not. Then suddenly there is a screech of brakes and we crunch to a halt, half-way over a mainly wooden bridge. It sounds as if we have run over an animal, a goat maybe or a dog, though I can hardly imagine an animal stupid enough or indeed slow enough not to have got out of the way.

Nobody on board looks very happy, least of all those whose part of the carriage is still on the rickety-looking bridge. Rather than try to get the whole of the train across, we stay stopped. In fact, a number of people including what looks like the driver have climbed down to the tracks. A man in combat trousers and a navy vest is staring disconsolately under the train from where there are sporadic gushes of steam. I join most of the other passengers – very noticeably
all
of those whose part of the carriage is still on the bridge – by clambering down onto the grass and wandering around aimlessly looking for some sign of a squashed animal. But there is nothing to be seen. No blood on the tracks nor maimed carcass on the wooden struts of the bridge or in the fast flowing white water gushing by below.

It is quite clear from the expression on the face of the man in the navy vest and from the piece of perished rubber he his holding in his hand that some form of piping has either failed or been broken. There’s a lot of head-scratching going
on. A bloke in overalls appears to be the engineer, but he doesn’t exactly have much in the way of tools: just a spanner and some rope. What exactly it is that has broken and how important it is to our chances of continuing to Guantánamo, which can scarcely be more than a few dozen kilometres away, I have no idea. Eventually, however, people are urged to get back on board. After a lot of spanner clanging and some general bodging it would appear the mechanic has done something – possibly used the bit of rope to tie things back together – to let us limp on far enough to get the rear of the train clear of the bridge.

Ahead on the left is what appears to be a dilapidated barracks with a dirty white colonnade, pale green walls and a rusted tin roof. Closer inspection reveals it to be
Empresa Comercial Mixta El Salvador 117 Carretera Larga
, in other words the local excuse for a supermarket situated at the village of El Salvador at kilometre 117 mark on the main road. We stop for a while, presumably while the engineer nips in to see if they have any stocks of rubber ducting which, based on the window display of El Telégrafo back in in Las Tunas, has to be at best an outside possibility.