Slow Train to Guantanamo (3 page)

At first glance it is hard to tell whether much of Havana is being rebuilt, restored, reconstructed, demolished or simply in the long process of crumbling. The reality is that all of those are true. One of the hardest things Havana has to cope with is its location. Most of the hurricanes which each summer smash into the south coast of the United States, from Miami to New Orleans, take a glancing blow at Cuba on the way past. In 2008 Hurricane Ike decided to stop over for a few days and all but undid a decade of painstaking restoration work.

Curiously the most striking thing about Old Havana, particularly in comparison to the rest of the city, not to mention the rest of the country, is how clean it is. There are waste bins on every corner, street cleaners sweeping religiously. And everywhere you look there are police – not secret police,
we will come to them later – but tourist police: the
Policía Especializada
in neat blue-grey uniforms on both men and women, in the latter case augmented by striking black fishnet tights worn under the ubiquitous miniskirts.

These are a very different force from the mainstream national police, the
Policía Nacional Revolucionaria,
a few of whom are also in evidence. Havana is Cuba’s public face, and apart from a few gated tourist resorts, all most visitors ever get to see.

The best old colonial buildings have been turned into grandiose hotels: splendid marble edifices such as the Hotel Saratoga, Palacio O’Farrill, Hotel Santa Isabel, the newly opened and immodestly named Hotel Palacio del Marqués de San Felipe y Santiago de Bejucal, and the grand if a little creaky Ambos Mundos (Both Worlds) famed for being Ernest Hemingway’s hangout in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Havana is even worse than Paris when it comes to bars trading on their history as Hemingway hangouts. Perhaps all writers should leave calling cards in pubs they pop into, just on the off-chance. I’d have run out long ago.

But then Havana in its hedonistic heyday, in what it did not know at the time was the terminal stages of capitalism, was a magnet for writers fleeing demons of one sort or another. Graham Greene stayed in the huge pink slab of the Hotel Sevilla and gave the same room to James Wormold, his vacuum cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent in
Our Man in Havana
. The book was published in 1958 but the film starring Alec Guinness was made a year later in the immediate wake of the revolution. Castro complained it did not accurately depict the brutality of the Batista regime, but watching it today is primarily a depressing reminder of how much Havana’s fabric has deteriorated since then.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the Malecón, the sweeping seaside promenade which stretches for nearly three
miles in a gentle curve from Old Havana to beyond the great 1930s edifice of the Hotel Nacional. Once the headquarters of the American mafia headed by gangster Lucky Luciano and with Winston Churchill among its pre-revolutionary celebrity guests, the Nacional is now like some old dowager, rather down-at-heel but still trading on past glories. Its chief claim to fame is the regular performances of the Tropicano cabaret, which for all the
mulata
beauties and daring dress sense displayed along the Malecón, is like watching a troupe of Bolton amateur dramatics ladies pretending to be Las Vegas showgirls.

The Malecón itself is Havana’s communal living-room. At four o’clock on a clammy sunny afternoon the sea wall is lined with natives armed only with a bottle or two of hooch and here and there a guitar, a trumpet or a few trombones. Cuba and its music are inseparable. Ever since Ry Cooder’s celebrated film
Buena Vista Social Club
made some of its veteran artistes global names, Havana has traded on the legend.

These guys are not here for the tourists. They are making music for themselves, and anyone who cares to listen. On the rocks beyond them Cubans strip down and plunge into the waves to cool off. Boys with fishing rods made, Huckleberry Finn-style, from bamboo canes and catgut hope for a catch that will make a better meal than anything that can be bought in the CUP ‘peso shops’.

Across the road a couple of young men in shorts are drinking from a bottle on a perilously insecure looking rooftop balustrade, four storeys up, their legs dangling over the edge. Once the Malecón was lined with chic cafés; today it is a panorama of neglect, peeling pastel colours, Formica-topped tables outside seedy bars busy in the evening with freelance prostitutes plying their trade. One building stands out, set a little way back: an eight-storey concrete slab which
incongruously claims to be the Swiss Embassy but in reality houses the US Interests Section, Washington’s representation in Havana since it broke off diplomatic relations in 1961.

Heading back towards the hotel I am shocked to find scaffolding surrounding one particular grand old building that looks almost as if it is being prepared for demolition. Surely not. If any building in Havana is sacrosanct so long as a Castro is at the helm, it has to be the Museo de la Revolución. This is the museum that boasts the exploding cigar supposedly sent by the CIA to kill Fidel, pictures of the great man himself wielding a baseball bat (in sport not violence, he was allegedly a great player in his day), rifles and prison uniforms, documents and old banknotes, and most significantly of all, housed in a glass showcase of its own,
Granma
, the ‘yacht’ on which Castro and his colleagues evaded coastguards to sneak back into Cuba to prepare their rebellion.

But the museum is merely having an external facelift. Just around the corner sits
Granma
in all her glory, a rather dowdy little 1940s motorboat originally owned by a sentimental sailor who named it after his grannie, never imagining that one day it would be preserved in glass and give its name to Cuba’s national newspaper, a baseball team and an entire province.

Around
Granma
like an honour guard of old troopers stands a collection of military memorabilia, including a Hawker Sea Fury propeller plane and a tank used to repel the US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion by anti-communist Cuban exiles in April 1961. There is a surface-to-air missile and the engine of a US Lockheed U-2 spy plane shot down by one of its kind. A diligent soldier of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Revolutionary Armed Forces) stands guard over them.

Breathing a sign of relief that the world hasn’t ended yet I
decide to give La Meson a chance for dinner, more in hope than expectation. There is always the flamenco to look forward to. Culinary delights are few and far between. I am told there are great Cuban restaurants in Miami. Maybe the chefs all emigrated.

The one thing I know I am not going to eat is the lobster. This is another one of those Cuban conundrums. There is an old saying in the world of journalism that whenever more than six hacks are gathered together for dinner they all will eat lobster. Apocryphally this is because one of them is bound to order it and it being bad form to do anything but divvy up the bill equally, everybody else decides they’d better have it too.

Price is not the reason I am not going to have the lobster. Cuba is one of the cheapest places in the world to eat lobster. The waters are teeming with them. And local people are expressly banned from catching them. Precisely because of their perceived desirability as a luxury dish lobsters are sold only for CUCs, which effectively means only to foreigners, so government-licensed fishing boats are the only ones allowed to catch them, and state-owned restaurants are the only ones allowed to serve them.

For all its homeliness, La Meson is owned by Habaguanex, which is a state organization, so lobster is on the menu. I know because I can see it. There has been a lobster slowly turning over a low heat spit since I left my bags, nearly two hours ago. Which means, you will have gathered, that by now it will have at best the consistency of one of those rubber models of lobsters you might see in a low-quality fishmonger’s window display.

Instead, at the waitress’s suggestion, I order the grilled pork with something called ‘a Cuban salad’, which instinctively sounds like a contradiction in terms. I should have known better, but sometimes the hard way is the only way.

What finally arrives masquerading as a salad, is some cubes of rubbery processed cheese, accompanied by a few olives and a sprig of coriander. The Waldorf will not be worried. The pork, which turns up some time later, isn’t much of an improvement. Cuba must be one of the only places in the world where seafood is grilled for hours and pork for a few seconds. My grilled kebab is a few lumps of tough pinky-white meat on a skewer by the side of a spoonful of relatively inoffensive bland rice and a few soggy plantain chips. Lurking next to it is something that looks like mashed potato and has a very similar consistency but tastes disconcertingly like banana flavour Angel Delight. I wonder vaguely to myself if the milkshake mix brought by the large lady from Santo Domingo might have made it through customs after all.

Thank God for the flamenco dancers. I have seen flamenco put on for tourists in Seville, Spain, which is supposed to be its home. Compared to this it was Ann Widdecombe on
Strictly Come Dancing
. As passion goes this is on the level of throwing a grenade into a firework factory. Two young women in their twenties strapped into corsets with dresses figure-huggingly tight to the waist then exploding into a riot of swirling satin strut, stomp and stamp their way across the raised wooden stage, whirling to twanging guitar chords and a drumbeat reminiscent of a voodoo rite. Mesmerizing. The audience, me amongst them, sits in rapt wonder, as do the Cubans standing in crowds outside – unable to afford the two CUC for a beer but taking advantage of the fact that the tropical heat means the bar is wide open to the street.

It is almost to exorcize the contagious fervour that after digesting what little I could of my dinner, I stroll through the old town up towards the Plaza de la Catedral for a glimpse of one of the New World’s most glorious old
buildings softly lit by floodlights under the dark tropical sky.

Described by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier as ‘music set in stone’, this baroque gem was built by Jesuits in the mid-eighteenth century on the site of an older building. It is too easy for us Europeans – and many North Americans – to forget how ancient some of the great buildings of Latin America really are. Columbus landed here on his first great voyage in 1492. Havana was founded in 1519, when Henry VIII was a mere boy on the throne of England. And it is not the island’s oldest city.

That honour belongs to remote Baracoa, at the opposite end of the island. It was founded nearly a decade earlier, but lost any chance of becoming the capital because for hundreds of years its location surrounded by high mountains made it inaccessible other than by sea. This situation lasted until the 1960s when putting a road through became one of the token great projects of the revolution’s early days.

The nearest city of any size to distant Baracoa is the one that is the destination of my planned journey: Guantánamo. For all the evil that word has come to evoke one way or another since the United States turned the bit of Cuban land it has controversially squatted on for a century into an incarceration camp for ‘enemy combatants’ in its ‘war on terror’, for Cubans it remains primarily the subject of one of their island’s most haunting and evocative melodies. Almost an alternative national anthem.

And here and now in front of one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the Americas it is that song that fills the air, played by a little chamber orchestra sat out in the warm night across the cobble-stones:
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
. A 1920s song about love for a simple country girl from the remote provinces, long since fused with words from that great mad romantic José Martí’s words to
become Cuba’s alternative sentimental national anthem:
Yo soy un hombre sincero, de donde crece la palma.
(I am an honest man from where the palm tree grows.)

It is hard to hear it in circumstances such as these – lilting strings, moonlight, a beautiful baroque cathedral illuminated by a warm yellow light, swaying palm trees while an elegant elderly black couple dressed in full colonial fig pose for cameras, he in white trousers, wide-brimmed straw hat, black jacket and silver-knobbed cane, she in full petticoated dress and bonnet – and not have the word Guantánamo conjure up anything a vision of heavenly enchantment.

Now all I have to do is work out how the hell to get there.

3
.
Trova
along with
son, danzón, salsa
and about a dozen other variations of traditional Cuban music was made famous by the 1999 film,
Buena
Vista Social Club
.

CHAPTER THREE

In Training

Breakfast is something of relief, primarily because the Cuban breakfast does not require much cooking. My plate of sliced pineapple, mango and papaya accompanied by thick mango juice and hot dark coffee hits the spot. The decision to take it at an outside table loses its charm when almost immediately a municipal drain clearing machine parks itself a metre way and begins sucking goop noisily from a manhole.

Nobody else seems to mind. And I am far from alone. By now the outside tables are packed with the
Policía Especializada,
puffing away on cheap cigarettes, swigging coffee – in one case at least accompanied by a tot of white rum – and joking boisterously with one another, not least because some of the female officers have difficulty maintaining a modicum of decency crossing their legs in those ridiculously short skirts. The black fishnets, it seems, are regulation issue in almost every government position.

Breakfast has a hot course too. One I am to discover is absolutely standard everywhere I go, not least because it relies on the one form of intensive farming that works: eggs. The choice does not automatically include a boiled egg. And I am more than happy with the options suggested –
revuelto
(scrambled) or
tortilla
. The latter turns up in seconds. Proving – as we Anglophones used to a myriad varieties of English know only too well – that the same word in the same
language does not necessarily mean the same thing in different places, the Cuban tortilla is nothing like either Spain’s thick potato omelette, or Mexico’s corn-based burrito wrapper. Order a tortilla in Havana and what you get is a rich eggy omelette, as thin as a French crêpe, well seasoned, and with a bit of sliced onion on the side. Surprisingly delightful. I feel set up for the day.