Slow Train to Guantanamo (32 page)

And so to the Moncada, to see how the Castros’ revolution nearly foundered on their almost adolescent over-enthusiasm. Having got to town earlier than expected, and reluctant to face another unpleasant Santiago taxi driver, I decide to walk it which turns out to be a terrible mistake. First of all it is further out than I thought, secondly because it is hot and Santiago is remarkably hilly, and thirdly because I don’t recognise it when I get there.

Because the image hasn’t been drilled into me since childhood, as if has for most Cubans, I don’t initially recognize the big yellow building for what it is. So I do what nobody would expect: I ask a policeman. He looks a bit surprised. We’re standing next to the thing. There is also, just across the road a vast 30ft by 10ft banner adorned by the faces of both Castro brothers and the slogan: ‘Santiago is Santiago, a rebel city once, a hospitable one today, heroic forever.’

Walking up to the door the evidence of the heroism becomes obvious in the spray of bullet holes around the door. The only trouble is that they don’t actually date from the ill-fated action that took place here on July 26, 1953.
The relatively minor damage done in the Castros’ attack was repaired soon afterwards. Then after the success of the revolution in 1958, Castro himself took a bulldozer to tear down the barracks’ outer walls. It was only in 1978 that with an old man’s eye to history and his legacy he had the outer walls rebuilt, the doorway re-‘sprayed’ with bullets and the building, which had been a school in the mean time, turned into a museum. Fidel may never have been to Disneyland, but that doesn’t mean he can’t take a lesson. A visit to the Moncada Barracks is a ‘must’ on the curriculum of every Cuban schoolchild.

The man on the door smiles at me – nice to see a foreigner come to pay homage to the birthplace of the revolution – and asks for two CUC. Feeling a bit cheeky I offer him two CUP, two pesos, which is what it costs ordinary Cubans. ‘Aren’t we all comrades?’ I get a mildly amused look but he still wants his CUCs. No confusing history with the present here.

The history itself relates that the attack took place on July 26, 1953, little over a year after the military coup which brought dictator Fulgencio Batista to power. The gaggle of well-to-do young men and peasant farmers who had gathered themselves around the illegitimate farmer’s son and Havana law student had deliberately planned their attack for the morning after Santiago’s annual fiesta. Fidel was counting on the forces inside still being drunk.

He had been thinking about his move for a long time. Fidel and brother Raúl had been recruiting and training opponents of the regime under the guise of a clay-pigeon shooting club. The 153 rebels were clad in blue army uniforms that had been stolen by a relative of one of the revolutionaries from the laundry of a military hospital. On the night before they gathered at a farm in Siboney – as it happens the place where the jolly university librarian woman I
met on the train from Camagüey lives – which was where most of them were informed for the first time of their target. The idea was to take over the barracks, loot its store of weapons and use its radio transmitter to send false messages to the army command while broadcasting revolutionary speeches urging the people to take up arms.

Equipped with a random and varied selection of weapons from shotguns, handguns, an assortment of rifles and one malfunctioning submachine gun, they set off at 4.45, before dawn, in a convoy of sixteen vehicles, hoping to give the impression of a delegation headed by a senior officer from Havana. They had three objectives: one group, including the then just twenty-two-year-old Raúl, was to take the Palace of Justice, a second smaller detachment of half a dozen was to seize control of the neighbouring military while the main party, led by Fidel himself, was tasked with the main assault on the barracks.

Unfortunately for them, Fidel’s troops were indeed nearly all from Havana, or at least western Cuba, and they did the one thing that is absolutely unconscionable in a military operation: they got lost. Unfamiliar with the city, they ended up split into two groups, while the lorry carrying most of their heavy weapons never arrived. According to Fidel’s own account the soldiers on duty at the barracks realized there was something fishy going on, refused to move aside and as a result he drove his car straight into them. His dilettante colleagues, poorly armed and hopelessly outnumbered, thought they had broken through the gates and jumped out of their vehicles. In the ensuing firefight fifteen soldiers and three policemen were killed and two dozen others wounded. The rebels suffered nine dead and eleven wounded, four of them by friendly fire from their own colleagues.

The aftermath demonstrated a gruesome and astoundingly incompetent mixture of atrocity and leniency on the
part of the Batista regime: within a few hours of the failed attack, eighteen captured rebels were summarily executed in the barracks’ firing range and their bodies strewn around the grounds to make it look like they died in combat. Of those who fled, a further thirty-four were murdered after admitting their participation. The remainder were rounded up but allowed to live to face trial, when a panel of three judges were harangued by Fidel presenting his own defence and complaining loudly about the ‘murder’ of prisoners.

As a result, nineteen of the rebels got off scot-free on lack of evidence while the ringleaders including Fidel and Raúl (who had actually succeeded in his own allotted task of capturing the Palacio de Justicia) were sentenced to thirteen years, later commuted to two. When they were released the pair wisely fled to Mexico where they continued to plot revolution now under the name Movimento 26 Julio, also known as M-26-7. As with Dunkirk, a disaster wisely handled can become a source of inspiration. Winston Churchill famously declared, ‘History will be kind to me, because I intend to write it.’ It was while he was in prison that Fidel wrote his famous manifesto ‘History Will Absolve Me’, and in the Moncada of today, he made sure of it.

The most remarkable thing about the museum to someone visiting it for the first time is how successful it is in making the visitor feel close to the actual events. Not just because it was just over fifty years ago, but because the artefacts on display still feel alarmingly contemporary, in the very real sense that they were ‘of the moment’ then, and surprisingly still don’t look too terribly dated today.

A glass case contains clothing worn by some of the impoverished farmers drafted into Fidel’s raggle-taggle army but rather than smocks from some peasant uprising or even Soviet-era army uniforms, they are denim jeans that look like they might have come from a retro stall at London’s
Camden Market. Why wouldn’t they? I can’t see the label but they might well be Levis. These men, after all, were contemporaries of Elvis.

Perhaps the most poignant exhibit are the items of clothing belonging to the failed mission’s most celebrated martyr Reinaldo Boris Luis Santa Coloma: nice brown brogue spats and a pair of gold cufflinks. Impeccably middle-class. Even Cuba had its champagne socialists.

Two elderly Cuban women come up to me and ask me in English what I think of the museum, obviously just slightly apprehensive as to what a foreigner might see in it all. I nod at the display in front of us, the brogue spats, and say, ‘Nice shoes. Expensive.’ They smile to one another, not simply but knowingly. They can take a joke, these Cubans. Even at their own expense.

On the way out you are faced with one whole wall devoted to a photograph of Fidel in fatigues with backpack standing on a rocky crest gazing out boldly into his brave new world. If it weren’t for the superimposed background of the national flag and the profoundly nineteenth-century image of old José Martí, he could be some unshaven Aussie backpacker.

The Lenin Museum in Moscow which flourished from his death in 1924 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was subsequently transformed into Moscow City Hall for many years and is now the Russian Historical Museum, in which Lenin plays a dramatically reduced role. The Stalin Museum in his birthplace of Gori in Georgia was built around his tiny childhood home and filled with examples idolatry and hagiography. It endured more than 50 years after his death, though following the 2008 war over South Ossetia, the Georgian authorities announced plans to transform it into a Museum of Russian Aggression. What will become of Fidel’s act of homage to himself and his apostles
is something which history that hasn’t happened yet will decide.

I have the vicissitudes of history firmly in mind as I make the trek back into town, thankfully mostly downhill.

The other great memorial site in Santiago, subject of my main interest the next day is thankfully only a short stroll way. It too is in many ways homage to a single man, one of the earliest of genuine globetrotters and will soon have endured half a millennium. The house of Diego Velázquez diagonally across from the Casa Grande on Céspedes Square is an unassuming building at first glance, just two stories high but built of ashlar stone with a Moorish grille balcony at first floor level, and a huge, square and rather imposing columned entrance. But then it is entitled to be imposing, given that it is the oldest building in Cuba and arguably the oldest European-erected building in the whole of the Americas.

Dating from somewhere around 1519–22, this was the home of Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, the man who conquered Cuba for Spain and became its first governor, founding not only Santiago, but also isolated Baracoa, nearby Bayamo, as well as Havana itself, and incidentally exterminating most of the native Taino Indians and importing the first black slaves. With a record like that we perhaps don’t need to feel too sorry that he died here in 1524 a bitter man after sending Hernán Cortés to conquer Mexico but falling out with him and getting none of the mountains of gold he captured.

The house today has been remarkably preserved and restored, given the general state of decay of most Cuban buildings of lesser historical importance, and features items used for forging gold on the ground floor as well as a recreation of how the rooms might have looked in the sixteenth century, as well as a restored nineteenth-century interior in the house next door. Wandering around its cool dark
rooms feels more like exploring some palace in Córdoba or Seville than the Caribbean, an intimation of how the sixteenth-century Spanish took their domestic world with them around the globe in much the same way the British built cricket clubs in India.

The Spanish roots of most Cuban music, however, have been much diminished by the vast surging drumbeats of Africa, the influences from French Haïti, especially down here in
Oriente
, and of course the remarkable, and purely Cuban evolution of the musical styles and cultures its natives have imported and invented. Perhaps the most dominant is
son
, with its derivative
salsa
which with its vivid syncopations, short choruses and swaying rhythms is perhaps the most distinctive Cuban sound.

Different but equally significant is
trova
, considered – just a little arrogantly – by the inhabitants of Santiago to be theirs. The word
trovador
has its origins in the mediaeval ‘troubadour’ which was a fair enough description of the groups of musicians who roved around
Oriente
in the nineteenth century playing music of their own composition, usually performing alone or in duos, as opposed to the bigger
son
and
salsa
bands.
Trova
songs are the classic Caribbean ballads, usually guitar-accompanied, romantic and slower than
son
, but still eminently danceable. But then it is a rule of thumb in Cuba that any tune is danceable; that’s what makes it a tune.

The Casa de la Trova, Santiago’s most famed music venue, with its galleried balcony hanging out over the street on the corner of Heredia and San Felix, is distinctly low-key and relatively relaxed. Famously Paul McCartney landed his private plane at Santiago airport back in 2000 and asked to be taken to the club where he hummed along with the resident singers, acknowledged a Beatles debt to their music style and left them a note of thanks still enshrined there amidst the many tributes left by artists from all over the world.

‘
Muchas gracias, señores y señoras, y señoritas
’ it reads, in admirable Spanish, ‘Paul McCartney
en Cuba, Santiago
, Jan 2000.’

But tonight that is about the height of the excitement. I pay my entrance fee, in CUCs of course, only to find the upstairs room has a motley three-piece band playing a little despondently to an audience of about a dozen, some of whom are clearly dancing girls employed by the establishment. The night is sultry and hot, the fans aren’t working and even the girls aren’t dancing much.

‘It is not good,’ Dolores, attired in a vast purple dress with frills and flounces tells me, puffing on a cheap cigarette as she leans over the balcony, ignoring the lacklustre music inside and sipping a warm soft drink: ‘There are not so many tourists now. I think maybe nobody has any money any more.’ It seems that even isolated communist Cuba is suffering from the global crisis of capitalism.

For the sake of it, I try a desultory twirl with Dolores on the dance floor, but the only others are a middle-aged Canadian couple and the band are hardly rising to the occasion. I buy a tot of Santiago’s famed rum and sit with it for a while before it dawns on me that if I am not careful I shall be late for my train. And that would never do.

The time has come for my last train ride in Cuba. The big one. And supposedly the best. The fabled
tren frances
, the ‘French train’, the alleged luxury express that travels direct from Santiago to Havana overnight, at almost twice the speed of any other. Although, remembering that the average speed of most of the trains I have travelled on so far rarely hit 40 m.p.h., I am not getting overexcited about this just yet, even though I have already been down to the station earlier in the day and bought a ticket with – in Cuban terms – the greatest ease.

Santiago’s station is the most unusual I’ve seen, a strange
modernist geometrical jumble of shapes, like something Frank Gehry might have designed if he’d been given lumps of concrete to work with instead of flowing titanium. The train is allegedly on time, according to a piece of paper on the glass of the
jefe del torno
’s office, but I’m dubious about there being any food and drink on board even a so-called deluxe train that runs overnight. I ask the
jefe
if there are any good food shops nearby to get supplies. The one I am directed to bizarrely resembles a low-end Chinese supermarket in Soho more than anything I’ve yet encountered in Cuba (I recognize lots of familiar soy sauce brands), albeit without the fresh goods. In fact, beyond the option of tinned sardines from Ecuador which I can imagine being hard to open on a train and potentially both smelly and messy if I succeed, the only thing that looks reasonable is a can marked Jiang Lou Luncheon Meat Reliable Forever, Patent Number 200730094346 from the Jianglou Canned Food Manufacturing Co. Ltd. With some justifiable trepidation I buy myself what is effectively a tin of Chinese spam. And a dry roll to go with it. Yum, yum.