Slow Train to Guantanamo (5 page)

‘Could I buy a ticket now?’

‘No. You must come back two hours before the train leaves. Then if there are any seats left, you can buy a ticket.’

Ah, the centavo was beginning to drop. I would be on standby. Better than nothing, but hardly reassuring.
Especially for the return journey when I would have a plane to catch.

‘What if there are no seats left?’ I ask, already anticipating the dreaded shrug of the shoulders so familiar to long-suffering travellers in the olden days in communist Eastern Europe. Instead I get me a beaming smile.

‘You are a foreigner. You will pay in
convertibles
, CUCs, no? For CUCs there is always a seat. That is why you talk to me, see. This is desk for special travellers.’

His job, I suddenly realize, is only to deal with foreigners, and other privileged members of society. Like the large revolutionary policeman who’d picked up a ticket in front of me, who would have paid in pesos rather than CUC but would have been given priority. Everybody else had to book their journey days in advance at least, then come and queue up and wait to be told whether or not they’d got a seat.

The best joke is that they pretend we’re all paying the same price. The tickets have the same face value, but which currency you are obliged to pay in, depends on who you are. As a foreigner paying in the convertible CUC rather than the CUP
peso nacional
, I would be handing over twenty-five times as much for a ticket with the same nominal face value. And even then, it seems, I can’t buy a ticket now unless I want to leave this evening.

Somewhat in a daze I leave the office and wander up to the main station itself to see if I can pick up a printed copy of the national rail timetable. I’m beginning to think timetables might be rather thin on the ground,
if
– and I haven’t quite got my head around this possibility which I would have considered distant but now seems to be approaching rather faster than any railway engine – such a thing as printed timetables actually exist at all.

Inside what might once have been a grand departure hall there are three information windows in a row. All boarded
up. The fourth is open. Behind a cracked glass window a pretty, chubby black woman is munching something. I ask her what time the next train leaves. (I know, I had already been told the answer but my brain is reluctant to take it in: even on a slow Sunday in Britain services aren’t that limited. Surely there has to be one to somewhere at some time over the next eight hours.)

‘Eight o’clock,’ she says. ‘To Santiago.’

‘That’s the only one today?’ She looks amused even to be asked the question. ‘Have you got a timetable?’ I try. She giggles and offers me some of her huge bag of popcorn.

Declining the popcorn as gracefully as possible under the circumstances, I try asking her – just in case I might get a different answer – about the
tren frances
. Does it run every night?

She shrugs. ‘Every night?
Todas las noches
?’ I’m starting to get desperate.

Wide eyes. ‘Nooooo.’

‘Alternate nights?’

‘More or less.’

More or less!?! ‘How do I find out? Can I buy a ticket now for a specific date?’

Her face cracks up into a beaming smile as if to say you’re having a laugh, mate.

‘In Santiago. They’ll tell you in Santiago. Buy a ticket there.’

I give her a look of incredulity. She gives me another huge smile and a phrase I’m going to hear again and again:
‘Cuba e’ Cuba.’
Cuba is Cuba.

On the rows of plastic seats facing the platforms a dozen or so people are sitting staring at a few diesel locomotives that don’t look as if they had any intention of moving. Ever. I have no idea whether the people staring at them might have just dropped in for a sit-down, a sort of extremely sedentary
form of trainspotting, or if they really are prospective passengers intending to sit there for another eight hours. I’m not about to do either. Time to find a phone, or at least a SIM card.

Mobile phones have become such a part of the modern world that it is hard to imagine what life was like without them. In Cuba you can find out. I had deliberately not brought my iPhone with me because it includes a GPS tracker and it is illegal to bring any such device into Cuba without the express permission of the military, a stipulation about which I have to say many tourists these days never even find out. Instead I had brought an old mobile – though still reasonable by standards of five years ago – tri-band so I knew it would work on whatever passed for the Cuban network.

Under Fidel Castro mobile phones in Cuba were only for government employees. Under his trendy octogenarian kid brother the regulations have been opened up: now anybody can have one. Anybody who can afford one, that is. A mobile is the must-have accessory for young Cubans. All I had to do, I had been told, was to buy a local SIM card and have my phone registered to work on the local network. Easy.

Except that I had forgotten the golden rule: in Cuba nothing is easy. A couple of the smarter hotels claimed to offer mobile phone services, notably the Inglaterra and the Sevilla. In the plush chintzy lobby of the Inglaterra, the one person equipped to deal with such high technology issues is at lunch. She would be back shortly, I’m told. I sip a cold Cristal at the bar and wait. After 25 minutes a large and rather severe mulatto lady arrived at the desk.

I stroll over and ask if I can buy a SIM card. She looks at me in amazement. No, sorry that is not possible, she says as if I’ve asked her for Raúl Castro’s private line. She could sell me a top-up if I already had a Cuban SIM, but
only if my phone was already registered. Which, obviously, it isn’t. Can I register? No, sorry. Same look. That can only be done at an office of ETECSA, the national telecommunications agency. Preferably the main one on Obispo Street in Havana Vieja.

With that sinking feeling that this wasn’t going to be as simple as I had hoped, I trudge off towards Obispo, half expecting the office to be closed. It isn’t. It’s open. In a very Cuban definition of the word ‘open’: that is to say the doors were actually closed. Locked in fact. And with a heavyset doorman standing there to make sure they stay like that until he decides there is room inside for more customers. Given that there are at least 50 people queuing up on the street outside that could be some time. Maybe several hours.

This is not good. I need a phone primarily to call ahead and book accommodation wherever it looks like I am going to end up each day. To my relief a woman in the crowd tells me there is another ETECSA office, located in a warehouse turned into a tourist art market down near the port, ‘just past the Russian church’. That is no more than fifteen minutes’ walk away so I head off following her rough directions. Havana sits on a large irregular bay, one of the world’s natural harbours (one argument about how it got its names is that it comes for the Dutch and German words for harbour, another however is that it was named after a native chieftain). All I have to do is head for the Malecón, turn right and sooner or later I’ll get there.

It turns out, as most things do, to be further than I expect. But I realize I am getting near when I spot a bizarrely incongruous golden onion dome, surrounded by four smaller undecorated ones. The building could be ageless, built in traditional style, its distinctively Russian domes topped with crosses wholly incongruous against the colonial Spanish
architecture of Havana Vieja and the decrepit warehouses of the port.

It seems more than improbably out of place. I am also astonished – given years spent living in the Soviet Union and visits to countless Russian Orthodox churches – that I did not spot it on my previous visit to Cuba. It seems highly unlikely that it belongs to the old Cuban–Soviet partnership of the Cold War years; under the Kremlin’s atheist communists even the churches in Moscow were falling into disrepair. Is this some far more ancient relic, of a Tsarist presence in the Caribbean? That seems no more likely.

I climb the steps and peer inside. It is empty, the whitewashed walls contrasting sharply with a magnificent golden reredos inlaid with stylized icons of the saints. A plaque on the wall tells me I am standing in the Havana Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, date of construction: 2006. This ‘house of God’ is, it would seem, the main token of reconciliation between two countries once united in their devotion to communism and atheism.

If I think the world has turned topsy-turvy, I can hardly imagine what Fidel Castro thinks. Over three decades, from the birth of Castro’s revolution the ‘great and powerful Soviet Union’, as the words of Moscow’s national anthem used to boast, kept the Cuban economy just about afloat by buying its sugar harvest in exchange for cheap oil, while Havana provided the Kremlin with a priceless communist thorn in Uncle Sam’s underbelly. Until it all went belly-up in Moscow. Overnight Cuba lost 80 per cent of its export market, and 80 per cent of its imports. The ‘special period’, as the early 90s were known, took Cubans to the brink of starvation. The worst tales are apocryphal, such as melting condoms on top of pizza bases instead of cheese, but there genuinely were families forced to survive on little more than sugar and water.

And now at a time of fresh relations with a newly prosperous capitalist Russia, what do they give their erstwhile allies? A church. Unsurprisingly it seems Fidel came to the opening ceremony out of politeness, but made a point of leaving before the service.

That’s when it dawns on me: there are, or would appear to be, no Russians in Havana. Once upon a time, back in the days when meeting a Russian on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain was as rare as a fillet steak in a Moscow butcher’s there must have been thousands of them here: party officials, military men, scientists, most famously ballistic missile men. Now, when you can’t walk down a street in London, Paris or Istanbul without being overwhelmed by Russians and they have virtually bought up Cyprus (only to find it was a bad bargain), there are none evident, this church notwithstanding, in Cuba. I have heard Italian, French, German, Chinese, Japanese and English in the busy streets of Old Havana, but not a word of Russian. The reason for this is obvious, of course: they still have communism here. And that is something modern Russians definitely want no part of.

This digression hasn’t sorted my mobile though. Happily the directions I was given were right. The warehouse on the other side of the road, as well as being home to various garish painting of street scenes being hawked to tourists, contains a little white cabin with ETECSA on the side. And there is no queue. Well, no queue to get in and only four people waiting ahead of me inside.

When I get to the front of the queue I find out why. This ETECSA office doesn’t do mobile: ‘You have to go to the office on Obispo.’ But there’s a queue a mile long, I protest. Yes, she nods. There usually is.
Cuba e’ Cuba
. ‘I can sell you a phone card,’ she says. ‘That’s what most people use.’ A phone card! I dimly remember them from that odd interim
period when few people had mobiles and we still had lots of phone boxes but they wouldn’t take coins any more. But hey, back to the future. It’s better than nothing, which is what I have now.

‘They cost five pesos,’ she says. I pull out a five-CUC note and she just as she is about to take it the woman behind me says, ‘Do you need to call abroad?’ ‘No,’ I say, because I don’t really, not least because I know although you can call anywhere in the world from Havana the flow of information is restricted by the price. For a call to Europe, five CUCs would last about 80 seconds.

‘So get a peso card,’ she says. The woman behind the desk shrugs – that’s the thing about everyone working for the government, it’s no skin off her nose – and hands me an almost identical card. At which point I am very grateful that I also changed some of my CUCs into national pesos: I changed 10 CUC and got 250 CUP pesos. I give her a grubby five, and she hands me the card, telling me calls within Cuba cost five cents a minute (that’s ‘national’ cents, or a twentieth of a twenty-fifth of a US dollar: less than 0.1 US cents. Virtually free!)

First I have to make sure I know how it works. Which means I have to have someone to call. But that isn’t a problem. I have just found my train out of Havana, advertised on the first railway timetable I have seen, pinned on the wall opposite, next to the dock for the little ferry dock across the bay. It was a train I had heard had fallen into disuse and had little hope of being able to take. But it is allegedly still running: and not just any train, one of the most famous in all Cuba: the Hershey Train.

Back in 1922 when the global giant confectionary company that started out in Hershey, Pennsylvania, still got most of its sugar from Cuba it built a little electric railway to bring workers from the countryside to its sugar mill. The reason
its timetable is by the ferry dock is that the Hershey train doesn’t leave from Havana proper, but from the evocatively named suburb on the other side of the bay: Casablanca. Say it again, Sam!

The train goes to Matanzas, capital of the neighbouring province and about 80 kilometres (50 miles) east of Havana, a fine first stop on my itinerary. I have a list of
casas particulares
downloaded from the internet before I left England. Now seems to be the right time to try to ring one in the hope of making sure I have a bed for the night, assuming that the timetable is accurate and the train is indeed running. Right now I am not taking anything for granted. It turns out to be a wise move.

The instructions on the phone card tells me to scratch off the silver coating, just like on a national lottery scratch card, to find my personal code. Underneath is a 13-digit number. I lift the receiver, insert the card into the phone and immediately an officious automated voice tells me to take it out because it isn’t valid. I try again. Same thing. At that point I look at the card a bit more loosely and notice there is a ‘use by’ date on the top. ‘Use by 14 March’ it says. It is now mid-June.

Annoyed at being taken for an idiot, I storm back into the cabin and point this out to the girl behind the desk. She looks at me as if I
am
an idiot, and points to the sign on the door. It says: ‘Please note that all cards which say use by 14 March are valid until December.’ D’uh? She shrugs and says:
‘Cuba e’ Cuba’.