Slow Train to Guantanamo (6 page)

Back to the phone cabin again. I try the same thing but still no luck. By now there is a queue of people waiting. In despair I ask one of them what I am doing wrong. It turns out I shouldn’t insert the card at all. At least not first. First I have to press a button and wait for a voice to tell me to enter the 13-digit number,
then
enter the card. Obvious really.
Except that that doesn’t work either. ‘No, no,’ the woman waiting for her turn to use the phone, tells me, ‘You do it too quick; the machine cannot keep up. Slowly.’

I do what she says, watching her smile at the foreign idiot unable to cope with technology, one button at a time, each one recognized by a beep. Suddenly I am through, at least to an automatic operator.

There is a plus side to this. The automated voice asks me if I want to change
idioma
to
inglés
. Yes please. Immediately the rather stern formal Spanish is replaced by what sounds like a sassy Florida American. ‘Please dial yore numbah’. I do, only to get: ‘
Wrang
number, check it up.’ It would be funny, except that ‘wrong number’ isn’t what I want to hear.

Checking my phone number once again, it dawns on me that I might have forgotten to include an area code. I try again and this time a phone at the other end rings. And rings. And rings. Eventually someone at the other end picks up. A child. Sounding about five years old. But obviously a bright child who fairly quickly understands that he is talking to a gringo, and therefore has to use the sort of language you would employ when, well, talking to a child.

A few seconds later an adult voice comes on, makes the same deduction, but nonetheless takes my name and says that someone will be there to meet the Hershey Train which leaves Casablanca at midday and usually – there is a long pause before the ‘usually’ – gets in around 4 p.m. Yes! I put down the receiver with something approaching a glint of triumphalism. I have actually achieved something. I have a phone card, a room booked for tomorrow night and the departure time – more or less – of a train that might get me there.

And opposite me is the Museo del Ron, not just a museum of rum but a cool place to sample it with music of the old
Buena Vista boys playing in the background. I sit down and sip on an ice-cold mojito, mint and rum mingling to soothe my mood. Don’t stop me now! Havana good time! I’m on the road at last.

CHAPTER FOUR

Hershey Bar

I’m not actually on the road of course, rail or otherwise. First I’ve got to cross the sea, or at least the bit of it that separates Havana proper from Casablanca, and the Hershey railway terminus.

This means getting up rather earlier than I had anticipated for a midday train. Guidebooks published in 2010 said the ferry across the bay goes twice an hour. The timetable down by the ferry itself, however, suggested it was once an hour at most. When I asked at the hotel, a waitress suggested it might be more like once every two hours.

Similarly the Hershey train itself, which once upon a time ran hourly, is now only three times a day, the first before 8 o’clock in the morning, which is out of the question, chiefly because that is before the first ferry.

Following my mojitos of the previous afternoon, I had decided to treat myself to a rooftop dinner at one of the private
paladares
, the confusingly-named Moneda Cubana, confusing because it definitely did not accept Cuban money, at least not the sort most ordinary Cubans have.
Moneda
nacional
was not welcome. The big sign by the door made clear: ‘CUC only’.

Two of the steps that have done most to make life easier for a relatively large minority of ordinary Cubans were in fact introduced in the wake of the Soviet collapse and the
resultant economic hardship. When it became clear tourism was an inevitable part of the answer, the government in 1997 allowed private individuals to rent out a room to foreigners for CUCs, in exchange for them paying to the treasury a large monthly tax, also in CUCs. These
casas particulares
(literally private houses) had the advantage for visitors – and disadvantage for the government – that it meant ordinary Cubans could meet foreigners more easily. But it also for the first time provided an ample supply of accommodation beyond the spattering of official hotels.

The obvious answer to the shortage of restaurants, the other most obvious way to soak up hard currency the foreigners might otherwise be loath to part with (especially given the shortage of things to buy) was to apply the same logic: tolerate a bit of private enterprise on a family-only scale and then tax it.

From the mid 1990s onwards the government allowed ordinary Cubans to open up their living-rooms or roof terraces if they had them to serve meals to foreigners for CUCs. Bizarrely they acquired the name
paladares
not from any government decree or popular tradition but from a Brazilian soap opera,
Vale Tudo
, popular in Cuba when private restaurants were first legalized. The main character ran a chain of restaurants called
paladar
, which means ‘palate’ in both Spanish and Portuguese. If you want a crash course in a Mastermind special subject on South American soap operas, Cuba is the place to come. They lap up all of them.

La Moneda Cubana is one of the oldest of Havana’s
paladares
. It occupies a magnificent location near the western end of the Malecón with a fine view from its rooftop eating space over the cathedral square, the bay with the old Spanish fortifications on both the Havana and Casablanca sides. It is a great spot to watch the sun go down, and enjoy
the spectacle at 9 p.m. each evening of a great old cannon being fired across the bay. It helps of course if you know about that bit in advance. I didn’t and ended up with a substantial splash of mojito in my lap when it went off behind me.

This time, as I was leaving in the morning and not at all sure what food would be like in the interior provinces, I broke my rule and had the lobster, or at least a small version of one in a mixed seafood platter. This was a private restaurant, after all. They could, I reasoned, be expected to be better cooks than the employees of the state-run hotels. I won’t make that mistake again.

I spent the remainder of the evening, while picking bits of rubberized seafood out from between my teeth, wandering the atmospheric streets of the old town, along Obispo and Obra Pia, names redolent with ancient Catholicism – Bishop Street and Pious Works Street – now awash with rum, beer, tourists and natives swaying to bands in ever bar playing
trova, danzón, rumba, timba
and
son
. Cuban music traditions, with their mix of Latino tunes, jazz improvisation and heady rhythms derived from African drumming are more than worthy of a book in their own right, but nothing quite equates to just soaking it up, or taking to the floor with the Cubans.

Sometimes that can be hard to avoid. Most bars have at least a proportion of working girls – and guys – in residence. This does not mean prostitutes. Prostitution is illegal in Cuba as well as the sort of sleazy sex industry that flourished in Havana when Meyer Lansky’s Jewish and Italian mafia gangs ran the girls and gambling emporia of the 1930s and later. Pimps are next to non-existent in Castro’s Cuba, but ironically it is one area in which freewheeling capitalism flourishes. There are more than enough girls – and guys – in Havana willing to give a tourist a good time – by no means
necessarily involving sex (since prostitution is illegal) – as long as they get to share a taste of the good life they can’t otherwise afford.

Each bar will have at least one ‘dance instructor’ of each sex, who may well be just that – to encourage shy Canadian ‘snow geese’ to get up and enjoy themselves, maybe just to spend a bit more money behind the bar, maybe to splash out on a bit of ‘extra fun’. Or maybe not. The latter was the option I chose when unexpectedly an extremely giggly large round black lady perched on a stool next to me and asked me if I wanted to
salsa
. When I politely declined, she suggested I might prefer something a bit more
piccante
. Maybe I would like her to be my girlfriend for my holidays. Like they used to say at the
News of the World
, I made my excuses and left.

Which is how I manage to be relatively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed heading out of La Meson de la Flota at 7.30 in the morning, strolling with a fair wind at my back (or would be if there was any wind rather than the constant oppressive tropical heat) towards the ferry terminal in time to catch the 08.00 to Casablanca. There is supposed to be a 10.00 ferry as well but nobody is willing to swear to that, and I’m gradually getting the message that getting anywhere takes a lot longer than expected.

Except now that I’m there, it doesn’t look as if they’re going to let me on. A fierce woman with dangly earrings, the regulation state micro-miniskirt girding her ample
derrière
above the equally obligatory fishnets, is aggressively wielding a metal detector in the direction of my rucksack.

‘
Bagaje, no
,’ she insists. No luggage. This is something I hadn’t reckoned on. This is hardly an international flight after all, nor even a long-distance crossing. The journey time is no more than 10 minutes across the bay, and the ferry itself a single-decked square rust-bucket – little better than
a motorized raft with a roof– with standing room only and place for a couple of bicycles.

But then I remember an anecdote I had heard and all but dismissed as a joke. Despite the wholly evident unseaworthiness of this dodgy looking excuse for a nautical vessel – the Woolwich ferry in South London is an ocean-going cruise liner in comparison – back in 2003 a gang of would-be emigrants hijacked one and tried to take it to Miami. It is perhaps 200 miles across the Florida Straits to Key West; these guys only got a few miles off the Cuban shore with 30 men, women and children as hostages on board before the Cuban coastguard boarded without firing a shot. The only shots that were eventually fired, were those that executed three of the hijackers.

That incident was nearly a decade ago, but it is undoubtedly still in the minds of government officials and their attitudes. On the other hand, as the routine at the airport suggested, there genuinely is in these latter, post-Fidel days of Cuban communism more of an air of official insecurity than anyone is admitting.

In the end, though, largely due to the influence of a younger woman who has already started going through my rucksack – partly I suspect in the hope of finding something worth confiscating – the tubby tyrant with the metal detector settles for giving me a brusque frisking. The only thing her colleague can find worth confiscating is my Gillette Fusion Power razor, especially after she plays for some time enthusiastically with the ‘smooth glide’ vibrating control. In the end her colleague insists that I remove and hand over the multi-blade razor head, clearly not suspecting (at least from a security point of view) that I might have a spare. If I really were James Bond I would have quipped, as I boarded the ferry, ‘That was a close shave.’

There are only a dozen of us on board the rusty motor raft
as we pull out into the waters of Havana Bay, the cool breeze from the sea welcome in the sticky heat building already at even this hour of the morning. The fare is two pesos each, but again I am forced to pay in convertible ‘CUCs’ while the Cubans pay in
nacional
pesos. I am not one hundred per cent sure however that my fare is going straight to the government. Not my problem.

By 8.30 I’m clambering off the ferry onto a crumbling concrete jetty and looking up at the gleaming white giant Jesus which dominates the hillside above Casablanca. I’m actually surprised I can see him at all. I have a problem with large religious monuments. Or rather they seem to have a problem with me. It first manifested nearly 20 years ago when on a visit to Hong Kong I went out to Lantau island, home to the then newly erected world’s largest statue of Buddha, a 250-tonne seated colossus more than 100 feet high. By the time I got to its base the fog was so thick I could barely make out Buddha’s big toe.

Similarly on my one and only trip to Rio de Janeiro I took the funicular up the Corcovado mountain to the city’s famed landmark 130-foot statue of Christ the Redeemer. By the time I reached the top, the clouds had come down. It might have felt like an allegory of the Ascension, but as far as I was concerned the Saviour was invisible.

The first time I tried to see the Sistine Chapel in Rome, I discovered I was there on the one day in the year apart from Christmas when the Vatican’s treasures were off-limits to the public. As a convinced atheist, I think God is trying to tell me something.

Even on this occasion the 66-foot high Christ of Havana is clad in scaffolding, not enough to completely obscure it, though if I can see Jesus I’m not absolutely sure he can see me. Which may be just was well. This statue has a history of interventionism: it was inaugurated on Christmas Eve 1958,
just 15 days before Fidel Castro entered Havana to celebrate the triumph of his revolution. As he did, a lightning bolt hit the statue knocking its head off. A mixed message at best.

Just to be sure, I tip a nod to Big Jesus – his head was subsequently restored – before making my way to a little concrete shed by the side of some rusty iron rails. This, according to the piece of scrappy white paper in the window announcing that the ticket office will open at 9.30, turns out to be Casablanca station. Not much of a place to kick your heels for nearly four hours. But I’m starting to realize that in Cuba waiting is a way of life.

There is not a great deal of local colour to take in. The station itself looks like a 1960s seaside bus shelter in peeling green paint and a slogan on the wall that reads,
MI FUTURO
–
REVOLUCIÓN
. In most of the world it seems history is condemned to repeat itself, in Cuba it would appear to be actively encouraged. Opposite me on the other side of the tracks, assuming these rusting bits of iron are actually part of a functioning railway, is a pile of concrete rubble that might once have been a house, overgrown with a crimson riot of bougainvillaea in full blossom.