Slow Train to Guantanamo (9 page)

For a start the classical atmosphere is somewhat diluted by the ugly protruding filaments of energy-saving bulbs.
Thanks to a deal with China, like that which replaced Havana’s unloved
camellos
with new Chinese buses, Cuba probably has more energy-saving bulbs than anywhere else in the world. There is also a big green poster advertising
hamburguesas
and two large Panasonic flat-screen televisions showing baseball. It could almost be a small town somewhere in Louisiana.

Across the road is the fire station, a crumbling neoclassical stone building with a great snub-nosed Russian fire engine, built by Zil (the same state firm that made the Soviet politburo’s limousines), alongside an almost identical vintage American General Motors machine. My first thought was that both were part of the ‘Fire Museum’ housed in the same building, but it would appear they are the current working vehicles.

But I have chosen the right place to take in the sounds and scenes. The Vigía and its veranda are Matanzas’ front parlour. Sit here long enough and the world passes by, a large proportion of it in classic 1950s American automobiles, far more than I saw anywhere in Havana other than the spruced-up tourist cabs in front of the Capitolio. But there is a reason for the relative affluence, and the traffic, all of it headed the one way: over the bridge and along the highway that leads to the foreigner-filled beachside holiday haven of Varadero.

I finish a cold beer and a
bocadillo de tortilla
– a sort of tomato omelette in a sweet, greasy bun – and take a brief stroll along the road. The first step, almost literally, is to cross the Yumurí river. An iron bridge takes me over murky waters that still manage to sparkle in the bright sunlight, lined with little shacks with boats tethered by their doors. It looks like pictures of the Mekong in 1960s Vietnam.

On the other side, there are two parallel roads. The one I am walking on is all but empty, lined with little houses built
of concrete breezeblocks brightly painted, music coming from every one. This gradually peters out and the surface deteriorates rapidly.

I cross rusted railway tracks – the ones I am due to leave on tomorrow? – and a wooden sign leaning at an oblique angle that actually says
crucero ferrocarril
– level crossing – although it is anything but level: deep pools of water have collected in lake-sized potholes. Two ageing lorries stand under a corrugated iron shelter supported by rusty ironwork next to what appears to be a closed tool store with red letters on a bright yellow background proclaiming how Fidel’s abortive 1958 raid on an army base in Santiago, at the other end of the country, ‘shows us that reverses can be turned into victories.’ The optimism seems forced. The whole scene would be one of depressing decay except that the bright colours, the sea beyond and the scudding tropical storm clouds against the blue sky lend it a curious superficial beauty. If they had East Germany’s climate here, communism here would have collapsed decades ago.

Across the tracks, though, things are different, here the roadway is a well-made dual carriageway which curves along the palm-tree studded Caribbean coast to the Varadero pseudo-peninsula. A splendid tail-finned Plymouth Belvedere, its turquoise paintwork a perfect match for the gleaming Caribbean waters, sits next to a windswept palm as if James Dean or Clark Gable had only just got out of it. An air-conditioned Viazul bus slows down for tourists on board to take photographs.

Close-up inspection reveals the exotic turquoise to be a faded green. A sticker on the rear windscreen proudly proclaims it boasts a rare and locally extremely coveted Pioneer hi-fi system. Whether it actually has the sound system or just the sticker isn’t evident, but the road to Varadero has to be the safest place in Cuba. Along the inland side of the
road is a military base. There are no troops in evidence, just a welter of the usual revolutionary slogans. A police car sits by the road, keeping an eye on the traffic, and the long lines of hitchhikers.

Varadero proper starts about 25 kilometres (15 miles) along the road, where a small bridge links what is really an island to the mainland. There is a police post there, but contrary to widespread Western belief, particularly in the United States, it is rarely manned. There is nothing to prevent ordinary Cubans getting to Varadero town, and they can even use some, if not all, of the hotels. What effectively keeps most out are the prices. Varadero is a CUC-only enclave, which is also what draws in those lucky enough to have secured employment on the peninsula. But not all of them get transport provided. Hence the long queue of hitchhikers.

I scramble over some rocks to the scrappy little patch of sand that is the town beach of Matanzas and dabble my already blistered feet in the warm but disconcertingly murky seawater. That famous radiant turquoise only starts further along the coast, near Varadero. As if the colour of the sea were charged for in hard currency too.

Along the sands two athletic looking black guys appear at first to be wrestling, one dressed entirely in black, the other in white with a red bandana around his head. I stand back as one grabs the other by the arm and appears to fling him bodily upwards, only for the other to go with the flow and turn a somersault landing perfectly on his feet. They repeat the manoeuvre, in reverse and I can only applaud. Far from local thugs, they are ballet dancers practising.

And then my attention is seized from the other direction, as borne on the rising wind a huge bird soars between the palm trees, brown-black feathers beating a downdraft only feet above the waves. I ask one of the dancers what it is, and they look bemused.
Buitre
. Vulture. These were the
red-headed birds I saw from the train swooping over the savannah.

Back at the
casa
, my host has dinner waiting. I’m glad I didn’t ask for the lobster. One of the most common recommendations for eating well in Cuba is to eat in private houses for a taste of ‘true home cooking’. That is a phrase I’ve always been a bit suspicious of: a taste of real British home cooking, I imagine, might be a fairly grim experience somewhat resembling a close encounter with a microwave.

Cubans may not have vast supermarket isles stocked with ready meals. But they do have microwaves. The landlady serves me a simple salad, very simple: one radish, two slices of cucumber, a tomato and some sliced carrot. Add a spring onion, salad cream, half a boiled egg and a slice of supermarket ham and it might have been the sort of salad my mother served as ‘tea’ in the 1960s.

But this is only the first course. It is followed by rice with prawns, boiled and with a pale pink sauce poured over them which adds colour, but unfortunately not flavour. I wolf them down and head out to sample the Matanzas nightlife – if there is any.

My first encounter is not propitious. Miguel, the drunk from Casablanca, still clutching – the same? – can of Cristal, wandering in the middle of the road. I turn a corner sharpish to avoid him, and end up where I wanted to be anyhow:
Parque de la Libertad
, the main town square.

Through glassless windows on the street that leads into the square I glimpse men in half-lit rooms under rotating ceiling fans playing chess with timing clocks that conjure up visions of Fischer and Spassky. Another legacy of the long-dead Russian connection, maybe? A sign on the wall behind them declares this to be the premises of the Revolutionary Army Club.

The square itself that hums with activity.
Parque de la Libertad
is the town’s after-dinner sitting-room. Men in baseball caps sit playing dominoes and drinking peso beer under trees whose leaves rustle in the warm slowly rising wind. Other groups, male and female, sprawl on the concrete benches, literally shooting the breeze. Children throw balls and chase one another, shouting and laughing with no obvious sign of or need for adult supervision. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody feels responsible.

Across the square I am tempted in by one building that has clearly just recently been renovated, where a line of people are drinking at the bar. The sign by the door announces it to be the Hotel Velasco. According to my guidebook, published only six months earlier, it doesn’t exist. Times are changing and things can move fast in Cuba. If they move at all.

I order a mojito. It is the best I have yet tasted, topped up with a splash of the best
añejo 15 años
, fifteen-year-old Havana Club which gives it just an extra kick and a lot more depth.

The gaggle at the bar is made up of two Canadian girls in their twenties on holiday plus a guy they seem to have picked up and a couple, the latter three to my surprise all Cuban. To my surprise only because this is a bar that accepts CUCs only. We get into a discussion, in mixed Spanish and English, and they ask where I am going and how.

When I tell them it is the Cubans who crease up with laughter. ‘
En tren?
’, by train? Why? Because it’s a great rail journey and the way most Cubans travel, isn’t it? They exchange knowing looks and smile patronizingly. Yes, but not all. Meaning clearly those who can afford not to. Either because they have sufficient access to CUCs to be able to afford the air-conditioned Viazul buses or because they have cars. Either of which places them in the affluent élite of Cuban society.

Predictably all of them work in the tourist industry. Which
is why they can afford to live like tourists. I am increasingly aware that there is a middle class is slowly emerging in communist Cuba, a phenomenon gently encouraged by the younger Castro’s gradual reforms, slight though they may be. Raúl – who turned 80 just a few days before I arrived – is tinkering enough with the long-established rigidly enforce structure of Cuba’s economy for it to have a noticeable effect on the population.

He has already dismissed hundreds of thousands of workers from superfluous government jobs, but at the same time made it legal for the first time since 1968 (when his older brother nationalized the entire workforce from shoe-shinersto barmen) for Cubans not only to set up in business on their own, but to hire another Cuban. Soon it might be two, or even three!

The guy with the two Canadian girls tells me he runs his own guide business. Only a year or two ago he could have been doing virtually the same thing, except that he might have been considered a
jinetero
. The word literally means ‘jockey’, but in Cuba it has long acquired a subsidiary meaning of one who ‘rides’ the tourists. The sexual innuendo was deliberately intended even if in many cases the
jineteros
or
jineteras
were just acting as guides and companions; there was usually more on offer if the price was right. Now, he proudly says, he has a legitimate business, and is thinking of taking on a secretary or driver. But he makes a face when I mention taxes. It seems that if their government gives Cubans the right to earn more money, not many of them are going to be happy giving any of it back.

Instead he changes the subject and tells me I have to try a
canchanchara
, which he claims is Cuba’s real national drink, Hemingway and his mojitos notwithstanding. The barman grins and starts to make me one: ‘This is what we Cubans drink to give us fire in our bellies to cut the Spaniards’
throats,’ he says with a jolly grin. It is an odd concoction to say the least. He spoons a large dollop of thick golden honey into the bottom of a glass, tops it up with squeezed lime juice, throws in some crushed ice and then fills up the glass with a huge measure of
aguardiente
, which in Cuba is the raw spirit distilled from sugar cane. It bears the same relation to a finished rum as bootleg hooch does to fine whisky, or poteen to potato vodka. It doesn’t have subtleties or nuances of flavour, but it does creep up and whack you over the head, which is of course what the Cuban rebels wanted to do to their Spanish colonial masters.

I’m wondering not just whether but
how
on earth to drink the thing, which at this stage looks an iceberg of firewater on top of a layer of brown sludge, when the Cuban laughs, orders one for himself and shows me. The trick is to stir it with a spoon to dissolve the honey while sipping up the mixture through a straw. It seems a bit effete for an army of revolutionary peasants, but it tastes delicious: a sweet and sour infusion that is the alcoholic equivalent of nitro-glycerine.

I cast my eyes, while I still have control of them, along the array of drinks displayed behind the bar. There is every variety of Havana Club of course – and the Cubans are delighted when I tell them that it has long since supplanted Bacardi as the rum of choice in London bars and clubs – plus some recondite and no doubt expensive imports that nonetheless every classy cocktail bar requires: including Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce and Angostura bitters.

Among the cocktail classics there is only one that has a Cuban local product substituted and at first I don’t even notice that it is. The little bottle of fiery red sauce with its diamond-shaped label and green lettering looks familiar; its only on close inspection that I realize it isn’t Tabasco, but a Cuban lookalike. In almost any other country it would be sued by the US manufacturer (Tabasco may be a region of
Mexico but the sauce comes from Louisiana) for ‘passing off’. But as US firms are banned by their own government from trading in Cuba they can hardly complain about unfair competition.

In fact, glancing along the shelves I start to pick out a whole range of Cuban copycats I had mistaken for the originals, from
Naranja
, which looks, tastes and has packaging almost exactly like Fanta, and Tu Cola: Cuban Coke. The real thing, it’s not.

I can’t help thinking that the relationship between communist Cuba and its giant capitalist neighbour is remarkably similar to one of the wackier creations of DC comics. When I was a child I was reluctantly fascinated by the freakish character Bizarro, a Superman clone that had gone wrong, with cracked white skin and a childlike mentality who married a Bizarro version of Lois Lane and lived on a cube-shaped planet where everything was like on Earth but viewed through a kaleidoscope rather than a telescope.