Island that Dared (16 page)

To go directly from Baracoa to Havana by public transport is not possible. However, I relished our return journey to Santiago with Norma as my seat companion – a congenial Bush-defying
Yanqui
, a botanist with a special interest in El Yunque’s two carnivorous plants, its
Coccothrinax yunquensis
(an endemic palm) and its
Podocarpus
, among the world’s oldest plant species. Despite her bona fide academic purpose she had been refused permission to travel to Cuba and, if detected on the island by US agents, could be fined US$10,000.

‘But I guess I’m OK, they wouldn’t dare take me on, I’ve a global name.
It could all go to the Supreme Court, Dubya has no right to restrict a US citizen’s freedom of movement – it’s unconstitutional, fascist stuff.’

As we passed close to Guantanamo Norma quoted George Clemenceau – ‘“The United States is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation”.’ She added, ‘And Clemenceau was dealing with Wilson – what epigram would he have hung on Dubya’s US?’

Norma provided a morsel of good news from the outside world; nineteen thousand non-violent protesters had just staged a vigil – organised by ‘SOA Watch’ – at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) runs torture courses for thousands of foreign (chiefly Latin American) military and police officers. By 2001 this educational
establishment
had aroused such public concern that it became WHISC, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Norma laughed angrily. ‘The phrase “security cooperation”, that’s supposed to make torture acceptable –
inevitable
, for “homeland safety”! The name change was a sop to the House of Representatives who wanted to close SOA and hold a congressional investigation. That was a bi-partisan move, defeated by only ten votes.’

SOA Watch was founded in 1990 by a Maryknoll priest, Roy Bourgeois. ‘It’s done most, of all the groups, to stir public worry about WHISC. In 1990 Roy and two other vets – former US officers, in your speak! – did sixteen months in federal jails. Punishment for protesting peacefully against hundreds of Salvadoran soldiers then being trained at the Fort. Roy himself won a Purple Heart as a Navy officer in Vietnam. And the others, the Liteky brothers, also got decorations. They’re not softy pacifists, they’re just against soldiers being trained as torturers.’

I said, ‘So quite a few of you – millions, in fact – have stopped off on the way from barbarism to degeneration.’

In Santiago we learned that all Cuba was preparing for a week-long ‘strategic exercise’ led by the army and involving, in one way or another, most able-bodied civilians. The first such exercise had taken place a year previously in reaction to the launch of Bush II’s ‘Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba’. The commission’s chairman was Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, and its chief advisors included Condoleeza Rice, then head of the National Security Council, and senior CIA operatives, Pentagon officials and representatives of most government departments. When its 450-page ‘Report to the President’ was publicised on 6 May 2004, Cubans took
particular note of a recommendation to expand ‘the Cuba budget’ to $41 million, the extra funding to benefit anyone likely to expedite ‘regime change’. The Report’s third chapter explains:

At once Ricardo Alarcón, President of the Cuban National Assembly, noted that the commission openly advocated ‘dominating Cuba and putting under US control the economy, the services and all social activities – in effect, completing the annexation of the country, which would barely be left with some imaginary local authorities, totally subjected to a foreign power.’

The Trio were touchingly put out because our overnight journey to Havana precluded an adequate seventy-fourth birthday party for Nyanya. When a severe chest infection felled Rachel, our last two days in Cuba were sadly Mummyless. Yet we managed to enjoy ourselves; it seemed I missed the invalid more than her offspring did. A return to Coppelia was inevitable, then more swimming below the Malecón and the discovery of Callejon de Hamel, an alleyway not far from No. 403 where the Trio revelled in expansive Afro-Cuban murals, at once amusing, mysterious and wildly colourful. My delayed birthday party was a gargantuan lunch in one of the Barrio Chino’s good-value Chinese restaurants. Even Rose couldn’t clear her plate so I had to improvise a doggy-bag, the ‘dogs’ being my companions at supper-time.

Candida looked both pleased and worried when I booked a room for 17–20 January 2006 – worried because she thought it inappropriate for an
abeula
to roam alone in the Escambray, the Sierra Maestra and the Sierra del Rosario. Solo travelling disconcerts the gregarious Cubans, especially when the traveller is past her sell-by date.

I, too, had mixed feelings about my return. Cuba was now so closely associated with a light-hearted family holiday that changing gear might be difficult. Yet part of me eagerly anticipated that change; without the Trio I wouldn’t have to worry about food supplies, landmines, staying too long in museums, travelling by train, getting lost, being arrested. As a traveller, I’d be back to normal.

This holiday had been an experiment of sorts, my first journey with the adult Rachel. When last we trekked together, in Cameroon in 1987, she was only legally an adult, aged eighteen. It pleased me that now, when she
was the leader, we remained on the same wavelength as travellers, wanting to do the same sort of thing in the same sort of way. And again I marked the peculiar value of a shared sense of humour; with nobody else do I laugh as much as with my daughter, a bond dating back to our Baltistan trek. Then she was aged only six but we both saw the funny side of various set-backs, like having to survive for days on apricot kernels, and thinking our morning tea tasted odd because before daylight I’d filled the kettle from the wrong bucket. When the temperature is -40°F one doesn’t go out to pee …

In January I zig-zagged back to Cuba via Miami, Key West and Jamaica. Miles Frieden, Director of Key West’s Twenty-fourth Literary Seminar, was responsible for this circuitous route. My London-Miami return ticket cost the Seminar three hundred and twenty pounds, my Miami-Jamaica-Havana return ticket cost me five hundred and eighty pounds. Thus was I directly exposed to the US embargo which since 1961 has been condemned fourteen times by the UN General Assembly.

After 11 September 2001 the US administration shovelled billions of dollars into its new Department of Homeland Security. So why were ten of Miami airport’s twenty immigration stalls closed at 1.00 p.m. when two flights had just arrived from London and one from Lima? That cost-cutting gave me more than ninety minutes to absorb a singularly unwelcoming atmosphere. Obese black-clad security officers carrying large guns strolled around surveying us all as though we were prisoners in transit who might at any moment make a dash for freedom. As the silent jet-lagged queues slowly shuffled forward, immigration officers snapped at those, like me, who coped clumsily with the finger-print and eye-print equipment. What happens to all those millions of records? Exactly what purpose do they serve? Were I to join al-Qaeda now, and return to the US in 2011 as an octogenarian terrorist, would an immigration officer immediately pounce on me? Seems unlikely …

All the airport staff were other than Caucasian. During the flight I had talked with an aged Miami resident, another varicose veins victim so we met while taking exercise. He was tall and stooped and brooding, with watery blue eyes and a toupee. In the past decade, he informed me, Miami has been infested with many thousands of ‘illegals’ from Columbia, Peru, Brazil, Panama, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Nicaragua – ‘all those places’. They deal in drugs, they smuggle, forge, cheat, mug, rape and murder. But when he agitates, demanding their deportation, he’s told they’re needed because Cuban-Americans breed slowly and dodge all the dirty jobs. But of course the Cubans stay in control, politically and economically, and that’s unlikely to change – the administration trusts them. (As well it might: their votes – plus the non-votes of those deviously excluded from the register – put Bush II in the White House.)

When stereotypes come alive one feels illogically taken aback: and I was soon to meet a few more.

At Miami airport an immigration queue delay caused me to miss, by five minutes, my 3.00 p.m. Greyhound bus to Key West. Next departure, 7.00 p.m. – what to do with this four-hour wait? A quick trip to the city centre? No, bad idea when jet-lagged: to face down-town Miami one would surely need reserves of resilience. Moping through acres of
concourse
I noticed a Cuban ‘Hair Stylist’ and drifted in for a trim.

While snip-snipping the senior ‘stylist’ introduced herself: Bertha, forty years an exile. In response to my murmuring that forty years is a long time to be away from home she looked ahead: with luck her three children and seven grandchildren could move soon to Havana. ‘That crazy man is nearly ninety (
sic
), when he’s gone we’ll be free.’

‘But will they want to move?’ I asked. ‘Weren’t they all born here? Marvellous of course for them to visit, I only wonder if they’d want to settle in Havana?’

Bertha bristled. ‘We had a fine apartment in Vedado, when there’s democracy we can get it back. My children know they’re
Cuban
. There’s going to be big opportunities, reconstructing. They can be happy working on that.’

‘And will you return with them?’

Bertha hesitated, frowned, sighed. ‘I figure I’m too old to leave my home. But I’ll be free to vacation with them.’ I nodded sympathetically, wondering how the younger generations really felt about Granny’s vicarious urge to return.

Bertha had taken it for granted that a European tourist would be
anti-Castro
and so did the Miami-born mulatto who sat beside me in the Cuban Bar where he seemed to have spent some time. Five minutes into our conversation he was proclaiming, ‘That island is
my
place, not belonging with Communists! My grandmother stays in Havana – very old, soon one hundred. She dies, he dies, I go back and live in her home. Four big rooms, in Centro, here I never get money for more than two rooms.’

‘What’s your job?’

‘I mend electrics, that’s a good job for Cuba. They have no men with this training, nobody
educated
.’ When he suggested that I might stand him a rum and coke I ordered a coffee instead.

Two hundred years ago Key West, then known as Caya Hueso, was no more than a coral and limestone reef, some four miles long by one and a
half miles wide, without arable land or fresh water, populated by flamingos, deer and turtles, conveniently free of indigenes – or anyone else. In 1819 John Whitehead, son of a New Jersey banker, happened to notice this reef. He had just survived a shipwreck and when the captain of the rescue vessel praised Caya Hueso’s natural harbour (wide, deep, sheltered) Whitehead quoted his friend John Simonton – ‘Capitalists will always go where profit is to be found.’

This harbour, a mere ninety miles from Cuba, promised much profit if developed as a naval and commercial port. True, Florida and its keys were Spanish possessions, as they had been for over three hundred years, but the US was gleefully watching that empire’s decline and Whitehead was prepared to wait. He didn’t have long to wait; in July 1821 Spain formally transferred Florida to the US.

Key West’s history is so short that every drama counts; my town map marked the spot, near Fort Taylor, where Narcisco Lopez’s failed 1850 expedition came to its climax. Lopez (born in Venezuela) was a former Spanish army officer and governor of the Cuban province of Trinidad who had been inspired to change sides by Bolivar’s plan for Cuba’s liberation. Early one May morning a crowd gathered to watch his steamer,
Creole
, being pursued by the Spanish gunboat
Pizarro
. As the gunboat came almost within firing range the steamer slowed and seemed doomed. The anti-Spanish crowd groaned in sympathy. Then suddenly black smoke began to pour from the
Creole
’s funnel and her wheels rapidly revolved: the crew had stoked her with crates of bacon and hacked-off bits of her woodwork. She escaped into the harbour leaving the frustrated
Pizarro
‘a few yards away, with port holes open, and broadsides grinning, like the fangs of a bloodhound balked of his prey’. So wrote an over-excited observer.

Key West gave Lopez and his ‘gallant band of liberators’ a tumultuous welcome. He and his officers were lionised by the town’s leading families while the
Creole
’s Cuban crew intimidated the respectable Spanish residents and looted saloons and grocery shops.

Fifteen months later, at Havana’s Playa el Morrillo, Lopez led two hundred and twenty-three men against one thousand three hundred Spaniards and killed their commander, General Enna, before being captured with fifty of his followers. They were shot and Lopez was garrotted beneath the Punta fort. Hundreds assembled to witness his strangulation and the authorities, oddly enough, allowed him to address them – ‘It was not my wish to injure anyone, my object was your freedom and happiness’.

Cuba’s Ten Year War (1868–78) overtaxed the Spanish garrisons and ‘volunteers’ – murderous bands of white racists, mostly not long arrived from Spain – were recruited to terrorise the population. Throughout the 1870s their atrocities drove thousands of asylum-seekers to Key West and among the earliest migrants was Vicente Martinez Ybor, a wealthy Spanish cigar-maker based in Havana. He reacted to the ‘volunteers’ by opening a branch factory across the straits and when the authorities, suspecting him of disloyalty, put him under ‘volunteers’ surveillance’ he moved himself, his family and all his assets to Key West. His factories employed generations of exiles and soon the island’s economy was suffering. All over the US, Key West-made cigars (the tobacco of course Cuban) were outselling their Havana-made rivals because they were free of import duty.

By the 1890s more than one-third of Key West’s 18,000 residents were Cuban, their community centre the San Carlos Hall. The original building was the starting point for Key West’s cataclysmic 1886 fire; spread by a gale, it roared for hours from one street of wooden buildings to the next and most of the town centre was lost. Then as now, conspiracy theories flourished in the sub-tropical climate; many accused Spanish government agents of arson, without any direct evidence.

This charge, however, was not wholly implausible. Key West had become important to the Cuba Libre movement after the Ten Years War when the clandestine Cuba Convention began to organise another armed uprising. The Convention’s leaders were war veterans; its members were academics, businessmen and professionals with a leavening of factory workers. As this Cuban colony donated more than its share to help buy weapons, boats and supplies, the burning of its cigar factories and colossal tobacco warehouse seriously depleted Cuba Libre’s coffers. Before the fire, at a fund-raising meeting in a packed San Carlos Hall, even the lowest-paid workers eagerly donated dollars and ladies impulsively unpinned brooches from their bosoms and slid rings off their fingers. One American, Colonel F.N. Wicker, Key West’s Collector of Customs, contributed US$100 (then an enormous sum) to ‘strengthen the sinews of war’ – in defiance of the official US façade of ‘neutrality’. Next day the Spanish Consul informed Washington, by telephone, and the day after Colonel Wicker was sacked – also by telephone.

Soon after, Havana charged Carlos Aguerro, a Key West Cuba Libre leader, with ‘rapine, arson, highway robbery and murder’. His extradition was sought but a US District Court refused the application because the alleged offences were associated with a revolutionary movement. Aguerro’s
friends carried him on their shoulders from Key West’s packed courthouse and thousands of cheering Cubans formed a procession behind him through the town centre. He then armed a schooner, was joined by a dozen other patriots and sailed for Cuba confident of being reinforced on arrival. Within hours of landing he and his followers had been, as the Spanish put it, ‘exterminated’.

A decade before the fire Carlos M. de Cespedes, son of the Great Liberator, was elected Mayor of Key West. By 1892 it had been realised that the Cuban colony here produced shrewd politicians as well as keen
revolutionaries
though most tended to vote for friends, relations or colleagues, feeling no particular affinity with either US party. Accordingly, both
Democrats
and Republicans ran Cuban candidates, all of whom were elected, leaving Monroe County without even one American representative. But this, interestingly, caused no discernible bad feeling in Key West.

My map also marked the spot where José Martí landed on Christmas Day 1891. Cubans thronged the banner-draped dock, cheering and singing, waving flags, weeping for joy. All Key West’s exiles – men, women and children – soon belonged to one of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC) branches, controlled by a central committee of veterans. For the next three years, until Martí ordered military action to begin on 24 February 1895, those clubs collaborated in the various tasks assigned them. It helped that most Key Westers were, like Colonel Wicker, on the Cuban side.

The most conspicuous monument in Key West’s cemetery is the
USS Maine
plot, its bronze statue of a solitary saluting sailor surrounded by
twenty-seven
white marble headstones, simple and nameless. Only twenty-seven, though two hundred and fifty-eight US sailors were lost when the battleship
Maine,
at anchor in Havana harbour, blew up on 15 February 1898 and quickly sank.

Two months earlier the
Maine
, apparently on her way to pay a courtesy visit to Havana, had docked at Key West and on Christmas Eve, when the crew hung illuminations from bow to stern, thousands crowded the
shoreline
marvelling at this jolly display of advanced naval technology. Key West’s elite then entertained the officers while the crew made merry in taverns, gambling saloons and (we can assume, though the coy local historians don’t say so)
burdels
.

In January the mood changed. From Havana came news of
anti-American
rioting and when the rest of the US North Atlantic Squadron joined the
Maine
many suspected that this Squadron was not so far south merely to take part in warm-water exercises. But nothing could prepare
them for the news telegraphed from Havana on 15 February. As the
New York Herald
reported, ‘Key West is in the deepest gloom’.

The future President Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, blamed a Spanish mine and wrote in his diary: ‘The
Maine
was sunk by an act of dirty treachery’. The Spaniards insisted, ‘Undoubtedly an accidental internal explosion’. In the 1970s, when US Admiral Hyman Rickover closely re-examined all the evidence, he agreed with the Spaniards. But in 1898 no US citizen would accept this explanation. (At least, none who dared to speak out; there must have been a questioning minority.) Inflamed by a stridently nationalistic press, the public clamoured for revenge and on 25 April the US declared war on Spain – a war long under consideration, but the
Maine causus belli
ended all dithering.

Earlier in April, when volunteers were besieging every recruitment centre, John Black Atkins landed in New York and reported to the
Manchester Guardian
:

Does that remind you of anything?

On 9 April three passenger steamers from Havana docked at Key West, each perilously overloaded with US citizens. They had been seen off by hundreds of Cubans yelling, ‘Get out,
Yanqui
Satan!’ Illogical hostility, you might think, when the US was about to declare war on Spain. But those demonstrators were well aware that the
Yanquis
did not have Cuba’s
liberation
at the top of their agenda.