Island that Dared (22 page)

By the late 1980s US newspaper headlines had become hoarsely
condemnatory:
‘Cuba’s AIDS Centre Resembles Prison’ – ‘Cuba’s Callous War on AIDS’ – ‘Cuba AIDS Quarantine Center called “Frightening”’– and so
on and on. As the AIDS virus is not air-borne, the more pedantic Cuban officials objected to Los Cocos being described as a ‘quarantine’ centre. It was, they explained, a sanatorium for the close epidemiological
surveillance
of the inmates who received rigorously supervised medical treatment. It was also a research centre where new drugs were being developed and tested.

Within less than a year the original score or so of infected soldiers had been joined by a similar number of civilians, mostly homosexuals whose seropositive status had been discovered in their local clinics. The army doctors, already stressed by their soldier patients’ increasingly perplexing symptoms, now had to cope with their homophobia. Segregation was called for, including restricted access to recreational facilities for the civilians – men not readily amenable to military discipline. They continued to complain about the soldiers’ (never the staff’s) nastiness and in 1988 the Ministry of Defence begged the Ministry of Public Health to carry this can of intractable worms.

Jorge Perez, director of the in-patient unit of Havana’s Institute of Tropical Medicine, was then invited to run Los Cocos. After some
hesitation
he accepted, on his own civilian terms; the sanatorium must come under the aegis of his Institute and he must be left free to devise another sort of AIDS control program. Nine years later he told Paul Farmer, a Harvard Professor of Medical Anthropology, ‘I saw that Cuba had a chance that many other countries did not: a small number of cases, and the public health capacity to intervene definitively to prevent a major epidemic.’

Under Perez, Los Cocos’ high walls were razed and the ‘internees’ became ‘residents’. The physiological necessity for ‘safe sex’ was explained in simple laymen’s terms but in graphic detail and with harrowing
illustrations.
Equal emphasis was given to the seropositives’ moral responsibility to safeguard others. Then some asymptomatic residents were allowed to return by day to their workplaces or their university halls and several were encouraged to practice their professions
in situ
, seropositive doctors and nurses taking charge of the infirmary and the laboratory.

All returning
internacionalistas
were screened, a routine ante-dating the AIDS crisis to prevent the resurgence of eradicated diseases. More and more seropositives came home, and increasing numbers of civilian homosexual and bisexual cases were diagnosed, the majority with North American or European associates. When Los Cocos overflowed, its grounds sprouted many small, air-conditioned residential units equipped with cooking facilities and colour TV. In 1993 Dr Perez made residential treatment optional but
not many ‘chose freedom’; coping with the Special Period was easier under the Health Department’s wing.

The establishment of sanatoriums in each province coincided with the beginning of the Special Period when funding for most projects was drastically reduced. Happily the bureaucrats listened to Dr Perez’s
argument
– were shortages of food (the Special Period’s main hardship) allowed to weaken seropositives, while their numbers increased for lack of the sanatorium regime, Cuba couldn’t avoid a major epidemic. Thus it came about that in Cuba the virus has so far been controlled. It is currently estimated that less than point one per cent of Cuba’s adult population is infected with HIV, compared to a global estimate of some one per cent.

All this starkly illustrates Castroism in action. The infected individual had no choice. Off to a sanatorium! – as inexorably as a convicted criminal goes off to prison. However, since Cuba’s healthcare system is not financially constrained the authorities could combine incarceration with the provision of everything needed to prolong seropositives’ lives. And, astonishingly – because Cubans are not culturally disposed to sexual restraint – most people did listen when the spread of AIDS through unsafe sex was presented as a moral issue.

In conversation with the director of a provincial sanatorium I found him taking the seropositives’ passivity for granted. ‘Why should they expect
choice
about how to react to their misfortune? If they look across at Haiti they can see where that gets people – it’s now with the Western
hemisphere’s
highest AIDS rate. And that’s after UNAid set up an expensive programme there years ago.’

In 2002 the US publicised its plan to donate fifteen billion dollars, over a five-year period, to the developing world’s AIDS-protection needs. Five years later we learned that most of those dollars had been squandered either on agency ‘overheads’ or on Bush II’s surreal campaign to defeat the virus through encouraging abstinence.

That evening an
apagón
, affecting just a few streets, halted my diary-writing.

‘The embargo,’ explained Tania. ‘We can’t get enough spare parts, again and again our electricians have to patch things up.’

We sat on the doorstep in the gloaming, attended by Mesa and Tigre, watching the western sky turn from old gold to plum to steel grey. Tania recalled the worst of the Special Period when almost every day, owing to the oil shortage,
apagones
struck, often lasting for eighteen hours. It became slightly easier to cope when electricity was rationed and each district
forewarned. Since 2003 all electricity has been generated by Cuban oil (too sulphuric to be refined into petrol) and now most
apagones
are brief.

Soon a little van rattled into view, laden with a prodigiously long ladder. ‘Let’s watch,’ said Tania and around the next corner we joined one of several animated groups, some sitting on their thresholds or window ledges, others lounging against walls. They had gathered to admire a lean, nimble, grey-haired man, festooned with tools, who swarmed up the ladder, held steady by his mate, and for over an hour struggled with a dottily tangled mass of wires linking two metal posts that soared above the house tops. He was working by starlight only and occasionally violet sparks ran to and fro along the wires causing the spectators to gasp fearfully or giggle nervously. Tania nudged me and said, ‘Don’t worry, he knows his job. It’s taking so long because he’s inventing the cure. Each
apagon
is different, he has to be creative.’

The evening traffic consisted of horse-buses, each with its mandatory oil-rag burning in a tiny tin hanging low from the rear axle. As the street lights suddenly went on we all cheered and clapped our hero and when the ladder had been swiftly folded and loaded the van sped off – to another
apagon
, Tania said, on the far side of the park. She added, ‘Embargo problems bring out the best in Cubans’ – a point missed, over the past half-century, by ten US administrations.

At first I had found Cuba’s Che cult, which reaches its full flowering in Santa Clara, rather irritating, even slightly distasteful. For propaganda purposes some aspects of his story have been blurred – unsurprisingly, yet I felt this dishonoured his memory. In the Prologue to
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War
he encouraged his fellow-survivors to record their own recollections and added, ‘I ask only that the narrator be strictly truthful. He should not pretend, for his own aggrandisement, to have been where he was not, and he should beware of inaccuracies’.

In December, on my way home with the Trio, I met in London a venerable Cuban to whom I confided my unease. Señor C— had known Che as a member of the first Revolutionary government, before he himself became disillusioned with Castroism in the ’70s and retreated to Europe. In his view, ‘This cult is a sort of transference. Fidel never wanted a personality cult to form around himself – at least not the usual sort, obvious and banal. But he thought Cubans needed a contemporary hero figure so he gave them Che, a twentieth-century back-up for Martí. Another thing, Che soon became a world hero, the most attractive face of the
Revolution – literally. After his “romantic” death, it was clever to keep him in the public eye, everywhere, not just in Cuba.’

A cynical view? Or a shrewd comment? I’m not qualified to judge. But my initial unease had faded by the time I reached Santa Clara.

Born in Argentina, as a two-year-old Che suffered his first asthma attack and all his life he demonstrated, as do many asthmatics, the
extraordinary
power of mind over matter. His mother (Celia de la Serna, of Spanish descent) recalled, ‘His father slept sitting on Ernesto’s bed because he weathered the breathless attacks better sleeping with his head resting on his father’s chest. I taught him his ABC but he could not attend school regularly. His brothers and sisters would copy the lessons and he did them at home.’ (Ché’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, was a civil engineer of part-Irish descent.) Despite this sporadic schooling, Che graduated as a medical doctor in 1953 at the age of twenty-five. And then – a delicious irony – the Argentinean government judged one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated guerrilla soldiers unfit for military service.

Che, a prolific and talented writer, penned numerous essays, lectures and TV talks while a member of the government. Amidst those hundreds of pages – explaining the ideological background to the Revolution’s military success and striving to boost the workers’ morale while urging them to try harder – one can discern signs of dissatisfaction with Cuba’s pace of change. Che was an impatient idealist, stressing the need for leaders to remain in touch with the masses while not himself taking their limitations into consideration. As leader of the Department of Industry he dealt harshly with Cuba’s militant trade unions who, in the bad old days, had wielded surprising power and secured for their members better ‘terms and conditions’ than were normal in Latin America. The man who declared himself willing to (and did) lay down his life for the poor of the earth was accused of hypocrisy when he told Cuba’s workers:

In fact Ché’s demands were not unreasonable three years into the Revolution, given two hundred thousand jobless. For everyone to benefit
from this radical social upheaval, some of the better-off trade union members had to accept reduced privileges. Nobody’s wages were lowered but annual bonuses regardless of output, and sick leave without evidence of sickness, were abolished. For the ensuing friction and confusion, education was the remedy. Workers must be brought to understand that now they were living in another sort of political entity. Dissent was
out
, equity was
in
. For the first time, national sovereignty was genuine, a fact readily appreciated as people came to experience the benefits of nationalising the means of production. Commitment to jobs, central to the delivery of revolutionary promises, increased spectacularly when Cubans realised that they were no longer working for the owners of private property but for a state that belonged (at last!) to them. An observer from New York State University, Professor Marifeli Perez-Stable, quotes a cigar worker in 1962 – ‘When a Cuban feels honour and pride in his heart for his nation, this means more than material benefits.’ And a brewery worker happily commented, ‘Never before has there been such fellowship between the workers and the administration and other Cubans.’

As an anti-capitalist, Che unfailingly practised what he preached. All the royalties from his best-selling
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War
went to the Writers’ Union with a brief note: ‘I cannot accept a cent from a book that does nothing more than narrate incidents from the war. Do whatever you wish with the money.’ Declining a fee for lecturing at Havana University he explained, ‘For me it is inconceivable that a
monetary
remuneration be offered to a leader of the government for any kind of work. Among the many recompenses I have received, that most important is that of being considered part of the Cuban people. I could not evaluate that in pesos or centavos.’ In a letter to Fidel, written before Che set off on his risky mission to the Congo, he noted that his family in Cuba would inherit nothing material but that was okay; the state would provide housing, education and medication for his four young children. To them, two years later, he wrote tender farewell letters from Bolivia when his survival seemed unlikely. The eldest received a separate letter, being of an age to carry the Revolutionary torch. ‘Remember, there are still many years of struggle ahead and even when you are a woman you will have to play your part.’ Aleida Guevera is still playing her part, working as a paediatrician in the most needy corners of the Majority World and helping to run the William Soler Children’s Hospital in Havana.

In 1965 Ché’s apparently abrupt decision to leave Cuba and resume his guerrilla career generated durable rumours. Anti-Castroites gloated over
an ‘inevitable’ falling out between two tough young men, ‘natural rivals for power’. It was knowingly asserted that Fidel, being the tougher of the two, had ‘banished’ Che. (Perhaps even had him eliminated? He had vanished without trace …) To those who knew both men, such flourishes of pop psychology lacked all credibility though for a time the rumours did have a certain destabilising effect within Havana’s body politic.

In its early days, Cuba’s Revolution was for export. Its military success excited that minority of Bolivar believers to be found in every generation, throughout Latin America, since the Liberator’s death. Cuba’s new leaders, especially Fidel and Che, were happy to be in this export business. During the ’60s a guesstimated two thousand Latin Americans studied guerrilla warfare in Cuban training camps, to the Soviets’ dismay. The Kremlin disliked armed insurgency not directed by the Kremlin. And here were these Cubans messing things up in a region designated by the Politburo (bearing the Monroe doctrine in mind) as best subverted by go-slow,
non-violent
political operations under KGB supervision. (A chilling book,
The Mitrokhin Archive II
by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, incidentally illuminates the KGB/CIA affinity – two sinister organisations having much more in common with each other than either has/had with the ordinary decent citizens of their respective countries.)