Island that Dared (27 page)

My host escorted me back to the Historic Centre where he had an afternoon appointment. We rode in a high four-wheeled carriage with a tasselled canopy, drawn by a well-groomed chestnut mare. I was invited to supper on the following evening to meet Gustavo’s son and
daughter-in
-law – and possibly the ‘clever fellow’, depending on transport from Santa Clara.

Studying my inadequate map (nothing detailed is available), I wondered if it would be possible to trek ‘off-road’ through the eastern Escambray to Sancti Spiritus. At dawn I set out to do a recce, taking a long, steep street past two-hundred-year-old dwellings, their thick walls and handsome shutters designed for coolness. Near this hilltop several mulattos were milking the family cow while minute piglets squeaked with excitement on being released from their shed. Here, as throughout the town, most homes had one or two bird-cages hanging from the façade at
head-height
. For generations the Trinitarios have been fixated on their
song-birds
– black, swallow-sized, with white-flecked wings. In many streets, between January and June, scores compete in singing competitions; public appraisal determines the winners, judged by the frequency, duration and intensity of their trill. Champions are worth their weight in pesos; Gustavo knew several men who had paid three or four months’ salary for an outstanding diva.

On the wide, flat summit of this limestone hill stands a solitary neglected little church, Trinidad’s oldest (1740), now permanently locked. An
unusual
three-arch bell tower was added in 1812 and the bells remain in
place though long since silent. On my return journey a few endearing juvenile
jineteros
were hanging around with a pony, offering to pose as mini-cowboys for the unpackaged tourists who get this far. One
enterprising
lad, seeing I had no camera, offered to teach me how to pronounce Ermita de Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria de la Popa for fifty centavos – which sounded like a bargain.

Again, perfect walking weather: half cloudy, a strong cool breeze off the nearby turquoise sea. Ahead lay low hills, one almost concealing a motel, another – much the highest – defaced by a gigantic radio mast; but it might give me some idea of the lie of the land towards Sancti Spiritus. A gravelly path climbed around slopes where coarse yellowish grass surrounded huge lumps of limestone. Half way up I saw two men in the distance, perhaps fifty yards apart, creeping slowly through low bushes, bent in two, then suddenly lying down, completely disappearing – then moments later leaping up, gesturing wildly and yelling. Drawing closer, I passed two occupied bird-cages hanging on bushes and the
centavo
began to drop. Sure enough, this erratic behaviour had an avian explanation; it was an attempt to capture birds without injuring them. The men hurried to the path, curious about me, then earnestly explained that singers needed to be taken for a walk at least three times a week, hung on bushes providing their favourite leaves, so that they themselves could pluck them from the twigs, and left alone for some time to commune with relatives and friends. Unless treated thus, their trilling deteriorated.

This hilltop, protected by its gradient, has escaped becoming a ‘Viewing Point’, complete with coach park and ‘amenities’. In truth the view is heart-stopping. Suddenly one is overlooking the whole length of the Valley of the Sugar Mills, previously hidden, and beyond rise the Escambray’s many royal blue ridges – subtly changing colour that morning as the high clouds slowly shifted. For a time I sat with my back to the radio mast, pretending it didn’t exist, then I had to circumvent its fenced base to suss out the terrain to the east.

My footsteps alerted a border collie (sort of) bitch, who jumped a wooden gate to greet the intruder, then rolled over to have her tummy tickled. The solitary unarmed guard seemed equally pleased to have this break in the monotony of his twelve-hour shift and vigorously shook my hand. He spoke basic English and was yet another of those strikingly handsome Amharic types – though what struck me as an Amharic type could be the result of Taino genes.

As Jorge led me around the fence I saw why this mast looked so shiny
new: it was a replacement for one knocked flat by Hurricane Dennis. Only when you see a prone mast, extending halfway down a mountainside, and then have to clamber through its complex innards, do you realise a) how gigantic these things are and b) how mighty is a minor hurricane.

Jorge fetched his powerful binoculars so that I could view some of the buildings on the valley floor. It was a friendly gesture, with no hint of
peso-seeking
. Several palatial haciendas have been restored – no wonder the slaves burnt so many canefields up and down this valley, eventually
reducing
their owners to bankruptcy and leaving the way clear for US corporations to move in.

I accepted Jorge’s invitation to drink coffee in the guard’s hut, then changed my mind on seeing that he had no cooking appliance, only a thermos of coffee to last him all day. When consulted about trekking to Sancti Spiritus he said there was no continuous track. I would have to follow the motor road – not a pleasing prospect.

Back in the Historic bit I refuelled on the terrace of a little bar in a narrow street near Parque Cespedes; there Trinitarios and unpackaged tourists gather, leaving the Plaza Mayor to the coachloads. Only four tables were occupied, one by one of the Swedes from my
casa
(who pretended not to notice my arrival) and two black schoolgirls – early teens, breasts budding, both conspicuously underclad and perhaps soon to be unclad.

An angry shout and a shrill yelp made me look up from my diary to see a burly, shaven-headed young man dragging one girl away, gripping her by the forearm and shouting abuse over his shoulder at the Swede. The other girl then stood up to go, looking rattled, but her ‘patron’ persuaded her to stay, stroking her silky bare shoulders and nuzzling her hair. I was about to leave when a slim mulatta emerged from the bar – fortyish, formally dressed in a grey pleated skirt and ruby-red shirt-blouse, carrying a worn leather briefcase and a camera. Few Cubans then used cameras, yet she didn’t look like a tourist.

Approaching my table, Beatriz asked in English if she might sit with me and introduced herself as a Cienfuegos doctor, a founder member of a small NGO dedicated to pressurising the police into enforcing the laws against child prostitution.
Sotto voce
she requested, ‘Please may I photo you like you’re my friend? Two or three quick shots – for my report.’ I nodded and played my part, smirking as I posed, holding up beer glass and notebook, the Swede and his acquisition in the immediate background but indifferent to the camera. Beatriz was in a rush just then but we met later,
by which time she had detected that the burly young man was, as I’d guessed, the girl’s brother.

‘Why,’ I asked, ‘do you have to pressurise the police? And how come these foreigners are so
blatant
? They surely know they’re breaking the law – but those questions must be related.’

‘Yes,’ said Beatriz, ‘closely related. It seems cruel our reputation as almost AIDS-free attracts certain men. It’s like a punishment for being good! What about Ireland, you also have problems?’

My knowledge of Ireland’s problems in this area is limited, but a reference to our drugs/prostitution link apparently cheered Beatriz, obliquely, by making Cuba seem not so bad after all.

In
Pleasure Island
Rosalie Schwartz reviews the situation:

Evidently many police officers are being ‘flexible’ while crusaders like Beatriz are being ‘strict’. Her loyalty to
el comandante
was unmistakable when we discussed ‘internationalism’, and she obviously saw her boldly independent NGO as a tool for the defence of the Revolution’s integrity.

That evening I tentatively quizzed Gustavo and family about the
government
’s attitude to NGOs – was it true some were discouraged?

Damian replied; he was a career bureaucrat notably less open-minded
than his father. ‘Cuba needs no small groups here and there. All citizens have their own big groups,
with power.
And with independence, not always doing what Party says. It’s true some groups, NGOs, are discouraged, like you say, or suppressed if CIA gives them money and gifts.’

I would have liked to follow that scent but Gustavo said, ‘For outsiders, even if they love Cuba, it’s hard to understand our Communist Party. It can’t suggest or enforce legislation – doesn’t that surprise you? It can’t nominate candidates for municipal, provincial or national assemblies. It doesn’t
administer
the state. The people have maximum administrative authority.’

When I asked, ‘Who nominates candidates?’ Gustavo looked at his mulatto son (of a Canadian mother) and said, ‘Damian has it all in his official head.’

Damian was being a New Man, slicing cucumber for the salad while his wife, Lucia, steamed rice. He finished his task before answering my
question
in such detail that his explanations belong to a later chapter.

Lucia placed the rice-steamer on the table as I asked, ‘How long are election campaigns?’

Everyone looked shocked. ‘We don’t have them!’ said Gustavo. ‘Here is not the US – no cash needed! Now eat some food. You like Hatuey to drink?’

As we helped ourselves to rice, salad and stewed chicken Camillo the dachshund caused a diversion by hurling himself towards a window, barking shrilly. Gustavo chuckled. ‘A turkey buzzard flew by – he hates them!’

When I quoted Fidel on the dangerous defects of Western ‘democracy’ Damian became perceptibly more genial, then offered me a lift to
Cienfuegos
on the morrow. His 1953 Chrysler, parked nearby, was astonishing – it had received so much t.l.c. it looked brand new. On
ad hoc
journeys one goes where the flow of chance contacts takes one and Gustavo had scribbled a note of introduction to his old Cienfuegos friend, Alberto, another retired academic well qualified to lecture me on crime and punishment in Cuba.

When Damian met me by the bus station, as arranged, he was on foot. Trinidad’s petrol ration had been delayed en route; the broken-down tanker was miles away awaiting a spare part. The search had begun for a sufficiently skilled blacksmith. Damian advised me to hitch-hike.

The Special Period’s transport problem produced a new ‘citizens’ force’, men and women wearing mustard uniforms with ‘TRANSPORTE’
arm-bands
. (I thought of them as ‘the Mustards’.) Standing at suburban junctions they ask hitch-hikers who wants to go where, stop vehicles which might not otherwise stop, organise queues when necessary and determine how many can safely board each vehicle. Drivers genuinely expect no payment and the Mustards’ services are also free in theory though some seek a peso or two. Outside tourist-conscious Trinidad, NP3 were firmly demanded of me – hardly excessive for a forty-mile lift in a Second World War military jeep with no windows, no discernible springs and a patched canvas roof.

Quite often we stopped to let people off and take on replacements but there were never more than six on board this four-seater vehicle: a reasonable load, by Cuban standards. Everyone had to hug their luggage – my rucksack by far the most awkward item, two hens in a nylon sack the noisiest. Our youthful soldier driver sought advice from his passengers about vegetable growing. Cuba’s army is expected to feed itself and devotes as much time to digging as to target practice.

For some twenty miles this ill-maintained road, built in 1952, runs level between the Escambray’s forested flanks and a flat shore piled with
hurricane
debris. Then it swings inland, crossing slopes of dense green scrub with occasional inhabited areas where palms draw attention to
mud-coloured
bohios
. There was little movement; a few horses grazed, being deticked by egrets, a few oxen ploughed, a few carts were being loaded with machete-cut cane. Three narrow deep-set rivers were spanned by drearily utilitarian bridges; it’s sad that modern technology has killed bridge-building as an art.

Eight miles from Cienfuegos our driver apologetically ejected me, with a big smile and an affectionate handshake. Traffic was sparse (perhaps extra-sparse because of Trinidad’s problem?) and the dusty cacti hedges offered no shade. It made sense to walk on, despite the 10.00 a.m. heat.
Quarter of an hour later a rice-loaded lorry, its passenger seats surprisingly empty, stopped voluntarily to pick me up and was going all the way. Its grey-haired, vivacious mulatto driver (Carlos) associated Ireland with Christians killing each other and thought Cuba fortunate to have no such conflicts. After we had parted, as I was strolling towards the central Parque Martí, the lorry pulled up beside me: my purse had been jolted out of my pocket. It held more than CP100 – a small fortune, for Carlos. Yet he had turned his vehicle – not easy in the centre – to follow me. Had I been put down near a bar he could never have found me and his virtue would have been rewarded. In Cuba one doesn’t take lost property to the police.

Cienfuegos is the only Cuban city founded by French settlers, migrants from Louisiana attracted by a safe, capacious harbour with a fertile, virgin hinterland. Led by Lieutenant-Colonel Louis Clouet (Rtd), they were a dogged lot. In the very year of Cienfuegos’s foundation (1819) a hurricane destroyed most of the new structures and their replacements were
repeatedly
ravaged: in 1825, 1832, 1837. On 10 June 1832 Lieutenant Governor Manuel de Mediavilla reported to Havana: ‘This newly reborn port that was recovering in its agriculture, the certain base of prosperity and the principal source of its happiness, has for the foreseeable future returned virtually back to its primitive condition …’

Hurricanes destroyed everything: growing crops, domestic animals and poultry, all the coffee, sugar and tobacco packed in warehouses ready for export, the flimsy homes of the poor and their few possessions. Wagon trails and railways became impassable. The coastal merchant ships, until recently more important than roads, were smashed to bits. Sugar mills suffered massive damage. Salt water killed vegetation over huge areas and rendered wells and streams, cisterns and vats undrinkable – sources of cholera. Yet Madrid was consistently unsympathetic and anyway too distant to provide emergency aid, even had the monarch been so inclined.

One notorious royal decision highlights imperial greed. News of the October 1844 hurricane took two months to reach Spain; meanwhile, the Havana authorities had decided to alleviate extreme hardship by
suspending
import duties on essential goods coming from the US – food, clothing, tools, building materials. But the royal exchequer mattered more than destitute Cubans. On 29 December word came from Madrid:

Her Majesty’s callousness surprised few Cubans and fed the island’s embryonic nationalism.

In 2005 UNESCO nominated Cienfuegos a World Heritage Site and I found the centre in transition. All Parque Martí’s splendid buildings – mostly former
palacios
– had been recently restored yet mere yards away stately mansions were literally falling apart; pedestrian-protecting nets ‘roofed’ the pavements. Further out, the old residential districts were pleasing in a predictable way: wide, straight, tree-lined streets and dignified colonial homes in shrub-filled gardens, their charm somewhat diminished by the proximity of affordable apartment blocks for the masses.

Taking Gustavo’s advice, I looked for lodgings on the Punta Gorda, a two-mile-long tapering peninsula appropriated a century ago by
Cienfuegos
’s richest merchants. (One guide book, getting its categories mixed, describes it as ‘the aristocratic quarter of the city’.) A stylish boulevard, the Paseo del Prado, leads to a half-mile Malecón where small boys sit on the wall trying to net miniscule fish. Here a row of early twentieth-century villas, art nouveau-flavoured, overlook the wide Bay of Jagua.

Then one is in a peculiar neighbourhood, its lay-out more Miami than Cuba. Four hotels and a restaurant face an open-plan settlement of gaily painted wooden houses, also early twentieth-century and slightly
Potem-kinish
; that freshly painted look surely has to do with Punta Gorda being Cienfuegos’s tourist hub. Here too are a convertible-peso pharmacy, a tourist office (never open during my visit), a petrol station (rarely open), and a new free-standing
tienda
(open ten to five with two hours off for lunch). The luxury hotels are offensively ‘gated’ and as for the restaurant – one stands still and blinks incredulously. It’s what happened when a sugar merchant of incalculable wealth imported the Italian architect Alfredo Colli and teams of artists and craftsmen (including thirty Moroccans) and told them he wanted a two-storey home suggesting Granada’s Alhambra, with three towers of strongly contrasting designs and as many Venetian, Gothic and Moorish motifs as could be applied inside and out, leaving no square inch undecorated. The Palacio de Valle is sufficiently o.t.t. to have reached the realm of entertainment. It took four years to build (1913–17) but its owner, Acisclo del Valle Blanco, reckoned it was worth waiting for.

Cienfuegos is among Cuba’s most polluted cities and on the far side of the lake-like bay (its outlet to the Caribbean Sea invisible) distant chimney stacks emit fumes perceptible even in Parque Martí – making one question UNESCO’s accolade. Also on that shore is the aborted Juragua nuclear plant, begun in the late 1970s with Soviet aid and designed to provide twelve per cent of Cuba’s electricity from 1993. Seen as one of the Revolution’s most important industrial projects, it was employing one thousand two hundred workers – many highly skilled – when it ‘became dormant’ in 1992. Its Director, Isaac Edilio Alayon, then requested an International Atomic Energy Agency inspection and Juragua was duly declared ‘safe’ (or as safe as such plants ever are). Nevertheless, the Bush I administration, spurred on by Senator Connie Mack of Florida, tried to panic the general public about Juragua’s threat to the whole US eastern seaboard. This was standing reality on its head. In fact Cuba would be at risk, for meteorological reasons, should Florida’s defective Crystal River reactor one day run out of control.

Behind the ‘Miami’ area, one is back in normal streets of detached, unpainted houses in small gardens. (Very short streets: here the peninsula is less than a mile wide.) Soon I had found a
casa particular
and been introduced by Nancy and Juan to their three dogs and two cats. The family’s milking nanny was tethered on wasteland across the road. While brewing my initiatory demitasse of coffee, Nancy fulminated against the Spanish-Cuban consortium rumoured to be planning another hotel on that wasteland – ‘eight storeys, blocking our sky’. This little house had one uncomfortable eccentricity: all the windows were kept tightly shut,
twenty-four
hours a day, in an attempt to deter Punta Gorda’s rampant
mosquitoes
. My room was oven-like, by reluctant choice; it lacked a fan and I couldn’t tolerate the raucous Soviet-era air-conditioning.

Punta Gorda’s semi-rural hinterland illustrates layers of Cuban social history. On expanses of common land, yellow-brown in February, livestock mingle: pony-sized horses, wandering sheep, tethered goats, countless poultry. Rough tracks lead to once-magnificent mansions, now occupied by several families, with weeds and cacti sprouting from cracked walls. Not far off, modest affluence is suggested by new DIY homes, some only
half-finished
but already lived in. Footpaths winding through tall bushes lead to primitive shacks proving poverty. Even the remotest of these enjoy electricity, but not piped water. Their inhabitants, though adequately clad and well-groomed, are the sort of people Fidel had in mind when he spoke, at the 2003 Pedagogy Conference in Havana, about the ‘many very poor white families who migrated from rural areas to the cities’.

The sad thing is to observe how poverty, associated with a lack of knowledge, tends to reproduce itself. Other sectors, mostly from very humble backgrounds, but with better living and working conditions, were able to take advantage of study possibilities created by the revolution, and now make up the bulk of university graduates, who likewise tend to reproduce their improved social conditions derived from education.

Punta Gorda’s sky is dominated by the unlovely arc-lights of the 5 September stadium. This gigantic sports complex, complete with a
psychology
clinic for sportspersons, was internationally admired in the 1970s. Inevitably the Special Period took its toll and now the place looks as
run-down
as the nearby apartment blocks – which doesn’t diminish the
attendance
at every game.

I had been told I must take baseball seriously, as the Cuban equivalent of hurling in Ireland or cricket in England, a sport that is more than a sport, an activity that permeates and expresses the national soul … Indeed, the numbers of boys who practise on Cuba’s streets (rarely with bats, often using homemade balls and worn-out gloves) did remind me of Irish juvenile hurlers in times past, before our car-infestation. On a Sunday morning I dutifully checked at the stadium but no game was scheduled. Instead, I joined half a dozen small boys who were watching adults
practising
in a nearby field. Close to our vantage point a goat was tethered – a randy billy, with distinguished horns, who sucked frequently and frenziedly at his agitated penis to the boys’ chortling delight.

For want of a mentor, this practice game merely baffled me. When one man crouched on the ground wearing a mask and body armour while another stood close beside him, wielding a bat, I couldn’t decide whether the latter was the former’s opponent or was attempting to defend him from balls thrown with lethal force. At intervals, for no reason apparent to me, certain men sprinted around the field as though pursued by a tiger – then suddenly stopped, at no particular point, to loud applause … There was an acute shortage of gear: everything had to be shared. The metal bats shocked me; when hearing of baseball bats being used by our street gangs to beat each other up, I had vaguely visualised something wooden and blunt.

Soon I moved on, to admire Parque Martí’s eclectic range of buildings and monuments. In 1902, to celebrate the Republic’s delusional birth, Cienfuegos’s workers’ corporation commissioned Cuba’s only triumphal arch. In 1906 José Martí was placed on his marble, lion-guarded pedestal. A smaller version of Havana’s Capitolio, the Palacio del Ayuntaiento, contrasts with the arcaded and perfectly proportioned Teatro Tomas Terry
commemorating a ruthless slave-trader, sugar-factory owner and mayor of Cienfuegos. The Palacio Ferreris (early 1900s), with its blue mosaic cupola, fanciful balconies and ornate wrought-iron spiral staircase, is another example of sugar wealth in action.

At right angles to the theatre is the small cathedral (neo-classical façade, two asymmetrical towers, agreeably simple interior needing some repairs). In the porch numerous faded photographs and posters recall the Papal state visit in 1998 – a P.R. triumph for both host and guest. Although this new alliance took some people aback (and infuriated Florida’s hard-liners) its base was obvious: a shared anti-consumerism. Pope John Paul could have delivered Fidel’s 1995 speech to the Social Development conference in Copenhagen:

By 9.45 a thousand or so worshippers (I made a rough estimate during the sermon) had assembled. In the south transept a smiling teenage band (two girls, two boys) played their guitar, tres, claves and bongo with all the verve expected of Cubans and most people happily swayed along. The drummer was one of the few blacks present. This preponderantly elderly white congregation had a scattering of middle-aged couples and several rows of adolescents and children. An ancient, bald, invalid priest, with sunken cheeks, sat in his wheel-chair to one side of the high altar, being earnestly addressed by a portly, silver-haired, dark-suited man with a
self-important
expression. Two beribboned girls, in frilly dresses, aged five or six, were hanging about on the altar looking expectant. When the tall, broad-shouldered celebrant appeared in his green chasuble they rushed to greet him and he affectionately hugged and kissed them before leading them by the hands into the sacristy. (At that point, in twenty-first-century Ireland, hairs might have prickled on the backs of some necks.)