Island that Dared (28 page)

Punctually at 10.00 the pre-Mass procession emerged from behind the altar, led by three teenage girls in low-slung blue jeans and tank-tops that showed lots of midriff despite the porch’s prominent strictures about apparel. (Beggars can’t be choosers and Cuba’s Roman Catholic church is well behind in the popularity ratings.) The teenagers walked abreast, slowly, followed by the celebrant holding one little girl by the hand and two tall thin youths in white surplices, swinging censers. Meanwhile many worshippers were accompanying a children’s choir in rousing hymns. Back
on the altar, the celebrant led the other little girl to a nursery-size armchair opposite the wheel-chair, but in a position of equal honour – and there she sat, alone and motionless, for the next hour, looking rather complacent. I tried, but failed, to imagine Zea in this role.

The teenage girls led the credo and read the epistle and gospel
confidently
and clearly. At the consecration, when the invalid was wheeled to the low altar table, he steadily held the chalice aloft while uttering the magic words in a quavering voice. Afterwards, many old women queued on the altar to kiss his ring. At the exit the priest chatted with his departing flock, absent-mindedly patting the little girls’ heads while they gazed up at him adoringly, stroking his brocade chasuble at thigh-level. I’m not hinting at anything undesirable; all this simply showed how innocently remote Cuba is from a world traumatised by child-abusing priests and parsons, too often shielded by senior churchmen.

In Cuba small girls hitch-hike solo, not always at points supervised by Mustards, everyone assuming they will be safe hopping into a car with one unknown male. And obviously they are safe or this custom would not have taken root, Cuban parents being no less protective than others. In Havana I met a New Zealander who insisted that Cuba must have its quota of child molesters – hidden, for ‘image-protection’ reasons – whereas our media provide maximum publicity, thus triggering neurotic fears. I agreed with him about the neurotic fears, palpable now in some countries and
dreadfully
destructive of wholesome social relationships. But I felt he was missing the point that Castroism has protected Cuba’s population from the moral degradation promoted by Capitalism Rampant – admittedly at the cost of certain fundamental human rights.

‘Human Rights’ (denial of) is the anti-Castroists’ biggest stick. Obviously it’s a real stick, but how big is it? Two separate though linked issues confuse this debate: a relentless, multi-faceted US effort to destabilise Cuba, and the West’s predisposition to be deceived by men like Armando Valladares.

The Valladares case, spanning decades, clearly illustrates how those issues converge. In 1960 this twenty-three-year-old former Batista police officer was convicted of three terrorist bombings and sentenced to thirty years in jail. During the 1970s many prominent Europeans campaigned for his release, presenting him as a tragic, talented victim of Communism, a hero who was managing to smuggle poetry out with the laundry. On his release in 1982 he settled in Spain and wrote
Against All Hope,
widely read and lavishly praised – especially in the US and Britain. (‘A magnificent tribute to the human spirit’ –
Sunday Telegraph.
‘A quiet account of
remarkable bravery’ – the
Economist
.) In his introduction Valladares assures us that he was imprisoned ‘solely for having espoused and expressed principles distinct from those of the regime of Fidel Castro’. (Sabotaging public buildings is of course an increasingly popular way of ‘espousing principles’.) The English translation blurb describes the author as ‘a law student, poet, sculptor and painter’ – just the sort of young man Batista recruited to his police force. It also claims that he ‘suffered torture, starvation and lack of medical care which left him paralysed’. Writing in 1984, Valladares asserted, ‘Today, at this very moment, hundreds of political prisoners are naked, sleeping on the floors of cells whose windows and doors have been sealed. They never see the light of day, or for that matter artificial light’. Around the same date, US legal teams and Amnesty International delegations were inspecting Cuban prisons. They found ‘no widespread complaints from common prisoners about their treatment in the prisons’; and ‘no evidence to substantiate accusations of torture’. They did however find many buildings in dire need of refurbishment and they recommended some quite drastic changes in the administration. On both counts the Attorney General’s office, in charge of all Cuban prisons, reacted positively to their criticisms.

In October 1982, Valladares flew directly from prison to Paris. His supporters and their attendant journalists assembled at the airport to welcome him and were astonished to see a hale and hearty ‘hero’
descending
the aeroplane steps, his ‘paralysis’ having been cured en route. The usual suspects funded his subsequent European lecture tour. Then, having obtained US citizenship (a quickie job), he was appointed to represent the US at Geneva as a member of the subsequently discredited UN Human Rights Commission. At that point a disillusioned and embarrassed Regis Debray commented, ‘The man wasn’t a poet, the poet wasn’t paralysed, and the Cuban is now a US citizen’. Debray, a French writer, had acted as Ché’s main link with Fidel during the Bolivian venture.

Vice President George Bush nominated Valladares as ‘an American hero’ in October 1988 and a few months later the departing President Reagan honoured him with the Presidential Medal. Thus reinforced, Valladares forgot both human rights and international law. On 31 August 1994 he joined in the demand for a military blockade of Cuba and asserted the Florida hardliners’ right ‘to launch military attacks from US soil’ against his homeland.

In 1994, when Special Period deprivations were at their worst, the US Interests Section in Havana sent an interesting report to the Secretary of
State, the CIA and the Immigration and Naturalization Service:

From Parque Martí I took a horse-bus back to Punta Gorda, where Gustavo’s friend, Alberto, was expecting me for a late lunch. As I approached his home he overtook me, an eighty-two-year-old pedalling vigorously through the afternoon heat with his toddler great-grand-nephew on a crossbar seat – rather a grand seat, intricately carved and painted sky blue. The toddler’s mamma, Clara, a marine biologist/ecologist allergic to mass tourism, was sitting on the verandah sewing a shirt for little Tomas. This substantial family home (c.1890s) was now divided into three flats and surrounded by ‘development’.

While Tomas was being fed Alberto and I relaxed in a spacious patio shaded by vines and presided over by a badly chipped marble statue of Minerva. ‘My grandfather stole her, on an ox-cart, in 1897,’ said Alberto. ‘From a sugar-magnate’s garden – he was pioneering “redistribution”, he would have made a good
fidelista
!’

I already felt sufficiently at ease to protest, ‘But Fidel never
looted
!’

Alberto chuckled. ‘True, he only “redistributed” – why we live in onethird of my grandfather’s home.’

Had Gustavo not told me Alberto’s age I would have guessed ‘late sixties’. He had a thick grey thatch above keen grey-green eyes in a face so long and bony I thought ‘El Greco!’ His grand-niece was a tall, willowy mulatta, her exuberant African hair and stern Spanish features adding up to great beauty. (Mulattas seem less inclined than blacks to hair-straighten: somebody must have written a thesis on that.) Clara spoke no English,
Alberto’s fluency dated back to his Harvard days in the early 1950s.

Lunch consisted of rice, chicken, salad; for those without convertible pesos, menus are constrained. As we ate Clara raged against the new hotel at the peninsula’s end, not because of its obtrusive ugliness but because it has much reduced the locals’ fishing area – locals who fish in earnest for protein.

This was a one-bicycle family; after the wash-up Clara lifted Tomas into his seat (no nonsense about harness or helmet) and pedalled off to her mother’s distant flat. By then, on my host’s suggestion, I was busily taking shorthand notes.

For thirty-five years Alberto had been involved in the evolution of Cuba’s justice system, a long, hard struggle (not yet over) to reconcile what the Revolution inherited with what the Revolution needed for its day-
to-day
protection and functioning. We tend to overlook this aspect of ‘revolution’. Obvious upheavals hold the attention: nationalisation, redistribution of land, the launching of island-wide educational, medical and housing programmes to benefit the majority. But nothing can work without a coherent, generally acceptable, body of laws. Of course Cuba’s enemies scorn the Revolution’s criminal justice system – without bothering to study it, as Alberto angrily remarked. ‘We’re always being charged with violating international standards – ironical, when ours is probably Latin America’s most efficient and fairest system. It’s certainly unique – has to be, for two reasons. One: to defend our independence from the
yanquis
’ non-stop
active
antagonism. Two: to help with the promotion of social justice. Our early “people’s courts” didn’t always work too well – some did “violate international standards”! Then the whole legal apparatus was taken apart and redesigned.’

Like many of his generation, Alberto could not ‘think positive’ about the Special Period. Rhetorically he asked, ‘When the Soviet collapse caused so much hardship, why did so many go on supporting an apparent failure? Every day, Radio Marti sent loud messages about exiles rushing to the rescue if we rebelled against Fidel. Instead, we listened to his call to think and plan and work together to get through the crisis – its length
unpredictable
. The first major economy was reducing the armed forces from three hundred thousand in ’89 to fifty-five thousand in ’97. Isn’t that remarkable? Not an expanding army, because deprived people might rebel, but a shrunken army told to grow food!’ Alberto paused, suddenly looking sad. ‘Now, I’m not so sure … The austerity of the Special Period was unifying. Today’s young are challenged by that divisive two-tier currency. You’ve seen
the damage for yourself, every foreigner notices. Inequality is back – maybe never really went away but for decades we
fought
it. Now its got to look like a built-in part of the structure. Some believe the Revolution can and will protect its foundations. I don’t see that. I see corporate waves eroding the base of our socialist cliff. Clara disagrees, says I don’t have enough faith in the young’s pride in Cuba’s independence. I’d like to be wrong!’ When the mosquitoes drove us indoors at sunset Alberto wrote an introductory letter to his friend Félix, an Angolan war veteran living near Jagua, from where I planned to trek to the Bay of Pigs. He advised me to take the 8.00 a.m. ferry – which meant joining the queue at 7.00 a.m.
latest
…

In darkness I set off for the ferry berth and, on the Paseo del Prado, asked directions of the only person in sight, an elderly man carrying a pair of spurs and a machete. ‘
El barca
?’ – he wasn’t sure but if I walked with him he’d find out. We continued under the arcade and at a street corner met a black woman, carrying a besom over her shoulder, who gave precise but complicated directions. (Cienfuegos’s port is vast.) I had to follow a long, unlit street, then turn this way and that – and the berth was unmarked, hard to find. My escort looked worried and was volunteering to guide me when a small lorry appeared. He stopped it with a shout, ran after it, enlisted the driver’s help – willingly given. At the ferry berth this young mulatto left his cab to assist me with my backpack and pointed out the obscure entrance. The Cubans are very couth, as a young friend of mine logically described nice new neighbours hours after learning the meaning of ‘uncouth’.

By 7.30 all the backless concrete benches in the waiting area were occupied. The ferry, invisible beyond a ramshackle shed, could only be boarded when someone unlocked a wire-mesh gate giving access to a narrow walkway. At 9.00 the gate remained locked but my companions cheerfully assured me we’d soon be sailing. By 10.00 most people looked less cheerful and by 11.00 many were restive. At 11.20 a uniformed official announced ‘No fuel’. He pointed to the problem, an antique tanker-barge immobilised halfway across the bay. If the ferry couldn’t sail by 4.00 p.m. a truck-bus would take us to Jagua the long way round: twenty-five miles instead of six. Cuba’s oil reserves are kept for emergency vehicles, priority being given to ambulances, then fire-engines, then police vehicles – an interesting order. Tourist buses (to Clara’s indignation) have a separate reserve supply organised by private enterprise with the government’s reluctant blessing.

I decided to try again the next morning and spent the rest of the day touring Cienfuegos’s renowned cemeteries. One, a National Monument, dates from the 1830s and is densely populated by larger than life angels. The other (1926) is park-like, its ‘gate lodge’ a replica of the Parthenon, its neo-classical tombs including a monument to the 5 September Martyrs. These young men died in 1957 when local revolutionaries joined the Rebel Army in an unsuccessful attempt to capture Cienfuegos’s important naval barracks.