Island that Dared (34 page)

Forty minutes later a motor-bike’s snarl ravaged the silence, then stopped. A figure appeared, hastening directly towards me, ignoring the path, and without any exchange of words I was captured by a brown-uniformed forest ranger wearing a hostile expression. Of course he was only doing his duty, though he might have done it more pleasantly. It seems we really were lucky in November, perhaps because of the Trio’s disarming presence.

I did not enjoy my four-mile pillion ride to the
campismo
at the end of that earth track. I suspected Grumpy’s accelerating around sharp bends was calculated to raise my fear-level (already high) and it displeased me to have to hold him in such a close embrace. As tourist resorts go, the
campismo
was innocuous, a score of thatched
cabañas
dotted around the sides of a bowl-valley with an alfresco restaurant overlooking many
mountainous
miles. Grumpy dumped me outside the reception office, then seemed disproportionately angry on hearing that Germans had occupied every
cabaña
. Much acrimonious debate followed; I wanted to sleep out, Grumpy insisted that I must register and sleep under a roof. He and the staff were not on good terms and as the light faded their quarrel widened to take in other topics. Finally I was led to a staff
cabañas
, the tariff reduced from CP26 to CP9 because it lacked TV, telephone, fan, bedside light, running water. When I tried to switch on the broken
baño
light it gave me the worst electric shock of my life – for an instant I imagined, ‘Heart attack!’ But I appreciated this
cabañas
’s isolation: it stood near a forested mountainside not too steep to be investigated at dawn, before Grumpy or his equivalent came on duty. Cuba’s tourist controls can be quite stressful when one isn’t of an age to enjoy Cowboys and Injuns.

At Bayamo’s Casa de la Trova a retired history teacher, whose English dated from the 1940s, had propounded his theory that the Sierra Maestra is short of transmontane paths not only because of the range’s awkward
configurations
. Until comparatively recently, he said, most goods travelled from port to port; shipping cargoes from Santiago to Manzanillo or vice versa was both simpler and cheaper than driving mule-trains across the Sierra Maestra. Hence Cuba never needed the system of traders’ tracks I had used in Nepal, Ethiopia, the Karakoram, the Andes, Laos – where the mountains are so much more formidable but water transport is not an option.

During the next three and a half days I was repeatedly baffled – but enjoyably so – by ‘awkward configurations’. Escaping from Campismo Popular was the easy bit. Directly behind my
cabaña
the dawn light revealed concrete steps built into a one-hundred-foot cliff, giving access to a natural swimming pool in a sluggish river. This ‘amenity’ seemed little used by the Campismo guests; vegetation was taking over. Upstream from the pool secure stepping stones led to a distinct path – With One Bound I Was Free!

Any stranger focused on a particular destination would find these mountains frustrating. Several times, over the next few days, I had to retrace my steps: when an apparently purposeful path ended on a
cliff-edge
and I realised its only users were wood-cutters; or when the way was blocked by a creeper-entangled fallen tree, an obstacle I might have tackled ten years ago but not now with aged bones to be considered. As I had
precalculated
, water was no problem; a delicious stream ran through every ravine. The humidity was testing but the sun rarely touched me. Amidst these dense, damp forests I was moving through a green twilight, emerging at intervals on to open terraced slopes where two or three families cultivated coffee, their crop flourishing in the nearby shade. My CDR apprehension was not justified; the astounded
campesiños
were of course curious but never interventionist. I got no whiff of the suspicion and hostility
encountered
by the exhausted
Granma
survivors who struggled into the Sierra Maestra in December 1956. Soon they were reunited with other survivors and recruited four locals, bringing the platoon up to twenty by the end of the month.

At that date no government had provided the Sierra Maestra farmers with either protection or social services and most families, though they might have been occupying their homesteads for over a century, were regarded as squatters by the big landowners who claimed the right to evict them without warning. Many were in more or less permanent conflict with the authorities and therefore disinclined to help Batista’s rebel-hunting Rural Guard. However, in early 1957 they were not yet ripe for revolution. Volunteers from the cities joined the Rebels in far greater numbers and Che found the
campesiños
’ apathy depressing. Fidel patiently set about overcoming it, emphasising that the Revolution would not only redistribute land but provided education and medical care for all. He also took a genuine interest in personal problems and listened to individual’s opinions, a new experience for peasants so accustomed to being abused and
humiliated
. Moreover, the Rebels paid for food and other assistance, in contrast to the Rural Guard and National Army who helped themselves to whatever they fancied and sometimes requisitioned precious pack-mules. Fidel’s execution of Chicho Osorio, a peculiarly vicious
mayorale
(land agent), also helped the Rebel cause. Usually the
mayorale
was a region’s most detested man.

The family who sheltered me on Night One consisted of a thirty-ish couple, two small boys who soon overcame their shyness and invited me to play baseball, and a grandfather, Angel, who initiated me into the art of palm thatching. Unusually, they allowed me to sleep on the verandah, perhaps judging it kindest to give in to the whim of a daft foreigner who didn’t know where she was going.

A new
bohio
was being built nearby, on the edge of the forest, to house Angel’s younger son and his bride. It was to be three-roomed, all wood, earthen-floored, palm-thatched; the bamboo rafters were already in place. One tends to equate palm thatching with putting up a tent but in fact, as Angel demonstrated, preparing the fronds is labour-intensive. First you must find those of exactly the right quality and length and let them wither naturally in the sun before spreading them on wooden slats under a roof of other fronds and saturating them with water (in Angel’s case hauled up from the bottom of a ravine on a fearsomely steep path). Three soakings are needed, leaving a day between the fronds drying out (
not
in the sun) and being resaturated. During this process unsuitable fronds are detected, those that might be responsible for future leaks. It’s cheering to know that in a few places people retain the skills, and have access to the necessary materials, to build themselves a sound new home – for free.

The Sierra Maestra is famous for its shortage of zig-zag paths, despite such very steep slopes. Each day I came to a few dodgy stretches, some with unnerving drops into ravines – though given so much vegetation one wouldn’t fall all the way. The main hazard is the friability of the soil in places – loose and dry, without boulders or roots to bind a path together. This makes for difficult ascents and terrifying descents, best accomplished on one’s bottom. During the second afternoon I had my self-esteem restored by a
campesiño
who was doing the same thing, sitting on a wooden tray evidently designed for the purpose. I was then crawling up, clinging to shrubs, and on seeing me he grabbed a branch to halt his descent and expressed extreme concern. Where was I going to? Coming from? And why? My idiotic replies didn’t reassure him and he went on his way – having offered me his toboggan – looking so worried that I feared he might contact a park ranger.

Some of the vegetation, varying with altitude, was unfamiliar:
aggressive-looking
bromeliads brandishing swords and spears, acres of blue-green thorny thickets, exuberant fountains of ferns, orchids large and small (given as one reason for guides being mandatory), and numerous, bizarre, contorted plants stirring memories of fairytale illustrations. As in Laotian forests (of which these reminded me) the bird-life was tantalising: flashes of red, blue, white, green, chestnut, only glimpsed through the obscuring foliage. In November the ornithological scene had disappointed us – but then, the chatter of tiny tongues does not facilitate bird-watching.

At most I walked six hours a day, slowly, and spent the other hours enjoying my immediate surroundings and chewing raisins while saluting
the Rebel Army’s energy. One exceptional journalist, Enrique Meneses, writing for
Paris Match,
spent four months with the guerrillas (other journalists gave up after four days or less) and reported that Fidel changed camp almost daily, leading his men up and down these gruelling gradients for at least twelve hours with occasional stops if they came to a
bohio
offering coffee. Whenever food was accepted (this happened rarely) the host received a hundred-peso gift.

Everybody around the few
bohios
I passed was friendly and invited me to rest but the usual gestures of welcome – water, coffee, homemade snacks – were absent. (I recall the same unavailability of refreshments at odd hours in rural Cameroon, far from all motor roads, where strangers are a novelty.) All these homes were earthen-floored and without running water but each had electricity. This is in telling contrast to the situation in many African countries where ginormous corporate-sponsored pylons span hundreds of miles of remote territory while beneath them thousands of homes are still lit by rags soaked in kerosene. There’s no profit for generating companies in the wattage used by hut-dwellers.

These mountains are not camper-friendly (the Rebels used hammocks) and Night Two was sensationally uncomfortable. Having seen no
bohio
since noon I walked too far, hoping to reach one, then had to make my bed across a precipitous path where the law of gravity precluded sound sleep. My own fault: stupidly I had climbed out of a ravine where I could have slept soundly on the stream’s level bank. Then the sun set and I dared not descend in darkness. However, the night noises almost made up for my perpetual motion. By day only bird calls break the silence, by night one becomes aware of a bustling population – croaks, hisses, grunts, wauls, squeaks, whines (some insect other than mosquitoes) and much rustling through the dead leaves. Of course nothing alarming: Cuba’s fauna is benign, the ants and mosquitoes merely tiresome.

In the summer of 1958 Batista, emboldened by the failure of a badly organised general strike, announced a major assault on the Sierra Maestra. Against Fidel’s three hundred or so guerrillas, General Eulogio Cantillo deployed ten thousand US-armed troops. By then there were quite a few foreign journalists around and a watching world could scarcely credit the news from Cuba. Cantillo’s thousands were not winning quickly … Time passed and they were not winning slowly … Could it be Fidel was right when he insisted ‘the people are with us’? Those ten thousand came from ‘the people’ and, if not yet ‘with’ the Rebels, they were unenthusiastic about opposing them. Especially on a battleground where the ‘enemy’ had had
time to become intimate with every ridge, precipice, track, river and ravine. Cantillo’s ill-trained men had never been required to operate on such demanding terrain.

On Day Three I was close to this battleground and, looking up at two of the highest crests, I wondered which one prompted Fidel’s Thermopylae remark. Hereabouts a small band of hand-picked sharp-shooters,
concealed
on a crest, killed hundreds of troops as they clambered up these slopes, their heavy arms more of a hindrance than a help. No Rebel could ever be targeted amidst the trees, no conscript could hope to reach the crest alive. Thermopylae with knobs on …

In July 1958 two hundred and twenty soldiers were trapped in a ravine and disarmed. Fidel then asked Che (an excellent chef) to prepare lunch for them while he was making arrangements to hand them over to the Red Cross – with maximum publicity. Another battalion, surrounded and captured in August, received the same treatment. Fidel then wrote to General Cantillo (one of several letters):

The Comandante also wrote to a battalion commander whose men had been put in Red Cross care:

Those who talked and wrote of ‘Cuba’s civil war’ were missing the point. Civil wars have a different flavour.

By the end of Cantillo’s eleven-week campaign it was clear that Batista would soon be replaced. His army was falling apart, many getting the
Thermopylae message and refusing to fight on, many others simply deserting. The prospect of Rebels in government – even as part of a coalition – horrified the head of the Caribbean desk at the US State Department. When reminded that most people regarded Batista as a son of a bitch, he achieved immortality of a sort by exclaiming – ‘At least he’s our son of a bitch!’

On Day Three I twice came upon vestigial ruins, bombed
bohios
and outbuildings on ledges where coffee was still being cultivated. Throughout Batista’s offensive, bombing was not confined to the Rebels’ real or imagined positions.
Campesiños
’ homes were attacked with equal ferocity, whether or not particular families supported Fidel. (There’s nothing new about NATO’s brutality in Afghanistan.) These bombers and bombs had been provided by the US with the sickeningly hypocritical proviso that they would be used ‘only in external defence’ – shades of Britain’s sales of armaments to Indonesia and elsewhere. When in need of refuelling and rearming the Cuban Air Force was made welcome at Guantanamo Bay naval base. However, the US anti-Batista lobby was gaining strength and in response to its pressure Lyman Kirkpatrick, the CIA’s inspector-general, feebly protested to Cuba’s Minister of Defence about ‘the extreme nature’ of BRAC’s favourite tortures. (When is torture not extreme?) Hugh Thomas has described BRAC as Batista’s ‘anti-Communist bureau which was practically a branch of the CIA’. More effective than Kirkpatrick was the US refusal to replenish Batista’s armoury, though the British soon hastened to his rescue with the sale, in September 1958, of seventeen Sea Fury aircraft and fifteen Comet tanks. One of Batista’s best buddies, the General Manager in Cuba of the Shell Oil Company, promoted this deal and we hardly need to be told (by Leycester Coltman) – ‘The motives for the contract at the British end were commercial rather than political.’ Before this deal was concluded Fidel telegraphed Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, begging him to stop the sale because those weapons would be used against innocent civilians. His communication was ignored.