Island that Dared (4 page)

Clearing my eyes of sweat, I looked at my watch: 10.50, beer-time for those who rise before dawn – and Rachel, succumbing to Havana’s aura, rather fancied a daiquiri. The Trio grumbled slightly on being brought down to earth but were cheered by the mention of Coppelia where they
could gorge on ice-creams after we had attended to our alcohol levels. During the descent to La Rampa I recalled that the name Vedado (‘prohibited’) dates back to the sixteenth century when all construction was forbidden on this slope overlooking the Straits of Florida. Platoons of sentinels were permanently on duty and needed to see the frequently approaching pirates as soon as possible.

In an al fresco bar a dilatory waiter took our order and when the Trio began to roam restlessly Mummy registered guilt about their delayed gratification while Nyanya spoke up for Adult Rights.

It seems socialism brings out the worst in architects – witness the Coppelia emporium, designed by Mario Girona and built in 1966 in the middle of a park that must, until then, have been a blessed antidote to Nuevo Vedado’s brash skyscrapers. Constructed mainly of reinforced concrete, it is topped by a single monstrous slab supporting a truncated cone. The six colossal circular ice-cream parlours on the upper floor are subdivided by naked concrete girders – grey and gloomy, seeming to belong beneath a motorway – and by pointlessly placed partitions of tinted glass. The
habaneros
are very proud of this excrescence, the first (and most bizarre) of a chain of Coppelias; all are open twelve hours a day, six days a week, serving affordable ice-cream of the finest
gelato
quality to the general public. In Havana a daily average of thirty-thousand addicts queue happily for hours, without shade. Latterly, however, the Coppelia ideal, like many others, has been tarnished; near the main entrance a small queue-free annex caters for convertible-peso users.

During our fifty-minute wait the naval officer standing behind me (home on a week’s leave) spoke of his favourite ports, Murmansk not among them. That led on to the Cuban/Russian relationship when thousands of Soviet troops were stationed on the island for more than twenty-five years. Dryly Nestor said that there had been no relationship; the Soviets kept to themselves, importing their own food and entertainment (if any) and apparently remaining immune to Cuba’s charms. I wondered if they were obeying orders or simply found Cubans uncongenial? The latter, Nestor thought – because occasionally groups of Central Asians did venture out to their local Casa de la Trovo. Privately I reflected that the average Russian’s deep-seated racism, impervious for seventy years to Marxist egalitarianism, must have inhibited social (if not sexual) intercourse. This suspicion was confirmed later by visits to areas where the Soviets had had bases and left bad memories.

Military precision marks the organising of Coppelia’s hordes. Neatly
uniformed stewardesses/sergeant-majors stand at strategic points, counting the departing customers, then beckon an equal number to replace them. Should five leave together, and the first five in the queue include only one member of a group of friends, that group must either separate or give way to those behind them. No one seemed to object to this regimentation. But I (otherwise conditioned) felt exasperated when a security guard forbade me to sit on the ledge of nearby railings. Momentarily I was tempted to pull up my trouser leg to show him what long queues in hot weather can do to varicose veins.

Once admitted to the high globe we were directed to a table and Rachel had to join two other queues – to pay for the docket listing our order, then to hand it to a server from whom a waitress soon after took our tray. The Trio pronounced that these gargantuan ice-creams were very good indeed, well worth waiting for – and they, being residents of Italy, are connoisseurs.

Not far from Coppelia we noticed a plaque identifying the site where Fidel first labelled the Revolution ‘Socialist’ – on 16 April 1961, the eve of the US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion.

Surprisingly, the Cubans have no regular siesta-time but that afternoon the younger generations rested briefly while I refuelled in what was to become my favourite Malecón café. Small and shabby, approached by a shaky wooden step-ladder, it was dual-currency; Cubans paid for drinks and one-course meals in national pesos, convertible pesos were expected from foreigners.

Miguel, the manager-cum-barman, kept Hatuey beer, brewed for the national-peso market, under the counter and filled the fridge with Buccanero and Kristal, favoured by tourists. The price difference was slight – NP18 and CP1 – yet my wish to sample Hatuey worried Miguel; he would get into trouble should a snooper from the local Committee for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR) chance to notice a tourist drinking Hatuey on the premises. I could however have lots of Hatuey to take away, concealed in my knapsack. Thus I discovered that this brew is less palatable than the tourists’, though equally potent.

On my first visit, the previous day, Miguel had been discussing Wilma with a hurricane-damage inspector. The café, raised above the street, had escaped flooding though it lost one side of its roof – quickly replaced by the municipality. Now his three-roomed home, behind the café at pavement-level, was the problem: a waist-deep torrent had swept through, ruining all the family’s possessions. He had a pregnant wife and three-year-old
twins yet the authorities were being slow to act. When the inspector had left Miguel glanced around at the only other customers – two young couples in far corners – then confided, sotto voce, ‘For the government this place makes tax money, a little home doesn’t. In times before – before ’92 – all little homes soon got fixed.’

In January I was to hear about Miguel’s uncle-sponsored migration to Florida; otherwise I wouldn’t feel free to record that conversation.

In some quarters the CDR (Committees for the Defence of the
Revolution
) have a bad reputation as groups of spies and bullies, ever ready to punish those who fail to uphold Revolutionary standards. While this may not be a baseless slander, it is certainly a wild over-simplification. When Fidel invented the system in 1960 he meant it to affect everyone’s daily life as an important instrument of civil defence and socialist reform. The president (unpaid) of each CDR is responsible for three hundred or so citizens (a barrio) and it is his or her duty to find out how people earn their money, what they spend it on, who does or does not march in demos, who is absent from home, where they have gone and why and for how long. We instantly recoil from such a system. Yet whether people are for or against Fidel it seems to be generally agreed that Castroism could not have been so quickly and firmly established, and made to work so well, without the CDR’s energetic observing, organising and persuading (or bullying) of their barrios.

Nowadays, out of some eleven million Cubans, at least three million are CDR members, an influential percentage of the adult population. As the state’s most significant mass organisation, the CDR is involved in all Public Health campaigns, in school enrollment and attendance, in the National Bank’s saving campaign, in arranging barrio study seminars, in checking the quality of services in local shops and reporting defects to the managers, and as crucial links between municipalities and barrios. (That last function helps to sustain Cuba’s vibrant version of participatory democracy.)

CDR presidents collaborate closely with the police and can in certain circumstances protect barrio members from over-zealous policing – or, conversely, expose them to it. A minority of presidents are themselves ‘counter-revolutionary’ and break laws while using their power to silence any who might report them. Much (too much) hinges on the individual president’s character. A minority are so dreaded that their barrios feel permanently at war with them. Others are so well-liked and trusted that
people go to them with their troubles, emotional or economic. Most are genuinely public-spirited, do their snooping as discreetly as possible and are accepted as an integral part of Castroism.

Early next morning, on our way to ‘do’ Old Havana, we paused in Fe del Valle Park to watch
ti’ chi
enthusiasts (including our host Pedro) being put through their paces by a stern mulatto whose Chinese genes were obvious. Havana has many action-packed corners. On the park’s far side primary schoolchildren were having a martial arts lesson, to the Trio’s envy.

Pre-Revolution, guide-books described San Rafael’s short (pedestrians only) business end as ‘elegant’. Now it was being spruced up to include it in the tourist zone, and a central row of unhappy-looking potted shrubs decorated its newly paved length. Formerly fashionable emporiums were being restored by workmen balancing on wobbly scaffolding or
demolishing
interior walls with sledge-hammers – and without any of the protective gear mandatory in our wimpish world. Two stores had been reopened, on Cuba’s emergence from the Special Period, as government-run dollarshops selling a narrow though gradually widening range of expensive (for Cubans) but usually shoddy imported goods. Others remained boarded up or displayed only a few items of unappealing national-peso-priced stock in fly-blown windows.

For me, Old Havana was a mixed experience. One can agree with UNESCO’s 1982 declaration that, as the largest and architecturally richest colonial centre in Latin America, it is part of ‘the cultural heritage of humanity’. But most such declarations have dire side-effects. La Habana Vieja is now among the Tourist Board’s main assets, second only to the ‘developed’ beaches, and it grieved me to see young black women in flouncy colonial costumes offering to read fortunes while elderly women, similarly attired, posed beneath porticoed arcades, smoking giant cigars, their placards saying – ‘Foto CP1’. A laughing boy, aged perhaps five, was nimbly dancing in a doorway on Calle Obispo, his father on guard against the tourist police but grateful for whatever the child might earn. A pair of slender adolescent girls, wearing bikini tops and leaning over the photogenic balcony of their semi-derelict mansion, shouted and waved at us and suggested ‘Camera?’ The bands playing near open-air cafés, then passing a sombrero around, were as skilled as Cuban musicians are expected to be but performances aimed at tourists tend to have a sad unspontaneous quality. Prostitution comes in different forms. When ‘being Cuban’ becomes in itself a tourist attraction, what happens to the Cuban
psyche? Cuzco, Bali, Khatmandu, Ladakh and too many other places know the answer.

We made the most of our national pesos, buying from pavement
entrepreneurs
shots of hot strong sweet coffee, glasses of cold freshly squeezed fruit juices and ice-cream cones for NP1 each. Ham and/or cheese rolls, warm from the baker and generously filled, cost NP5 and substantial
homemade
pizzas (but the queues were long) NP10 to NP15. Outside tourist restaurants we studied menus and calculated that the most meagre meal for one, minus drinks, would cost NP260 – CP10.

Throughout much of Old Havana motor vehicles are forbidden or restricted and generally Cuba’s acute oil shortage (now being eased by Venezuela) has had a benign effect. In 1992 half a million bicycles were imported from China, just as that country was foolishly planning to replace two wheels with four. Then bicycle rickshaws (‘bicitaxis’) were introduced and at once became popular. Another novelty, for the benefit of tourists who are not supposed to use bicitaxis (though some do) is peculiar to Havana: a small fleet of canary-yellow three-seater covered scooters (‘cocotaxis’). Ciclobuses, too, are an innovation, copied from Miami; these can carry several bicycles in metal containers, fore and aft. In contrast are the famous
camellos
, comically humped mega-buses serving distant suburbs; these carry 300 passengers in theory and more than four hundred in practice – including adherents to the outside.

Away from the sea, the Trio showed little interest in Havana, being too young to be excited by its architectural glories, its web of historical
associations
or its proliferating political question marks. They had long been looking forward to stamina-testing expeditions so now it seemed only fair to move on to the undeveloped (so far) Oriente coast.

Candida and Pedro were adamant that a train journey, our preferred option, would involve cruelty to children. We must do it the tourist way, in a comfortable overnight Viazul coach to Santiago de Cuba. Like most
casas particulares
hostesses, Candida repeatedly exerted herself for her guests beyond the call of duty. Having rung the Viazul office to book our seats, she organised a cut-price taxi to the terminus and arranged for us to lodge in Santiago with her old friend Irma.

Capital cities and ‘the next biggest’ tend not to love one another: London and Birmingham, Rome and Milan, Dublin and Cork, Havana and Santiago. Doubtless social anthropologists (maybe psychologists too?) have secured lavish grants to study this phenomenon but in the Cuban case one needs only to know a little history. Santiago was founded as the capital of Spain’s new island colony – a very long time ago, but Santiago hasn’t forgotten.

When Diego Velazquez de Cuellar came upon a desirable natural port at the foot of gold- and copper-bearing mountains, conveniently close to Jamaica and Hispaniola, he at once set up a central trading station, named it after Spain’s patron saint and gave it ‘capital’ status. That was in 1515. A few decades later when Spain had extracted eighty-four thousand ounces of gold, failing seams put Santiago’s importance at risk. So did increasingly audacious pirates – and Nature. After a series of devastating earthquakes Cuba’s Governor, Gonzalo Perez de Angulo, moved his
headquarters
to Havana, just in time to miss the 1554 sacking and capture of Santiago by French privateers. Their mini-fleet had been able to take the town so easily because of peninsular/creole tensions, already common throughout Spanish America. Santiago’s governor, Pedro de Morales, distrusted the local creole militia and, while he dithered about deploying them, his small Spanish-born garrison was overwhelmed. All governors, administrators and regular troops had to be
peninsulares
, most of whom saw creoles as a lesser breed. This uneasy relationship was to colour Cuba’s history, often with blood-stains, until Spain handed the island over to the US in 1898.

In 1620 Cuba’s total population was less than 7,000, in 1650 it hardly exceeded 30,000. The island attracted few settlers while Spain’s continental conquests promised bigger bucks faster. Until the 1760s not many slaves were imported: an annual average of 240 between 1511 and 1762, if we can depend on El Escorial’s figures.

The multinational swarms of pirates and privateers who threatened shipping routes for so long resembled modern ‘terrorists’ in one respect – they occupied a grey area. One monarch’s pirate might be another’s privateer. To Phillip II, Francis Drake was unquestionably a pirate. Yet in
1570, before his first voyage to the Caribbean, Elizabeth I gave him ‘a regular privateering commission’. All privateers were licensed by their governments who appreciated, when war broke out, having privately owned and provisioned ships to reinforce the national navy. (Never mind that those owners invariably ran extensive smuggling operations, usually detrimental to their government’s trading. In that respect they were analogous to such twenty-first-century mercenary armies as Blackwater.)

The Governor of Cuba’s first duty was to protect the empire’s loot from both foreign pirates and creole freelance traders (aka smugglers).
Therefore
it was decreed, in 1558, that all commerce must go through Havana’s port and Santiago dwindled to thirty households. But a generation later its revival began when Cuba was bisected. In military matters the Governor of Havana retained control over the whole island, otherwise the province of Oriente was to enjoy virtual independence under Santiago’s jurisdiction. Oriente then incorporated the modern provinces of Guantanamo, Holguin, Las Tunas, Granma and Santiago.

When the defence of Havana became Spain’s priority, Cuba’s unguarded coastline, fretted with countless small natural harbours, developed into a buccaneers’ paradise. Throughout the Hispano-English war (1585–1603) creole cattle ranches and sugar mills were regularly raided. Also, barter flourished; disloyal creoles living hundreds of roadless miles from Havana were delighted to form cordial trading relationships with the empire’s foes, exchanging meat and hides for European luxury goods and African slaves.

Oliver Cromwell caused a demographic upheaval when he sailed on to the Caribbean scene in 1655. (He was good at that, as we Irish have reason to remember.) This expedition, to take both Santo Domingo and Cuba, formed part of his ‘Western Design’ which had to be modified after the Spaniards’ successful defence of Santo Domingo. The fifty-five somewhat battered English ships, plus transport vessels carrying considerably fewer than the original 9,000 soldiers, prudently forgot Cuba and set sail for tiny, almost undefended Jamaica. Its seizure served as Cromwell’s
consolation
prize and caused some 10,000 wealthy planters to flee to Oriente, more than doubling its population overnight.

By 1768 Cuba’s population had risen to (approximately) a hundred and ten thousand whites, seventy-two thousand slaves, twenty-three thousand free blacks; some of those whites were almost certainly mulatto though not yet named as such. After Haiti’s 1791 revolution, thousands of French refugee-planters arrived, complete with slaves and the latest technology.
Most of those refugees invested lavishly in cane growing which became very big business – much too big – for Cuba’s future welfare.

In 1662 a fleet of twelve English ships, captained by Christopher Myngs and carrying 2,000 soldiers, easily captured Santiago, sacked the town, demolished the harbour’s fortress by blowing up its powder magazine – and then withdrew. This show of force achieved both its objectives by demonstrating that Jamaica would remain an English possession and forging a Santiago-Jamaica trade link. Spain could do nothing to hinder the brisk ‘informal’ trade in copper, sugar and slaves that soon developed to the mutual benefit of Oriente and Jamaica.

Thus Santiago evolved as a predominantly creole city, resentful of any peninsulare-directed meddling in its commercial affairs. Oriente men led all Cuba’s nineteenth-century wars of independence and around Santiago battles were frequent. Many Oriente
campesiños
supported Fidel’s guerrillas as they fought the US- and UK-armed troops of Cuba’s military dictator, the mulatto Fulgencio Batista Zaldivar. With some justification, Santiago proudly describes itself as the ‘the cradle of the Revolution’.

As some of my readers will be aware, I’m not an urban person. Shortly after arriving in a city – any city, however historical, beautiful or politically intriguing – my mind strays towards the exit. So why (I asked myself in the taxi to Viazul) did Havana not have the same effect? Was it because the
habaneros
behave more like villagers than like urban dwellers? I looked forward to spending longer among them on my solo return.

The Viazul terminus has an airport taint. Glossy coffee-table volumes of scenic photographs fill the little bookstall, unappealing souvenirs gather dust in display cases, revolving stands show postcards (printed in Italy) of stereotypical Cuban activities. Spaced-out processed passengers sit in mute orderly rows while new arrivals queue to have each item of luggage weighed, labelled and pushed away on trolleys. Another queue ensures a seat number chit so skimpy one has to concentrate hard on not losing it. From corners, impassive anti-
jineterismo
police watch over all. Our Oriente journeys would, we hoped, be very different – and they were …

Many of our fellow-passengers being Cuban surprised me; Viazul was initiated for tourists only. Cuba’s sudden dependence on foreigners’ hard currency agitated Fidel, who fantasised about protecting Revolutionary standards behind what came to be derided as ‘tourism apartheid’. No relevant law existed, yet from 1992–97 Cubans seen in conversation with tourists were often reprimanded and occasionally arrested. Then, a few
months before the papal visit of January 1998, the official mood abruptly changed and normal relations became possible. Yet the ‘apartheid’ policy hasn’t sunk without trace. Quite a few Cubans, especially in the provinces, remain uncertain about how they should react to unpackaged foreigners.

Soon after a punctual departure at 6.15 p.m., the Trio were sound asleep and as Rachel studied our map, planning treks, I watched the crimson sun sinking towards a frieze of royal palms and distant factory stacks. Havana’s twentieth-century accretions cover many miles and offer nothing distinctively Cuban, apart from numerous Che Guevara portraits on gable ends and huge wayside hoardings exhorting the citizenry to do their bit to keep the Revolution on course.

As early as the 1930s Cuba was an exception in Latin America, most Cubans being city-dwellers. When tourism’s possibilities attracted many more to the capital, Fidel began to have nightmares about mushrooming shanty-towns threatening public health yet he dared not put the hungry Cubans on too tight a rein by forbidding ‘change of residence’. April 1997 saw a compromise, a new law restricting job-seekers to one-month absences from their native place: thus, at intervals, all would have a chance to earn a few convertible pesos.

On Cuba’s Central highway, built in the 1930s and well maintained, the traffic was light. At 10.15 we parked outside an imitation of a US
fast-foodery
on the edge of an anonymous town. Here most passengers supped and I sauntered to and fro with an earnest young Australian journalist, tanned and long-limbed and puzzled by Cuba. How come so many
habaneros
were so jolly and welcoming when they were so
deprived
? On the bus he’d been scribbling a list – most couldn’t afford
essentials
like cosmetics, detergents, deodorants, nappies, vitamin supplements, shampoo, hair dryers, toasters, electric kettles, cell phones, computers. He loved Cubans, was upset by all those missing essentials, was keen to promote the tourist industry. At the end of a very hot day I had no energy to spare for argument – beyond asking why, given Caribbean sunshine, Cubans should need hair-dryers? (Come to think of it, why should anybody, apart from the manufacturers? For millennia we’ve been drying our hair without technological assistance.)

Later I reproved myself for not having tried to educate that young man. He had been commissioned to write a series of articles on ‘Cuba in Transition’ and, as climate change works its way up the political agenda, journalists should be emphasising Cuba’s energy-saving habits. Little things do count. When one buys a homemade fruit juice from a pavement
seller it comes in a glass to be handed back – not in a ‘disposable’ mug to be tossed into a litter-bin (or on to the verge). The sheer enormity of ‘climate change’ deters us from thinking about such minutiae although, cumulatively, they’re at the core of the problem.

Throughout the long night I envied my sleeping companions. As
greyness
replaced blackness, low humps replaced flatness – the Sierra Maestra foothills. Now the Trio were awake and hungry and thirsty. Promptly their ever-ready mother provided oranges, nuts and water while I furtively opened a tin of Buccanero – but not furtively enough to avoid Zea’s informing the general public, ‘Nyanya’s having beer for breakfast!’

An extravagant sunrise celebrated our arrival, all gold and crimson, surging upwards from the horizon to fill half the sky. In Santiago’s suburbs tropical vegetation almost overwhelmed the solid little tiled houses. Fiacres drawn by smartly trotting horses were taking people to work – or
towards
work, because these vehicles are excluded from the narrow Old City streets.

A dozen taxis, parked at random outside the lucrative Viazul terminus, competed for emerging passengers by playing jolly tunes on their horns. Most were government-registered, their takings therefore taxed quite heavily. We chose an unregistered veteran, bright red where it wasn’t rusty. ‘Cadillac 1954!’ boasted its beaming black owner as he packed our rucksacks into the boot where chicken-wire replaced the lost floor.

As we drove uphill Rachel, pointing left, exclaimed, ‘There’s the Moncada barracks!’ Moments later Rose, pointing right, exclaimed, ‘They’ve a Coppelia here, in that park!’ Beyond this wide, busy boulevard one descends to the quiet, sloping streets and alleyways of the Old City.

Discreet logos mark
casas particulares
and No. 197 San Pedro was easy to find, a single-storey late eighteenth-century home, washed pale blue, its finely carved double door opening off the street and protected by an elaborate wrought-iron grill. We were welcomed by Candida’s friend Irma – sixtyish, blessed by the sort of bone-structured beauty that changes but never fades, looking elegant in a house-coat. She hugged us on first sight, as is the Cuban way, then led us through a short hallway into a spacious drawing-room, rarely used, where the burnished mahogany furniture was nineteenth-century imperial and the high ceiling, of collar-and-beam trusses, had been copied, we later realised, from Casa Diego Velasquez. Here dozens of frighteningly valuable china ornaments were displayed on window ledges, in wall niches and corner cabinets, on numerous frail occasional tables. They ranged from tiny figurines of courting couples to ornate jugs, tall slim vases, dogs sitting and lying, transparent coffee sets,
delicate floral bouquets, birds perched on branches and angels perched on clouds. Urgently I warned the Trio – ‘Never
run
through this room!’  

In the patio, cooled by much potted greenery, life-size plaster statues of a smiling black couple wore nineteenth-century cane-cutters’ attire. On three sides stretched long corridors tiled and pillared, their walls replete with stags’ heads. Our accommodation took us aback: two enormous bedrooms, each ‘en suite’ with two double-beds, bedside lamps, a large fridge and efficient (unless the electricity went off) standard fans. One motive for our journey had been to introduce the Trio to another way of life and this was another way in the wrong direction – incomparably more luxurious than their own spartan home near the top of a mountain in the Dolomites. However, the water supply was sluggish at best, non-existent at worst and the electrical fittings – mostly in unexpected places – made sounds not normally associated with plugs and switches.  

The Trio devoured their four-course breakfast in a long narrow
dining-room
across the patio from our bedrooms. This was also the family
living-room
where Irma and Antonio watched TV in the evenings, seeming genuinely interested in what Fidel (or Ricardo Alarcón, his possible successor) had to say. In the nearby kitchen, from early morning, Irma’s two daily helps were busy – both black, we noticed, as was Candida’s cleaning lady. But those relationships were free of any whiff of ‘mistress and servant’, the women addressing one another as ‘compañera’.