Island that Dared (44 page)

In my Gatwick departure lounge I sat beside Ben, an engaging young architect excited about his first visit to Havana, as a job-seeker rather than a tourist. It seemed the Architects’ Council of Europe foresaw a
replacement
soon of ‘Cuba’s hardline regime’, followed by ‘immense opportunities for its members’. Ben quoted his ACE boss. ‘We don’t care what the Americans think. They tried to force the EU into a trade boycott and were told to get lost.’ Ben reckoned members keen on conservation could work for UNESCO in Old Havana but – ‘I’d prefer to help rebuild Cuba by regenerating infrastructure. In exchange Cubans can learn from us, travel to Britain when they’re not shackled any more! They’ve three schools of architecture, turning out about five hundred a year, but they’ve never seen anything worthwhile going up.’ With that last opinion I had to agree, but the phrase ‘to help rebuild Cuba’ grated. We’ve heard it too often in recent years from the bombers of Afghanistan and Iraq.  

I had a folder of press-cuttings in my shoulder-bag, too precious to be entrusted to airline baggage-handlers, and I urged Ben to read the last few paragraphs of a Brian Wilson article. This former Foreign Office minister was the only member of the British government to maintain regular contact with Cuba between 1997 and 2005. In the
Guardian
(8 February 2007) he wrote:

Replacing the cutting in my folder I unkindly remarked, ‘British firms of architects may be less popular than the Canadians and the Spanish.’

By 2.00 p.m. we were approaching Havana, flying slightly out from the coast. The first change was seasonal – a landscape vividly green. The second change was equally predictable: that long, bare, dingy space where Rachel, the Trio and I had waited through the small hours was now a garishly commercialised concourse – we might have been in any
international
airport. And the taxis, all licensed and in good condition, were under traffic officer control with no bone-shaking free-lancers parked around the corner.

My middle-aged black driver, Gerardo, became chatty on hearing that this was my third visit. ‘For you Cuba is good! For me too! From Ireland many come – another island, maybe we same sort?’ I acknowledged a certain temperamental affinity, then ventured to ask, ‘How is Fidel?’

Gerardo chuckled. ‘He’s OK, not dying the way the
Yanquis
want! He came on TV last week, with an interviewer for an hour, quick with his mind but thin and tired. He says a lot with his pen in
Granma
, still seeing what’s wrong with the world. And next week we’ll watch him talking with Chavez.’

Noticing Havana’s shiny new buses I exclaimed in wonder. ‘From China,’ said Gerardo. ‘Hundreds of them and the oil from Venezuela, 90,000 barrels a day, below half-price. We give 14,000 medical people to work free for Chavez – it makes the
Yanquis
mad! Radio Marti says in any country our brigade workers can go to the US embassy and get a free ticket to the US. And a work permit. And citizenship after a year. Then they get madder so few want to go!’

When we had said goodbye I turned into San Rafael, happy to be back but soon demoralised by the humid heat, incomparably worse than in November-March. Candida reminded me that it would be even hotter in Oriente – and hottest of all when I reached my ultimate destination, Playa Las Colorades.

A saddening change was the permanent police presence (always a lone young officer) at a street corner close to No. 403. I had never before seen police keeping Centro under surveillance. Crime was rapidly increasing, warned Pedro. I shouldn’t carry my passport with me, or much cash, and I should always wear my shoulder-bag around my neck.

Candida added, ‘Last year we had two million tourists, mostly European and Canadian, spending one and a half
billion
dollars! But they also bring problems …’

Overnight the weather relented slightly and as a gusty wind delivered frequent heavy showers I revisited the former presidential palace, now the Museum of the Revolution. Here one is educated in such detail that my previous two visits had left many rooms unseen. As usual, groups of schoolchildren were imbibing history and neither they nor their teachers looked bored. English children may not know their Corn Laws from their Magna Carta but Cuba can’t afford to neglect history; it nourishes the Revolution’s roots.

The Wars of Independence had inglorious aspects, some creoles favouring annexation by the US, some mulattos distrustful of their white
comrades-in
-arms, many blacks – even after 1886 – not too keen on being counted as Cubans. Yet with hindsight one sees how much those struggles achieved. Gradually and painfully they created an emotional environment in which people were prepared to be forged – by Martí and then by Fidel – into a unified nation. (Did processes not dissimilar happen in Europe millennia ago, as disparate tribes fought over territory and resources?) By 1950 one of Martí’s most important messages (‘Being Cuban is more important than being white or black’) had been dripping steadily on to the stone of prejudice for some sixty years.

Pre-1959 racism per se was not on Fidel’s agenda. For obvious reasons the Rebel Army’s leadership was mainly white, as was the first interim government which at once opened to all Cubans the previously segregated clubs, beaches, parks, theatres, hotels.

Ironically, Spain’s exit in 1898, followed by the island’s take-over as a US playground, had led to more rigidly enforced segregation than any previously experienced. In 1985 Martha Gellhorn revisited Cuba where she had lived as Ernest Hemingway’s wife from 1939–44. After a forty-one year absence she observed:

This psychological transformation is arguably the Revolution’s greatest triumph; it is easier to raise a people’s material standard of living than to raise their morale. To many Rich Worlders it seems the Revolution nurtured self-respect in a paradoxical sort of way, not by encouraging Cubans to value themselves as individuals (our route to ‘self-esteem’) but by educating and organising them to co-operate for the general good, persuading and sometimes coercing them to obey government directives in order that they might enjoy a range of benefits denied to their ancestors. Even the
jineteros
and
jineteras
, officially and unjustly labelled ‘
counter-revolutionary
parasites’, have a non-obsequious way of going about their business rarely observed among their equivalents elsewhere.

That afternoon I searched through Havana’s second-hand book market in Plaza de Armas for copies of the English translation of
Fidel and Religion
, subtitled ‘Castro talks on Revolution and Religion with Frei Betto’. I wanted several copies, for distribution among my friends, this being, in my
estimation
, one of the single most important books written about Cuba since the Revolution. When first published in 1987 it became an instant
bestseller
in Cuba, where more than 200,000 copies were sold within a few days and 1.3 million within a few months – to a population of, then, some ten million. All over Latin America sales were comparable and soon editions had been published in the USSR, the GDR, Italy, Poland, Spain, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Australia, Vietnam, Bulgaria, India – twenty-three countries in all, served by fifteen translations. In Santiago thousands queued to buy copies autographed by the Brazilian Dominican priest, Frei Betto. In Switzerland the Roman Catholic Church devoted an hour-long TV programme to debating the book. Harvey Cox, in his
introduction,
wonders why there was such worldwide interest and remarks, ‘The loquacious Fidel’s sermon, whatever else one may say about it, is keeping the folks in the pews awake’.

Shortly before leaving home I had read an advance copy of
My Life: Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet,
based on a hundred hours of interviews spread over three years.
Fidel and Religion
is based on four long
conversations
– real conversations, not interviews; the Dominican scholar was on Fidel’s spiritual wavelength. Ignacio Ramonet deals with twenty additional years, using a journalist’s technique and being at times too hagiographical.
My Life,
though full of fascinating detail, fails to dig deep, stays on the political surface, doesn’t alert us to the extraordinary nature of the Cuban experiment and its relevance to twenty-first century needs. Frei Betto’s three hundred and seventeen pages take us to the place where Fidel’s vision shines clear.

In the Cuban Book Institute, under the Plaza de Armas arcade, I made a new friend. Tall and thin, white-haired and sad-eyed, Donatilo wore threadbare jeans and a too-big bush-shirt that didn’t suit his non-macho persona. We got into conversation about my failed quest for
Fidel and Religion,
then I had to explain myself and soon Donatilo was inviting me to his Miramar flat – ‘Come to drink coffee, I offer no more for I live alone and don’t cook.’

Donatilo’s English was fluent; in 1959 he had been halfway through a Yale course when enthusiasm for the Revolution drew him home. ‘I’m a maverick; as my family took off for Miami, I took off for Havana!’ Later I learned that this maverick had resumed his academic career at Havana University, become an internationally recognised authority in his field and married a fellow-academic whose death, a few months previously,
explained
those sad eyes.

Next day even the
habaneros
were glistening with sweat and complaining about the humidity. It drastically reduced my walking range so I waited twenty-five minutes for a Chinese bus; the public transport improvement was relative. From the coast road many hurricane souvenirs were visible: smashed rowing boats flung far from their moorings, roofless sheds, ponds of scummy stagnant water, jumbles of driftwood to which householders had added garbage of interest to mangy, stray dogs.

For me Miramar – Havana’s early twentieth-century development beyond the inconsequential Rio Almandares – was (almost)
terra incognita.
The seriously rich once occupied super-mansions on its wide tree-lined
boulevards
and Miami’s influence is perceptible, as is the recent recovery of
Cuba’s economy. Here be handsome embassies, and sleek speeding cars with CD plates or corporate logos, and a disfiguring rash of brand new multi-storey tourist hotels. My search for Donatilo’s flat took me up and down a few pleasant, narrowish avenues, linking the boulevards – the residences smaller, flowering shrubs spilling over garden walls, dachshunds and poodles with smart collars guarding flimsy gates.

Donatilo’s ground-floor flat (two rooms, plus kitchenette and
baño
) overlooked a privately-owned
organoponico
, created and cultivated by
Donatilo
’s daughter and son-in-law and two grandsons, who lived upstairs. I had anticipated a tête-à-tête over coffee but the family invited me to join them for supper. Julia and Felipe were both government officials – senior civil servants, in our terms, a species not often encountered by chance in Cuba. The boys were out at their ballet class, an acceptable interest for your average Cuban lad.

Over
cervezas
and daiquiris Felipe guesstimated that in 1985, when Fidel and Frei Betto so fruitfully conversed, the former was long-sightedly preparing people for the emotional as well as economic shock of the Special Period. Fidel, he believed, longed for the world to recognise that Cuban Communism was a separate phenomenon, far removed from the Soviet version.

Julia doubted that
el
comandante
was all that long-sighted, Donatilo agreed with his son-in-law and felt the book had helped Cubans by drawing a clear ideological line between Havana and Moscow. All were agreed that it had had a drip-drip effect in Latin America and contributed to the region’s new assertiveness.

Remembering those two hundred thousand who bought
Fidel and Religion
as it came off the presses in 1987, I enquired about the present publishing scene. Felipe’s aunt had helped, pre-Special Period, to run Ediciones Vigia, an illustrious publishing house which produced hand-made books in limited editions of two hundred – for free – to be presented as academic prizes. Youngsters keen to learn book-making used to queue up for
apprenticeship
places. Now Ediciones Vigia must bow to market forces and sell its books for convertible pesos to be able to afford recycled paper.