Island that Dared (58 page)

Although the Five had now been pronounced free men, against whom no legal sanction remained, they were not released. Soon Ricardo Alarcon was protesting bitterly, ‘They are five kidnap victims of an administration that rides roughshod over the law everywhere. Not just in Abu Grahib and Guantanamo – within US territory as well.’

A few weeks later, on 30 August 2005, more than one thousand five hundred internationally respected philosophers, writers, artists and
musicians
, including six Nobel laureates, wrote an open letter to the then US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez. It ended:

Neither the three Atlanta judges nor all those distinguished
sympathisers
could influence the Five’s enemies. A year later, on 9 August 2006, a majority of the full Atlanta Appeals Court of twelve judges ruled against the 2005 revocation, reinstated the Miami sentences, denied the Five a new trial and ordered the case back to the original three-judge panel for ‘a consideration of nine outstanding issues’.

For how many more years must the Five remain ‘kidnap victims’?

Even when the sea is boisterous groups of youths dive off the Malecón wall through dense spray – an apparently hazardous frolic but those lads know their shoreline. I paused to watch one group, including three girls who didn’t dive, as they laughed and shouted while being tossed about in the heaving, seething water. Emerging unscathed on to those sharp volcanic rocks, when the waves are so bullying, demands a special skill. In our
overprotective
world most youngsters have no chance to develop such skills in a natural setting.

By midday on 1 November the sea was wilder than ever I’d seen it, a gusty force nine gale flinging the spray forty feet high. The Malecón was deserted, except for two young men standing on the wall, supporting each other, being showered. I first saw them at a little distance and as I drew closer another soaring fountain of spray enveloped them – then they were no longer visible, on wall or pavement. Immediately their disappearance was noticed by a policeman outside the Hotel Nacional on its high bluff directly above.

Within five minutes two ambulances had arrived, closely followed by a van marked ‘Bombaderos’ from which jumped four Navy divers in full kit. As they plunged into the tumultuous Atlantic a fire brigade arrived and hoisted two long ladders over the wall. Then a tiny lifeboat emerged from the port, looking futile as it rode the waves.

Meanwhile a small crowd had gathered, excited in a subdued way as such crowds tend to be. But the mood changed to shared anxiety when two parents joined us, a mother and a father of those reckless young men. Anxiety became grief as an hour became two hours. Eventually we saw that gallant little lifeboat returning to the distant port. Both bodies had been found, so injured by those jagged rocks that no attempt to swim would have been possible. An ambulance drove the parents to the lifeboat’s berth.

All that afternoon the sun shone strongly between tropical downpours and once I sheltered on the café-terrace of the venerable Hotel Inglaterra, overlooking Parque Central. To celebrate this first visit to a Havana tourist hotel I decided to sample its cuisine and from a limited menu chose a ham and cheese sandwich. Forty minutes later an adolescent waiter placed a dinner plate in front of me; the ‘sandwich’ consisted of a stack of five slices of thick stale white bread separated by thin layers of ham and cheese (both items processed and imported) and rings of raw onion. Two ‘airline’ butter pats decorated the side of the plate. When I requested cutlery the youth looked peeved and returned after some time with a plastic fork wrapped
in a square of loo paper. The young Austrian woman at the next table was not enjoying her anonymous jam imported from Spain. We agreed that these repellent foreign foods (part of inward investment deals) do a lot to maintain Cuba’s reputation as a gourmet’s hell. By then the sun was shining and in the park I could see an ancient man washing a sackful of plastic bottles in the fountain. Two days previously I had watched him collecting those bottles from amidst the litter thrown across the Malecón by the storm.

Helena from Vienna, a regular visitor to Cuba, was upset by Havana’s increasingly obvious and persistent beggars. Victims of the bureaucracy, I suggested; having failed to cope with it they had become non-persons, probably through no fault of their own. For instance, that unfortunate widow in Santa Clara, who couldn’t get a change-of-residence-permit, might find herself destitute were she to move illegally to live with her daughter. But why, wondered Helena, were officials not rounding such people up and returning them to whatever bureaucratic box they had fallen out of? Blatant begging contradicts what visitors expect of Fidel’s Cuba. I reminded her that we were now living in Raul’s Cuba, a not-
so-subtly
different place as several of my friends had pointed out since my return to the capital.

Overnight the wind dropped and Pedro sadistically informed me that my last three days would be ‘calm, humid and all sunshine’.

Emerging from No. 403 at daybreak I saw at the far end of San Rafael a puzzling wall of white fog, luminous and thick. Soon I had identified it as an anti-mosquito chemical, being sprayed from two gigantic cylinders on the back of a rickety little truck, one of several that all morning moved at slow walking speed throughout Havana. This deadly vapour seemed to rasp at one’s nose, throat and lungs but the
habaneros
consider such temporary (we hope) discomfort much preferable to haemorrhagic dengue fever – otherwise known as break-bone fever, so agonising are its symptoms.

This virus, usually transmitted by the
Aedes Aegypti
mosquito, is mainly confined to the indigenous populations of south-east Asia. However, since 1997 the non-haemorrhagic virus (common in tropical and sub-tropical regions and rarely a killer) has been spreading in the Western hemisphere, especially in Brazil and Cuba.

Haemorrhagic dengue first arrived in Cuba in 1981, appearing
simultaneously
in three regions about two hundred miles apart, to the
epidemiologists
’ bewilderment. None of the countries with which the international
brigades were then involved is a source of this virus. It spread quickly; more than three hundred and forty-four thousand sufferers over-crowded the hospitals and the US Treasury, loyal as ever to the embargo, delayed export permits of the specific insecticide so urgently needed. Yet only one hundred and fifty-eight died, of whom one hundred and one were children. In 1984 the epidemiologists’ curiosity was satisfied when Eduardo Arocena, leader of the Cuban exile gang Omega 7, testified in New York’s Federal Court while being tried on another matter, that towards the end of 1980 a ship sailed from Florida to Cuba with:

Evidently Arocena had some futuristic vision of genetically modified mosquitoes designed to bite Soviets only. Incidentally, Omega 7, based in Union City, New Jersey, was described by the FBI in 1980 as ‘the most dangerous terrorist organisation in the US’.

New York’s Federal Court may have been surprised by Arocena’s confession but
Science
readers were not. According to that magazine, haemorrhagic dengue had been studied since 1967 at the US government centre in Fort Detrick, Maryland, being listed ‘among those diseases regarded as potential biological warfare agents’. And where better than Cuba to do a test run?

In 1971 terrorists obtained from the CIA the African swine fever virus and within six weeks half a million Cuban pigs had to be slaughtered to prevent an island-wide epidemic. This was the Western hemisphere’s first African swine fever infection and the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN ranked it a ‘the most alarming event of the agricultural year’. Small wonder if some Cuban officials remain paranoid to this day about dissidents’ potential.

To say ‘
adios
’ to good friends I spent three days criss-crossing humid Havana – prudently, by bicitaxi. (A melancholy mission: we were unlikely to meet again.) Those concentrated conversations – some starting at 8.00 a.m., some ending at 1.00 a.m. – made me acutely aware of witnessing history: Cuba on the cusp. My contacts, though numerically limited,
represented various social layers, from the sporadically employed victims of industrial collapse to the tourism-connected resurgent bourgeoisie to the securely employed but impoverished intelligentsia. Predictable hopes and fears were expressed, varying with an individual’s circumstances, but everyone was quietly proud of the smooth transfer of power in August 2006, seen as a reassuring measure of national stability.

By then Raúl and his team had been in charge for fifteen months yet Fidel remained very much present, continuing to communicate through his
Granma
essays – still being read by many,
pace
certain outside observers. There was a general expectation that after the Assembly elections in
February
2008 Cuba would have its second President Castro, as has happened. No one mentioned faction fighting within the government but a few hinted that unity could fracture as preparations were being made for the Sixth Party Congress in 2009. This might well be a healthy development, said my dissident friends. It would surely make more space for the sort of discussions of public grievances that Raúl had begun tentatively to encourage. Perhaps then my friends could publish the polemical journal for which
socialist
foreign friends had recently offered them funding.

Unlike Juan in Camaguey, all those
habaneros
were uncritical of the reforms being promoted or mooted by their Acting President. Yet a few of the more outspoken doubted his dexterity – could he carry them through without conceding that pure Castroism simply wouldn’t work in the hostile global environment of the twenty-first century? He is reputed to be an adroit string-puller behind the scenes but leading a nation towards drastic modifications requires another sort of talent. It was generally agreed that in any event major reforms should happen gradually – and not only to avoid upsetting Fidel. As one young man pointed out, most Cubans have no memory of another way of being. Castroism has formed their world and however impatient some may be for change everyone will need time to adjust to socialism remoulded.

Taking off from José Martí airport my hopes were higher than on the flight home from Jo’burg in 1995. South Africa’s problems were and are far more complex than Cuba’s. In 1959 Fidel could lead a real revolution without risking countrywide bloodshed and so he was able to construct the sort of egalitarian society Madiba dared not attempt to build. It comforts me to think that recent developments may not have invalidated Juan Antonio Blanco’s cautious prognosis. In the middle of the Special Period this remarkable Cuban – philosopher, historian, diplomat, radical and one-time rock singer – looked ahead and wrote:

There is no certain victory for the Revolution. Lloyds of London would not offer an insurance policy on this prospect. But its victory – which means preserving independence and social justice within a framework of ethical solidarity – is still possible … Cuba cannot – if it wishes to survive – be a museum for a dying socialism, but neither can it be the pastiche of Latin America’s tragedy. Cuba has the human and material potential, in spite of the crisis, to become a successful social laboratory for a new model of authentically human and sustainable development. If it is possible to ‘reinvent’ socialism anywhere, then the conditions for doing so exist on this island.