Slow Train to Guantanamo (10 page)

Just to reinforce the point, the television cuts from its interminable coverage of a baseball game somewhere in Florida to yet another commercial break, this time advertising health insurance. Up until now I hadn’t realized the screen in the background beyond the bar was showing what appears to be US television. The regime does not approve of its citizens watching US channels, and tries to block them, especially those run by Cuban emigrés, which broadcast anti-Castro propaganda. This, however, is ESPN
Deportes
, broadcast from Mexico City but unashamedly targeting the vast numbers of Spanish-speaking Americans in the southern states.

But anyone who might think allowing Cubans to watch adverts for the subversive luxuries of capitalism, might want to vet the content. ‘You too can have total healthcare insurance in the Miami area,’ the announcer is boasting (in
Spanish), ‘for just $100 a month.’ The Cubans beside me splutter into their
cancancharas
. ‘That’s $1,200 a year,’ one of the girls exclaims. Far more than a top rate Cuban surgeon earns. ‘Here it is free,’ she says proudly. Free healthcare is one of the benefits of the revolution that no Cuban would argue with, even if the American embargo means they lack many drugs. She is no less than astonished, and more than a little sceptical, when I tell her it is free in Britain too.

I leave them mildly disbelieving to wander the few yards back to my
casa
. On the way I yet again come across Miguel the drunk for the final time, lying unconscious in a doorway. I check that he is breathing. Dark clouds are gathering over the moon. But I doubt it will be the first time he has woken up wet.

CHAPTER SIX

Little League

Sunlight streaming through the thin curtains of my room wakens me and I emerge to find the central courtyard of the house recovering from a minor flood. It has rained heavily during the night and the drains have only just coped. But the waters have receded enough for the wrought iron table to be laid for breakfast and already I can feel the sun hot on the back of my head.

It seems odd to someone brought up in the British Isles to have both rain and sun almost in one’s living-room. But as I observed, Cuba’s climate makes a mockery of our strict delineation between outdoors and indoors.

By 11 o’clock in the morning I’m sitting on a bench lapping up the sunlight outside the cathedral of San Carlos de Borromeo, a hulking squat slab built in 1693. It is closed – for renovation – and looks like it has been for some time. So long, in fact, that the sign that says
CLOSED FOR RENOVATION
, needs renewing.

So instead of enriching my cultural knowledge I am doing what people in hot climes do a lot: ‘chilling’. If it were an Olympic discipline, Cubans would be gold medallists. Just about everyone I can see is practising hard, dressed for the part in flip-flops and open-necked shirts. The only exceptions are annoying groups of teenage kids who can’t resist the game of ‘where’s the foreigner from’.
Dedonde, dedonde, quel país?
Luckily my deductions in Havana prove accurate. Reply in any language, particularly English, and you will be pestered for hours. Say
ruso
– Russian – and they gape open-mouthed for a few moments and slope off. Khrushchev must be spinning in his grave.

The thing about ‘chilling’ though is that after a while it wears off, especially in the heat. Matanzas may have a long and rich past dating back to the seventeenth century – when it was named (
matar
is Spanish verb ‘to kill’: hence the noun
matador
) for the slaughter of 30 Spanish colonists (the guy in the hotel bar wasn’t kidding me) but nowadays it’s a bit dull.

There is, however, a museum. And I have never seen anyone more delighted than its attendants when I walk in the door. A middle-aged woman in a tight red miniskirt looks over her glasses and almost jumps to her feet, and shouts to her two colleagues who emerge in a fluster from some dark sepulchral recesses of the interior. Beaming. All of them. Matanzas museum doesn’t get many visitors.

Then comes the difficult bit. The entrance fee, the first woman tells me, is ‘
Dos pesos
’. Two pesos. And then she bites her lip and all but looks away, before adding, ‘CUC’. Because I am a foreigner, I have to pay 25 times the local price.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me, but to them it is clearly so exorbitant they are embarrassed to ask for it. I hand her a five and immediately provoke another crisis. She can’t change it. ‘
Momento, señor, uno momento
,’ she pleads, panicking that her first foreign guest this millennium – to judge from my reception – might decide not to bother after all, and dashes out into the street to find change.

In the mean time, to make sure I don’t change my mind, her colleague has already started to show me round. I don’t really need or want a guided tour, and I’m in any case not sure my Spanish is up to it, but I don’t want to spoil her
evident enjoyment in actually having something to do for her living, even if it is only following me round and telling me where the door is to the next room.

By the time her colleague comes back with my change I am thoroughly engrossed in the history of Matanzas. And a fairly grim one it is too. The Athens of Cuba was a Mecca for slave traders, to the extent that by the middle of the nineteenth century they made up more than 62 per cent of the population, over 100,000 souls. Amidst the cane-cutting machetes, and pirates’ pistols, the museum has a seemingly endless stock of leg-irons, but also some enlightening comments on the Spanish attitude to slavery: unlike in the Anglo-Saxon world, the Spanish imposed a hierarchical ladder which luckier and more industrious slaves could actually climb, to the extent of eventually not just winning their freedom but access to the ranks of the bourgeoisie. Contrary to their reputation as harsh colonial masters, the Spanish, partly aided by the turbulence back home during the early nineteenth century including the invasion of Spain by Napoleon, contributed to the growth of an educated, relatively affluent black middle class. There was a much larger degree of intermarriage than in Anglo-Saxon colonies.

The one Matanzas is most proud of is Juan Gualberto Gómez, born to slaves on a sugar plantation who were allowed to purchase his freedom allowing him to learn to read and write, and send him to school in Havana. His intelligence was such that his parents, with financial support from the owner of the sugar plantation where they worked, eventually sent him to Paris to learn to be a carriage maker.

There he lived through the traumatic events following the Franco–Prussian War, the Paris Commune and the rise of the Third Republic, becoming instead a French–Spanish translator and writing for a French newspaper. When he finally returned to Cuba, it was fate that he should bump
into and become friends with José Martí, the gadfly intellectual revolutionary. Martí made him his ‘man in Havana’, but the Spanish arrested him, deported and interned him in their north African enclave of Ceuta.

Unlike Martí therefore, he survived the wars of independence, returned to Cuba and for the next thirty years until his death in 1933 he was a champion of the free press, campaigning against those who were ready to let Cuba slip into America’s back pocket. It is hard to know what he would have made of the Castros’ regime, but it is easy to know what they thought of him. Like his old chum José Martí, they made him an airport, Cuba’s second biggest, at Varadero, just up the road.

The lady showing me round the museum is also keen that I see their other proud possession: bit of twisted metal from the wreckage of
La Coubre
, a French freighter which exploded in Havana harbour in March 1960, just a few months after the revolution. The ship was carrying large amounts of munitions ordered by the Castros from Belgium. Not only were the arms lost but 75 people died and more than 200 were injured, not least because a second bomb exploded half an hour later, apparently deliberately targeting the rescue services, which included Che Guevara acting in his trained profession as a doctor. The Cuban revolutionaries blamed it squarely on the CIA. The US government has never commented, but acknowledges the existence of official files on the incident, closed to the public for 150 years. Over to you, Mr Obama?

There are more rain clouds on the horizon as I emerge back into the blistering sunlight, leaving my three museum ladies clucking over a one-CUC tip and smiling like they’d just been invited to a Buckingham Palace garden party.

I look at my watch and realize that it’s barely 12.30. I’ve still got another 12 hours in Matanzas. Time to make the day
for one of the hordes of taxi drivers who seem to be the only group in town actively touting for business. In theory only ‘official’ licensed tourist taxis are supposed to take foreigners; in practice anyone does, taxi driver or not. If you have a car in Cuba, no matter how ancient, you are part of an élite. It has only just been proposed by the new regime to make it legal to buy and sell cars (and/or property); up until now if you or your family didn’t have a car before 1959, you either have good contacts in the government, or you walk.

That not only explains the continuing survival of those American dinosaurs from the fifties – if it goes you can’t replace it – but it makes every Cuban car owner an amateur mechanic, and a part-time taxi driver.

Opting for style rather than comfort I choose the owner of a bright red big-hooded bulbous 1958 Peugeot 403, the distant ancestor of the little models being imported for government use today. My destination is Monserrate, a nineteenth-century monastery that had fallen into disuse but has recently been restored. The main reason for visiting it, however, is the spectacular vista from the hill top over the whole city, straddling its two rivers, the Yumurí and the San Juan, a pair of glinting silver ribbons that wind their way through the lush green landscape. In the distance I can just make out a little grey-white line of the hotels in Varadero.

Aware that this is one of the few towns most beach-loving package holiday makers actually visit, the government has set up a laid-back little bar and restaurant. And mindful – up to a point – of its own citizens it also operates a second, which takes
moneda nacional
, a little down the hill, without the view. I give it a go, much to the surprise of the staff who exchange glances suggesting I should know my place and eat in the foreigners’ café.

The procedure for ordering in a
moneda nacional institution
is a little different. For a start you don’t really order a
dish so much as compose it. Cubans get exactly what they pay for. No more and no less. And I mean exactly. Just like in the old Soviet Union, there is a weight for each piece of meat on the menu. If there’s pork chops available it will say ‘pork chop, 210 grams’. I order rabbit – not least because I’m surprised to see it – 160 grams – and at the waitress’s prompting, add some rice (180 grams). Otherwise I’d have just got a piece of meat on its own.

Well, not quite on its own. It comes in a sauce. A quite nice sauce actually. Brown. More like a thick gravy. Its main function though is to disguise how little meat there actually is. Of that 160 grams I’d say a good 100 is bone. Which means scraping around somewhere in the brown goop for a few shreds of rabbit meat. This was one lean bunny. But what there is tastes okay and the sauce gives the rice some taste, plus there’s the bonus that the whole meal costs only marginally more than the beer I wash it down with.

Cacique is one of two brands I’ve come across that are sold for national pesos. The name comes from the word for ‘chief’ in the language of the Taino tribes who were the original inhabitants of Cuba before the Spanish arrived and exterminated them, partly deliberately and partly because they introduced them to European diseases such as smallpox and the common cold. The Taino got their own back by giving the Spaniards syphilis.

The other beer is Mayabe, named after a town in the Holguin province of eastern Cuba, where there is supposed to be a drunk donkey called Pancho who lives on the beer. I suspected this story of being apocryphal but there is a YouTube video so I suppose it must be true, though the donkey looks less than desperate for another pint.

To my taste, however, Cacique is a better beer than the supposedly premium brand Bucanero sold primarily to tourists for CUCs. For a start it is lighter and more bitter
without the cloying sweet taste that I suspect in Bucanero comes from putting too much sugar into the brew. Not that it’s a whole heap cheaper. A can of Cacique costs 18 pesos while outside Havana you can get a Bucanero or Cristal for one CUC, which you have to remember is worth 25 ‘national’ pesos. A substantial bit more you might say, but it still means for the average Cuban without access to CUCs (unlike most of those living in Matanzas) a can of Cacique costs a couple of days’ salary.

Inevitably by the time I finish my meal and head back into town, there isn’t a taxi to be found. Anywhere. It’s siesta time; in fact the main way to distinguish siesta time from the rest of the time is the absence of would-be taxi drivers hawking their services. The result is that I could do with a siesta myself by the time, footsore and fried, I trudge into the town centre.

Going back to the hotel to crash for an hour or so seems a bit defeatist, especially as it seems one or two of the taxi drivers have decided to re-emerge, it is still hot as hell and a lot more humid, and there’s a bit of beach a couple of miles out of town.

La Concha is not exactly Varadero, just a little crescent of sand with a bar at one end. The bar is mainly colonized by a middle-aged Italian bloke sporting a coiffed salt-and-pepper hairstyle with a Cuban girl less than half his age on one arm and a Rolex on the other, fondling them alternately. He looks like the sort of bloke who might have been a regular guest at Silvio Berlusconi’s
bunga bunga
parties.

The heat is unrelenting, at least 35ºC and humid enough to grow orchids in the air. After a brief swim and a seat in the shade, I realize I’m in danger of melting and reckon it’s time to go back and pack my bags. Which is when I discover that the taxi drivers have packed it in for the day again.