Slow Train to Guantanamo (21 page)

Either way, I try to put Juanito’s no-show down to tropical torpor rather than imagine him languishing in a cell for fraternization with a foreigner, and head off through the sleepy, sun-drenched streets of Camagüey in search of shade and a spot of lunch. It’s a Sunday afternoon and the heat seems to have sapped the very life and soul from the scorched streets of the city. I am noticeably flagging, keeping in the few shadows cast by low houses from a sun almost directly overhead. A bicycle bell makes me jump and I turn and see in the lee of the overhanging gable of an old colonial house a grinning brown face on a
bicitaxi. ‘Hola
,’ he says. ‘
Hola
,’ I reply. And then, implausibly, he recognizes me. ‘
Hé, tu es un
amigo de Juanito
.’ Hey, you’re a friend of Juanito. It comes out, of course, as: ‘
tu e’ un ami’o
,’ but I’ve learned to look out for the missing consonants. He spotted us in the bar last night. I ask him where out mutual friend might be, but he just shrugs. Any minute now he’s going to tell me, ‘
Cu’a e’
Cu’a
’. Instead, he offers me a lift.

I’m getting short on CUCs though – having blown the
budget more than intended on my Italian shorts – and the
casa
still has to be paid in the morning plus there is the difficulty that this being Sunday the banks aren’t open and Camagüey doesn’t boast an ATM. All I can offer, I make clear in advance, is a few national pesos he seems happy enough. A completely free ride was never in question. I am a foreigner and that means I have more money than him. A lot more. In any currency. I manage to make him understand that a restaurant with a bit of shade would be nice, and a few bumpy minutes bouncing on an unpadded wooden seat later I am on San Juan de Dios, the most colourful and atmospheric, ancient square in Camagüey, in the corner of which, within a bright blue painted colonial era building just across from the pastel yellow eighteenth-century church is the Campana de Toledo, probably one of the smartest looking restaurants in town. Empty.

There is a reason for this, as I discover shortly after ‘tipping’ Juanito’s
ami’o
20 pesos, less than one CUC, about half the normal rate, but about four times what he would have charged a native. Fair enough really. The Campana de Toledo looks as if it has everything a hungry, hot pedestrian could desire: the delightfully cooling ceiling fan and shady terraced courtyard are extremely welcoming. Certainly a lot more welcoming than the staff. It takes more than twenty minutes before anybody turns up. And when they do, in the face of a dour-faced middle-aged waiter in a starched collar that must be hell to wear in this temperature it is only to tell me that I can have a beer but no food. Food, it would appear, is ‘off’.

Surely they have something, I ask, pointing out that the kitchen is supposed to be open and they charge in CUCs. He looks a bit grumpy, and I realize that this is a state restaurant and although they may charge in CUCs, the staff get paid in pesos. About five minutes later, he comes back with the beer
– a Bucanero of course – and tells me they can rustle up a little snack of
moros y cristianos
, the black beans and white rice that is the Cuban staple, its ‘Moors and Christians’ an unusually racist hangover from Spanish colonial days.

I agree, because I’m hungry, and it is always possible that a smart place like this might just about manage to do humble food well. Except that, of course, they don’t. An hour later, having drunk one more beer than I intended and spent as much time as I can be bothered pushing overcooked soggy rice and undercooked hard beans around on a plate, I pay – to my horror, rather more than I would have for a decent meal in an English gastro pub, and this out of my dwindling supply of CUCs – and leave without tipping. I get a surly grimace from the waiter, but then I didn’t exactly get a service with a smile.

The heat has abated slightly and there are faint life signs in the seemingly comatose body of Camagüey, or ‘
Cama’way
,’ as I am learning to say. I wander back into the main part of town – San Juan de Dios is visited mainly by tourists – to find doors and windows behind wrought iron grilles open now revealing scenes of domestic bliss, or at any rate domesticity: a bloke in his vest watching baseball on a tiny CRT telly, a woman in a shawl (can she be cold?) darning a shirt, a bloke tinkering with what looks like a motorbike engine on the floor of his living-room. Here and there even the wrought iron grilles are open and kids pile out onto the street, girls skip and run along the cobbles or sit gossiping on the steps like miniature versions of the mothers they will soon become, boys throw things at one another or playing tag, the lucky one or two struggle with a toy scooter on cobbles.

It is a good half hour’s walk back to the main square, at least by the route I take which seems to be a lot longer than the journey on the
bicitaxi
. I realize I am hungry again. Or
rather that I never really stopped being hungry. Luckily there is a restaurant on the corner opposite the Cambio bar, open and serving actual food. For national pesos. In the evenings. At lunchtime – when the tourist coaches from the beach resorts are expected to be in town – they only take CUCs.

There is an interesting sort of price relationship: prices in pesos are twice what they would have been at lunchtime in CUCs, which means everything is approximately 90 per cent cheaper. I opt for the chicken, which I am gradually coming to realize is the safest bet, only to find that the foreigners have had it all. Chicken is off. In fact, everything is off except for
biftek de jamón
, which might be a piece of gammon but could also be a pork burger. I decide to pass and numb the hunger pangs for a bit with a can of Cacique beer, which at least is devoid of Bucanero’s cloying sweetness.

By 8.30 p.m. República is heaving. It is promenade hour, the epitome of Mediterranean culture transported to the Caribbean. This could be Spain, Turkey, Italy or Greece, everyone out in their Sunday best doing a spot of window shopping. Camagüey isn’t short on window dressing. There is a women’s fashion store that could hold its own with Swedish chain H&M, except that in Cuban terms the prices are pure Bond Street. The Panamericana chain – prices in pesos, but also astronomical – looks almost as good as BHS (which is fairly faint praise), but I know from experience too that much of what is on display is just window dressing. Items in the windows aren’t necessarily for sale inside. And even if some of them are, it would be a miracle if they had your size.

All of which fills me with wonder at how well the average Cuban turns out for the evening promenade, in chic tight, tight, low-cut jeans, with big silver belts and figure hugging T-shirts. And that’s just the blokes. Not that the girls dress much differently, apart from a commendably socialist,
economically efficient use of much less material, particularly in the jeans, which I suspect go through several lifetimes, starting out as ultra-tight denim leggings and ending up as little more than denim knickers.

Blokes my age of course are mostly dressed in sensible slacks with polished shoes and open-necked white shirts, as opposed to my grubby polo shirt, sandals and heavy Italian shorts with an elasticated waist. And I’m supposed to be the one from a sophisticated European nation visiting a down-and-out third world country.

The biggest queue in town is for the ice-cream parlour. There is something of a 1950s American feel-good film about the scene of all these fresh-faced teenage kids giggling and jiving as they queue for wholesome, old-fashioned refreshment with nothing ahead of them but an evening strolling around town or heading for a dance hall with little likelihood of alcohol (unaffordable) or narcotics (unavailable). You can almost imagine an old-fashioned Georgia or Alabama Republican right-wing congressman from that era nodding approvingly, except of course that absolutely nobody here is even aware of skin colour, not least because there are so many variations.

The other advantage – and I do hope the Cuban kids too regard it as an advantage – is that when they go dancing, 90 per cent of the time it is still to their own music rather than cultural colonial imports from the United States. Cuba is one of the few places in the world where you won’t hear John Denver’s
Country Roads
telling you West Virginia is ‘almost heaven’. Here country roads are still
carreterras
rurales
and if they bring tears to the eyes, it’s because they’re absolute shit to drive on. Or would be, if you had a car.

Back in the Cambio, still vainly in the hope of bumping into Juanito. The barman gives a shrug of shoulders with a smile that, having lived in East Germany where the Stasi had
informers everywhere, I can’t regard as wholly innocent. Instead of Juanito, the man dominating the bar tonight is the sort of Cuban who definitely does have a car. Probably a big one. It would have to be. The man himself is big, brimming with muscle and if I had to stage a wild guess at his family history I would suggest his ancestors might have been the biggest tribesman any pirate could drag out of central Africa onto a slave ship only to find him seizing control of the ship in mid-ocean and feeding Bluebeard to the fishes. It is hard to resist the analogy: for a start he is wearing a blue and white spotted bandana. And puffing a big fat cigar. And showing off his mobile phone.

With good reason. In a land where only a few years ago mobiles were not only scarce and horribly expensive, but also illegal, he has a brand new state-of-the-art Blackberry on which he is playing aloud a video version of the latest Floridian badass Black-Hispanic rap hit, a clear suggestion that the immunity to cultural colonialism might not survive a transition to capitalism.

As a foreigner, with a third-rate, non-3G mobile in my pocket, I am an obvious target to which to display his technological up-do-dateness. When, on repeated urging and his determination not to believe I don’t have one, I finally succumb to the ‘I’ve shown you mine, now show me yours’ line, the look on his face is pure ecstatic one-upmanship delight. Beaming all over his face and puffing smoke from his thick cigar in mine, he tells me in a language that I can only describe as Black-Hispanic-Floridian-Cuban-English, ‘
You have phone, you wan’ proper phone, no un telefono miki mau
.’ Yep, some smart ass Cuban wannabe gangsta has just told me I am a loser because I have a Mickey Mouse phone!

The fact that he is smoking a cigar also shows what a big timer he is in local terms. Cigars may be the national pride
and joy but these days they are strictly for the tourist market. Even Fidel, for whom a big cigar was once as much of a personality statement as it was for Winston Churchill, has given them up. For health reasons. The Cambio does sell cigars, notably the top brand Cohiba, the same as I got at black market rates from my driver in Santa Clara. These, however, are undoubtedly genuine and cost a fairly eye-watering CUC 19.80 each, which is actually not that bad consider you would pay nearly £25 in Britain. They are, of course, unavailable in the United States, except for Arnie Schwarzenegger
⁷
who famously smoked them in a tent adjoined to his office when he was governor of California – they are as beyond the grasp of most ordinary Cubans as a day-trip to Miami. That is not to say most Cubans don’t smoke. They do. But they smoke cigarettes, which are substantially cheaper and ironically boast US-themed names such as Hollywood and Vegas, though there is one which has distinctly more politically correct branding and an advertising slogan to match. Popular.
Yo soy Cubano, yo soy popular!
I’m Cuban, I’m popular, but the Spanish also suggests ‘one of the people’. Not exactly Mad Men, but not too bad for a country where everything is run by the government.

This particular cigar smoker is keen to treat me to his life history. Or a version of it. He’s keen to make clear that despite his obvious affluence he is a man of the people too, even though he’s not exactly preaching communism. What I’m getting is an old-fashioned rags-to-riches story, the sort you might hear in a bar in Chicago, even if it does have a particularly Cuban flavour: ‘Man, I not know who ma daddy was. Mi mama, she
una puta,
a whore, ma daddy prob some fuckin’ turista.’ I sympathize but it’s not as if he’s listening. Apart from the usual obligatory, ‘
Daydon
?’, the standard
abbreviation of ‘
Dedonde vienes?
’ – where do you come from – he’s not interested in anything but himself.

Unlike my conversation with Juanito the previous night this is not so much an exchange as a tirade. This guy may have a traumatic family history but the sad truth is he’s a first-rate example of a human archetype common to both capitalism and communism: the pub bore. I make my excuses and leave. The night may be young, but I’m not.

In the morning I have a train to catch. And in Cuba that means you’ve got to be on your toes.

7
. See
All Gone to Look for America
, by Peter Millar, Arcadia Books 2009.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Changing Carriages

Camagüey’s near derelict station at 7.15 in the morning is implausibly busy. There are actually two trains doing a fairly passable impression of coming or going, even though the one I am here to get – the only one I had been told was scheduled for today – is not due for another two hours.

At least one of the two locomotives belching smoke, oil and diesel fumes next to the platform is certainly being used to take passengers, although I’m not absolutely certain it ought to be, seeing as the vehicles lined up behind it bear a closer resemblance to cattle trucks than anything designed for human conveyance.

Nonetheless humans are piling out of them. Little humans: scores of kids with skin colours every hue of the human rainbow but every uniform a pristine brown with white shirts, indicating they are middle-schoolers, aged roughly between eight and ten. This heap of rusting cattle cars, is, it would seem, the equivalent of the school bus and has trundled into Camagüey from the little villages between here and the coast.