Slow Train to Guantanamo (22 page)

The other doesn’t exactly look fit for human conveyance either, certainly not humane conveyance. The carriages are marked clearly
Ferrocarriles de Cuba
(Cuban Railways) in yellow paint, clearly done by hand and quite probably by someone still suffering under the effects of a few too many
tots of rum. Apart from that – and the fact that most of them actually have windows with at least a few panes of glass in them – these carriages look like they were not so much bought off the shelf from a railway supply company as put together by someone with a load of scrap metal and a welding gun.

Up front, leaning out of the window of a red and yellow locomotive belching steam into the palm trees, a big black man is doing a remarkable impression of a Caribbean Casey Jones wondering whatever happened to the Cannonball Express – because there is absolutely no danger of the locomotive he is in charge of ever acquiring that nickname.

For much of the next hour he shunts his ramshackle collection of carriages one way and the other for no purpose obvious to me and without anyone making any attempt to board them. At least it is something to watch as the minutes turn into hours for the hordes of us gathered on cracked black plastic seats loosely anchored to iron struts laid out across the floor of what passes for a waiting-room in the creeping dereliction of Camagüey station.

There is something almost hypnotic about watching this facsimile of railroad activity and it is with a shock that I look at my watch as yet another train pants into the station and I realize it is exactly 9.20 a.m., the hour my train is due to arrive. And here it is! Two trains in a row approximately on time! The
jefe de torno
unties one end of the piece of rope that was the demarcation line between waiting area and platform proper and we’re off, storming the carriages, pushing pieces of improvised luggage through open windows and clambering up the treacherous rusty iron steps onto the train.

Inside it’s actually not that bad. Probably also East German in origin from the familiar look of the luggage racks, many of which are still functional. I notice this quite quickly
because the middle-aged, well-dressed man who is one of the five other passenger sharing my compartment is taking great care in placing a rather rickety looking cardboard box with holes in it, which seems to comprise the whole of his luggage, at the end near the door.

My other fellow travellers are a young couple – she in cut-off jeans and silver-embroidered bikini top, he in cotton slacks but bare-chested – the middle-aged man who could have bought his stripy polo shirt and grey chinos in Marks & Spencer’s – and a couple of older women, both wearing tight jeans and black halter tops, possibly at an age when they ought not to be.

The corridor is still chaos. Passengers are piling onto the train at the nearest open door, wisely not wanting to take any chances on how soon a train that actually arrived on time might decide to depart. Those already on board are bustling past one another in opposite directions as they hunt for their reserved seat. Meanwhile, hordes of vendors – quite happy to take the risk of being carried off in a country where trains regularly slow down to walking pace – hawk half-litre bottles of home-brewed
aguardiente
hooch, unappealingly grey wafer biscuits, greasy-looking pork fritters, boiled sweets and the inevitable plastic bottles of mango juice. I’m only taking a relatively short ride but most people on board are in for the long haul, all the way to Santiago.

It’s not just people selling stuff though, there are would-be buyers too, sticking their head through doors looking for goods (I use the word ‘doors’ loosely: it’s a long time since any train compartment I have yet seen in Cuba was acquainted with a physical door).

The doorway to our compartment is now being graced by a very plump apparition from an over-the-top Gothic comedy show. Dressed in micro-mini denim hotpants above fishnet tights, head wrapped in a multicoloured scarf and
wearing a fluorescent pink camisole under what appears to be a string vest, the one thing that leaps instantly to my mind is Matt Lucas playing the ‘only gay in the village’ in Little Britain.

I’m trying my best not to giggle, but my amusement turns to revulsion (and pity!) as she – it is a she – hauls up string vest and camisole to reveal a protuberant brown tummy covered in pink bumps. Self-preservation has me panicking about unknown tropical diseases. She tells us it just appeared overnight and thinks it has to be a rash or insect bites. It’s still not exactly the sort of thing British railway passengers routinely reveal to one another. But then nor do they lack basic drugs such as antihistamines which by common agreement is what this woman needs. Cuba has universal free healthcare but a lack of funds and the US embargo means even the most basic medicaments can be hard to come by.

My own luggage contains sticking plasters, blister plasters, the essential Imodium and copious quantities of sunscreen and insect repellent, but not much else. Like most ‘first world’ travellers, I had just assumed – in this case rashly – that if I need something fairly basic I can pick it up wherever I am. Not in Cuba. The other side of the coin is that people routinely keep whatever medical supplies they might have on them, especially when travelling. Within minutes the others in my compartment have produced an extraordinary array of half-full bubble packs, tablets packed in silver or orange foil, all of them unbranded generics. How they know which is which is beyond me until I realize that they probably never have a choice. The same drug isn’t sold under a multiplicity of brand names. If you can get it at all, you know what it is.

One of the bubble packs I recognize as what the bloke on the train from Santa Clara was selling. What it is I have no idea, but the woman with the ailment reckons it is what she
needs. It is immediately, unquestioningly handed over. No money asked for and none offered. It’s the old communist mantra, although the first time I have observed it actually working: to each according to her need, from each according to her ability (in this case, to provide). Or you could just call it common humanity. Either way I am impressed.

Not so with the punctuality, though. The train may have pulled in dead on time, and been boarded – in almost pirate fashion – instantly. Forty-five minutes later, timetable notwithstanding, we still haven’t moved. On the platform there is an announcement to passengers behind the piece of rope that has been restrung to mark the separation between platform and waiting-room that Train 5 to Havana via Santa Clara will be delayed owing to a problem with the locomotive. There is a general groan on board our train too, even though it is going in the opposite direction. There has been no hint from the loudspeaker as to how long either delay could be despite the fact we are now already nearly an hour late leaving. It could be hours. Even days.

Inside the compartment it’s hot and, given the relatively relaxed standards of dress, the smell of sweat is rising. I’m almost refreshed when a few drips of what seems like relatively cool water land on my head, until I start wondering where they could have come from. Then a loud cheeping follows and the man in the ‘smart casual’ collection leaps to his feet and takes down the box with holes in it from the luggage rack above my head. I’ve just been peed on by a chicken.

He is profuse with apologies. I’m too amused to be angry. He explains he is a chicken farmer in Las Tunas, and this is a prize bird. It turns out to be an excuse for almost everybody to introduce themselves. The young man with the bare torso is called Dario and is a nurse, which explains why he had the right bubble-pack, his girlfriend is a teacher, the younger of the two older women a university lecturer in Spanish and
history. She is immediately fascinated by the fact that I am a foreign writer and tries at length to engage me in a bookish conversation that stretches my linguistic skills, not to mention extremely limited knowledge of recent left-wing Latin American literature. Happily there is a sudden jerk that throws all of us into or out of our seats. We’re moving. 10.50 a.m., only ninety minutes later. We wave sympathetic farewells to those on the platform still waiting resignedly for news of the locomotive for Train 5 to Havana.

The university lady wants to know where I am headed and just nods when I say Guantánamo. I am beginning to realize that it doesn’t quite have the same resonance for Cubans; first and foremost it refers to the town, one of the oldest in the country, only secondly does it refer to the bay which ought to be that town’s outlet to the sea but is blocked by the foreign base squatting astride it. She insists Santiago is much nicer. She lives in Siboney, she says proudly, then has to explain that it is a seaside town not far outside Santiago and is both very pretty and very famous because that is where Fidel (nobody needs to add the surname) holed up to hide after his first abortive attempt at revolution. She tells me I will understand when I visit the museum dedicated to the birth of the revolution in Santiago.

I am more surprised to hear that Siboney’s best beach is called Daiquirí, which up until now I had only known as a cocktail. That gets a laugh all round. You get good daiquiris in Cuba; Hemingway, inevitably, is amongst those credited with inventing them. It turns out that Daiquirí as a place name goes back to the long vanished indigenous Taino people, but that its global fame was established early in the twentieth century when an American mining engineer working in the area ran out of gin for his G and T, and made the best he could with what was available, pouring white rum over the locally plentiful staples of limes and sugar.

I manage to entertain them with news that this wasn’t very different in fact from ‘grog’, the standard Royal Navy tipple for sailors in the Caribbean. If necessity is the mother of invention, locality provides the raw materials. The supposed ‘Hemingway’ variation, also claimed by the El Floridita bar in Havana, added a few drops of maraschino liqueur and was served frozen (as are most in American bars today, although to purists you ought to ask for that version specifically).

Neither is on offer in our cramped train compartment, but we do have the next best thing, in the sense of ‘the only thing’ available: Dario hands me a bottle of dark ruby red liquor labelled
Tradición 16%
, and urges me to take a glug. It tastes strong, but most of all it tastes like warm, sweet cough medicine. I pull a face and his girlfriend hands me a plastic cup of hot sweet coffee, to wash it down with. Actually the two go quite well together and my reaction wins a round of applause, and a round of
Tradición
for everybody too.

The result is that we are all quite merry when, sooner than expected, though more than an hour and half later than it should have done, our train pulls slowly into Las Tunas and it is time for me to say goodbye.

‘Try the local wine,’ says the university lady. ‘You will like it.’ I smile politely, but I think she is having me on. Cuban wine? I don’t think so.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Tuna Fishing in Cuba

There have to be more enticing, certainly more prepossessing names for a city than Las Tunas, especially one not situated anywhere near the sea. Something fishy here, you might suspect. Being told that its full name – rarely used – is Victoria de las Tunas doesn’t help. Victory of the red-fleshed, bluefin sushi favourite over the evil porpoises or bottlenose dolphins perhaps?

Ironically, the ‘Victoria’ bit was bestowed by the Spanish in 1869 after winning a battle here in the islanders’ first war of independence, which goes a long way to explaining why nowadays it isn’t often used and this town of some 150,000 people is usually simply called Tunas: pronounced the same way US Americans say the name of the fish
tuna
.

But the
tuna
in Las Tunas has never had anything to do with fish.
Tuna
is a native form of tropical cactus, a species of prickly pear which can be peeled and eaten or its juice extracted to make a wide variety of non-alcoholic drinks. Allegedly the town got its name because they grow freely in the area and became a nickname used by the hordes of merchants who came to the area to buy its main product: beef from cattle ranches. There aren’t many of either any more as far as I can see.

But there is an endless array of the usual run-down
bicitaxis
to get me to next
casa
. My driver is a jovial, elderly 
bloke, a good decade older than I am, with a thick pair of glasses, full head of grey hair and scrawny, hard-pedalling thighs desperate to convince me that, instead of the
casa particular
I have already booked, I should stay at his place instead, or his cousin’s place. His cousin can even throw in a
chica
for free, he says, turning round to leer at me lasciviously – and dangerously, as we narrowly avoid another pothole. I decide to decline the offer.

Las Tunas has been dubbed Cuba’s most boring town, but in the afternoon sunshine it seems rather pleasant, the houses neither collapsing tenements nor seventeenth-century relics, but fairly modern, relatively well-kept little two-storey provincial homes, most pre-revolutionary and in the late colonial style, painted in an array of bright pastel colours, like those where I saw the kids playing baseball in Matanzas. Not too many rusty tin roofs. Always a plus in Cuba.

The landlady of my
casa
is waiting for me. I’m her only guest, but the accommodation is more than suitable: more or less a studio flat with cooking facilities and large, if basic, bathroom on the ground floor of a pleasant two-storey stone-built townhouse at the far end of the main road in from the station.

Strolling into the main square, I see banners to remind me that Las Tunas is currently hosting the regional assembly of the Communist Party of Cuba, under the slogan
MORE EFFICIENCY AND PRODUCTIVITY
. Maybe that’s why the town looks like it has all been given a fresh lick of paint. Most strikingly of all is a splendid symmetrical, neo-classical two-storey building with a clock in the centre painted a shocking bright blue. This is the town hall, dominating – not least by its alarming colour – the main square named after Vicente García, a local lad who, the inscription on the statue of a stern, sword-wielding gentleman tells me, was a Major General and hero of the first Cuban war of independence. 
This was the abortive war fought against Spain from 1868 to 1878 which bizarrely ended in a stalemate, the result being an end to slavery (the slaves had been freed and joined the rebels), but the continuation of occupation. García was the last of six ‘presidents of Cuba’ declared during the war. Afterwards, he emigrated to Venezuela only to be poisoned by the Spaniards putting ground glass in his favourite dish, a pork, plantain and okra stew, an assassination almost as bizarre – if more successful – than the CIA’s attempt to kill Castro with exploding cigars (they never actually got them to him).