Slow Train to Guantanamo (23 page)

The memorial relates how García famously captured the town from the Spanish in 1876, thereby turning on its head the name Victoria de las Tunas they had given it for an earlier battle. I suppose that explains why the full name has survived.

For a town famously supposed to be boring, the main square is delightfully quixotic. Apart from the bright blue
ayuntamiento
, and Señor García, there is a sweet little whitewashed church which looks like it dates back to the 1600s, the art deco pink and white Hotel Cadillac, a cinema with what looks like a giant red and white radio mast towering above it, several random pieces of municipal concrete work that look a bit like bus shelters (except that there are no buses) and, dotted at regular spaces along the edge of the square, tall palms waving gently in a warm late afternoon breeze.

There is also a pleasant café with outside tables, serving hot coffee and cold beer, inevitably for CUCs only, which is why the only Cubans in it are those working at the bar and a very young girl flirting with a group of three middle-aged Italian men. The words of my
bicitaxi
man come disconcertingly to mind. Is this the end-product of a decade of Berlusconi? Or is it a more local endemic epidemic?

The Cuban exile community in Miami try to make out that prostitution in Cuba is the result of poverty, a corrupt moral climate and an uncaring communist government. Some of that is certainly be true, but as an umbrella explanation nothing could be further from reality. It was the communists who banned the prostitution that under the Batista US-funded dictatorship had been one of the island’s economic mainstays. The moralists in the United States tutted, but still came here for their holidays, filling the casinos and bordellos they banned back home. The reality was that they simply exported to a convenient offshore
oubliette
vices they pretended to abhor at home – out of sight, out of mind – a bit like they still do with Guantánamo Bay today.

There is no doubt that the Castro government turns a blind eye to the local womenfolk turning tricks for tourists willing to pay them in CUCs, but those who do are, on the evidence – like the fat old lady who propositioned me in the bar in Havana – mostly freelances, rather than in hock to some pimp. People trafficking in Cuba is all the other way.

Nor is their any official laxity about foreigners propositioning underage girls. The age of consent in Cuba is sixteen, as it is in most of western Europe. I am not making any national judgements here, but it is a fact that in Cuba Italians in particular have a bad reputation. In 2010 three Italian men were jailed in Bayamo, not far from Las Tunas, after the body of a young girl was found following a sex and drugs escapade at a hotel. But any suggestion that Havana is the Bangkok of the west is far from the mark.

There is at least one aspect of Italian culture, however, that has found mammoth favour amongst ordinary Cubans: ice-cream. Just as in Camagüey, there are crowds here queuing for the stuff, this time on the steps of a puce-pink colonnaded building on the main street. The sign above the door says it is called Yumurí, presumably after the river, and the
crowds are patiently waiting to be served by a man dispensing ice-cream.

Yumurí certainly justifies the ‘yum’. On offer are six exotic flavours, all of which look remarkably good. I join the queue and plump for mango. They have surely enough of the damn things without having to add any artificial flavouring, I hope. It’s a good bet. The ice-cream is delicious, cold, refreshing and a perfect mix of fruitiness and creaminess. But then I’m not really surprised. It has been my experience over the decades that communist economies are absolutely crap at providing almost any of the normal consumer pleasures of life. But they can do ice-cream. Even the Russians could. And in a curious twist of economic history Italian-style ice-cream ended up in Cuba after a lengthy journey via New York and Moscow.

Way back in the 1930s Stalin’s Internal and External Trade supremo Anastas Mikoyan tasted what was to most Russians a little-known delicacy on a trade visit to New York. Mikoyan was hugely impressed and off his own bat imported American machinery to make it in Moscow. Whereas shortages and incompetence blighted much of Soviet manufacturing, Mikoyan kept standards in the ice-cream industry rigorously high and under his own personal control. Stalin allegedly joked to him, ‘Anastas, you like ice-cream better than communism.’ Not a bad choice, but deciding whether or not to laugh at Stalin’s ‘jokes’ was never an easy call. The call came for Mikoyan shortly thereafter in the Great Purge of 1937 but it may say something that all he faced was dismissal; most of his colleagues were executed. He would later get his own back by helping write Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, denouncing Stalin after his death.

It was Mikoyan who was chosen by Khrushchev sent as the first top Soviet official to visit Cuba after the revolution and it may well have been he who persuaded Fidel to get
into ice-cream. The result was Coppelia, Cuba’s state-run ice-cream business, of which Yumurí is the Las Tunas incarnation. There is no doubt that Mikoyan was considered a linchpin in the Soviet–Cuban relationship. He was deputy prime minister at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis which ended with withdrawal of Soviet missiles in return for guarantees that the US would neither invade Cuba nor assist any future Cuban exile invasion such as had occurred at the Bay of Pigs the previous years. Mikoyan was given the tricky job of telling Castro – who had urged a nuclear strike against the US if an invasion were threatened – that they would also be removing smaller weapons not included in the deal.

If Coppelia is Russia’s sole long-term legacy to Cuba, it has been a huge success, offering a vast array of often unusual flavours and every town in the country has its ice-cream parlour or street vendor.

For me, however, the highlight of Las Tunas main street is the shop a few doors down from the open-air ice-cream trolley. If I hadn’t stopped for my little tub of mango delight and retreated into the shady colonnade to eat it before the sun turned it to liquid, I might otherwise not have noticed this extraordinary emporium with orange foil coating its windows and the usual Cuban lack of interior lighting. But standing in the shade of its doorway my eyes wander over El Telégrafo’s window display. And boggle. It’s not particularly striking at first glance. It’s dark and it takes a few seconds for the eyes to adjust before I realize I am staring into the display case of the most remarkably exotic inventory of any shop in Cuba, and possibly the world.

First glance is deceptive: here are a few women’s dresses and T-shirts hung on white plastic hangers, some shoes beneath them, a plastic shopping bag in front, also for sale, as is the bright orange bubble wrap next to it. But let the glance wander and there are also some men’s trousers, a pile
of baseballs, a domino set, some plastic toy lorries, two ladles and three green buckets, a garden fork, an industrial-looking spade, a milk churn and an oil pump. And in the next window? A coil of barbed wire, an elegantly displayed 18-inch machete, some energy-saving light bulbs and a few pickaxe heads. The next? A few plastic plumbing joints, a handful of bottles of washing-up liquid, a solitary tin of furniture polish and two pots of paint, some elegantly-arranged blue plastic cutlery, a thick-rimmed set of coffee cups, and lying up on its side against an internal pillar, yep! a kitchen sink.

Tearing myself way from the Harrods of Las Tunas I wander down past the end of the main street where the town gradually seems to fizzle out into a sprawl of dusty suburbia, where tin roofs begin to appear. On my right is a small house with what at first look appears to be a bit of particularly
avant-garde
sculpture displayed on a concrete slab outside. It is a long tangled piece of metal shaped in a rough curve. It looks angry, post-modern, deliberately distressed. Arresting. Only on closer examination I discover – with a bit of a shock – that it is indeed angry, and distressed. With good reason.

It is the small plaque on the wall of this simple wooden house that alerts me. It reads simply ‘Here lived Carlos M. Leyva González, Martyr of Barbados’. Barbados is somewhere I associate with sandy beaches, rum cocktails and a thriving upmarket tourist industry, not martyrs. But then that’s because I learned my history in another world.

The piece of ironwork in the garden is indeed a sculpture, by Juan Heznart Hedrich from Matanzas, created in 1978, and the reason it looks like nothing so much as a piece of aircraft wreckage is because that is precisely what it is supposed to represent.

The aircraft in question was a Douglas DC-8 belonging to Cubana airlines and this modest little monument in a
garden of a small house in one of Cuba’s least visited towns is a poignant evocation of what many natives still consider their country’s darkest hour. It is a monument to an incident that, for reasons which will become clear, few foreigners have heard about. Or if they have, they have forgotten, or worse still, dismissed it.

Amongst global sporting events there are many which attract a lot more attention than the Central American Fencing Championships. Nonetheless, for Cuba back in October 1976 it was a big thing. That year’s event was being held in Caracas, Venezuela, and the Cuban team included Carlos Leyva González, the twenty-nine-year-old young man with wavy hair in shirt and tie whose face is depicted on the metal plaque attached to the wooden wall of his former home. The big thing for Cubans was that their team had had a good competition: the best imaginable, in fact. They had taken a clean sweep of gold medals. They were therefore in party mood on the way home, flying on Cubana de Aviación’s Flight 455 from Guyana via Trinidad, Barbados and Kingston, Jamaica, back to Havana. When they landed in Trinidad they found two Venezuelan men looking for a flight to Barbados (despite having signally declined to take an earlier British West Indian Airlines flight). The team were in such high spirits that one of them helped the pair change their tickets to fly with Cubana.

In Barbados the pair left the plane, but unknown to the team, did not quite take all their baggage with them. Eleven minutes after CU455 took off from the island’s Seawell Airport (now Grantley Adams International) the plane reached an altitude of 18,000 feet when two bombs, one in the rear lavatory, one in the central section of the plane, exploded, one destroying the control cables, the other blasting a hole in the fuselage and starting a fire.

The Cuban captain radioed back to the Seawell control
tower: ‘We have an explosion aboard. We are descending immediately! We have fire on board! We are requesting immediate landing! We have a total emergency.’

A few minutes later, still eight kilometres short of the runway, the aircraft plunged into the sea killing all 73 passengers on board, including 11 Guyanese, five North Koreans and 57 Cubans including several government officials and all 24 members of the gold medal-winning fencing team, several of whom were still in their teens. It was, at the time, the worst ever terrorist attack on a civilian aircraft in the western hemisphere. It was later discovered that the bombs had been detonated by a pencil-shaped detonator concealed in a tube of Colgate toothpaste.

The two bombers were subsequently arrested in Venezuela and jailed and the plot traced back to anti-Castro Cuban exiles Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, both of whom belonged to organizations linked to the CIA. They too were arrested but all four were acquitted by a Venezuelan military court. The prosecutor appealed and they were retried by a civilian court. All spent various terms in jail. Bosch was released in 1987 and moved to Miami where he died in 2011.

Carriles, believed to have been the prime mover in the attack, escaped jail in Venezuela, fleeing to El Salvador where he became involved with CIA operations there. He was also implicated in a bombing campaign in Havana in the mid-1990s intended to cripple the country’s growing tourist trade. Eventually, he made his way to the United States, where he was arrested on for nothing more serious than immigration irregularities and soon released. The CIA denies involvement in the bombing of CU455 but documents since released prove that it had at least advance warning of an attack against a Cuban civilian airliner.

There is no doubt that Posada Carriles has blood on his
hands, just as there is no doubt that today (as of 2013) he still lives happy and unrepentant in Miami with an American wife and two children. His nickname is ‘Bambi’. Anti-Castro exiles see him as a hero. In Cuba he is considered as bad as Osama bin Laden. At eighty-four, Carriles is two years younger than Castro. It remains to be seen which will laugh last. Or if anyone will see the joke.

Sitting there in the shade of an unkempt palm tree in the garden of this little wooden house, I found it worth reflecting on the fallibility of ‘history’, and the cold cynicism of the old maxim that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. And that soundbites such as the ‘War on Terror’ do not necessarily define what terror is and when those who declare themselves to be fighting terrorism on behalf of civilization can in their own ends turn a blind eye to acts of terror. Or even tacitly condone them.

But
Cuba e’ Cuba
(I’m at it now) and despair never quite overcomes
joie de vivre
. Almost directly opposite this poignant little monument is a bar with salsa music pouring out. I climb the stairs to the first floor of Las Antillas to find a group of young twenty-something Cubans drinking beer and laughing. Cubans with CUCs, obviously: the beer is Bucanero, and they are ordering it in copious quantities. In the garden below there is a statue of naked girls and dolphins cavorting over a concrete pool conspicuously devoid of water. It’s supposed to be a fountain. Then the music starts up again and the locals have taken to their feet doing that curiously Cuban dance that anywhere else in the world might be taken for lap-dancing: the girls grinding their posteriors into the crotches of their male partners.

There’s a funny thing about dancing in Cuba. It is sexy, in the sense that all the rhythms and motions are inspired by sex, but it isn’t erotic. It’s not intended to evoke desire; more to celebrate the act, rather than lead to it. It’s intended to be
joyous, but not necessarily flirtatious, unless you obviously want it to be. And then you won’t be on the floor long. At least not standing on it.