Slow Train to Guantanamo (7 page)

My belief that a train might actually arrive is given an oblique sort of encouragement by the sight of man on a ladder doing some form of welding work near what seem to be overhead electric cables. I suspect doing welding near live cables might not fit the prescription of our own dear Health and Safety Executive, but then they probably wouldn’t approve either of the fact he isn’t wearing gloves or goggles, despite the flying sparks, and his ladder doesn’t look awfully well secured.

The noise of the welding gun is a counterpoint to the rattle of cicadas in the trees. There is a curious laid-back exotic romanticism to it all. It occurs to me that if I were Japanese I should compose a haiku, something along the lines of

Above rusty rails

Sparks fly, crimson flowers fade.

When will my train come?

A little pedestrian perhaps, but I think I’ve got the number of syllables right and the flowers are a seasonal reference, sort of. Then a cloud of dust billows down what passes for a road and one of those ancient black Chevrolets that the Russians modelled their 1960s Chaika limousines on, clunks across the tracks, does a three-point turn for no apparent reason and disappears again, swallowed up by its own sandstorm.

From out of nowhere, a scrawny, pale-faced elderly bloke with close-cropped grey hair in a black singlet hanging loosely over his emaciated frame stumbles into view, trips up on the tracks, steadies himself and then collapses onto the bench in front of me, takes a long swig from a can of Bucanero
fuerte
(the 5.7 per cent ABV variety) and belches loudly.

A few minutes later he looks over in my direction and mumbles something of which I pick up one word,
borracho
, amongst a slur of other syllables. Which is fair enough, because
borracho
means drunk, and he is at least applying it to himself. With a hiccup.

At this stage, however, I haven’t had long enough to work out that rather than saying
estoy borracho
(meaning I’m drunk) he might actually have said
soy borracho
(meaning, I am a drunk). Because the latter certainly turns out to be the case.

It did not take an awful lot of the three hours we were both going to sit there waiting for a train for me to realize that. Initially, he seems harmless enough, almost pleasant even. He even has some English: ‘Sorry,’ he says pleasantly apologetic when he realizes that my Spanish is substantially less than perfect, and I am having difficulty understanding him. ‘Please tell me if I am a problem for you,’ he says,
embarrassing me into the usual, ‘No, no not at all’ disclaimer. Disclaimers I almost immediately come to regret as he says, ‘Sorry,’ yet again, before completely unexpectedly and very loudly bursting into song: ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word!’

I am partial to a glass myself but 9.30 in the morning seems a bit early to be as wasted as this guy clearly is and singing to strangers in the street is definitely more than is called for.

Happily it doesn’t last. After a slight intermission, during which I suspect he has briefly dozed off, he comes to, apparently slightly sobered up. For the next half hour or so, we have a conversation in which he and actually tells me interesting stuff, such as the fact that just along the coast at Las Terrazas is where Hemingway kept his boat
Pilar
. As I noticed earlier, just about everybody in Havana has a Hemingway story.

The reason for his more than adequate English, he tells me, is that he has a son in Norway, ‘where everybody speaks English’. Then suddenly he goes quiet. ‘They are looking at me,’ he says. Who, I wonder, and then I notice a couple of policemen who have just come off the later ferry. They don’t seem to me to be paying any attention to anyone much. But then I am not Cuban. Or drunk.

‘When I was at the University of Havana, they said I was mad,’ the drunk, who tells me his name is Miguel, says. ‘Because I was an individual. You know what Stalin said, he said, one man is more of a problem than a million, a million is just a statistic. They watch me, you know.’

It is not impossible. I have lived in countries with secret police long enough to know you never know when they might be watching and when they are not. But in reality I suspect it is a long time since anyone has watched Miguel, or watched out for him. That does not mean he is paranoid.
His Stalin quote is inaccurate, the original is a lot worse: ‘the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.’ But the fact that he knows it suggests he might indeed at some stage have been a thorn in the communist authorities’ side. It might also explain why now, in his fifties but probably not much older, he is unemployed. And a drunk. I ask him where he is going.

But the sleep-induced sobriety is wearing enough and instead of a destination I get something between poetic prophecy and drunken doggerel: ‘I don’t know where I’m going. No one knows, when the volcano blows.’

Over by the crumbling concrete jetty a café is opening up. A bite to eat might be a good idea. The timetable suggests the journey to Matanzas, barely 80 kilometres (50 miles) by road, will take nearly four hours as the train winds its way through the countryside and along the coast. It also gives me an excuse to escape Miguel’s now melancholy drunken ramblings.

The café staff are cleaning up, sweeping the bare concrete floor and my hopes of finding something edible are not great. But then a large man in a loud checked shirt comes over an inquires if I am a foreigner: the unavoidable
de donde, amigo
question: where do you come from, my friend? I tell him and he says he is the manager, that they are just getting ready to open in half an hour. I explain that I am waiting for the train and gesture towards the station where Miguel has once again burst into song, this time serenading an elderly couple doing their best to ignore him.

The manager shakes his head. ‘Take a seat, I will get you something,’ just taking the time to reassure himself – politely – that I can pay in CUCs.

Ten minutes later, much to my surprise and astonished pleasure, the kitchen has rustled up a
bocadillito
– a roast pork and grilled bacon sandwich served with some freshly
made potato crisps. I settle down to eat under some dried palm fronds savouring the cool breeze from the bay and a cold beer from the fridge. If I’m going to have to put up with a drunk all the way to Matanzas, I’d better take some of his medicine.

By the time I get back to the platform a few more potential passengers have arrived. The ticket office isn’t open yet but there is a woman in an approximation of a uniform fussing around. I take my seat again opposite Miguel who has mercifully gone back to sleep. A woman with two children arrives and shouts the question which I have been warned is crucial etiquette in the unavoidable everyday Cuban experience, the queue: ‘
Quién es último?
’ Who’s last?

This is a remarkably civilized and in my experience uniquely Cuban attitude to queuing. Instead of having to stand in a long line for hours – and in Cuba queues frequently last for hours if not days – you find out who the person immediately ahead of you is. That way everybody is free to mill around or wander off until you see that person being called. It is a sort of chain reaction and happily, while I was feeding my face, the drunk Miguel has already established my place in it at the head of the line.

Eventually with much clanking and squealing of iron on iron an apparition which I can only construe to be our train lurches in. The drunk looks up from his sleep and says surprisingly lucidly, ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.’ I wonder for a poignant moment if he might actually mean it. Then all of a sudden he repeats the same line, at the top of his voice, in an impromptu karaoke version of Phil Collins. It seems his entire English vocabulary and syntax is a litany of pop song refrains strung together with a few conjunctions. (I suspect it was that which would put the Phil Collins line into my head arriving in the bleak Santa Clara dawn two days later.)

Glad as I am to see the train arrive, I find it hard to believe it will actually get us to Matanzas. The only time I have ever seen such rusted bodywork was in a scrapheap for ancient cars in the midst of the Montana desert. There are just two carriages and parts of the lower sections of each which look thin enough to push a finger through. The roof has long lost the bulbs supposed to fit in its horn-like headlights. The pantograph which provides the power from the overhead rails looks like if it stopped hanging from them the whole train would fall to bits.

But clearly everyone else is more optimistic. The ticket office is open. I pay my four ‘CUCs’ and finally get hold of my first Cuban train ticket, a little piece of paper with punched holes for each station you are allowed to stop at. I’m going all the way so it is virtually perforated.

My fellow passengers are an assorted lot: a massive handsome black guy who could be a double for the young Mohammad Ali, in a tight red T-shirt that shows off his pecs, a skinny, stereotypically Latino gangsta-looking bloke in designer sneakers and bright orange shorts with a spider tattoo climbing up his arm, a well-built mulatto woman in skin-tight day-glo pink pants and a tight low-cut top, and of course the drunk who is now giving English lessons of a sort to one of the children of the middle-aged woman who arrived last. The elderly couple I had spotted from the café apparently aren’t getting on the train all day: it seems they’ve just come to watch.

A quick look at the train suggests, to say the least, that it lacks even the most rudimentary toilet facilities, so I really need to lose some of that beer before getting on board. The difficulty is that there is no obvious sign indicating the whereabouts of the station conveniences.

This turns out to be for the very good reason that there aren’t any. Not any more. I eventually identify a blue-painted
concrete block which proclaims itself the
servicios
, but both cubicles are missing doors and boarded over. In desperation I take a quick leak behind the block and get back to the platform just in time to see a bloke who appears to be the conductor in a white shirt jumping down from the train and calling at people to climb onboard.

But before we are allowed to, he fetches a bucket of water from a standpipe and splashes it over a seat, apparently his own, before wiping it dry with a cloth. Only then are we invited to clamber on board.

The seats are the most basic I have yet encountered on any form of public transport: basic plastic moulds fixed to wooden frames screwed to the floor. An old lady I hadn’t noticed on the platform, coal black with the classic finely-chiselled features of the Yoruba Africans who in the nineteenth century were imported into Cuba as slaves, is helped on board by a young man, a son or nephew perhaps, and sits down opposite me. She is painfully thin with a fine lace scarf wrapped around her head, gold rings on her fingers, painted fingernails and a long cigarette holder. She is carrying a plastic bottle of a pale yellow liquid. It could be a drink, a medicine or a urine sample.

A few clanks, bumps and creaks later, we are off. Ten seconds later we stop, barely a few dozen metres from the platform. There is a long minute’s silence when I wonder if that is it for today. Then the clanks and bumps again and we lurch once more into life. For a full twenty seconds this time. I am no longer surprised it will take four hours to get to Matanzas. Four weeks seems more probable.

The same procedure repeats itself a couple more times, and then finally we pick up a surge or power and are rattling away into the lush tropical landscape, hurtling along at a speed of maybe 20 miles an hour. Not that going much faster would be a good idea, given that all the doors and windows
are open and we are at times so close to the rich green foliage that heavy fronds slap the fragile-looking bodywork and at times flap briefly into the carriage. Britain’s Health and Safety inspectors would have heart failure, but then they would almost anywhere in Cuba; here everyone, including the conductor, thinks it’s a bit of a laugh.

In the first five minutes we stop another three times. At stations. Or what pass for stations: raised concrete platforms, about six feet off the ground with steps, and scrawled in black paint names for the middle of nowhere. Penas Altas for example is little more than a junction with a road, where a couple of lorries, despite the lack of a level crossing, wait patiently for us to rattle by.

We leave the jungle and are out in a savannah area with a few shacks here and there, wooden or part breezeblocks with corrugated iron roofs, and the occasional surprisingly smart looking pastel-painted bungalow that wouldn’t be overly incongruous on the outskirts of Worthing, on the English south coast. I stick my head out of the window and note fierce-looking red-headed birds of prey wheeling in the bright blue sky above us. Perhaps they know something I don’t.

At times it’s like being on a fairground ride as the coaches shake from side to side, almost bouncing over the rails. The conductor has to jump from one coach to the next over rusty footplates that don’t interconnect. The train is beginning to fill up now as we stop at more stations. A young Revolutionary Policeman no more than twenty-two or twenty-three gets on, his blue-grey uniform perfectly pressed, his black shoes shining, and his gun firmly buttoned in to its holster. But he’s just on board for the ride and gets off a couple of stops later at a hamlet with no more than three shacks, some chickens running loose and a goat tethered to a stake. I suspect it’s where he lives and he’s going home for lunch.

With the warm air flowing freely in from the open doors and windows and a landscape occasionally lush tropical jungle, occasionally seasonally parched savannah, the first two hours pass quickly and in no time we are pulling into the half-way point, the reason for the railway’s existence in the first place: Central Hershey.

The original sugar mill was set up here by chocolate magnate Milton Hershey, who came to Cuba in 1916 and fell in love with the place to the extent that he not only brought the railway, but set up his own model town, much as his British rivals Cadbury did with Bournville, south of Birmingham, complete with its own schools, healthcare system and baseball team. In 1946, however, a year after old Mr Hershey’s death, the company sold the operation to the Cuban Atlantic Sugar Company, in a deal which accounted for 60,000 acres of land as well as the railway, sugar mills and electric plant. If the old philanthropist would have regretted the loss of the Cuban connection, just thirteen years later his company must have been grateful it had got out when the business was seized by Castro and nationalized.