Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 13
The pause is an opportunity for the in-train catering to arrive, two men in blue waistcoats doing a push-me, pull-you act to manhandle what would be a supermarket trolley if Cuba had supermarkets over the perilous gap between carriages. Going in the other direction is a man with some loose wires in one hand and a soldering iron in the other. I’m not reassured.
The trolley reaches us and they’re selling some orange liquid which is not thick enough to be mango juice and I have yet to see orange juice in an island just south of Florida. In any case it is unimaginable that anyone could drink it with the train rocking and rolling as the men with the trolley bounce up and down like toddlers on a trampoline. They also have what look like sandwiches.
Pablo provided what is so far reliably proving the best meal of the day in Cuba: a decent breakfast, of some fresh mango, pineapple, guava, coffee and a fried egg in a bun. But I’m still tempted. I have no idea how long I’m going to be on this train, especially at our current stop–start rate of progress. The prognosis was six hours, for a distance of barely 300 kilometres (170 miles), but in my opinion it’s anybody’s guess. The girl beside me doing crosswords has started showing baby pictures around: she’s on her way to Santiago de Cuba (at least another six to eight hours’ travelling time) for the first glimpse of her nephew. Her brother’s first child was born eighteen months ago, but this is the first time she’s managed to get a train ticket to visit them. Makes me realize what an exception they make for foreigners, or rather their hard currency.
Before I make my mind up whether or not to buy something from the trolley – what they have is disappearing fast – I decide to check out the on-board toilet facilities. Arguably the best decision of the entire trip. To say Cuban train toilets leave something to be desired would not just be an understatement, it would suggest the person speaking inhabited an altogether alien reality. British train toilets leave something to be desired. American train toilets leave something to be desired. Italian train toilets leave something to be desired. Remarkably perhaps, French ones really aren’t bad these days. But Cuban train toilets are the best advertisement yet seen for colostomy bags.
It is not just that what passes for washing facilities is a rusty oblong metal basin not properly fitted but jutting out over its equally rusty pedestal with a hand-painted scrawl on the wall above saying agua no potable (not drinking water). Which is a bit of a bad taste joke because there isn’t any agua, potable or otherwise. Not in the so-called sink, and not in the toilet either, fairly obviously because the foul, blackened, rusted pipe that should connect the toilet bowl to the cistern above, only makes it half way up the wall. Which at least makes it wholly irrelevant that there is no chain, cord or handle of any device attached to the empty cistern.
Then we come to the toilet itself, the sitting accommodation. Or rather we don’t. In fact we stay as far away from it as possible. If you’re a bloke and have no sense of smell or can hold your nose and your breath and your privates at the same time, you can just about dare to use it although for once, ladies, you’d excuse us for aiming from a distance. But it won’t matter to you, because you’d have to be insane to consider using it yourself. Not only is there no seat – I had taken that as read – but the bowl itself is not just filthy, rusty and looks – I assure you I was not going to get close enough to do anything other than catch a glimpse of the sleepers and gravel hurtling by underneath – dangerously sharp edged. Obviously if in extremis there was absolutely no alternative you’d be desperately trying to avoid even the slightest contact between your nether regions and this sharp-edged tetanus trap, but giving the constant jolting motion of the train you’d be a braver man – or woman – than I even to consider it.
I have no idea what the women on board this train intend to do, other than cross their legs for hours on end and dash out in a crowd at stations, though I wonder if their facilities are much better. I know what I am going to do, though, and that is not eat or drink another thing on this journey. No input, no output. Better than that, I head back to my seat and open the medical pocket on my rucksack, I am going to take two Imodium. Preventively.
But it is a couple of hours of jolting, sweating journey time later that I encounter the biggest shock. One that, really, I should have anticipated.
I’ve strolled down to the end of the carriage to stretch my legs and enjoy a view through a different window – yes, I know it isn’t going to change much – but I’ve been on this train for more than four hours now. It’s just a few lines, scratched and almost illegible at the bottom of the cracked window frame. To me it’s like that scene at the end of the original Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston and the girl come across the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty on a beach.
Just seven words, even if it’s longer in English: Türgriff erst bei Stillstand des Zuges betätigen: do not operate the door handle until the train has come to a complete standstill. It’s not the instruction that has knocked me back. It’s the language. This train – the rolling stock – isn’t Mexican or Chinese. It’s German. Almost certainly East German of course, but German all the same. It’s only now with that terrible realization planted in my brain, that I begin to recognize it, to see everything with new eyes: the sensible double luggage racks, large one on top to take bags not needed on the journey, the familiar height of the backrests and the squared-off metal brackets that attach them to the bodywork, the few remaining traces of wood veneer below the windows, mostly covered in a thick layer of grime and grey industrial paint.
But above all else it’s the empty spaces on the compartment walls above the seats, paler rectangles with screw holes at each corner. Once upon a time, they would have held quaint little black and white photographs of the historical cities of the German Democratic Republic: Dresden, Meissen, Erfurt, Weimar. True, trains in old East Germany were not up to the standard of the high-speed network already being developed in the West, but they were efficient, ran on time (mostly) and, above all else, clean.
These carriages would have been a gesture of solidarity to a fraternal state, from ill old Erich Honecker – the man who boasted he built the Berlin Wall and predicted it would last at least a hundred years – to big bushy-bearded compañero Fidel.
Sitting in a café in what had been East Berlin a couple of years after the Wall came down, Markus Wolf, once East Germany’s chief spymaster, told me how Fidel came on a state visit once but climbed out the window of his suite in the middle of the night to avoid his official guards and go whoring. Different days, different times.
The landscape is surprisingly constant: palm-fringed savannah dotted here and there with the rusting abandoned ruins of sugar mills. In Ciego de Avila, more vendors line the platform, offering the inevitable plastic bottles of mango juice, polystyrene cups of coconut milk and plastic bags of dry biscuits. One guy in a baseball cap has a different offering: a bubble pack of pills. Testament to the shortage of easily accessible prescription drugs. I ask the girl with crossword puzzle books if they are headache pills. She looks up and with some embarrassment says that they are ‘for the toilet’. Say no more. I understand completely. Local Imodium!
By early afternoon we are getting close to my destination. The last but one stop is called Florida. I have to pinch myself to remember that it just means ‘Flowery’ in Spanish. It is obviously a popular enough destination: several dozen people are jumping down off the train, throwing bags out to friends or relatives standing in the fields beyond the end of the platform. Almost as many get on trying to sell more edibles. For a country with a supposedly centralized, state-controlled economy, there is a lot of in-your-face private enterprise going on.
Just under an hour later, and an hour late, we pull into Camagüey. I unload myself onto the platform in a vast scrummage of people. There is a group of solders in uniform climbing on board, pushing against the flow of people trying to disembark as if nobody knows just when the train will depart. Which is almost certainly the truth.
I scour the crowded platform in vain for Pablo’s pal who was supposed to come and meet me. At last, with the platform almost empty and the big orange locomotive growling sullenly in anticipation of departure, a bloke with a shaven head, blue shorts and a bright yellow Carlos Santana T-shirt comes up to me and says, ‘Mister Peter?’
Ten minutes later, after a nerve-wracking ride in a relatively well-kept Lada through what seems like an incomprehensible winding maze of streets (of which more anon), we pull up outside a bungalow: a terraced bungalow: a single storey pastel-blue little modern house with a red-and-white striped awning, wedged between two beautiful but crumbling colonial-style houses at least two centuries older.
I suppose you could call it World Heritage Site View.
CHAPTER TEN
Negotiating the Labyrinth
Within less than two hours however, I am feeling deeply au fait with the real reason for Camagüey’s World Heritage status: I’m lost.
My intention was merely to take a quick stroll round the city centre to get my bearings in the daylight. I had agreed – more in hope than expectation – to take dinner at the casa. Rodrigo, the man in the Santana T-shirt, assured me his mother-in-law was a great cook.
‘Take a left at the end of the street, then a right and you’re heading for the town centre,’ he said. ‘We’re on Calle Principe in case you need to ask someone the way back.’
Finding my way into the town centre was as easy as he suggested, past the birthplace of Ignacio Agramonte, another hero of Cuba’s nineteenth-century independence struggle. The main square is named after him too, and as I entered it there was a quaint little flag-raising ceremony going on. A teenage boy in vintage military uniform and a girl in a flouncy frock carrying a bouquet of flowers came out and stood to attention while a little band played the national anthem. It was quite touching in a mildly kitsch sort of way.
Beyond the square was Maceo, a neat little parade of shops, not unlike the Boulevard in Santa Clara, a scrubbed and polished showcase for the tourists, with granite pavements and windows apparently full of goods. It was only when I took a closer look that I remembered where I was. The shops were open, but there were no lights on inside while the goods on display in one window were repeated in the next. There were probably more Che T-shirts than the better-dressed Cuban – who on the evidence preferred to advertise Metallica or Motörhead – might need. There was also a lot of plastic buckets. In different colours.
It reminds me of Weimar or Erfurt in the 1980s, little East German towns whose ancient heritage was slowly crumbling into the cobbles but each had a ‘modern’ show street like a layer of thin sugar icing over a cardboard façade. Back there and then as here and now, the shop windows displayed more goods than were usually available inside. There were always items in the window that could not be sold because they were ‘for display only’.
Reality comes up to me in the form of a street sweeper in a pristine white and yellow uniform who nudges me with his elbow, covertly inviting me to inspect the piece of contraband in his hand: it is a 25 centavo coin, a quarter of one national peso, worth approximately 1p. ‘Only one CUC.’ he hisses. I look at him in genuine amazement. ‘Che Guevara, Che Guevara,’ for it is indeed the great man’s head that graces it. I wonder briefly if the government deliberately doesn’t feature the great global image on any of its hard currency just so locals can hope to fleece the tourists by selling them a coin in common circulation at 100 times its face value.
By now I’m at the top end of Maceo in a square called Plaza de los Trabajadores (Workers’ Square), which thinking back over the route I’ve taken I rashly decide must be only a stone’s throw from Calle Principe. Just over there, a left and a right and … I’m somewhere I haven’t been before with not the faintest idea in which direction I should be heading.
I have a simple map, but none of the streets around me are on it. It turns out there is a reason for this, although not a very good one. Camagüey, it appears, is a critical case of a phenomenon that afflicts a lot of Cuban towns; most streets have two names: an old pre-revolutionary one, often religious, and a newer one, usually named after one of Castro’s heroes or cronies. And you never know who is going to use which.
Camagüey has a tradition of conservatism and Catholicism – Pope John Paul II delivered a homily here on a visit in 1998 – so here most people prefer the old names, but maps tend to use only the new ones. That means that what people call San Fernando is marked as Bartolomé Masó, while San Esteban is Oscar Primelles and Santa Rita is El Solitario. To make matters even worse, you cannot be sure which will be on the street sign, if there is one. So for a map to be any use at all, you have to know not just where you are to start with, but possibly also both names of the street in case the sign on the wall has the other one.
All that, however, is just extra complication to the main problem which is that Camagüey is a city deliberately designed to get people lost. That, rather than its pretty colonial architecture, is its chief claim for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Whereas every other colonial city founded by the Spanish in the New World was laid out formally – Madrid even passed legislation, the Laws of the Indies 1573, requiring colonial towns to be built to a grid around a central plaza – Camagüey is a maze of oblique angles, retreating curves, U-bends and dead ends. Without even the organic growth pattern that marks many mediaeval European cities, Camagüey is a city planner’s schizophrenic homage to irregular geometry.
A few joysuckers claim its chaotic development was haphazard but most natives and historians believe this inhabited maze which could swallow a small army was designed deliberately to do just that. Because its rich cattle market made it even more of a target for pirates than little Remedios, the inhabitants of what was then called Santa Maria del Puerto Principe6∗ (it was renamed Camagüey for an old Taino Indian chief after independence) moved further inland and redid the street plan.
It didn’t necessarily help a great deal. One of the more famed visitors was Henry Morgan, who built a reputation as one of the more ferocious pirates of the Caribbean, despite the fact that he held the title of Vice Admiral in the Royal Navy at the time. He dropped by in 1668 with some 500 freelance villains, looted the cathedral and tortured what few citizens he could find. It would be nice to think his ghost is still trapped in some Camagüey blind alley, but he went on to infamously burn Panama City to the ground before falling out of favour with King Charles II and drinking himself to death in Jamaica.
I’m feeling in need of a stiff tot of rum myself by the time I finally get back to Calle Principe, thanks only to kindly meant imprecise directions and eventually running across the landmark birthplace of good old Ignacio Agramonte again.
Dinner is on the table. Or rather covering it. I know that what I’m paying in CUCs is the equivalent in national pesos of a month’s salary for most people, but I wasn’t expecting a month’s supply of food. Especially as the standard of cooking is what you might expect from somebody who’s asked their mother-in-law to come round and lend a hand. It’s not awful; it’s just not very good. Or rather, what she’s done with most expensive ingredient isn’t very good. It’s fish. What sort of fish I have no idea. And I expect she didn’t either. I’m wondering if even the fish did. However it started out, it has ended up as a great grey overcooked pile of vaguely fishy protein with a texture like a load of tissues left out in the rain.
It comes served with a few basic ingredients for a salad: some grated carrot, a bit of shredded lettuce, one small tomato and some dried-up cucumber. Not assembled, you see, but just set out, separately on a plate, with a lot of cooking oil and vinegar slopped over them. It’s well meant, but not exactly thought through.
The one thing that really does work, however, is the one she probably makes every day and has just knocked up here as an extra filler, as if one were needed with half a steamed shark or whatever it is on offer: black beans and rice. These frijoles, the Cuban staple, have been boiled up until tender in a deliciously tasty onion broth and come with the rice served on the side to add at will. It would have been a good, if unadventurous, nourishing and tasty meal on its own. My biggest problem, however, is feeling obliged to choke down a quantity of the expensive fish.
With the television on in the background and two young children running round and arguing, that feeling of ‘living alongside a local family’ is definitely overdone. Especially as my meal is laid out as something special, separate; the family have either already eaten or will eat later. I am beginning to understand that meals in Cuba are seen as necessity rather than occasion. People eat food because they have to and do it when they can. The concept of cuisine in everyday life is about as absent as it was in ration-book Britain in the 1950s.
I am secretly desperate to face down their obvious disappointment that I haven’t cleaned my plate and escape this haven of chintzy domesticity that has a little too much about it of a 1960s American soap opera. The family are rich as Croesus by Cuban standards, which means they can afford to live in the materialist comfort of US suburbia a generation ago, and with all the lack of roots and tradition that go with it. For them, the revolution might never have happened.
Wandering back into town feels like a different world. I am careful to note landmarks along the way not just to avoid getting lost again but to feel back in a less candied Cuban reality. Passing each open window is like watching a series of cameo tableaux behind wrought iron grilles: a bicitaxi in the middle of a living-room, an old couple on an ancient chaiselongue watching a sitcom on television, a Baptist church on the corner with girls in red skirts and white shirts standing up to ‘give testimony’ at the Saturday night service. A sign on the wall says: ‘Home is home, prayer is all’. Next door is the district headquarters of the Communist party. Their signs says, ‘We face a war of ideology. Let us fight a battle of ideas to win it.’ Beneath it two old blokes with baseball caps pulled won over their eyes are dozing peacefully.
