Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 14
The real party is going on in Agramonte Square, outside the Café Ciudad. A lively, busty young woman in tight jeans and a skimpy white halter top with stiletto heels and a Panama hat tipped racily over one eye is shaking her maracas and singing her soul out in front of a four-man band on guitar, saxophone, congas and trumpet.
After a time chilling in warm moonlight and salsa sounds, that tot of rum definitively beckons. The place to have it is El Cambio, a surprisingly hip-looking bar on the corner of the square, with paint-streaked walls covered with deliberate graffiti and adorned with a few carved heads like totem poles. I order a Siete Años shot and a can of Naranja to wash it down.
El Cambio is the epitome of Camagüey cool. Hemingway might not have drunk here but you could imagine Hunter S. Thompson would have. There is a whole mid-70s vibe to the place: some cool jazz playing on the stereo and a tall black girl in ripped blue jean shorts with a handbag slung over her shoulder trying to make a call from the payphone on the wall in one corner. A glance at the cooler cabinet soon makes it obvious though that this is a joint aimed almost exclusively at the foreign tourist trade: there’s not just Bucanero in there, but Becks too. And Red Bull. And, most remarkably at all – given that this is Cuba and there’s supposed to be a 100 per cent trade embargo with the United States – the ultimate symbol of American global hegemony: Coca-Cola. Can Coke have engaged in illegal sanctions-busting?
The barman sees me stare, smiles and says, ‘Imported from Canada.’
Meanwhile, across the room a guy at a table on his own is fiddling with some wooden figure or other. I try to guess how long it’s likely to be before he tries to sell it to me. And underestimate by approximately 30 seconds. I’ve been waiting for this. Camagüey has a reputation for being particularly plagued by jineteros, the ubiquitous touts who live off tourists, though so far apart from the street cleaner trying to sell his ‘Che’ coin, I’ve had no bother. Eventually though – after maybe about five whole minutes – he sidles up to the bar, pulls up a stool, takes a sip of his drink, which looks like neat dark rum, and introduces himself:
‘Hola, my name is Steve.’ He gives me a beaming smile displaying a mouthful of ivory white teeth, save for one that looks filled with either silver or tin, and holds out a hand. I know what’s coming but I smile back and take his hand: Cuba is a friendly country. Even the rip-off merchants have a laid-back charm.
We sit there for a moment or two like a couple on a blind date stuck for conversation, Steve – and it has to be highly improbable that is his real name – beaming at me as if tongue-tied but probably just trying to muster his English. For a bizarre moment I realize what it must be like to be a girl at a bar being picked up without wanting to be. But I know that’s not what this is about.
And, sure enough, after a few more minutes of mildly uncomfortable silence marked only by a half-effort of a laugh and a matey punch on the arm and the clinking of glasses to consummate our wonderful new friendship, he gets down to business as he pulls the wooden figure out of his bag and set to polishing it.
This is the bit where I’m supposed to respond by showing the merest modicum of polite interest that will allow him to launch his sales pitch. I stare straight in front of me, over the bar, and concentrate on sipping my rum. I can almost feel the frustration next to me, growing as he pays ever more exaggerated attention to his polishing. It’s not fair, I’m not playing by the rules. But then it’s his game, not mine. For the moment. Eventually, and without any more effort at seductive small talk, he cracks and says, in not too badly broken English, ‘What do you think of this? Do you like it?’
It’s my turn to relent. I take a look at the thing which is some sort of crude totem pole thingie with what appear to be flowers and animals carved on it. It reminds me vaguely of something my well-travelled American uncle used to bring back from Africa, things that looked a bit like ancient ritual tribal carvings but were really mass-manufactured in sweatshops in Mombasa. The main difference is the wood is dark brown, not black.
‘Very nice,’ I tell him, doing my very best to convey that I am merely being polite and not a potential customer, and turn pointedly back to my drink. He does at bit more rubbing at it and then says, ‘You know how long it’s taken me to make this?’
I shake my head in a desultory sort of way, still trying to indicate that I’m really more interested in my rum than small talk, and a lot more than shopping for second-rate statuettes.
‘Fifty hours, man. Can you imagine?’
Frankly, looking at the thing, no, I can’t. He gives a deep, theatrical sigh, then says, ‘But times are hard, y’know. I’m thinking of selling it.’ He makes a good fist of looking sheepish, shy, awkward and desperate at the same time and says, ‘Would you like to buy?’
I give him a broad smile, which is cruel because I’m getting his hopes up. ‘Funny you should say that,’ I tell him as I reach into my own little shoulder bag, ‘Because I’m in the same business, sort of.’
That gets an odd look, which gets odder still when I add, ‘My speciality though is metal toys’.
I’ve been waiting for this moment, just a little wickedly, almost from the moment I landed in Havana. From the depths of my bag I bring out a little red model of a London double-decker bus. Obviously made in China. My wife had bought me a handful of these from one of the tourist trap junk sellers on Oxford Street, with the idea – gleaned from years living in the Soviet Union, and a visit to Egypt where a policeman once asked me if I had a pen, then said thank you and walked off with it – that in semi-third-world countries a bag of little goodies to give out was one way of making useful friends. I had considered giving one to old Pablo’s granddaughter, but discovered that the wheels came off almost as soon as you touched the thing, and, coming from health-and-safety addicted Britain, was painfully aware that to a small child they could be almost as lethal as the pin-sharp little metal rod that served as an axle. I had considered simply chucking them in the nearest bin, but at the back of my mind a wicked little alternative scenario had taken route. And now it had materialized.
‘It took me two months to make,’ I say.
‘Steve’ peers at the little red bus, then gives me a look, for just a second, as if to say, ‘You’re having me on, aren’t you?’ And then he glanced back at the statue and the bus and gave me another look that said, ‘Of course, you bloody are!’ and we both burst into simultaneous laughter.
I try to keep a straight face while he looks me in the eye for a long moment, then shakes his head and gives a deep belly laugh, sticks his hand in the air and high-fives me, following up with a bit of genuine global English: ‘Fuck you, man. Fuck you!’ There are some American imports that even the trade embargo can’t ban.
We chink glasses again, only this time I offer to buy him a shot of rum. He accepts avidly. Then, thinking that maybe I’ve softened up, takes out the totem pole again and says, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t …?’
In response I hold up the little bus and say, ‘Just five pesos to you.’ Then adds, ‘Convertibles. CUC’ He creases up, shaking his head. But the smile, when it comes back, is genuine. I’ve made him laugh. All of a sudden he reckons I might just speak his language, one way or another.
All of a sudden it is if we have both crashed through an invisible wall: he is no longer just another hustler, I am no longer just another mark. We shake hands again, not a high-five, just a shake. ‘My real name is Juanito,’ he says. I do my best in Spanish which is about as good as his English and for the next half hour or so we exchange life stories, or a sort – I suspect both of us are making stuff up (I certainly am) – and swop drinks.
There is a reason for this. Juanito, it turns out, isn’t drinking local rum at all. Or rather he is, and I’m not. I’m on Havana Club, which most locals can’t afford; he’s on local hooch distilled by a mate of his and turned brown not by ageing but by a bit of burnt molasses. He only tells me that after I’ve tried a swig.
The barman is already laughing. It’s part of the deal, the pact, the great Cuban conspiracy. In any bar in a capitalist society – try it in your local – a punter who brought in his own hooch and sat there drinking it while trying to pester (relatively) wealthy real customers would be tossed out on his ear. But here our barman is not the owner, and not on a share of the profits, or a performance-related wage, nor does he feel beholden to his employer: he’s just a civil servant, like everybody else from the farmer to the factory worker, holding down a job like any other poor schmuck who works for the government. Albeit one where he can expect to get tips in the all-important CUCs.
And that’s the point, of course. He also charges in CUCs and there’s no way in a million years Steve, or Juanito, or whoever, can afford to pay. But because this is a CUCs only bar, he can’t buy anything else in there either. So the barman lets him come in and drink his homemade hooch while trying to con whatever cash he can from the tourists. In our economies you’d automatically assume the barman would be asking in return for a share of any profits, but here I genuinely don’t think he is. He gets hard currency tips – which he definitely doesn’t share – and in return he’s willing to let a fellow comrade try his own hand on the market economy.
It’s not exploitation, it’s not communism, it’s not even capitalism, it’s just a way of life. It might even be a curious form of Christian ethics: ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.’ Live and let live. Not so much dog eat dog as share a spot in the shade on a sunny day.
The hooch, by the way, is horrible. Probably not poisonous, but with at best the delicate flavour you might get from adding a spoonful of honey to half a pint of white spirit. I do my best not to retch. Then order another Naranja to wash it down. Juanito looks envious so I buy him one too. He cracks open the can and gulps at it as if it were nectar. Naranja too is available only for CUCs. Emboldened by my seemingly lavish hospitality, he glances at his bag again, clearly wondering if it might be worth one more go at flogging the wooden totem pole. I shake my head, making clear a dead horse would be a better bet.
He smiles, shakes his head, and before I know it we are into a discussion of life in Cuba and life in what he likes, somewhat wistfully, to call ‘the real world’. He’s as keen to learn colloquial English as I am to get a handle on the Cuban dialect, and delighted to hear I can help him with a few phrases of German too: ‘German tourists have much money.’ I nod. These days, that’s a given.
‘No “s”,’ he tells me. ‘Qué?’ I reply, à la Manuel in Fawlty Towers. What do you mean, no ‘s’? It turns out he means Cubans don’t pronounce it. Two months, in Spanish ‘dos meses’, in Cuba sounds like ‘doh meh’, instead of dos mayses. They aren’t very big on ‘b’ either, which is why the ubiquitous phrase that accompanies every shoulder-shrugging explanation of the way things are sound like ‘Cu-a e’ Cu-a’. In fact, Juanito makes clear, Cubans aren’t keen on over-precise pronunciation at all. Not only is the Castilian lisping ‘th’ sound for ‘c’ or ‘z’ unknown, given half a chance most Cubans will elide any consonant they can get away with.
‘Particularly where you are going – el oriente,’ he tells me. It would appear, to my surprise, that Cuba has an east–west divide much the same way England has a north–south divide. Camagüey is pretty much the middle market. Los Habaneros, he explains, look on people further east pretty much the way Londoners look at anyone who lives north of the Watford Gap, while the inhabitants of Santiago de Cuba, which was the first major Spanish settlement and is still revered as the birthplace of Castro’s revolution, regard the capital’s pretensions with the same disdain British Geordies heap on ‘soft southerners’.
The accent, he tells me, is also more pronounced in the east, with a greater historical influence from neighbouring French-speaking Haïti. There is no doubt where Juanito’s sympathies lie: people from Havana, he tells me, call easterners Palestinos. I’m not sure what sort of statement – if any – that might be on global geopolitics but then Cuba is pretty much in a bubble of its own these days.
It’s just occurred to me that this is a pretty serious esoteric little conversation I’m having with a bloke who’s basically a hustler. Daringly I take it just a little bit farther and ask him if he doesn’t have a regular job. He gives me a look of extreme disdain. ‘For pesos? There’s no job in this country that’s worth doing for money. Money that’s worth shit, and you don’t even get much of that!’
Not exactly what I had been expecting to hear. But doesn’t everybody have to have a job? I mean, the state boasts zero unemployment, apart from deadbeat dossers like Miguel back in Matanzas, or wherever he might be crawled under a bush now.
Juanito gives me a sideways look and touches his nose. ‘It depends who you are,’ he says enigmatically, then adds, ‘I have connections.’ He’s unwilling – fairly understandably – to be pushed into revealing more detail, even taking an oblique glance at the barman who’s doing his best not to appear to be listening to our linguistic mishmash of a conversation. But from Juanito’s facial expression and body languageit’s fairly plain he means his family have enough ‘pull’ that nobody asks any questions. It’s the supreme irony: in this communist system you have to be hard wired into the system in order to opt out of it.
I try to pussyfoot around the subject for a few minutes, looking for any reaction to mentions of communism in general, the state of the economy, even Fidel’s health, all of which gets little more than sceptical looks from my conversation partner. Until, that is, I mention Cuba’s great global icon, the hero of a million student bedroom posters: Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara himself. That gets me a reaction, even if it’s not remotely what I had been expecting. Juanito throws back his head and roars with laughter. ‘Che Guevara?’ he says, and then in loud and perfect English: ‘That man was a fucking lunatic!’
I immediately notice the expression on the barman’s face, but even that isn’t quite what I expected. Not exactly shock, or offence, or terror, more a sort of highly surprised, hard to suppress amusement. He quickly turns to face the wall studiously polishing a glass.
I’ve obviously touched a nerve here. Within minutes Juanito is giving me a tirade, not against Che or communism but against foreign tourists. ‘You know what I hate? I hate the rich bastards from Spain or Germany or wherever who come here and tell the likes of me, I live in a paradise after they’ve spent a week lying on their arses in some all-inclusive hotel in Caya Coco that’s off-limits to most ordinary Cubans.’
A bit like this bar, I suggest warily, though of course it’s not off limits, just out of the ordinary local’s price range. He gives me a wicked smile of acknowledgement. He offers me another shot of hooch. I take it, and in return buy him a packet of 20 local cigarettes, made from the sort of black shredded tobacco that never gets near a Cohiba or Romeo and Juliet but is all most Cubans can afford, it they are lucky. They cost me 0.60 CUC, barely 60 US cents, but enough to put a smile on Juanito’s face. We’ve done a deal, of sorts. We are equals. Even though I’m still not going to buy his totem pole. Nor, frankly, finish his hooch.
‘Hey,’ he says, ‘do you want to help me?’ I nod, politely, though at this stage non-committally. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says, eyes bright now as if he’s just thought of a world’s best wheeze, ‘I could sit out there, on the square, with my figurines, and you could come over and look impressed, and if some foreigner comes up, you can tell them how good my stuff is, and how you’ve watched me work. You could even buy one. Or pretend to.’ He adds the last phrase with a roll of his eyes in response to the sceptical expression on my face. ‘Why not?’
I’m laughing. And then I think about it. Why not, indeed? What do I care if some tourist on a day-trip from the all-inclusive zone can be persuaded to part with a few CUCs to make Juanito’s day a bit better? I shrug and say, ‘Sure’, and he high-fives me again. I’ve just signed up to be a hustler’s apprentice.
So, I say, thinking the best way to get the measure of my new business partner is to ask him the age-old interview question, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?’ It may seem silly but it’s a pretty loaded question in a country where the law – and almost every aspect of society – has been laid down by one man, now in his mid-eighties, and his brother still in power and only a year or two younger.
His eyes fall. Like so many of his compatriots, old and young, Juanito just can’t imagine life without the Castros. Then he lifts his head again and looks me in the eyes and I know that what he is about to say is the complete and utter truth. ‘What I would really like,’ he says, ‘is to go to Bangkok and fuck girls the way the Italians do in Cuba.’
I’m tempted to burst into laughter, but I don’t, because I realize he means it.
And as if on cue, we are suddenly joined by a bouncy young black woman in a flouncy skirt who kisses Juanito on both cheeks and, having had a rapid fire shake down on the state of his newly acquired friendship with un extranjero, and apprised of my linguistic skills, leaps into the conversation with a question of her own:
‘How do you say in German, “I want to make love with you”,?’ she asks with alarming directness. I’m about to ask why she wants to know, when I realize just what a stupid question that might be. ‘To say nicely,’ she adds, almost primly, before spoiling it just a little by the clarification, ‘Not fucky, fucky, I won’t want to be crude.’
I help her with the correct pronunciation of ‘Ich will mit dir schlafen,’ which is still the rather quaint euphemism that the majority of German tourists will probably want to hear, even though it would be obvious that neither she nor they would be intent on doing too much sleeping.
Under the circumstances maybe there is some excuse for me being just a tiny bit surprised when a few minutes later she mentions the fact that she is married. I know Cuban men can be remarkably broad-minded but I doubt that they are wholly immune to jealousy. ‘Is okay,’ Juanito smiles and says, ‘He is Canadian. Lives in Canada.’ And his lady friend beams too, as if that explains everything. Married to a foreigner, she can get an exit visa whenever she wants, – which is what most Cuban women want from foreign men – but she couldn’t find a job in Canada and chooses to come back to Cuba often. I don’t like to ask if it’s for the work!
