Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 17
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).
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.
