Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 18
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.
But before I’ve had any more time to philosophize about a way of life expressed on the dance floor, the couples have split and the dance turns into a conga and before I know it I am dragged to my feet and thrust into it. I do my best for a few minutes but can’t quite keep up with their youthful enthusiasm, and respectfully slump back into my plastic chair. Eventually they too give up and go back to their beer and light up cigarettes. It’s been a happy reminder that for most Cubans – both those with and those without the luxury of access to CUCs – life is about living it, about every day experiences and relations with other people. Carpe diem could be the national slogan. Eat, drink and be merry while you can, just in case tomorrow we’re hungry, thirsty and the merriment will be harder to come by.
Things, as such, don’t matter for most people, largely because most people don’t own many things. True, that is changing, as marked by the enthusiasm to possess the latest mobile phone. But for the moment at least, the slogan of Wall Street’s former (and future?) Masters of the Universe is irrelevant. Here it isn’t a case of ‘He who dies with the most toys wins,’ but rather, ‘He who manages to have a good time without any toys at all.’ It may not be a great blueprint for capitalist entrepreneurialism but it’s a hell of a recipe for a life of hedonism. The guys give me a high-five as I get up to go. Hasta la vista.
On the road back into town, though, I catch a glimpse of one of those leitmotifs of Cuba’s potential future, a refugee from another society which not so long ago was in the throes of arguably worse poverty than the Castros’ Cuba today, and is now well on its way to being a global superpower, and perhaps – frighteningly – even the model for global civilization despite still pretending to espouse a communism that is now little more than totalitarianism: China.
The sight itself is nothing more scary than a bus. But it is a Chinese bus. What is most disconcerting about it is that it still appears to think it is in China. The lettering on the front and along the sides is in Chinese, as is the roller sign in a window above the driver. I have no idea where this bus is headed, but I am pretty certain it is not where the sign indicates. Helpfully transliterated into English, it says: Handang Hospital Shuttle Bus. Clearly nobody here thought it worth changing the sign. In a town like Last Tunas if there is an actual bus, everybody will know where it is going.
This only slightly surreal vision trundling by along the dusty, steamy streets draws my attention to the other sparse traffic and the fact that even here the old 1950s rusting American limousines which for so long have been an accidental romantic icon of communist Cuba are now increasingly few and far between. The only romantic relic I can see is not American but German, an ancient Opel Rekord, dating from perhaps the mid-1960s. Apart from that, here as in Havana, the echoes are of a more recent past, though one that is equally drifting into the realm of memory: Russian Ladas and Moskviches, cars designed for bad roads and worse drivers, but for long seen only in the land of ice and snow, and now translated here to the tropics to rust away their days as a memory of another outdated empire.
I wonder idly why they don’t seem to have any Trabants, the iconic little East German runabout which became a global symbol when they poured west in their thousands after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With their ‘Duraplast’ composite bodywork – a material related to both Bakelite and Formica reinforced with cotton fibres used as a cheap and lightweight alternative to steel – they would at least have had the advantage of standing up better to the tropical damp. Perhaps they would melt? Or maybe Trabbies were just too crap even for Cubans.
I arrive back in the main square just in time for the evening opening of a hostelry I hadn’t noticed earlier in the day, when it would have looked like just another shuttered dilapidated building. It turns out to be another of supposedly boring Las Tunas’s peculiarities: Don Juan’s wine room. So the woman on the train wasn’t having me on after all. It seems unlikely. Impossible even. I haven’t seen a vine anywhere in this landscape of savannah scrub and jungle. The only wine anywhere on display has been Spanish. But there is not doubting the physical presence of Don Juan’s wine bar.
The room is light and airy, whitewashed walls with a big, dark hardwood bar, and two waitresses in the obligatory short skirts and black fishnet tights. One is smoking a cigarette and looks mildly annoyed by my presence. The other, however, a tall dyed blonde with longer legs than her skirt was intended for, could not be more charming. Especially when I tell her I’d like a glass of wine. Wine, it seems, is not something the Don Juan wine bar has much call for. But they do have some. In fact they have lots of it. There isn’t much call for wine.
I ask her what wines they have, and which she would recommend, which causes a bit of embarrassment. Most customers drink beer or rum. Tentatively, I ask her for a wine list. This causes a puzzled look for a moment. Carta de vinos, I repeat, wondering if I’ve got something wrong. I have. It’s the word carta.
‘Ah,’ she replies, getting the gist and adds, ‘Soroa.’ It’s my turn to take a minute to catch on, until she indicates the bottles behind the bar and in the glass-fronted fridge standing next to it. Don Juan’s has lots of wine, but it doesn’t really need a list. There are only two: red and white. Soroa, it turns out, is a brand. For both red and white.
‘It is actually Cuban wine?’ I ask doubtfully.
She seems surprised, but nonetheless thinks for a moment before saying, ‘Sí,’ as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Whereabouts does it come from, I venture, not exactly expecting a detailed French style monologue on the virtues of terroir, chalky soil and south-facing slopes. Which is just as well, because I’m not going to get one. But she does know where the wine comes from. Extremely exactly.
‘Finca Chirigota, km 79 on the Autopista Nacional. Provinca Pinar del Río.’
The other end of the island, west of Havana, which might explain why I haven’t exactly seen row after row of vineyards in the island’s dusty interior. Pinar del Río, I am aware, is the country’s least sweltering province, more mountainous, good for tobacco growing and, I dare say, wine. But then as according to the waitress the vineyard is the only one in Cuba, there’s no point being picky.
‘I’ll have a Soroa, then.’
‘Which colour, Red or white?’
‘Which is better?’
She has a think about that, shrugs and says ‘White.’
‘I’ll have a white, then.’
‘Dry or sweet?’
That’s a no-brainer. If they make both, I can bet my last CUC that the ‘sweet’ is going to seriously sweet.
‘Dry, please.’
Within seconds she is back at my table with a bottle straight from the fridge, dripping beads of condensation, held forth for my appreciation with all the attentiveness of a trained sommelier.
‘Ah, just one glass,’ I say.
She looks suddenly crestfallen.
‘There isn’t a bottle open.’
This actually sounds good news, given that most customers don’t drink wine, the last bottle might have been opened by Che.
‘Can’t I just have one glass from this bottle.’
I should have known the answer before I asked the question, and a pang of guilt washes briefly over me as I see the moral conflict fighting on her face.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘No. You have to buy the bottle.’
It is gone 7 p.m. but I have already had a couple of beers and was looking forward to a couple later rather than downing an entire bottle of wine on my own.
‘How much does it cost?’ I ask nonetheless.
‘2.40,’ she says, quickly adding, ‘CUC’, thereby sending the price up 25 times. But at £1.99 ($2.40) it’s less than half what I’d pay for a glass of bargain basement Chardonnay back in Europe. On the other hand, with even bargain basement Chardonnay, you know what you’re getting. Usually. This is unexplored territory.
‘If you don’t want to drink it all now, we can put it back in the fridge and keep it for you,’ she adds.
Done deal. I nod. She smiles and disappears, bringing a glass and then disappearing with the bottle, to open it for me.
The minutes pass. Quite slowly. More than a few of them. The waitress has left the room, leaving the bottle on the bar, where it stands alone, losing its cool (in a manner of speaking) wholly disregarded by the other waitress who has lit up another cigarette. After a good ten minutes, by which time the bottle sitting patiently on the bar in the early evening tropical heat must be well on the way to lukewarm, my friendly waitress reappears and engages her grumpy colleague in heated sotto voce conversation. There is obviously a problem.
And her colleague is obviously not going to help her solve it.
After a few moments she comes over to my table, biting her lower lip and reveals the source of her embarrassment. It’s not an unknown problem, just not one I’ve never before encountered in a wine bar: they don’t have a corkscrew.
I resist the temptation to break into laughter, if only to spare her all too obvious embarrassment, and suggest we do what I have done too many times before, from student parties to ill-equipped hitchhiking trips: use the handle of a fork to push the cork into the bottle. The waitress looks a bit doubtful so I take the fork and do it myself, shrugging to make clear it’s really not an issue. Cu’a e’ Cu’a. She is almost tearfully happy as she pours me a glass. I offer her one for herself – I’m seriously not intending to drink the whole bottle– but she backs off waving her hands, leaving me to wonder if the wine is really that bad.
It’s not. It’s actually rather nice. Dry, not too acidic, with just a hint of flint over an underlying fruitiness. Not exactly a Sancerre or a Chablis, but a perfectly acceptable everyday bottle of plonk on a par with anything you’d pick up in the supermarket without paying too much attention. I wonder if I should look out for Soroa next time I’m in Tesco? Probably not. I have enough random bottles in lurking in dark corners of kitchen cabinets – from Bulgarian Rakia to Croatian Maraschino – to know that there are some drinks which taste better in situ than they do when you get them home.
By now it’s gone 8 p.m. and time for food. The waitress promises solemnly to keep the rest of my wine, putting it back in the fridge open. I ask if she has any suggestions where I might get dinner and she immediately says El Baturro which I had spotted a little earlier not far away. She smilingly informs me that it does the best food in town. The trouble is that in Cuba that sometimes means the only food in town.
Happily on this occasion that turns out not to be the case. Not least because El Baturro is closed. The sign on the door says open, and there is an orario next to the menu that plainly says it is open daily from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. But it is definitely closed. The door is locked and the interior is in darkness. Fortuitously at just that moment – although it could apply to just about any moment in most Cuban towns – a bicitaxi man is passing, and realizing I might otherwise be heading for bed on an empty tum, save for my two glasses of Soroa, I ask him if he can take me to a restaurant. Adding, just to be sure, ‘an open one’.
Five extraordinary minutes later we have done what seems like a little circuit of the town centre and I am standing in front of a rather dull but unquestionably open little restaurant called La Bodeguita. I say extraordinary minutes because this particular bicitaxi man happens to own what has to be the Rolls-Royce of bicitaxis. Not only does it have a proper bicycle seat – rather than the usual variation on leather belts, bungee cables or bundles of rags – it also has, a PSP.
