Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 2
This is one of those apocryphal but true stories that tells you a lot about Cuba. Martí was a Cuban nationalist who had a love–hate relationship with the United States, a socialist who was also a dandy, a charismatic romantic revolutionary, a poet and a nutcase. Today he is an airport.
Having sailed through immigration and security, my one moment of stress before heading for downtown Havana, was tipping the clutch of toilet ladies gathered purposefully round the door to the gents. I had 45 British pence in small change, which seemed an adequate sum though I doubted they would recognize the currency. They didn’t, but all that mattered was that it was foreign. Converted into the money nearly all Cubans are paid in, that is about as much as the average worker might earn in a day. In Cuba’s curious economy, the foreign currency tips alone make being a toilet cleaner at Havana airport a much sought-after profession.
Taxi drivers make more, a lot more, especially, as everywhere in the world, taxi drivers based at the airport. A ride into central Havana in what turned out by ordinary Cuban standards the height of luxury – a ten-year-old Peugeot 306 – was going to cost me, the cab driver grinned, 25 US dollars. At least, that was what he said. It wasn’t actually what he meant. In Cuba, money, like everything else, is complicated.
Prior to Castro’s revolution the Cuban peso was pegged to the US dollar, afterwards it was pegged to the Soviet rouble. When the USSR collapsed in 1990, the Cuban peso went into freefall, but in the bleak years after the collapse of the Soviet Union when even the Spartan supplies from the rest of the communist world dried up, the only option was to use the currency of the hated enemy. Cubans duly dragged out piles of dollars sent from relatives in the US and hidden under mattresses and for half a dozen years the dolar became the only money worth having.
Then, in 2004, George W. Bush decided he would do his bit to win the vote of anti-communist Cuban exiles in Miami and increased sanctions against Havana. In an admirable (if rash) fit of pique, Fidel responded by banning the use of the dollar. Its place was taken by the ‘convertible peso’ (already in circulation but not so widely used as the greenback). Ever since that has been the currency of necessity for foreigners and desire for Cubans. It is pegged to the US dollar, which means there are 25 ordinary (or nacional) pesos to every one convertible peso. The former are officially designated CUP (but universally simply called ‘pesos’) while the latter are designated CUCs, and usually called that too, phonetically pronounced ‘kooks’.
It sounds complicated, and it is, but it can be literally a matter of life and death in Cuba. There is not a whole lot you can buy with CUPs. Most bars in Havana and shops selling a limited variety of goods you get anywhere in most other countries deal only in CUCs, which means no ordinary Cuban can afford them. A doctor earns 500 national pesos a month – the equivalent of roughly US $20 (less than my cab fare). As the US-Americans say, ‘go figure’.
The important thing is not to get the two confused. If you do, despite the intrinsic honesty of most Cubans, it’s not hard to get taken for a mug, or to use a word that in the vernacular is almost equally insulting: a gringo.
On the way into the city my cab driver tells a caller on his mobile phone – the latest Cuban must-have but subject to interesting restrictions – to ring back because he has a gringo in his cab. To his surprise I immediately object. My Spanish is not great but nor is it non-existent and I resent being referred to by what I have always considered to be the contemptuous term for a US-American.
The driver looks abashed for about half a millisecond then shrugs, and says no, it’s not just Yankees, it’s, ‘You know …’ and then dries up. I suddenly realize he is struggling to avoid racial stereotypes. Eventually by a mix of body language, gestures and euphemisms he conveys his meaning: a gringo is any pale-skinned northern European-looking bloke. It is the only form of, albeit mild, racism I am to perceive in my whole Cuban adventure.
He admits to being surprised I understood. Most gringos, I gather, don’t speak much Spanish. Most of the pale-skinned northern European-looking blokes he meets come from Canada, so-called snow geese fleeing the winter. They too are, however, allowed to be called Americanos, which must make Cuba about the only place in the world where Canadians (if they understood) might take it as a compliment.
This got us talking enough for him to point out – if only to save his embarrassment by changing the subject – that the black BMW hurtling past us on the inside belongs to the South African ambassador. He knows this because Cuban number plates have a colour code. Black is for diplomats, with a number to signal their country, white is for government ministers, red for the tourist industry including hire cars, brown for the armed forces, green for agriculture, blue for all other state-owned vehicles (which in a communist country accounts for a huge proportion), and yellow for private vehicles, which by the bizarre logic of Cuba’s economy makes yellow the rarest colour.
So how is Cuba these days, I ask him, meaning, without spelling it out, post-Fidel, a world that as yet most Cubans are not quite sure has really arrived? I’m not really expecting an answer other than ‘wonderful as ever’, the sort of North Korean-style ‘dear leader’ reply that was common among the few Cubans who would talk to foreigners a decade or so ago. Since the man who was the Cuban revolution stood down from power in 2008 in favour of his younger brother, there have been some reforms and rumours of reforms. Change is afoot in Cuba, even if it is not exactly generational change: Raúl turns eighty-two in 2013 and Big Brother, heading for ninety, is still watching.
My driver’s answer, though not exactly critical, surprises me: ‘Better.’ Better? I ask in astonishment. Better under Raúl than under the sainted Fidel? In what way? ‘There are big changes,’ he offers voluntarily. ‘Now it is okay to do business.’ Isn’t that just the tiniest bit capitalist, I hint, using the dreaded ‘c’ word. He shrugs, thinks a second and gives me one of those gems of wisdom that on the right day cab drivers the world over are capable of producing: ‘Greed is not good, but making money is never bad.’
Then he drops me at the corner of Plaza Vieja, and with a broad smile pockets his 25 CUC, more money than a brain surgeon would make in a month.
I am a few yards’ walk from my hotel along cobbled streets too narrow for motor vehicles. The Plaza Vieja, literally Old Square, is one of the most atmospheric in all Havana, popular not least because of the Austrian joint venture brewpub in one corner, and the inevitable trova3 band playing on the terrace. It is teeming with tourists: French, Spanish, German, Italian, most of them European, including a few Brits, and a goodly number of Canadians, although as it is summer, most of the snow geese have flown back up north.
La Meson de la Flota is the smallest of the hotels operated by Habaguanex, the state-run company that runs most of Old Havana’s hotels. La Meson in reality is little more than a pub with three upstairs rooms. It was once an old pirate haunt and now prides itself on a nightly flamenco show.
After dumping my bags and an ice-cold glass of Cristal, one of the two main Cuban beer brands aimed at those wealthy enough to be able to pay in CUCs (the other is the stronger, sweeter Bucanero), I stroll out into the warm sticky afternoon heat to reacquaint myself with a city that is forever being built and forever falling down.
Since 1982 Havana Vieja, the heart of the city founded by the Spanish and one of the most important staging points for their conquest of the New World, has been a UNESCO World Heritage site. It receives UN funds and restoration of its historic centre is a national priority, not least because since the early 1990s and the demise of the Soviet Union, one of the prime props on which Cuban communism depended, tourism has become a keystone to the economy. Or what passes for an economy.
At first glance it is hard to tell whether much of Havana is being rebuilt, restored, reconstructed, demolished or simply in the long process of crumbling. The reality is that all of those are true. One of the hardest things Havana has to cope with is its location. Most of the hurricanes which each summer smash into the south coast of the United States, from Miami to New Orleans, take a glancing blow at Cuba on the way past. In 2008 Hurricane Ike decided to stop over for a few days and all but undid a decade of painstaking restoration work.
Curiously the most striking thing about Old Havana, particularly in comparison to the rest of the city, not to mention the rest of the country, is how clean it is. There are waste bins on every corner, street cleaners sweeping religiously. And everywhere you look there are police – not secret police, we will come to them later – but tourist police: the Policía Especializada in neat blue-grey uniforms on both men and women, in the latter case augmented by striking black fishnet tights worn under the ubiquitous miniskirts.
These are a very different force from the mainstream national police, the Policía Nacional Revolucionaria, a few of whom are also in evidence. Havana is Cuba’s public face, and apart from a few gated tourist resorts, all most visitors ever get to see.
The best old colonial buildings have been turned into grandiose hotels: splendid marble edifices such as the Hotel Saratoga, Palacio O’Farrill, Hotel Santa Isabel, the newly opened and immodestly named Hotel Palacio del Marqués de San Felipe y Santiago de Bejucal, and the grand if a little creaky Ambos Mundos (Both Worlds) famed for being Ernest Hemingway’s hangout in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Havana is even worse than Paris when it comes to bars trading on their history as Hemingway hangouts. Perhaps all writers should leave calling cards in pubs they pop into, just on the off-chance. I’d have run out long ago.
But then Havana in its hedonistic heyday, in what it did not know at the time was the terminal stages of capitalism, was a magnet for writers fleeing demons of one sort or another. Graham Greene stayed in the huge pink slab of the Hotel Sevilla and gave the same room to James Wormold, his vacuum cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent in Our Man in Havana. The book was published in 1958 but the film starring Alec Guinness was made a year later in the immediate wake of the revolution. Castro complained it did not accurately depict the brutality of the Batista regime, but watching it today is primarily a depressing reminder of how much Havana’s fabric has deteriorated since then.
Nowhere is this more evident than on the Malecón, the sweeping seaside promenade which stretches for nearly three miles in a gentle curve from Old Havana to beyond the great 1930s edifice of the Hotel Nacional. Once the headquarters of the American mafia headed by gangster Lucky Luciano and with Winston Churchill among its pre-revolutionary celebrity guests, the Nacional is now like some old dowager, rather down-at-heel but still trading on past glories. Its chief claim to fame is the regular performances of the Tropicano cabaret, which for all the mulata beauties and daring dress sense displayed along the Malecón, is like watching a troupe of Bolton amateur dramatics ladies pretending to be Las Vegas showgirls.
The Malecón itself is Havana’s communal living-room. At four o’clock on a clammy sunny afternoon the sea wall is lined with natives armed only with a bottle or two of hooch and here and there a guitar, a trumpet or a few trombones. Cuba and its music are inseparable. Ever since Ry Cooder’s celebrated film Buena Vista Social Club made some of its veteran artistes global names, Havana has traded on the legend.
These guys are not here for the tourists. They are making music for themselves, and anyone who cares to listen. On the rocks beyond them Cubans strip down and plunge into the waves to cool off. Boys with fishing rods made, Huckleberry Finn-style, from bamboo canes and catgut hope for a catch that will make a better meal than anything that can be bought in the CUP ‘peso shops’.
Across the road a couple of young men in shorts are drinking from a bottle on a perilously insecure looking rooftop balustrade, four storeys up, their legs dangling over the edge. Once the Malecón was lined with chic cafés; today it is a panorama of neglect, peeling pastel colours, Formica-topped tables outside seedy bars busy in the evening with freelance prostitutes plying their trade. One building stands out, set a little way back: an eight-storey concrete slab which incongruously claims to be the Swiss Embassy but in reality houses the US Interests Section, Washington’s representation in Havana since it broke off diplomatic relations in 1961.
Heading back towards the hotel I am shocked to find scaffolding surrounding one particular grand old building that looks almost as if it is being prepared for demolition. Surely not. If any building in Havana is sacrosanct so long as a Castro is at the helm, it has to be the Museo de la Revolución. This is the museum that boasts the exploding cigar supposedly sent by the CIA to kill Fidel, pictures of the great man himself wielding a baseball bat (in sport not violence, he was allegedly a great player in his day), rifles and prison uniforms, documents and old banknotes, and most significantly of all, housed in a glass showcase of its own, Granma, the ‘yacht’ on which Castro and his colleagues evaded coastguards to sneak back into Cuba to prepare their rebellion.
But the museum is merely having an external facelift. Just around the corner sits Granma in all her glory, a rather dowdy little 1940s motorboat originally owned by a sentimental sailor who named it after his grannie, never imagining that one day it would be preserved in glass and give its name to Cuba’s national newspaper, a baseball team and an entire province.
Around Granma like an honour guard of old troopers stands a collection of military memorabilia, including a Hawker Sea Fury propeller plane and a tank used to repel the US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion by anti-communist Cuban exiles in April 1961. There is a surface-to-air missile and the engine of a US Lockheed U-2 spy plane shot down by one of its kind. A diligent soldier of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Revolutionary Armed Forces) stands guard over them.
Breathing a sign of relief that the world hasn’t ended yet I decide to give La Meson a chance for dinner, more in hope than expectation. There is always the flamenco to look forward to. Culinary delights are few and far between. I am told there are great Cuban restaurants in Miami. Maybe the chefs all emigrated.
The one thing I know I am not going to eat is the lobster. This is another one of those Cuban conundrums. There is an old saying in the world of journalism that whenever more than six hacks are gathered together for dinner they all will eat lobster. Apocryphally this is because one of them is bound to order it and it being bad form to do anything but divvy up the bill equally, everybody else decides they’d better have it too.
Price is not the reason I am not going to have the lobster. Cuba is one of the cheapest places in the world to eat lobster. The waters are teeming with them. And local people are expressly banned from catching them. Precisely because of their perceived desirability as a luxury dish lobsters are sold only for CUCs, which effectively means only to foreigners, so government-licensed fishing boats are the only ones allowed to catch them, and state-owned restaurants are the only ones allowed to serve them.
For all its homeliness, La Meson is owned by Habaguanex, which is a state organization, so lobster is on the menu. I know because I can see it. There has been a lobster slowly turning over a low heat spit since I left my bags, nearly two hours ago. Which means, you will have gathered, that by now it will have at best the consistency of one of those rubber models of lobsters you might see in a low-quality fishmonger’s window display.
Instead, at the waitress’s suggestion, I order the grilled pork with something called ‘a Cuban salad’, which instinctively sounds like a contradiction in terms. I should have known better, but sometimes the hard way is the only way.
What finally arrives masquerading as a salad, is some cubes of rubbery processed cheese, accompanied by a few olives and a sprig of coriander. The Waldorf will not be worried. The pork, which turns up some time later, isn’t much of an improvement. Cuba must be one of the only places in the world where seafood is grilled for hours and pork for a few seconds. My grilled kebab is a few lumps of tough pinky-white meat on a skewer by the side of a spoonful of relatively inoffensive bland rice and a few soggy plantain chips. Lurking next to it is something that looks like mashed potato and has a very similar consistency but tastes disconcertingly like banana flavour Angel Delight. I wonder vaguely to myself if the milkshake mix brought by the large lady from Santo Domingo might have made it through customs after all.
Thank God for the flamenco dancers. I have seen flamenco put on for tourists in Seville, Spain, which is supposed to be its home. Compared to this it was Ann Widdecombe on Strictly Come Dancing. As passion goes this is on the level of throwing a grenade into a firework factory. Two young women in their twenties strapped into corsets with dresses figure-huggingly tight to the waist then exploding into a riot of swirling satin strut, stomp and stamp their way across the raised wooden stage, whirling to twanging guitar chords and a drumbeat reminiscent of a voodoo rite. Mesmerizing. The audience, me amongst them, sits in rapt wonder, as do the Cubans standing in crowds outside – unable to afford the two CUC for a beer but taking advantage of the fact that the tropical heat means the bar is wide open to the street.
It is almost to exorcize the contagious fervour that after digesting what little I could of my dinner, I stroll through the old town up towards the Plaza de la Catedral for a glimpse of one of the New World’s most glorious old buildings softly lit by floodlights under the dark tropical sky.
Described by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier as ‘music set in stone’, this baroque gem was built by Jesuits in the mid-eighteenth century on the site of an older building. It is too easy for us Europeans – and many North Americans – to forget how ancient some of the great buildings of Latin America really are. Columbus landed here on his first great voyage in 1492. Havana was founded in 1519, when Henry VIII was a mere boy on the throne of England. And it is not the island’s oldest city.
That honour belongs to remote Baracoa, at the opposite end of the island. It was founded nearly a decade earlier, but lost any chance of becoming the capital because for hundreds of years its location surrounded by high mountains made it inaccessible other than by sea. This situation lasted until the 1960s when putting a road through became one of the token great projects of the revolution’s early days.
