Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 21
As if he’s reading my mind, my moneychanger – his eyes continually flicking one way and the other to be sure our transaction hasn’t been observed – tells me, as if it is a great secret, that there is a paladar just a few streets away. I shrug. Okay, so the privately-run paladar restaurants tend to be grouped mainly in the big tourist towns but there is no reason why Guantánamo shouldn’t have one. Then he taps the side of his nose and reveals the big secret: ‘Un peso paladar.’ A private restaurant where you can pay in pesos? This is a real rarity. I’m not even sure it’s legal. From the government’s point of view the whole point about legalizing private restaurants was for them to provide a service that the state couldn’t – cooking half-decent food – and sell it to foreign tourists in exchange for their sorely needed hard currency, a goodly proportion of which has to be paid to the state.
The idea, as with casas particulares, was to get ordinary Cuban citizens to act rather like licensed collectors of tax from tourists, while providing said tourists with a useful service as an accidental, if useful, by-product. The idea of providing a service for Cubans in their own currency would make no sense at all to the communists: the only obvious point of buying things at one price, adding value and selling them to your fellow citizens is surely to make a personal profit. And that sounds dangerously like capitalism! Which is against the law.
However dubious I may be about what I’m going to find, my moneychanger’s directions are good. When I find the place it looks like somebody’s home, which of course is exactly what it is. There is no sign outside but the lights are on and the door is open and sticking my head round it, ready to apologize and retreat if I find I really am peering into somebody’s parlour, I find half a dozen tables with green plastic tablecloths, three of them occupied, and on a stand by the door half a dozen typed sheets of paper which on closer inspection are menus.
‘Hola,’ a smiling man in his early 40s, comes forward to shake my hand and usher me to a table. ‘Para comer?’ he says. Something to eat? Yes please.
The menu is not exactly extensive. In fact apart from the offer of a cheese salad – my memories of rubber cheese in Havana are still disturbingly fresh – there is only one dish: pork fricassee. I’m dubious about the pork, but at least having only one option makes choosing what to have easy.
When it comes it is surprisingly good. Possibly not quite as hot as I might have liked but when the ambient temperature – in the room – is 32ºC, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. What was advertised as a ‘fricassee’ is in fact little pork kebabs fried in oil, served with some crunchy fried plantain chips and a side salad of coleslaw and a bit of cucumber. For which the more than acceptable price is 40 pesos (about $1.50, less than one British pound!). But adding a couple of beers from the fridge – Mayabe or Cacique, the two mainstream peso beers which in any case I prefer to the CUC alternatives, more than doubles it.
Bodily needs satisfied, it’s time to head back into town to pick up on the nightlife, not that I’m actually expecting there to be any. The reason I am here is not the city itself but the barbed wire fence down the road. But I haven’t got there yet, and I am not really sure whether or not I am going to be able to. The Castro government has never been happy with Uncle Sam squatting on a corner of its coastline, and in the circumstances one would imagine they ought to be wryly amused at being able to point the finger so close to hand at Washington’s biggest international embarrassment. Oddly, the reverse seems to be true.
The best view to be had of the US base from Cuban territory used to be the scenic viewpoint of Mirador de Malones, set on a hilltop to the west of the bay looking down on it. For a long time, the Cuban army used it as an observation post to keep an eye on the goings-on beyond the barbed wire, primarily because they have always feared the base could be used to prepare some new Bay of Pigs-style intervention. The army would, for a few CUCs and after extensive security clearance, allow foreign tourists to share their view of the ‘imperialist enemy’ and even offer them a cocktail while they borrowed the telescope.
But for several years now, curiously sensitive that Guantánamo Bay has become notorious in its own right, rather than revel in offering a bird’s-eye view of the world’s most controversial concentration camp for unconvicted prisoners, perhaps for fear of being accused of deliberate provocation, the viewpoint has been closed to foreigners. The closest it is now possible to come to the base – though it is in fact very close indeed, much closer than the Mirador but without the raised viewpoint – is the sleepy little port of Caimanera, several kilometres beyond Guantánamo town. But even that requires an escort and official clearance and I am not going to get any further down that road tonight.
The walk back into town from the paladar is an object lesson in the eccentricity of Cuban urban architecture, though that is hardly the right word to describe buildings usually more in a state of dilapidation than construction. Here there is what might be an extravagant hotel from some grand Spanish imperial fantasy: high-ceilinged with tall windows, the outside a riot of pastel blue-painted colonial pillars, both Doric and Corinthian, supporting a flat roof upon which as ambitions grew and then dwindled an equally grand second storey has been added, then a jerry-built third. Its next-door neighbour could be something straight out of a spaghetti Western, low-slung with swing doors. And then another riotous palace of pillars and mirrored walls with a second storey utterly decrepit, windowless, with peeling green paint on the walls and a single flickering strip light on the ceiling illuminating a bare-chested fat man in knee-length shorts sitting on a rocking chair as if on the porch of his home, which this probably is. He looks like some tenth-century Bedouin who has set up tent in some deserted Pharaonic necropolis.
In front of it, squat and stubby next to the kerb, stands one of those iconic items that screams out twentieth-century urban America in the same way a red telephone box once did for England; a fire hydrant.
The next street is pure 1930s art deco, all Odeon lines and curves and the same peeling paintwork, until I come to a bar that could be a subtropical incarnation of some New York or London epitome of urban cool: a great three-storey, barred-window, base-thumping beast of a building covered in creeping vines and largely without a roof. It is called, without the slightest streak of street-savvy urban irony, La Ruina.
I stroll in and settle down with a beer only to be almost immediately plagued by hustlers, trying to sell me ‘Che’ three-peso notes, yesterday’s edition of Granma and in some cases, themselves. ‘You want chica, chica?’ asks one young woman of around thirty, all but thrusting her bosom in my face. ‘Spasibo, nyet,’ I reply, reverting to my old pre-1990 stand-by for avoiding unwanted hagglers, and speak Russian at her. It works here too. ‘Humph,’ she flounces off, ‘People say I pretty.’
To my surprise, however, the Russian has encouraged one older man to come over and talk to me. He has passable Russian, about as good as my Spanish, and for a few minutes we get along swimmingly until it becomes clear he too wants to sell me something: old Cuban postage stamps. And he is determined to haggle for them, even when I make clear I have absolutely no interest. He only gets the message when I pull out a handful of pesos, rather than CUCs. He jerks his thumb in the direction of a back room with a separate street entrance, as if to say, that’s the place for the likes of you.
Maybe it is too. On the assumption that if it operates in pesos rather than CUCs there will be fewer hustlers in there, I give it a go. There are four staff but only two customers, sharing a coffee. In the other, hard currency side there were more than half a dozen, but as far as I could see they were all hustlers rather than customers. I order a Mayabe and drink it slowly, relieved by the lack of hassle until, somewhat nervously, the barman plucks up the courage to ask me for something. I sigh and try to work out how to tell him I’m not buying, but when he opens his mouth all he says is, ‘Please, would it be possible for you to buy us a soft drink?’ By ‘us’ he means himself and his optimistically smiling female colleague.
It is such a small request that for once I agree. He is as good as his word taking one can of Naranja, the local fizzy orange, and pouring it not just into two glasses but four, handing one to the table waiter, who currently has no tables to wait, and the man by the door who might be described as security if there were ever any people trying to come in. I am so touched that I decide there and then on an act of spontaneous generosity: Naranjas all round. Hey big spender! It’s cost me less than the price of a pint of real ale in London, yet it’s hard to believe the little ray of sunshine it’s brought into these people’s lives. Or the torrent of conversation it unleashes. It had not occurred to me that none of the staff waiting in a bar like this, a peso bar, earns enough to buy a can of the cheapest drink they sell in their own currency.
The smiling barmaid Maria is the most forthcoming. My brief question about how they get by leads to hearing half her life story: she is thirty-four and has a four-year-old child but hasn’t seen the father for three years. She lives with Marco, the barman who asked for the drink, and earns 250 pesos a month. That is approximately $10, about £7.50. A can of Naranja costs 20 pesos, more than two days’ wages. The economics of course are not quite ours, to say the least: the state ration of basic rice, beans, sugar and bread is free as is cooking oil. She also gets a free milk ration because she has a child under six. Although she says she lives with Marco, she basically means she sleeps with him, because she still actually lives with her mother. The flat costs next to nothing while electricity and water costs are minimal, not that the electricity works all the time. She gets a state ration of toothpaste and soap too, but the stuff we take for granted: meat, fresh veg, fizzy drinks and alcohol are all luxury items to be savoured rarely if at all. Like my hustler back in Camagüey, most people make their own sugar-based hooch.
So how late do they work, I ask? Bar closing times in Cuba seem to me extraordinarily liberal. I have never heard anyone ring a bell or call ‘last orders’.
Marco looks amazed: ‘Twenty-four hours, of course, what else?’
I hadn’t thought about it, but the only bars I have seen closed looked closed for good. Possibly decades ago, though given the general state of dilapidation of Cuba’s built environment it can be hard to tell. Ruina’s back bar, for example, where we are now standing, has no roof and only ivy climbing the walls for decoration, apart from the fridges of cold drinks.
‘How can we close? If we went away, people would come in and steal everything,’ says Maria, as if it was the most obvious statement in the world and the idea of a bar having a closing time the absurdity.
But then putting a roof on the bar would probably cost more than the government pays the staff. A roof would require real materials. The staff just get pieces of paper that are literally barely worth the paper they are printed on. And not enough of those.
I refer to the hustlers in the CUC bar next door, and my new peso bar friends are sympathetic, but to both parties. ‘People have to sell something else to get by,’ says Marco. ‘Including the girls selling themselves?’ He shrugs. ‘Are you sure they are all girls?’ I give him a sceptical look. I know about the ladyboy phenomenon in Thailand, but in Cuba? ‘Oh, yes, there are many travestidos. Often you can tell because they have pet dogs. It is a thing for some of them. But they have to have money to afford them. How do you think they earn it?’
I feel more than glad I gave short shrift to the buxom lady trying to press herself on me, although if she was really a bloke what my old editor at the Sunday Telegraph used to call ‘her embonpoint’ was remarkably impressive.
Bang on topic Marco says; ‘Cuanto cuesta una chica en Londres?’ How much is a girl in London? It’s one of those questions that throws you, not so much because he is enquiring about the going rates of sleazy escort agencies, of which London has as many as any big capital city, but because that’s not really what he means at all. He might as well be asking how much an orange costs, or a bar of chocolate. Maria is looking at us attentively, not because she’s shocked by his question or my reaction, but out of casual interest, as if she’d also like to know the going rate too.
‘It’s not like that,’ I try to tell him, then add: ‘Probably a couple of hundred pounds an hour or a lifetime of bondage.’ I’m joking but I’m not sure he gets it.
Bill Clinton’s election campaign team coined the phrase, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ They should have come to Cuba. They had no idea!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hotel GTMO
Lissett, owner of my Guantánamo casa, which seems to double as home from home from a variety of almost exclusively beefy-looking black local lads who spend much of the day lounging on her floral chintz sofa watching soap operas (including the inevitable Mujeres de Nadie) and baseball, tells me the only way I am going to get to Caimanera, the closest point to the US base, is with an official pass, a taxi and a ‘licensed guide’. I assume that means one guaranteed to toe the official government line on the base and relations with the United States. And the only place I am going to put all that together, it appears, is on the outskirts of town at the government-run Viazul hotel.
A bicitaxi pedalled by someone who actually knows his way round town gets me there in barely 15 minutes. And there is no mistaking where you are. On the approach road is a big blue roadside sign that uses language which would be ironically familiar to the US forces on the other side of the wire: HOTEL GTMO. I hear The Eagles in my head reworking Hotel California: Welcome to the Hotel Guantánamo. You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.
The hotel itself, is a nondescript 1970s box behind railings. The road sign may label it HOTEL GTMO but the malfunctioning neon sign outside has a version of its own: Hotel *uan**namo.
We are clearly in a suburb at least partly reserved for the party élite. On the right is a slab-like concrete building which at first glance, misreading the sign as policlinico, I take to be the local hospital, which makes the slogan on the banner above the door somewhat worrying: ‘Socialism or death’. It turns out to be politic and this is the headquarters of the local communist party. Which I suppose makes it okay. Sort of.
Opposite is a big green expanse of parkland, dominated by some colossal statuary in pink granite, reached by a flight of steps. At first sight it is mind-bending. Think Stonehenge reinterpreted by Salvador Dalí: an arrangement of huge great vertical stone obelisks that then suddenly bend and intertwine with one another, here and there sprouting heads and bodies. Into the columns are carved the names to go with some of them: Mariana Grajales Coello9 (after whom the square is named), as well as Antonio Maceo Grajales and Máximo Gómez, and of course, José Martí, all heroes of the late nineteenth-century conflict which eventually led to independence from Spain. It is a stunning piece of architectural sculpture, bold, modern, similar in size and dramatic effect to some of the more grandiose pieces of Soviet statuary, yet at once strikingly different, unmistakably Latin.
And just to reassure us that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, next to the hotel is a huge billboard poster of Castro. Not Fidel but Raúl, looking for all the world like your favourite bespectacled smiling uncle playing soldier with, in giant letters below, the most audacious slogan I have yet seen in Cuba: ‘EN GUANTÁNAMO, SI SE PUEDE!’
‘In Guantánamo, Yes We Can!’ I can’t not love the fact that here in this Bizarro World, Latin mirror-image of the US, Barack Obama’s slogan has found a second home. Or the irony that one of the first things that President Yes-We-Can said he was going to do was close down the detention camp at Guantánamo. And so far, already in his second presidential term, no, he hasn’t.
No doubt Raúl has taken the same comfort as Obama did from the slogan’s magnificent vagueness.
At the hotel reception desk I’m told the man I need to talk to is called Yanossi and he isn’t there. But if I wait he might turn up. In fact he does, in little more than a quarter of an hour, and puts on a grave face when I tell him what I want.
‘Yes, it is possible,’ he says at length, not looking like he means it. ‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe. Or yes?’
‘Maybe yes. I will have to ask.’
‘When?’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’
I have a horrible premonition of mañana sickness coming on.
‘Please,’ he adds. ‘I need your passport number. Then I will ask and I will call you. This evening.’
I supply what he needs and the phone number of Lissett’s casa. ‘But when,’ I ask, ‘might I be able to go?’
‘If yes, then tomorrow.’
‘Really?’
‘Maybe. Maybe yes.’ He smiles.
It seems about as optimistic an answer as I’m going to get as I head back into town with ‘Guantana-mayra’ running through my brain, though it occurs to me that this is the first place I haven’t actually heard it being played.
In the mean time I may as well take in the sights Guantánamo has to offer, chief among them the city museum, which allegedly offers an unusual view of the US base. The museum is congenial quaint little colonial building with a courtyard fringed with palm trees at its heart. As in Matanzas, I am the only visitor and the attendant feels obliged to follow me round each room, not so much to be sure I don’t steal or damage anything, nor to offer any supplementary information on the exhibits, but simply because it’s marginally less boring than sitting by the desk which is what she does for most of most days.
