Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 22
There are some interesting enough exhibits about the history of slavery in ‘oriente’ – eastern Cuba – and the usual collection of machetes and blunderbusses plus a few ancient photographs of landlords and revolutionaries from the turn of the last century. But when I ask her about the ‘other’ photographs, the more recent ones, she pretends not to know what I am talking about.
‘The ones with los Americanos,’ I say, then correct myself, remembering Cubans are proud to be Americanos too – ‘los gringos?’
‘Ah,’ she says eventually with a knowing smile. ‘Not here. Gone.’
I give her a sceptical look but she just smiles back and shrugs.
I find it hard to hide my disappointment. This has to be all part of some strange new attitude to the Obama administration. The pictures I had hoped to see were of rows of naked US marine buttocks. Not for any lascivious gratification, I hasten to add, but because they represented one of those hilarious moments of Cold War culture clash. Back sometime in the 1970s the marines stationed at Guantánamo Bay thought the most hilarious thing they could do to show how they felt about communism was to demonstrate one of the latest capitalist crazes: mooning. An entire platoon of them had, for a laugh, turned their back on the watching Cuban guards, bent down and dropped their trousers.
But rather than take offence at being faced with such a gesture of imperialist disdain the Cubans apparently thought it hilarious and took photographs which they then for several decades hung on the walls of this very museum. If you want to see what capitalism looks like, the message was, here you go. If US citizens had been allowed to visit Cuba, I always wondered if they would have been proud of their armed forces. Or if the servicemen themselves, had they been allowed to visit, might not have regretted ‘posing’ for Cuban cameras in quite that position. Sadly, it seems, now that a few US citizens are finally being allowed to visit, we may never know.
That leaves the main attraction in Guantánamo museum as a very different if rather more salubrious exhibit, and one that commemorates a more daring feat. One with a room all to itself. At first glance it looks like the rusting hulk of some antique diving bell, a great lump of grey metal about three metres high with a porthole, a hatch and a bright orange bottom, on which are stencilled the letters that give it all away: CCCP.
This primitive-looking chunk of heavy-duty ironwork is the grim reality of the Soviet version of that supposed ultimate example of twentieth-century futuristic technology: a spacecraft. To be more precise this is the re-entry module from a Soyuz spacecraft in which on September 18, 1980, along with a Russian colleague, Guantánamo-born thirty-eight-year-old Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez became simultaneously the first Latin American, and first person of African ethnic origin to go into space. He and colleague Yuri Romanenko spent just over a week on board the Salyut 6 space station before returning to earth in this diabolically unsafe looking spherical iron lung, landing in the dark somewhere in the desert of what is now Kazakhstan. Rather him than me.
Back out in the baking heat of Guantánamo town I try to go to the bank again only to find this time it’s closed because, as in Santa Clara, there’s a power cut and the tills have closed. I exclaim in despair to the man blocking the door, ‘La economía de Cuba es muerta!’ This country’s economy is dead. He shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘Si, Señor,’ as if I’m an idiot for only just noticing it.
As chance would have it however, stomping away angrily from the bank, I come across an aspect of Cuba’s economy that is doing rather nicely indeed, and may even offer a ray of light in the darkness: Guantánamo’s main Mercado Agropecuario, still a relative novelty in Cuba: a farmers’ market.
Introduced in the mid-1990s to supplement the meagre state rations by allowing co-operative farmers to sell supposedly surplus production, these markets have now become a vital part of the still severely strapped supply chain for the ordinary Cuban family. As well as being an example of just how fertile this country could be and how its farmers could probably end the supply-side crisis overnight if only they were allowed to. When Marco and Maria manage to save a few pesos from their meagre salaries, this where they come to splash out on such luxuries as a few eggs, or a chicken they will make last a week.
In a semi-derelict concrete hall with a roof over only half of it, makeshift stalls on rickety wooden tables are piled high with produce: oranges, bananas, little yellow mangoes and big red-green ones, pineapples, dried beans, cabbages, onions, limes, cucumbers, garlic, tomatoes. The prices are in pesos, moneda nacional, not CUCs, and they are ridiculously cheap. Six pesos (no more than a few pence) will buy you a pound of oranges. I do a double take. Yep, a pound of oranges: 1 lb. In a country where everything else is metric, as throughout the rest of Latin America, prices in the free market are given per lb, as if somehow an Anglo-Saxon ghost lives on in the spirit of free enterprise.
The tomatoes, rich, ripe, red and reassuringly irregular in shape and size look too tempting to resist. I ask the dealer for four.
‘Four pounds?’
‘Er, no. Just four tomatoes.’
He gives me a sour look, which is a chilling experience now that I come to notice he is the size of a small volcano and has only one ear, which seems more likely to be the result of some form or urban or other warfare rather than a Vincent Van Gogh artistic temperament. But he sells me them nonetheless. I accompany them with a few corn fritters, ears of sweetcorn tossed in batter and fried on a griddle by an amiable smiling woman. Together they make one of the best littlemeals I’ve had in Cuba. And one of the cheapest.
There isn’t a lot of meat on display. At least, not dead meat. Over in one corner, leaning idly against a pillar in a blue T-shirt, baggy Bermuda shorts and with a baseball cap on his head proclaiming ‘I ♥ Jesus’ is a paunchy middle-aged bloke holding a piece of string with a chubby black pig on the end of it. Quite a little pig, but chubby enough, and at this moment – wholly unaware of why it’s been brought to the market – cheerfully rooting around among the various bits of fallen fruit putrefying in the heat which didn’t quite make it into the pungent-smelling waste bin.
While I’m standing looking at the pig a thirty-something scrawny black woman with a low top that shows up a bad rash of self-inflicted tattoos running across her shoulders and apparently down her spine, chunters something incomprehensibly at me. I haven’t a clue what she’s on about and give her my standard, ‘No, no,’ until she staggers off grumpily, at which the pig-flogging friend of Jesus bursts out laughing and indicates in no uncertain fashion, with use of his right hand and mouth formed into an ‘O’ that I was possibly being offered a blow job. Possibly for pesos! He seems quite excited by the idea and makes a show of whistling after her. I feel like telling him his pig looks a better option. But I don’t want to offend the pig.
By early evening Yanossi from the hotel still hasn’t called, so I use Lissett’s phone to call him. Happily he is still at the desk, but less happily he has not heard back from whoever it is has to issue my permit to enter the ‘border zone’.
‘It is not a problem,’ he says. ‘I will call you again,’ ignoring the fact that I had to call him, finishing off with that word that is supposed to be reassuring but somehow never is: ‘Mañana.’
To drown my sorrows, I head back to the Ruina, once again taking refuge from the hustlers by opting for the peso bar. I order a rum and opt for Maria’s recommendation of Mulata, made in Santiago at the original Bacardi distillery, rather than the ubiquitous Havana Club. I am surprised at how cheap it is, even in pesos. Yes, she nods, ‘Much cheaper than in the shops.’
‘What?’
‘Yes, to buy in bar is 30 per cent cheaper than in shop.’
This makes no sense at all to me. Why? How can it be cheaper to sell it in a bar which has to cover its overheads, from lighting to staff costs, than in a shop when it’s simply sold in the bottle it left the distillery in. She shrugs her head. Buying and selling are things the government does. Not for ordinary mortals to question. She does just does her job.
Then in a blinding flash of half-forgotten Soviet logic I remember that is what it comes down to. A main aim of communist society is zero unemployment: making sure everybody has a job. Not necessarily a useful job. Just a job. Maria has a job, just like the babushkas who used to sit at the bottom of escalators in the Moscow metro had jobs: just not jobs that served any purpose. The purpose of the jobs that Maria and her colleagues do – running a bar that is open twenty-four hours a day – is not to sell alcohol and soft drinks at a profit. It is to be a job for Maria and her colleagues. The job gives her a role, and therefore is an end in itself.
The fact the government which owns the bar and pays her does not make a profit is totally irrelevant both to her and to the government. It doesn’t make a loss either: the rum is manufactured in a distillery owned by the government and sold, whether in a shop or a bar by people who are employed by the government, to people (with the exception of tourists) who are also employed and paid by the government. What goes around comes around, except that in what is effectively a closed circle economy with little exposure to the outside world, there is usually less of it second time round. The circle becomes a downward spiral.
It sounds like insanity until, with a bittersweet moment of humility, I realize I can think of quite a few people in our own society, still, post-Cold War misleadingly called ‘western’ though a long way east of Cuba, who do jobs that aren’t exactly useful either if you dare to analyse them too closely. The difference is that when the money is tight, particularly as now in times of austerity, they get sacked. At which point the government has to pay them. Which is why, of course, the people who are best off are those who work for the government. Until the government, pretending it too feels the economic pinch, makes them too redundant, at which point it has to start paying them again, albeit at a lower level.
We all go mad in our own ways.
9. Marianna Grajales Coello was Cuba’s Florence Nightingale, running a field hospital during the conflict. She gave birth to thirteen children, nearly all of whom served in the rebel army, two of them as generals. She was famed for her courage under fire and even before the communist revolution was fêted as the ‘Mother of Cuba’. Fidel Castro created a ‘women’s platoon’ named after her. Like José Martí, she too is now an airport, serving Guantánamo.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Cactus Curtain
The next morning, about 10 o’clock the phone rings. Lissett comes to fetch me. It is Yanossi, the guide from the hotel. If he says ‘yes’, I can be there in 20 minutes by taxi, ready to depart. I can be on the USA’s ‘final frontier’ by lunchtime.
He says, ‘yes’. My permit has been approved. But my initial celebration is restrained by something about the tone of his voice. ‘But,’ he adds, inevitably, ‘there is a problem.’
‘The man, he is not there.’ Ah, the man. I’d forgotten about him. ‘What man?’
‘The man, the policeman who has to sign papers. He did not go to work this morning.’
Ah. My plans are going to be dashed because some lazy Cuban cop has thrown a sickie!?
‘Can’t someone else sign it?’
A long sigh on the other end of the telephone. ‘No. Only him.’
‘When will he be in?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow. I hope so. Maybe tomorrow you can come to the hotel. Early. Maybe then we go.’
‘Maybe?’
‘Maybe yes. I think so. Very much.’
His sigh is nothing to my own. Already I’m getting to feel I’ve had enough of Guantánamo proper. There’s only so much time a man can spend in a one-horse town full of hustlers with only one half-decent bar. Plus the casa has filled up and it’s starting to feel cramped. After a couple of weeks on the road – or more specifically the railroad – in Cuba you begin to get a real feeling of what life is like for the ordinary native. And a real hankering for some creature comforts.
On an impulse, I decide to leave the casa and check into the Hotel GTMO for the night. At least that way if Yanossi’s man actually bothers to turn up for work in the morning I’ll be on the spot.
First though, I need to get a souvenir. I can hardly have come all the way to one of the most famous-named destinations on the planet, albeit not one on many tourist itineraries, without getting something with the name on it, and given that every town of any size in Cuba has a shop selling souvenirs aimed at the dwindling number of foreign tourists in order to squeeze a few extra CUCs into the government’s ever-empty pockets.
And sure enough there is one. Right next to the main square, an Artex government-run souvenir and art store. And sure enough it has souvenirs. Exactly the same as you can buy in any other state-run tourist souvenir shop in any other town in Cuba; pictures of Che, posters of Che, T-shirts with Che on them, postcards of Che, even a few postcards of an old photo of Fidel swinging a baseball bat. There are Cuban flags, shoulder bags with the Cuban flag on them. And rum. Silly little Chinese-made plastic watches with fish on them. Ashtrays with pictures of Havana on them. But not one item that bears the name Guantánamo. Not even a postcard of the town square. Not even a CD of the bloody song they don’t play here. Nada.
Disappointed, I wander back towards the casa to pick up my bag and head out when suddenly my eyes are drawn to a sports clothing store. Yes! There, in the back of the window, is almost exactly what I have been looking for. On sale for pesos even rather than CUCs. I wonder why it never occurred to me. In baseball-crazy Cuba, of course the one thing that would have the town’s name on it is the local baseball team’s shirts. There it is in big arcing orange letters on black: GUANTÁNAMO. I buy three, one for me and one for each of my kids. My dad went to Guantánamo and back, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. Wear it with pride!
By mid-afternoon I have checked out and in. As far as creature comforts go, the Hotel GTMO isn’t offering much. It has more Cuban guests than foreigners – as on the trains, they pay in pesos, we pay in CUCs – and feels rather like one of the old Soviet Intourist hotels from the early 1980s: more like a field hospital than a place of recreation, with uniform grey painted interior walls and no functioning lift. But it does have one thing that after weeks of sweating on and off sticky trains seems like a gift from heaven: a swimming pool.
It may not be exactly a five-star lido, more like a blue-tiled pit full of water set in the middle of an expanse of partly cracked concrete, but hey it’s wet and cool, whereas everything else around here, including me, is wet with sweat. It looks inviting enough until I take a sudden turn when I spot, floating close to the edge, what appears to be a surreally large bluish dead frog. My stomach turns over until I notice a the shallow end of the pool a gaggle of eight- or nine-year-old Cuban kids splashing about and hurling other animals at one another, including a small pink plastic alligator, a bright green snapping turtle and a yellow bus.
Relieved, I leap into the water ready to give them a taste of their own medicine by hurling their mislaid toy over at them. I grab the said jolly smiling frog with its big popping eyes, only to find my hand closing not on hard plastic, but on swollen, slimy grey viscous frog flesh. What I had at first believed to be a bloated dead frog turns out to be … a bloated dead frog. It’s all I can do not to empty the contents of my stomach on top of it, which would hardly make things better, and instead just manage to hurl the thing out of the pool onto the concrete surround. Somehow my enthusiasm for a swim has suddenly evaporated.
For the rest of the afternoon I manage to retain my composure with the help of a neat rum from the hotel bar, a couple of cold beer chasers a cigar from the CUC shop, and sit there in the shade like some pink-faced relic of British colonial days lost in the ruins of somebody else’s empire, drinking and smoking and watching the bloated fog swell ever larger as it cooks on the concrete. It ought to be moved but nobody seems interested, and there’s no way I’m going to touch it again.
In the evening the hotel bar fills with an unusually rowdy gang of what appear to be Cubans but a lot more affluent even than the emerging middle class I have noticed. At their centre is an elderly man who is obviously a paternal figure of some sort, though not as affluent as the rest of the family, with a surprisingly youthful pretty girl on his knee, whom he is treating in a decidedly non-paternal manner.
The kids, teenagers mostly, sport expensive trainers and gold or silver chains around neck or wrist, and smart shades. They are all, I slowly notice, substantially chunkier in build than any other young Cubans I have seen. That is when I suddenly hit on the truth, which with a bit of eavesdropping is confirmed by their conversation: these are Miami Cubans, probably the old man’s children and grandchildren, come back maybe for the first time since their parents or grandparents did a runner maybe a generation ago. These are the first US citizens I have come across in Cuba and the first hard evidence that Obama’s cautious thawing of relations by letting ‘Americans’ of Cuban origin visit their ancestral homeland. The bit of totty on the old boy’s knee is his attempt to show off in the only way he can that he might not have their money, but there are still some things worth coveting in the ‘old country’.
At 9 a.m. the next morning I am standing at reception, after a breakfast of lukewarm weak coffee and a stale bun – ‘fruit’s off’ – worse than anything served up in any of the private homes I have stayed in – waiting for Yanossi.
It is 10 a.m. before he shows up, looking almost apprehensive to see me standing there. Oh no, don’t tell me his policeman or whatever he is has thrown another sickie.
‘Wait, please,’ he says in English. ‘One moment. I make phone call.’
He picks up a vintage handset and begins dialling. Then his face grows sombre. He is speaking Spanish of course, and as so often happens when people revert to their native language after making an effort for a foreigner, he suddenly sounds a lot more intelligent. But what I am picking up is not good.
