Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 23
‘I see. Oh dear. That is a great pity. How long? I see. Oh dear. That is a shame.’ Then a long pause. ‘Yes, yes, I shall tell him.’
He turns to me with a long face.
‘He hasn’t turned up again?’ I venture despairingly.
‘No, no. That is him. His mother. She is very ill. She had heart attack yesterday. This is why he not at work yesterday. It is very sad. He has to take her to the hospital.’
‘But …?’
‘Hmm?’ he looks up at me as if unable to comprehend that I might heartlessly have other matters on my mind than the regrettably poor health of the mother of a local police official. ‘Oh yes, your permit. It is okay. You can go.’
A whoop of relief seems inappropriate for the circumstances, but within half an hour, both guide and taxi – a yellow Lada with a Grand Prix-style chequered spoiler on the rear – have arrived, and we are off, with a brief stop along the way for the guide to dash into a grey-looking office building where she picks up the all-important piece of paper with a scribbled blue line along the bottom of it, which I take to be the all-important signature. I could have forged it in a heartbeat. And maybe as a result spent as long behind bars in Guantánamo town as some of the men on the other side of the wire have spent there.
We roll out of town on rough roads for barely a kilometre before we come to the first checkpoint, a little hut by the side of the road manned by two officers of the Policía de Carreterras, traffic cops. They check the carnets, the identity cards of both driver and guide, and examine my all-importantpiece of paper, but bizarrely don’t ask to see my passport to check that the one relates to the other.
It only takes a few moments and we are on the road again. It appears that the taxi-driver, a genial grizzled man in his fifties, knows more about the area than the bouncy twenty-something girl guide, who is there presumably because the state tourist office has to be involved.
‘Everybody who lives in Caimanera has to have a permit,’ he tells me. ‘And anyone from Guantánamo who wants to go there, even just to visit for the day.’ It would appear my permit is for all three of us. I had forgotten, of course, that once upon a time, before Guantánamo Bay came to stand for what it does today, the main reason Caimanera was so off-limits was that the Castro government feared its citizens would try to sneak into American territory to claim asylum.
Guantánamo Bay’s strange status is one of the world’s oddest colonial legacies. It goes back to what the United States still calls the Spanish–American War and Cubans call the War of Independence, in which US involvement was possibly helpful but neither asked for nor particularly wanted. It was, Cubans will tell you and it is hard not to agree, a war in which rebels fighting for their freedom were used by a new would-be world empire as an excuse to grab land from an older fading world empire.10
In 1898 the US fleet was attacking Santiago, then as now the capital of eastern Cuba, when one of the far-from-rare summer hurricanes hit. The fleet retreated from the open sea to the relative safety of the big, sheltered bay along the coast. They realized this was handy and when eventually Cubans achieved a form of independence in 1903, effectively as an American puppet, its first president Tomás Estrada Palma was obliged to sign a treaty granting the United States a ‘perpetual lease’ on the territory, a deal reaffirmed in 1934 by the Batista government that had come to power in a right-wing coup with US support. Under the terms of the original 1903 deal the United States was supposed to pay Cuba an annual fee of $2,000 and to this day it still sends cheques for the inflation-adjusted sum (now over $4,000 a year) to Havana. Castro keeps them uncashed – allegedly save for one which the US claims is justification for its continued presence – in a desk drawer. For years between the signing of the first treaty and the 1958 revolution most of the inhabitants of Caimanera provided the menial labour on the base, while the little fishing town itself became saloon bar and bordello for the GIs and seamen.
But the revolutionaries repudiated the treaty (probably correctly) as signed under duress, and gradually turned the screw on access to the ‘occupied territory’. After some anti-communists claimed asylum there the Castro government in 1961 planted a thick border of sharp-spined cacti around the perimeter, which almost in parody of what was going on in Europe (the Berlin Wall was built the same year) became known as the ‘Cactus Curtain’. But the real deterrent to anyone crossing was the thousands of mines planted not just by the Cubans but by the Americans too, although the latter were eventually removed under Bill Clinton in 1996, and replaced by motion sensors. Needless to say, transforming Guantánamo Bay into the world’s most notorious detention camp for untried prisoners has done more than Fidel in his wildest dreams might have to deter even the most dissident Cuban from trying to enter this little patch of ‘freedom’ squatting on the end of their island.
Nonetheless, a big red roadside sign we pass reads AREA DE ALTA SEGURIDAD PARA LA DEFENSA – Area of high defence security. The clear implication being that the threat is from the other side. But the road is noticeably better now, presumably military-maintained, and runs through a lush plantation of coconut palms.
A second checkpoint looms ahead of us: a concrete hut with two tank trap barriers in the middle of the road in front of it. We all get out and soldiers in green uniforms with insignia that mark them out as interior ministry troops open the boot and look inside. Our documents are inspected again, and this time the man in charge – a sergeant by the stripes on his arm – asks to see my passport as well. I feel a terrible tendency to lapse into Russian. It is something to do with the atmosphere, this sense of a strictly guarded frontier on the edge of nowhere. It reminds me of the Soviet–Finnish border circa 1985 except that instead of ice, snow and endless pine-woods full of wolves, there is sultry heat, palm trees with cacti behind them and salsa music coming from the stereo in the Lada. A sign behind the guard hut proclaims that the village of Cayamo, which is where I assume we are, is an ‘impregnable bastion of the revolution’.
We trundle on, the Cuban side of the frontier to the base now directly on our right. I can see Cuban troops in lookout towers beyond barbed wire training their binoculars on something in the distance. There is also a little railway that my taxi driver explains is still used for small gauge freight trains carrying fish or the salt taken from the salt flats now stretching away to our left.
‘Guantánamo salt is famous. The best in Cuba,’ my taxi driver explains. And there was me looking for a souvenir when I could have picked up a culinary delicacy in any state food shop. Maybe. My ‘guide’ has hardly said a word yet.
The land is low-lying here, partly swamp, which explains Guantánamo Bay’s reputation as a breeding ground for mosquitos and tropical disease. Almost like an ill omen I spot a forest of small gravestones, an old cemetery on what is now effectively an island amid the salt flats and swampland. In the distance though, I can see the unmistakeable white golf-ball shape of a radar dome, the first US construction I have seen on Cuba other than 1950s cars. And tall stilts supporting a water tower. Somewhere over there I know there is also a Pizza Express, a Taco Bell, Subway, KFC and a McDonalds. It is rumoured that well-behaved detainees are rewarded with Happy Meals. Oh brave new world that has such fast food chains in it.
Meanwhile we have come to Checkpoint Number Three, which looks substantially more serious than the first two. For a start we not only have to all get out of the car, I am invited alone – at gentle gun point no less – into a little concrete cabin where an elderly army official with tremendous white moustache and thick glasses demands to see my documentation. He spends what seems like ages scrutinizing my passport before eventually asking me to point out where its number is. I show him and he checks it methodically against that on the all-important piece of paper signed by the policeman with an ailing mother in Guantánamo town before entering it by hand in a ledger.
The next question is more puzzling, to me at least. ‘Su nacionalidad?’ My nationality? The guy is holding my passport, right? I would have thought it was a bit of a giveaway. ‘British,’ I tell him, pointing to Her Majesty’s crest on the front of the maroon jacket. I am almost about to direct him to read that guff about ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs requests and requires, etc….’ and to point out the bit about ‘without let or hindrance’. But he is looking at it carefully, nodding and eventually says, ‘Frances?’ Eh? And then it dawns on me that the only words written on Her Majesty’s crest are Honi soit qui mal y pense. French.
For a moment I’m tempted to go with the flow and be amused by presenting a British passport and being deemed French. I believe strongly in the European ideal but even the most fervent advocates of the EU haven’t taken things that far yet and there are more than a few old-fashioned Europhobes in Britain who still regard the French as mortal enemies. But on sober reflection I recall that getting documentation wrong in suspicious communist countries especially as regards nationality can be a very bad idea, and feel reluctant to see my short-sighted Cuban colonel (or whatever his rank is, I have actually no idea) end up behind bars, possibly with me for his cell mate.
‘No, no,’ I tell him. ‘Inglaterra.’
‘Ah,’ he says, in a ‘why didn’t you say so in the first place’ sort of way and enters that too in his ledger, though not without a second glance – in fact more of a second detailed examination – of my passport. Not without cause, I realized, noticing for the first time that nowhere on or in the said document does the word by which most of the world still refers to our country appear: England. Scottish National Party, please note.
A big sign by side of the road informs us the sleepy little huddle of houses is the outskirts of Caimanera.
‘Alligators,’ says the driver. I stare out of the window eagerly. ‘No, no. Not here, but the town, is named after alligator. Cayman.’ How about that? A town in Cuba named after a Porsche!
Our own equivalent, the yellow Lada with go-fast stripes and its chequered spoiler skirts the seafront and twists up a hill to what has to be one of the country’s nicest – and emptiest – resort hotels: the Vilamar, a pretty agglomeration of red-roofed chalets with an elegant hardwood bar and restaurant both fully staffed and both totally empty. Unsurprisingly. It is still illegal for foreigners to spend the night here, and all but impossible for Cubans. And in any case who would want to? Cuban shipping has access to the sea through the American-controlled bay but any sprawling sandy beaches there might be would lie on the shores of the Caribbean rather than the bay. And it is not as if Cuba is short on beaches. So until the day this last bit of Cold War frontier finally thaws, the Vilamar will remain a beautiful, fully-staffed, fully-functioning white elephant. Complete with mosquitoes, one of which, a particularly vicious little bastard, has just felt obliged to live up to Guantánamo Bay’s unwelcoming reputation by tucking into a pint of my blood, the first mosquito bite I have had on Cuba.
As the sole visitor I feel compelled to please my hosts by posing for a photograph with them, cold can in one hand, straw hat on head and Fidel-style (before he quit) Cohiba cigar in the other. In the background is the inner bay, which is wholly under Cuban control, and the watchtowers – nearly all of which are clearly ‘American’ (the Cubans of course only ever call them Estados-Unidosense, making an adjective out of US). There is even one of those little fixed tourist binoculars on a stand which for a few CUC cents will let you spy up close on Uncle Sam, or at least get you a slightly less distant view of a US marine using a pair of binoculars to stare back at you.
It is one of the strangest feelings I have ever experienced in a quarter century covering the Cold War to what we all thought was its end. When I lived in East Berlin I would delight in taking visitors to the viewing stand next to the Reichstag from where they could look over, as over the 28 years of the Wall’s existence thousands of tourists and hundreds of foreign dignitaries had done, to the supposedly frightening communist east beyond the walled-off Brandenburg Gate. Then I would load them into my car and drive through Checkpoint Charlie, turn left along Friedrichstrasse and left again down Unter den Linden to where the Brandenburg Gate stood floodlit from the other side, with the Wall almost invisible a hundred metres away, and try to tell them that there were two sides to every story.
The Wall was wrong of course, inhuman and by its very nature necessarily ephemeral, but the point I was trying to make, and still adhere to, is that history is what historians make it. Or as a greater wit than mine once put it, ‘The only reason God tolerates historians is because they can do what he cannot: alter the past.’ Just as journalists, and travel writers, do our best with perceptions of the present.
After all, here I am standing in an empty restaurant in a communist state with one party rule, which tolerates no opposition and insists despite the obvious economic quagmire into which it has led its people, that its system is fairer and more honourable than that of the country on the other side of this fence, which unselfconsciously styles itself ‘leader of the free world’. It should be a bad joke, but the tragedy is that it isn’t. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the US presence at Guantánamo Bay – and the obvious parallel is Britain’s long but now relinquished occupation, under a similar treaty, of Hong Kong – it is the US itself which has turned logic on its head. The US regularly, repeatedly, systematically accuses the Havana government of a lack of respect for human rights, yet the continued existence of this greatest symbol of its own willingness to suspend those rights makes all else farcical.
Staring out at the watchtowers and radar domes on the low green tropical hills beyond the barbed wire I know that in camps over there, men in orange jumpsuits are imprisoned in cells without ever having faced trial; they have suffered what nobody disputes is torture by waterboarding. This makes it hard to believe there are – or maybe ever were – clear-cut sides in the Cold War or even now in its bastard child, the War against Terror. In all of this Cuba cuts an anomalous figure, like those apocryphal World War II Japanese soldiers holed up in Pacific islands decades after their war ended.
I know and like the United States. Many of my cousins are US citizens. In the year of Barack Obama’s election I travelled 10,000 miles by train around that massive continental nation which prides itself, mostly rightly, on justice and liberty. Yet here in what most US citizens, including the bulk of Cuban emigrés in Florida, would consider the patch of weeds in Uncle Sam’s well-kept back yard, I can’t help feeling happy to be on this side of the fence.
In a small room next to the restaurant’s unused swimming pool there is a small exhibition dedicated to the base. In fact the entire floor of the room, about the size of a small child’s bedroom, is dedicated to a curious topographical map: piles of sand in the corners of the room arranged to represent the hills beyond the forbidden frontier. On the wall is a hand-painted history of the bay, ‘baptized by Christopher Columbus in 1494 as the Great Bay … illegally occupied by the United States’. On the walls are aerial photographs, decades old, of the base’s desalination plant (Castro long ago cut off fresh water supplies), the hospital and streets of formulaic US suburban housing. They are all at least 30 years old, and all of US origin. For all that Cuba might want to spy on this cuckoo-like outpost of Yankee imperialism, they have had to get their photographs from Newsweek. They might have done better by using Google Maps. But then the problem may be not so much that this is a country where the government limits access to information, but that this is a country run by eighty-year-olds.
Back down in Caimanera town my minders are happy to let me ‘escape’ for an hour or so. The streets are little different to any other small Cuban town I have seen: dusty, hot, peppered with small dark cafés and shops with little produce. I drink a cold Mayabe at a corner bar watched with great curiosity by a group of three grizzled locals. Foreigners are obviously a rarity in Caimanera. The only thing that stops them staring disconcertingly is when I try to ask them about the base. They shrug their shoulders, mutter under their breath and turn back to their coffee.
Down by the shore a group of kids are splashing happily in the bay. The US watchtowers haunt the horizon several hundred metres away, but nobody pays any heed. Rather over-optimistically I ask a passing woman to take my photograph with the watchtowers in the distance but she merely shakes her head vigorously and points to a red sign nailed to a truncated palm leaning over the water. In big white letters it says ACCESSO CONTROLLADO. I take the point, though I’m not sure everybody does. Just beyond it two men are wading out into the water, carrying makeshift fishing rods.
And then beyond them I notice what has to be the main Cuban military guard post. Except that at first glance that’s not what it looks like. Standing on a concrete base at the edge of the gravel beach is an absurd pantomime three-storey structure in turquoise blue with a white balustrade surrounding a second floor balcony. It could be the lifeguard station at some elaborate 1930s art deco swimming pool or the stand from which some Gilbert and Sullivan dictator would review his troops. The top floor is reached by a ladder from the second, but it is in any case empty. The supposed occupants, two of them, are lying in the shade by the foot of it, smoking, rifles by their sides. Whatever the state of permanent alert on the Cactus Curtain, in Caimanera today it is clearly not red.
On a street corner next to the inevitable José Martí street, with a bust of the great man on a plinth, there is a swathe of supposed graffiti – obviously done by state-sponsored artists with official permission, like those on the walls in Santa Clara – showing a spit of red land, clearly intended to indicate the base, with a Cuban flag flying from it and the sloganin big bold letters: TE QUIERO LIBRE. I want you to be free. Next to it two teenage girls are sitting on a ledge, chilling. One of them is wearing a red T-shirt with the Stars and Stripes on it.
