Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 25
The Casa de la Trova, Santiago’s most famed music venue, with its galleried balcony hanging out over the street on the corner of Heredia and San Felix, is distinctly low-key and relatively relaxed. Famously Paul McCartney landed his private plane at Santiago airport back in 2000 and asked to be taken to the club where he hummed along with the resident singers, acknowledged a Beatles debt to their music style and left them a note of thanks still enshrined there amidst the many tributes left by artists from all over the world.
‘Muchas gracias, señores y señoras, y señoritas’ it reads, in admirable Spanish, ‘Paul McCartney en Cuba, Santiago, Jan 2000.’
But tonight that is about the height of the excitement. I pay my entrance fee, in CUCs of course, only to find the upstairs room has a motley three-piece band playing a little despondently to an audience of about a dozen, some of whom are clearly dancing girls employed by the establishment. The night is sultry and hot, the fans aren’t working and even the girls aren’t dancing much.
‘It is not good,’ Dolores, attired in a vast purple dress with frills and flounces tells me, puffing on a cheap cigarette as she leans over the balcony, ignoring the lacklustre music inside and sipping a warm soft drink: ‘There are not so many tourists now. I think maybe nobody has any money any more.’ It seems that even isolated communist Cuba is suffering from the global crisis of capitalism.
For the sake of it, I try a desultory twirl with Dolores on the dance floor, but the only others are a middle-aged Canadian couple and the band are hardly rising to the occasion. I buy a tot of Santiago’s famed rum and sit with it for a while before it dawns on me that if I am not careful I shall be late for my train. And that would never do.
The time has come for my last train ride in Cuba. The big one. And supposedly the best. The fabled tren frances, the ‘French train’, the alleged luxury express that travels direct from Santiago to Havana overnight, at almost twice the speed of any other. Although, remembering that the average speed of most of the trains I have travelled on so far rarely hit 40 m.p.h., I am not getting overexcited about this just yet, even though I have already been down to the station earlier in the day and bought a ticket with – in Cuban terms – the greatest ease.
Santiago’s station is the most unusual I’ve seen, a strange modernist geometrical jumble of shapes, like something Frank Gehry might have designed if he’d been given lumps of concrete to work with instead of flowing titanium. The train is allegedly on time, according to a piece of paper on the glass of the jefe del torno’s office, but I’m dubious about there being any food and drink on board even a so-called deluxe train that runs overnight. I ask the jefe if there are any good food shops nearby to get supplies. The one I am directed to bizarrely resembles a low-end Chinese supermarket in Soho more than anything I’ve yet encountered in Cuba (I recognize lots of familiar soy sauce brands), albeit without the fresh goods. In fact, beyond the option of tinned sardines from Ecuador which I can imagine being hard to open on a train and potentially both smelly and messy if I succeed, the only thing that looks reasonable is a can marked Jiang Lou Luncheon Meat Reliable Forever, Patent Number 200730094346 from the Jianglou Canned Food Manufacturing Co. Ltd. With some justifiable trepidation I buy myself what is effectively a tin of Chinese spam. And a dry roll to go with it. Yum, yum.
Back at the railway station with only two hours to go I am faced with three of the most obviously gringo lads I have ever seen, even if they are undoubtedly Europeans rather than North Americans. This blond, fair haired trio of tourists in shorts and panama hats turn out to be Czechs – Tomas, Martín and Karel – who have hardly been backpacking – other than a means of carrying their luggage – but travelling Viazul buses from one resort to another with a mild spot of catered camping in the mountains. I can only say they look like they’ve had a better time than I have. But I’m not really sure they’ve been to Cuba. For a start one says, glibly as if it is just an afterthought, ‘I trust the train is on time.’
I find it hard not to crack up. Here they are, three lads from the heart of the old Soviet evil empire travelling around the most crocked communist country remaining – apart from North Korea – and they expect it to be like Europe. But then why wouldn’t they with their squeaky clean EU maroon passports and their bundles of euros.
‘Do you think we might have to share a compartment with any Cubans?’ asks Tomas, somewhat apprehensively.
‘Oh yes. Definitely,’ I tell them to their obvious horror. I am sorely tempted to tell them that just twenty-five years ago ‘westerners’ – which of course they now unquestioningly consider themselves – travelling in Eastern Europe would have worried about having to share their compartment with any Czechs.
But they probably weren’t even born when the Berlin Wall came down. One makes a bit of a fuss about not being that young, but then adds, ‘My parents often say things didn’t work so well back in those days.’
Which has a rich irony to it as at precisely that moment there is an announcement over the crackly station Tannoy (I suspect they still do actually use ‘Tannoy’) in Spanish. The Czech lads are blissfully ignoring it until I decide I really had better translate for them that the station master has just announced the train to Havana will be three hours late departing.
I can see the incipient panic. ‘We have a flight tomorrow, via Amsterdam back to Munich, then the InterCityExpress back to Prague.’ says one. This seems a bit optimistic to me. I’m leaving at least 48 hours clear for this supposedly thirteen-hour journey. But Prague these days is in the German sphere of influence rather than the extinct Soviet one. They are used to things working. It turns out they had enquired about flights but decided they were too expensive. Now they’re wondering if they could get a cab to the airport on time.
By this time I am resigned to my fate and camp out on a spot near the platform with my back to my rucksack and settle down for an extra three hours’ wait. Three and a half hours later, with no further announcement and not the remotest sign of a train, I am starting to wonder if even my 48 hours was breathing space enough. To take my mind off it I do the only thing that in the circumstance was really likely to make things worse: I open the spam.
From time to time back in England I have been unamused to find bad Chinese takeaways using spam as a filler meat in anything from hot and sour soups to dumplings. I have always taken it as a hint not go back again. But that was before I encountered the sort of spam the Chinese ship to Cuba. The creature contained in the tin is a sort of slimy bright pink rubber smelling vaguely of pork you’ve left out of the fridge for a week. Even worse, I have managed to cut my finger opening it on the ridiculous unwinding steel spring thing which I remember from years ago on old corned beef cans. At least my pre-trip tetanus injection wasn’t wasted. I staunch the bleeding with my bun. That’ll add some protein to my dry bread meal.
There is not a bin in sight, so I surreptitiously move the spam to a kerbside near the road where over the course of the next half hour – yes, four hours after the original scheduled departure time of the special Havana express – I notice one or two dogs come to investigate. None of them fancies it either.
By now the three Czechs are seriously panicking and wishing they’d got that flight. As the minutes tick into hours, I’m afraid the sight of their growing desperation is the only thing that keeps me amused. Schadenfreude may be a German word, but it is a universal emotion.
Eventually, a mere five hours behind schedule our train rumbles into the station. The pride of Cuba’s railways has not completely let us down. Except of course that quite frankly it is a heap of shit. The tren frances is French all right, but it’s a far fry from a 200kph TGV. In fact it is more like a train regional, the sort of decent slow clunker that connects smaller cities in France, or used to. This one has to be at least thirty years old. That said, it is almost literally light years better than any train I have travelled on since I came to Cuba.
The windows don’t open – obviously – because the train is supposedly air-conditioned, not that any of the air conditioners I can see is emitting cold air. The automatic sliding doors between the carriages have long since given up on the automation idea. And the sliding. They are permanently stuck half-open and have to be physically forced apart, after which they are naturally reluctant to fully close again.
But the airplane-style seats are wide, far apart, upholstered in red leather – unripped! – and even actually recline a little, so it may be possible to get some sleep. Which is about all there is to do as barely half an hour after we pull out of Santiago station all the lights go out. An economy measure, apparently, but then I think back to El Spirituario, where through the early hours of the morning the lights were permanently on, and breathe a sigh of thankfulness for small mercies as I nod off.
Morning comes early on a rocking, rolling train without window blinds. I have no idea where we are, but evidently nowhere near Havana. I wonder how the Czech lads are doing, stroll along a carriage or two and find them anxiously looking at their watches amidst a dozen snoring Cubans. They look glad to see me chiefly in the vain hope that I can reassure them they’ll be in plenty of time for their flight. I have no idea how near or far from Havana we might be, not that even if I had it would be any guide as to how soon we might get there.
By the time I get back to my own seat I notice we are passing through one of the smaller stations – where the ‘express’ of course does not stop – and realize the only news I could have given them would have been bad: we are scarcely half-way there.
Conversation with the young couple opposite me – a waiter called Mario and his young wife – shows that they clearly fit into the third of my Santa Clara baker’s Cuban social classes. He works in a tourist resort and so they have access to CUCs. They also have property: and may soon even have more than one. They have been living in Santiago where with CUCs he bought the materials to build his own house. Now they are en route to Havana because his parents have just died and he has inherited their house.
The first law on housing instituted after the revolution contained the maxim that ‘housing is to live in, not live from’. The state had first rights to buy any house on the market, effectively banning the sale of property to another individual. But it is one of Raúl Castro’s most radical reforms that from November 2011, Cubans have been able to buy property from each other (exiles are still excluded) and inherit without having lived with the relative in question first. Mario and his wife now aim to open a casa particular and serve food. Foreign tourists are all they need to change their lives forever. As long as they keep coming.
My outward journey flashes past my eyes and the detail collapses into an overview that is far from heartening. There are whole swathes of central Cuba that more than anything else resemble the aftermath of a war, the general state of disrepair worn down and denigrated by the tropical climate. I am reminded of the Croatian district of Slavonia in the weeks after the withdrawal of the Yugoslav National Army: buildings in ruins, without roofs. The chief difference here is that there are still people living in them. For every one new building erected or restored in Cuba over more than half a century of communist rule, there must be at least 20 that have fallen down. There is a ruina bar in every town, roofless and worked by staff who don’t earn enough to buy a drink there.
For the first time now there is an incentive to repair and restore property in the hope of selling it on or leaving it to relatives. It is an important step, as is the ability to employ another person who is not a relative. The beginnings of a more sensible economy, albeit one still under the aegis of socialist principles, are gradually beginning to emerge.
The question still to be answered is how far will it go, and what will it do to the countryside? Barely 10 per cent of the landscape visible from the railway is under any sort of agriculture. The nearest equivalent is the groups of wandering goats grazing where they can, and a few fenced off fields of scrawny cows.
We pass a tiny town half-built breezeblock houses roofed with thatch or corrugated plastic, populated by a few dozen kids, some sleeping adults, one ancient rusting Chevrolet and three horse carts. At one stage we pass under the concrete frame of a road bridge, neither end of which touches the ground. Not so much a work in progress, as a work forgotten about.
The hours pass by, hunger assuaged by some more mango juice and a man selling remarkably edible ham rolls. With my newly acquired facility for Cuban dialect I work out that what sounds like ‘Doh pa sink’ is actually in the Spanish I learnt at school, ‘Dos para cinco’, and means he is offering two rolls for five pesos. Nacional.
Eventually we pass the outskirts of Matanzas, with the smart new bungalows of citizens class two crawling along the bay. I glance at my watch: 14.15. The Czech lads will make their flight after all.
And then suddenly, almost before I realize it, the view from the window changes to ocean and container ships floating at anchor and we are pulling into the sprawling, incoherent, rambling suburbs of Havana. Past a goods yard we crawl, past coaches and freight cars that look like abandoned toys from some long-ago childhood. Then from behind me I hear that new global common denominator: a Nokia ringtone and a male voice says: ‘Buenas … soy en el tren.’ Hiya, I’m on the train.
Aaaargh. Maybe the future is arriving after all. Just a little bit late.
Postscript
Cuba is changing. Slowly, so far very much at its own pace. Fidel Castro has been retired from government since 2008 and from the Communist Party of Cuba since 2011. He is approaching ninety years of age. His younger brother Raúl, who assumed both duties, is at the time of writing nearly eighty-two, but has nonetheless just been confirmed in a second term of office, though he has stated that he will step down when that expires in 2018.
Already he has introduced a limited degree of liberalization, including the right of farmers to sell a limited amount of produce in private markets, the right to buy property, the so-far limited right of one Cuban to employ another in what effectively constitutes a private business. Almost one million Cubans formerly employed by the state are being released with the option to set up small businesses of their own, without being taxed so heavily that they will not be viable, as has happened at times with the casas particulares and the paladares.
Tourism, therefore, is still seen as playing an important, if not dominant, role in the country’s future. But above and beyond catering to the rich foreigners, there are now Cubans going back to old trades such as shoe repairing and hair cutting, as well as opening restaurants, such as that I visited in Guantánamo. In some ways, these legal relaxations are only regularizing a black market that has already been in existence for years; in others they are genuinely opening up new opportunities.
There is no longer the same paranoia about foreign travel – in either direction. Although there is still substantial hostility in the ruling Communist Party to those who went into exile and have tried to fund and encourage opposition in their homeland, modern Cubans are no longer so comprehensively hindered from applying for visas, travelling abroad, and returning home. Indeed, in many cases the biggest impediment can be getting a visa from the country they wish to visit rather than permission from their own government to go abroad. Mobile phones are already relatively commonplace, and access to the internet, though still rare, is no longer taboo.
These are rights and freedoms that we in the ‘free world’ take for granted, but in Cuba it is genuine change and completely unlike anything that happened in East Germany or the Soviet Union until right at the very end of their existence. If there is a parallel in old Eastern Europe it is probably Hungary where a greater degree of tolerance was always shown towards black market private enterprise and foreign travel.
Already more and more US citizens are ignoring their own government’s already watered-down restrictions on travel to Cuba. The visit by megastars Beyoncé and Jay-Zee in early 2013 and the rapturous reception they received is proof that the artificial barrier is gradually disintegrating.
Certainly more and more Cubans are meeting foreign tourists who increasingly in their own way are no longer remaining restricted to the luxury enclaves to which the Communist Part of two decades ago once wanted to confine them. It is relatively easy to travel independently in Cuba, although the word ‘easy’ is hardly the one to use if you mean travelling like ordinary Cubans, as I trust this book will have made clear.
But the point is, you can do it. At no time was I ever troubled by, followed by (to the best of my knowledge) or hassled by any representative of the Cuban government, secretive or otherwise. The vocal arguments I heard about the regime on the trains and from individuals I encountered along the way were uttered with no obvious sense of fear; as someone who lived in East Berlin and Moscow, I think I have a pretty good nose for that.
The biggest issue for most Cubans is their continuing poverty, symbolized by the gross difference between the national currency in which most people earn their wages, the CUP peso, and the convertible CUC. But at least this parallel currency system, for all its harshness and inequality, works after a fashion and who knows, might even become a path to levelling the playing field: with the CUP wholly under control of the government with no foreign exchange markets to worry about, it might, just might, conceivably in time be revalued upwards towards parity with the CUC, at which stage they could be merged. That is a pipedream at the moment and I am no economist, but there are many ways in which Cuba’s current political and social situation could evolve.
