Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 3
The nearest city of any size to distant Baracoa is the one that is the destination of my planned journey: Guantánamo. For all the evil that word has come to evoke one way or another since the United States turned the bit of Cuban land it has controversially squatted on for a century into an incarceration camp for ‘enemy combatants’ in its ‘war on terror’, for Cubans it remains primarily the subject of one of their island’s most haunting and evocative melodies. Almost an alternative national anthem.
And here and now in front of one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the Americas it is that song that fills the air, played by a little chamber orchestra sat out in the warm night across the cobble-stones: Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera. A 1920s song about love for a simple country girl from the remote provinces, long since fused with words from that great mad romantic José Martí’s words to become Cuba’s alternative sentimental national anthem: Yo soy un hombre sincero, de donde crece la palma. (I am an honest man from where the palm tree grows.)
It is hard to hear it in circumstances such as these – lilting strings, moonlight, a beautiful baroque cathedral illuminated by a warm yellow light, swaying palm trees while an elegant elderly black couple dressed in full colonial fig pose for cameras, he in white trousers, wide-brimmed straw hat, black jacket and silver-knobbed cane, she in full petticoated dress and bonnet – and not have the word Guantánamo conjure up anything a vision of heavenly enchantment.
Now all I have to do is work out how the hell to get there.
3. Trova along with son, danzón, salsa and about a dozen other variations of traditional Cuban music was made famous by the 1999 film, Buena Vista Social Club.
CHAPTER THREE
In Training
Breakfast is something of relief, primarily because the Cuban breakfast does not require much cooking. My plate of sliced pineapple, mango and papaya accompanied by thick mango juice and hot dark coffee hits the spot. The decision to take it at an outside table loses its charm when almost immediately a municipal drain clearing machine parks itself a metre way and begins sucking goop noisily from a manhole.
Nobody else seems to mind. And I am far from alone. By now the outside tables are packed with the Policía Especializada, puffing away on cheap cigarettes, swigging coffee – in one case at least accompanied by a tot of white rum – and joking boisterously with one another, not least because some of the female officers have difficulty maintaining a modicum of decency crossing their legs in those ridiculously short skirts. The black fishnets, it seems, are regulation issue in almost every government position.
Breakfast has a hot course too. One I am to discover is absolutely standard everywhere I go, not least because it relies on the one form of intensive farming that works: eggs. The choice does not automatically include a boiled egg. And I am more than happy with the options suggested – revuelto (scrambled) or tortilla. The latter turns up in seconds. Proving – as we Anglophones used to a myriad varieties of English know only too well – that the same word in the same language does not necessarily mean the same thing in different places, the Cuban tortilla is nothing like either Spain’s thick potato omelette, or Mexico’s corn-based burrito wrapper. Order a tortilla in Havana and what you get is a rich eggy omelette, as thin as a French crêpe, well seasoned, and with a bit of sliced onion on the side. Surprisingly delightful. I feel set up for the day.
And it is to be quite a day. First things first. I need to get to the railway station and find out about train timings. The Estación Central de Ferrocarriles (Central Railway Station – even though it is actually the only railway station in Havana proper) is situated to the south-west of the old town, on the other side of the main central artery that divides the ancient part of the city from the great sprawl of the districts known as Centro Havana and Vedado, much of which dates only from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The great landmark that sits on the broad boulevard that is officially known as the Paseo de Martí (that man again) but everyone simply refers to as the Prado, is the Capitolio. This is a magnificent copy of the Capitol in Washington DC, one of those facts that seems to confirm the image of Cuba as an image of the United States seen in a distorted fairground mirror. It was finished in 1929 and for a mere 28 years from 1931 until the revolution in 1959 was the seat of government. It now houses the Academy of Sciences. And is open as a museum. To itself.
Wander beyond it though into the streets of Centro or Vedado and you are in the Cuba that does not receive generous UNESCO grants for restoration. The result is, well, to put it delicately: rubble. Or soon to be rubble. There is hardly a tenement block that does not appear to be made of fast crumbling concrete. Washing hangs on lines stretched across balconies that appear to defy gravity by remaining tenuously attached to the buildings they protrude from. Cubans lean on them and shout to one another across the street. I wouldn’t stand on one if you paid me.
It is hot, sticky – 29ºC (84ºF) and 80 per cent humidity, which is pretty much standard for Cuba most of the year round – and the streets are crowded both with pedestrians and motor vehicles, of one sort or another. Two things immediately strike me as having changed since my previous visit four years earlier. First there are no more of the idiosyncratic, slow, dirty and dangerous buses known as camellos for the simple reason that they were hump-backed. Instead there are now Chinese-built bendy buses that not too long ago must have been shiny. Secondly, and this has an almost tragic note, there are far fewer of the ancient iconic American automobiles that have become Cuba’s accidental global trademark.
They are still there, of course, 1950s Chevrolets and Cadillacs, their bright painted colours – sometimes renewed with a lick of gloss – defying their rusting bodywork. But it is only here, in front of the Capitolio, where they line up to offer rides to tourists, that I realize how few of them I have seen compared to just four years ago. In fact, the more I think of it, the more I realize I have seen a greater number up on bricks or in final stages of decomposition by the roadside than actually on the road. It may be a sign of changing times, or it may be just that at long last these old workhorses – never designed as such but forced into the role by the US embargo and a curiously egalitarian-inspired communist ban on private car sales – may finally be coming to the end of the road. There is a limit to how long soldering irons, sewing needles and coat hangers can keep a car on the road when it lacks spare parts that, even were there no embargo, have been unavailable for more than four decades.
In their place there are, from a nostalgic romantic’s point of view, a depressing number of nondescript, relatively modern, blue-number-plated Peugeots, similar to my taxi from the airport. These appear to have become the government import car of choice. Yet as one emblem of romantic nostalgia fades away, another emerges. As the elegant dinosaurs of the golden age of American capitalism slowly edge towards extinction, their place as iconic totems is being taken by the woolly mammoths of the golden age of global communism: the imports of the Soviet era. Here and there I spot an East German Trabant (its composite body signally suited to the tropical climate, as long as it doesn’t go soggy in the hurricane season) or a rusty Wartburg, and a host of Moskviches and Ladas. To someone like me who lived and worked in Eastern Europe, they too are now especially evocative of a vanished world.
I am standing outside the garishly painted El Floridita, which boasts of being Havana’s most famous bar and the home of the Hemingway daiquiri (it is certainly the most expensive place in Cuba to drink one), although not where it was invented (more on that later). A vehicle pulls up outside to put a smile on my face I would never have imagined, a perfect automobile incarnation of the two worlds that Cuba still schizophrenically straddles: an improvised stretch limo made up of two Russian Ladas. Amazing what the human imagination can do with a hacksaw and a welding gun.
I have another mode of transportation to the train station, however, one that suits the heat. Nowadays as visible in the wealthy metropolises of Chicago and London, the pedal-powered conveyance usually known as a bicycle rickshaw is called a bicitaxi in Cuba and, like so many things in this Caribbean communist anomaly, has had an evolution all of its own here. The main difference, for a start, is a general lack of proper saddles for the cyclist. The lean black guy in a red singlet and shorts I ask to take me to the station has manufactured a place for his posterior out of an ingenious crisscrossed set of bungee cords. It doesn’t look comfortable but it appears to work.
The breeze caused by our motion is a blessed relief but the ride soon develops typical Cuban fairground qualities as we edge into traffic by a process of alarming wiggling turns to avoid potholes big enough to lose a leg in. All of this is accompanied by a strange series of whistles from my ‘driver’, not melodic, not constant, just sharp, frequent and met more often than not by similar responses from other bicitaxi guys. For a moment I wonder if they are communicating in some sort of code, and then as he emits a particularly strident whistle just as an elderly lady with an open basket of overripe bananas on her head steps into the street in front of us, I realize: nobody has a bell!
My driver also is as keen to chat as your average London cabbie with a foreigner in the back of his taxi. ‘Where you from?’ he starts in elementary English, repeating it in Spanish, a phrase I am to hear constantly over the coming weeks, ‘De donde?’ I give him the easy answer, ‘Inglaterra.’ ‘Ah,’ he says and then, just as we nearly run over a passing nun, he launches into a tirade in Spanish, disconcertingly turning his head very few seconds to make sure I understand, which I do, despite a shaky start primarily due to his subject. To my surprise, he is talking about the pope.
‘You have good people in England and in Netherlands,’ he says. ‘I saw the pope visited your country and many people protested.’
Well yes, I think, but there were also a lot of people who turned out to welcome him. I have no idea where this is going. It is a totally unexpected conversation. He points to a tattoo on his arm which unfortunately means nothing to me and then goes on to tell me how nuns beat children and that the pope is a murderous pervert.
Whether this guy had a nasty childhood experience at the hands of some Catholic clergy – enough people did – I have no idea, but I do know religion in Cuba is complicated to say the least, with a substantial fusion between Catholicism and old African religions. One way or another I am fairly certain that when Pope Benedict came to town in March 2012 – and even Raúl Castro turned out to meet him – this guy wasn’t in the audience.
But his attention has now switched to making sure I pay him his fare (one CUC) as he deposits me outside a palatial but crumbling edifice that I take to be the central station. I can see the trains. Or at least some trains. Beautiful trains, but not trains I am going to be taking any day soon. Sadly. On traffic islands in the middle of the road behind railings sit several examples of the most wonderful nineteenth- and early twentieth-century steam locomotives, beautifully painted up and firmly out of action, relics of a distant past, a past when, I am about to learn, Cuban trains actually worked.
Right now I need to discover a timetable for those that still actually run, and how to buy a ticket. That turns out to a belief system all of its own.
The place to buy tickets, for a start, is not inside the main station building itself but in a special office just around the corner. I push open the door and find myself in what looks like the waiting-room at a British NHS hospital: filled with long lines of people sitting on plastic chairs, and not looking as if they expect to leave them any time soon. The only significant difference is that is hot as hell.
In front of them there is a line of little ticket windows, only one of which appears to be staffed. I spend a few minutes vaguely looking for timetables on the walls, or any information as to the system – in Spanish, I am not expecting anything in English – but find nothing more than a hook from which hangs a sheaf of papers that might be train numbers and times but look to me like Excel spreadsheets.
Over the next few minutes the woman at the ticket window calls two names and each time someone goes up, apparently collects a ticket or reservation and leaves. Happy. I walk up to her and attempt in halting Spanish to ask about train times. She stares at me as if I have landed from Mars and asked to be taken to her leader, and points to the end of the room, where I realize there is an open door with a policeman standing by it.
Not wholly encouraged by this I go over and realize the policeman – a burly black guy with Policía Revolucionaria (the ones who might actually have to deal with crime rather than just smile at tourists) on his sleeve – is also trying to buy a train ticket. From a little man sitting at a desk inside the door out of sight of everybody in the waiting-room. I do what seems sensible in the circumstances: I wait my turn.
Eventually the policeman, after displaying his identity card, goes away with a piece of paper with something written on it which, from the smile on his face I assume to be a ticket. The little man – I call him that not patronizingly but because he was one of those pale-skinned, pinched-faced, skinny characters in a waistcoat (in this heat!) who seemed to embody the global caricature of a railway clerk – looks up at me with mild bemusement on his face. Now for the hard bit.
‘Cuando …’ I start. I knew my Spanish was going to have to sink or swim on this trip. What I hadn’t quite been prepared for was the heavier than expected Cuban accent. Happily the clerk was prepared to listen, and reply, in a close approximation of my pidgin castellano.
Spanish is every bit as global a language as English, and that means it’s got every bit as many accents. Castellano, the language of Madrid and what you end up speaking if you learn Spanish in Europe, is actually quite difficult to pronounce properly, laden with lisps. For example, that most important of phrases, ‘a beer please’, is written ‘una cerveza por favor’ but in a classic Madrid accent sounds something like ‘una therbetha por fabor’. In most of the new world, from Mexico down to the tip of Latin America it sounds more like ‘una servesa por favor’. Easier. Unless of course you have learned the other version first. And laid-back Cuba has a take on the lingo that is all its own.
But Cubans on the whole are remarkably educated people and my railway clerk has worked out that I want to know what time the trains left for the east. He has a simple answer: the train to Santiago de Cuba leaves at eight. What about the more local services? He smiles and repeated his answer. Yes, I smile back for politeness’ sake, and to show him I have indeed understood what time the train to Santiago leaves, but I wasn’t just asking about that one. It’s not as if the train to Santiago can be the only train, can it? Can it? His response is simply to look even more amused and reply, ‘Sí, el único.’ Yep, just the one.
I hadn’t considered this possibility. Santiago is on my route, sort of. It is the second biggest city in Cuba, Havana’s ancient rival in everything from sport to salsa. Guantánamo, the end of the line, lies beyond it. So at least getting on a train heading for Santiago is a step in the right direction. I can always get off and on along the line.
The only problem is, I don’t want to leave today – I have things to sort out, like a mobile phone SIM card so I can ring ahead to book rooms – but I do want to leave in the next day or two. But most importantly I need to get back to Havana in time to catch my plane back to Britain. My plan is that having taken the slow route there, I’ll take the fast route back, sampling the supposed luxury of the tren frances, the ‘French train’, supposed to be the pride of Ferrocarriles de Cuba, an overnight deluxe service direct from Santiago to Havana. Under the circumstances booking in advance seems like a good idea, so I decide I might as well give it a go.
‘Can I buy a ticket now from Santiago to Havana for the 20th?’ I ask.
‘To buy a ticket to Santiago, you should come back here on the 15th.’
‘No, I want to buy a ticket for the train that leaves Santiago on the 20th.’
‘Ah, for that you should go to the station in Santiago on the 15th.’
This is starting to look bad. I hadn’t planned on getting to Santiago that long in advance. I had to get to Guantánamo first.
‘Can’t I buy it here, now?’
By now he’s looking at me as if I’ve seriously lost my marbles. I’m beginning to understand the rest of the people in the waiting-room, why they were there, how long they had probably been waiting and why they’d sensibly left their brains at home.
‘To buy a ticket from Santiago, you must be in Santiago,’ he says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. He almost has me believing him too. That’s the thing about Cuba: it has a logic all of its own.
‘What would I do,’ I ask aloud, aware that I might be getting into the realms of speculative fiction here, ‘if I wanted to buy a ticket to go from here to Santiago tonight.’
He brightens up at that. ‘That is not so hard. Then you should come back tonight. Two hours before the train is due to leave.’
‘Could I buy a ticket now?’
‘No. You must come back two hours before the train leaves. Then if there are any seats left, you can buy a ticket.’
Ah, the centavo was beginning to drop. I would be on standby. Better than nothing, but hardly reassuring. Especially for the return journey when I would have a plane to catch.
‘What if there are no seats left?’ I ask, already anticipating the dreaded shrug of the shoulders so familiar to long-suffering travellers in the olden days in communist Eastern Europe. Instead I get me a beaming smile.
‘You are a foreigner. You will pay in convertibles, CUCs, no? For CUCs there is always a seat. That is why you talk to me, see. This is desk for special travellers.’
His job, I suddenly realize, is only to deal with foreigners, and other privileged members of society. Like the large revolutionary policeman who’d picked up a ticket in front of me, who would have paid in pesos rather than CUC but would have been given priority. Everybody else had to book their journey days in advance at least, then come and queue up and wait to be told whether or not they’d got a seat.
