Slow Train to Guantanamo, page 8
It seems perfectly reasonable to me, but to them it is clearly so exorbitant they are embarrassed to ask for it. I hand her a five and immediately provoke another crisis. She can’t change it. ‘Momento, señor, uno momento,’ she pleads, panicking that her first foreign guest this millennium – to judge from my reception – might decide not to bother after all, and dashes out into the street to find change.
In the mean time, to make sure I don’t change my mind, her colleague has already started to show me round. I don’t really need or want a guided tour, and I’m in any case not sure my Spanish is up to it, but I don’t want to spoil her evident enjoyment in actually having something to do for her living, even if it is only following me round and telling me where the door is to the next room.
By the time her colleague comes back with my change I am thoroughly engrossed in the history of Matanzas. And a fairly grim one it is too. The Athens of Cuba was a Mecca for slave traders, to the extent that by the middle of the nineteenth century they made up more than 62 per cent of the population, over 100,000 souls. Amidst the cane-cutting machetes, and pirates’ pistols, the museum has a seemingly endless stock of leg-irons, but also some enlightening comments on the Spanish attitude to slavery: unlike in the Anglo-Saxon world, the Spanish imposed a hierarchical ladder which luckier and more industrious slaves could actually climb, to the extent of eventually not just winning their freedom but access to the ranks of the bourgeoisie. Contrary to their reputation as harsh colonial masters, the Spanish, partly aided by the turbulence back home during the early nineteenth century including the invasion of Spain by Napoleon, contributed to the growth of an educated, relatively affluent black middle class. There was a much larger degree of intermarriage than in Anglo-Saxon colonies.
The one Matanzas is most proud of is Juan Gualberto Gómez, born to slaves on a sugar plantation who were allowed to purchase his freedom allowing him to learn to read and write, and send him to school in Havana. His intelligence was such that his parents, with financial support from the owner of the sugar plantation where they worked, eventually sent him to Paris to learn to be a carriage maker.
There he lived through the traumatic events following the Franco–Prussian War, the Paris Commune and the rise of the Third Republic, becoming instead a French–Spanish translator and writing for a French newspaper. When he finally returned to Cuba, it was fate that he should bump into and become friends with José Martí, the gadfly intellectual revolutionary. Martí made him his ‘man in Havana’, but the Spanish arrested him, deported and interned him in their north African enclave of Ceuta.
Unlike Martí therefore, he survived the wars of independence, returned to Cuba and for the next thirty years until his death in 1933 he was a champion of the free press, campaigning against those who were ready to let Cuba slip into America’s back pocket. It is hard to know what he would have made of the Castros’ regime, but it is easy to know what they thought of him. Like his old chum José Martí, they made him an airport, Cuba’s second biggest, at Varadero, just up the road.
The lady showing me round the museum is also keen that I see their other proud possession: bit of twisted metal from the wreckage of La Coubre, a French freighter which exploded in Havana harbour in March 1960, just a few months after the revolution. The ship was carrying large amounts of munitions ordered by the Castros from Belgium. Not only were the arms lost but 75 people died and more than 200 were injured, not least because a second bomb exploded half an hour later, apparently deliberately targeting the rescue services, which included Che Guevara acting in his trained profession as a doctor. The Cuban revolutionaries blamed it squarely on the CIA. The US government has never commented, but acknowledges the existence of official files on the incident, closed to the public for 150 years. Over to you, Mr Obama?
There are more rain clouds on the horizon as I emerge back into the blistering sunlight, leaving my three museum ladies clucking over a one-CUC tip and smiling like they’d just been invited to a Buckingham Palace garden party.
I look at my watch and realize that it’s barely 12.30. I’ve still got another 12 hours in Matanzas. Time to make the day for one of the hordes of taxi drivers who seem to be the only group in town actively touting for business. In theory only ‘official’ licensed tourist taxis are supposed to take foreigners; in practice anyone does, taxi driver or not. If you have a car in Cuba, no matter how ancient, you are part of an élite. It has only just been proposed by the new regime to make it legal to buy and sell cars (and/or property); up until now if you or your family didn’t have a car before 1959, you either have good contacts in the government, or you walk.
That not only explains the continuing survival of those American dinosaurs from the fifties – if it goes you can’t replace it – but it makes every Cuban car owner an amateur mechanic, and a part-time taxi driver.
Opting for style rather than comfort I choose the owner of a bright red big-hooded bulbous 1958 Peugeot 403, the distant ancestor of the little models being imported for government use today. My destination is Monserrate, a nineteenth-century monastery that had fallen into disuse but has recently been restored. The main reason for visiting it, however, is the spectacular vista from the hill top over the whole city, straddling its two rivers, the Yumurí and the San Juan, a pair of glinting silver ribbons that wind their way through the lush green landscape. In the distance I can just make out a little grey-white line of the hotels in Varadero.
Aware that this is one of the few towns most beach-loving package holiday makers actually visit, the government has set up a laid-back little bar and restaurant. And mindful – up to a point – of its own citizens it also operates a second, which takes moneda nacional, a little down the hill, without the view. I give it a go, much to the surprise of the staff who exchange glances suggesting I should know my place and eat in the foreigners’ café.
The procedure for ordering in a moneda nacional institution is a little different. For a start you don’t really order a dish so much as compose it. Cubans get exactly what they pay for. No more and no less. And I mean exactly. Just like in the old Soviet Union, there is a weight for each piece of meat on the menu. If there’s pork chops available it will say ‘pork chop, 210 grams’. I order rabbit – not least because I’m surprised to see it – 160 grams – and at the waitress’s prompting, add some rice (180 grams). Otherwise I’d have just got a piece of meat on its own.
Well, not quite on its own. It comes in a sauce. A quite nice sauce actually. Brown. More like a thick gravy. Its main function though is to disguise how little meat there actually is. Of that 160 grams I’d say a good 100 is bone. Which means scraping around somewhere in the brown goop for a few shreds of rabbit meat. This was one lean bunny. But what there is tastes okay and the sauce gives the rice some taste, plus there’s the bonus that the whole meal costs only marginally more than the beer I wash it down with.
Cacique is one of two brands I’ve come across that are sold for national pesos. The name comes from the word for ‘chief’ in the language of the Taino tribes who were the original inhabitants of Cuba before the Spanish arrived and exterminated them, partly deliberately and partly because they introduced them to European diseases such as smallpox and the common cold. The Taino got their own back by giving the Spaniards syphilis.
The other beer is Mayabe, named after a town in the Holguin province of eastern Cuba, where there is supposed to be a drunk donkey called Pancho who lives on the beer. I suspected this story of being apocryphal but there is a YouTube video so I suppose it must be true, though the donkey looks less than desperate for another pint.
To my taste, however, Cacique is a better beer than the supposedly premium brand Bucanero sold primarily to tourists for CUCs. For a start it is lighter and more bitter without the cloying sweet taste that I suspect in Bucanero comes from putting too much sugar into the brew. Not that it’s a whole heap cheaper. A can of Cacique costs 18 pesos while outside Havana you can get a Bucanero or Cristal for one CUC, which you have to remember is worth 25 ‘national’ pesos. A substantial bit more you might say, but it still means for the average Cuban without access to CUCs (unlike most of those living in Matanzas) a can of Cacique costs a couple of days’ salary.
Inevitably by the time I finish my meal and head back into town, there isn’t a taxi to be found. Anywhere. It’s siesta time; in fact the main way to distinguish siesta time from the rest of the time is the absence of would-be taxi drivers hawking their services. The result is that I could do with a siesta myself by the time, footsore and fried, I trudge into the town centre.
Going back to the hotel to crash for an hour or so seems a bit defeatist, especially as it seems one or two of the taxi drivers have decided to re-emerge, it is still hot as hell and a lot more humid, and there’s a bit of beach a couple of miles out of town.
La Concha is not exactly Varadero, just a little crescent of sand with a bar at one end. The bar is mainly colonized by a middle-aged Italian bloke sporting a coiffed salt-and-pepper hairstyle with a Cuban girl less than half his age on one arm and a Rolex on the other, fondling them alternately. He looks like the sort of bloke who might have been a regular guest at Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties.
The heat is unrelenting, at least 35ºC and humid enough to grow orchids in the air. After a brief swim and a seat in the shade, I realize I’m in danger of melting and reckon it’s time to go back and pack my bags. Which is when I discover that the taxi drivers have packed it in for the day again.
Convoys of rusty buses and open-topped trucks are flying by, stuffed with workers from Varadero. The ones in the trucks are jammed together, hanging on for dear life as they jolt unheedingly over ‘sleeping policemen’. I envy them. Despite a sturdy straw hat salvaged from a previous trip to Mexico, I feel in danger of dropping from heatstroke. There is a total lack of shade.
On the landward side stretches a long, gently curve of neo-colonial single-storey buildings, with mock Corinthian columns, most still bearing remnants of once-bright colours while one or two have been repainted: blues, pinks, purples, yellows. Every single one is shuttered up. At one end there is a faded mural of José Martí, Camilo Cienfuegos and Fidel Castro, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of Cuban Communism.
I am back in Bizarro World again. In front of me, in the middle of a long thin field of brown grass between the former shopping arcade – I realize now that is what this gentle colonial curve must once have been – the Cuban flag hangs limply from a flagpole. The symbol of independence from Spain since 1902, unchanged by Castro, began life – like the Capitolio, mimicking a US institution. The US ‘stars and stripes’ flew in Havana for three years during the 1899–1902 US intervention in the Cubans’ revolt against Spain. When the Cubans adopted one that was their own design but remarkably similar: a star and stripes, five stripes and a single star.
Today the US flag flies only at the far end of the island, at Guantánamo. But the influence still hovers in the background. Cuban Spanish is littered with US-Americanisms. Hot dogs are translated literally as perros calientes while los baños a literal translation of ‘bathrooms’, is used here – as in Mexico – when they mean toilets (servicios in Spain).
Beneath the flag a group of kids in smart red uniforms are practising baseball. It could be a Little League game somewhere in Florida or the Carolinas. And all of a sudden I can visualize the little neo-colonial parade behind me festooned with inflatable toys, beach balls, flippers, hot dog stands, a picture of the finger-lickin’ chicken-selling colonel, the Seattle coffee shop mermaid in her green circle and – somewhere subtly integrated into the colonial architecture – the yellow arches. And I don’t know if it would make the average Cuban laugh or cry. The Cuban national anthem, much touted by the Castros, includes the lines ‘to live in chains is to live in dishonour’. Will it still be true when the chains are Starbucks, KFC and McDonalds?
We could ask ourselves the same question back in Britain. I find it hard to rejoice that one of the few signs of economic expansion in the current climate of recession is that Krispy Kreme donuts are tripling their number of branches in the UK. On a recent holiday to Thailand, globally famed for its healthy cuisine, I found the natives queuing for coffee and donuts at American chains. Cuba for the moment is safe from this commercial contagion, but only because it is in an isolation ward. Fully exposed to the virus, I suspect it would succumb in a heartbeat.
The same speculation is still running through my head three hours later as I watch what passes for adverts on Cuban television: a video montage of Che Guevara smoking cigars, brandishing pistols, in a doctor’s white coat treating patients, and incongruously bare-chested on a factory floor. These alternate with romantic shots of the bearded Camilo Cienfuegos riding on horseback at the head of a troop of revolutionaries, looking for all the world like the US Seventh Cavalry.
I am sitting with four other people in a line of red plastic chairs in a concrete bunker that purports to be a railway station somewhere very definitely on the wrong side of the tracks, about a mile out of the centre of Matanzas. On the wall is a photograph of Raúl Castro in his army cap beaming myopically through his glasses with what one cynic has called the ‘smug smile of a self-satisfied Madrid green-grocer’. Slogans stencilled on either side proclaim, ‘Unity means Strength and Victory’, and, ‘We have no right not to do our best’. It is easy to laugh at these faded, endlessly repeated political slogans, but western politicians regularly come out with equally glib nonsense: they just don’t paint it on the walls.
But my major concern for the moment is trying to find out when my train might arrive, to little avail. It seems the reason for my extended stay in Matanzas is that being relatively close to Havana, not many trains stop here. That said, not many seem to pass without stopping either. Except for goods trains. Yet again Cuba seems to have followed a US model: the railways have become dominated by goods trains. Passengers come second best.
In theory, according to a chalk scribble on a blackboard near a doorway that leads onto what I presume is the platform, the train is timetabled at 23.20. With little faith in just how the system might actually work I’m here even earlier than the two hours before departure I was advised in Havana.
On the advice of the lady owner of my casa, I have asked for the jefe de torno, the duty manager. A thickset man in his forties claimed to fit the bill and told me he’ll call me up to the ticket office at 23.00 to buy a ticket. And not before. Despite the fact that I am here two hours early.
The blackboard is the only timetable. The television, which in a European station might display train information, is there to entertain the waiting passengers, of which there is a growing number. A bloke in jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes is taking surreptitious swigs from a bottle of rum. After a while he pulls out a packet of cigarettes and goes out for a smoke. For the first time I notice a red sign on the wall proclaiming No fumar. Even here in Cuba, home of the big cigar, the health lobby has won at least a token victory in the war against smoking. Even Fidel, once never seen without a cigar in his mouth, gave up in the 1980s.
By 10 p.m., with just an hour or so to go, things are getting livelier. Sort of. A little green lizard just ran across the floor. There are now about 15 of us waiting, most captivated by an Argentinian soap opera on the television, called Mujeres de Nadie (Nobody’s Wives), which mainly revolves around a series of flirtatious affairs between female doctors, their male colleagues and various patients. The acting is histrionic to say the least, one blonde in a white coat displaying angry grimaces while waving her hands in the air. It may, of course, be true to life; I’ve never been in an Argentinian hospital.
The bloke with the rum bottle inside his jacket comes back in with a decent looking filled roll, which he indicates he bought outside. A woman in her sixties with a big suitcase asks me to look after it for a moment while she goes to get one too. This seems a good idea. I was so concerned with getting to the station that my only thought for provisions was a bottle of sparkling water. I go to the door to find a guy with a rasta hairdo selling ham rolls from a big cardboard box. They aren’t cheap by Cuban standards, or maybe it is just that he has twigged I am a foreigner that he demands one CUC. Or because we are in Matanzas, Varadero’s backyard?
It is just gone 23.05 and I am watching the ticket counter avidly for any sign of the man who has just appeared behind the Perspex window beckoning me, when chaos breaks loose. Suddenly, without any obvious signal, everybody jumps up and crowds around the window waving pieces of paper and the bloke behind it is calling out names. None of them sound like mine. I turn in blind panic to the guy with the rum bottle who gives me a broad grin and calls to the man behind the counter, ‘What about our foreign friend here?’
The lady whose case I looked after joins in, and the jefe de torno, almost in embarrassment, feels obliged to assure everybody that I’ll get a seat: all in good time. I feel mildly reassured but extremely touched and impressed by the wave of popular concern. In fact the only word I can find for it is one that no longer sounds hollow: solidarity.
The lady with the suitcase asks me where I am headed and when I tell her my next stop is Santa Clara, she insists I visit the Che Guevara mausoleum, which is already on my list. ‘Magnificent,’ she enthuses, ‘absolutely magnificent. But only right for the hero of our revolution.’ This with, as far as I can tell, not the slightest trace of irony.
She tells me she is a anaesthetist and a professor at Havana University medical school, and is on her way to the medical school in the city of Sancti Spiritus, the eventual destination of the train we are, hopefully, about to board. She asks me about the E. coli outbreak in Europe; she’s worried about our hygiene standards.
She tells me she used to work ‘in Leningrad’ (the change of name back to St Petersburg has not caught on in Cuba). When I tell her I lived in the Soviet Union, she sighs with genuine nostalgia. ‘Ah, those were the good old days. Everybody was so friendly. All comrades together.’ I ask if she speaks much Russian, but she looks surprised even at the thought, and says, with a broad smile, ‘Nyet.’
