Island that Dared (13 page)

Fifteen assembly members accepted Platt only because the alternative was a continuing military occupation; they acknowledged that they had voted for ‘a restricted independence’. General Juan Gualberto Gomez, one of the black leaders of the War of Independence, was blunter. He voted against Platt, declaring that it would ‘reduce the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban Republic to a myth’. Which it did, until 1 January 1959. Although the Amendment was repealed in 1934 it had by then poisoned Cuba’s body politic and the repeal in no way affected the status of Guantanamo Bay as leased property.

In the early 1960s, when the US Joint Chiefs of Staff were frantically seeking a justification for again invading Cuba, they suggested staging a series of lethal attacks on US citizens and interests – all to be blamed,
using CIA-concocted ‘evidence’, on that diabolical Castro. This lunatic project included a plan to simulate a Cuban attack on Guantanamo Bay, employing Cuban exiles to sink a ship by way of deceiving the international media. Havana soon became aware of all these plans, which may partly explain why none was directly implemented.

On 1 May 1964 Fidel emphasised, in his Labour Day speech, that Cuba would never use force in an attempt to reunite the island:

During the 1960s Fidel made some major mistakes but he was too experienced a soldier to bite off, militarily, more than he could chew. Besides, even verbal agitation about reuniting the island would have deflected people’s energy from the task in hand – improving their own living conditions.

Our driver took a cigarette break and bought a sack of bananas in the tiny town of Yateritas; state-owned banana plantations, well weeded and watered, cover many nearby acres. When we continued the Caribbean Sea was
coruscating
beside us, separated from the road by a narrow shore of jaggedly pitted limestone. Gazing across this dazzling water towards the prison, I sent telepathic messages of sympathy to its wretched inmates and winced to remember the methods used to entrap so many ‘unlawful combatants’.

To your average Afghan US$5,000 is a small fortune and that was the ‘bounty’ offered to anyone who handed a ‘terrorist’ over to US forces or their allies – allies like the criminal Rashid Dostum whose private army was not dedicated to making Afghanistan ‘safe for democracy’. In David Rose’s chilling exposé of ‘Gitmo’ (the US pet name for their base) he explains:

Notoriously, the ‘unlawful combatant’ concept was invented by the Bush II administration to put its captives (imprisoned on leased territory over which the US has no sovereignty) beyond the protection of both the Geneva Conventions and US law. It could also be applied to those ‘Coalition’ troops who invaded a sovereign state under false pretences in March 2003 to secure US control of Iraq’s oil. Personally I would like all homicidal combats to be regarded as ‘unlawful’. But that’s another debate for another generation – perhaps the Trio’s?

The fuzzy notion that 11 September 2001 so traumatised the US administration that it lost its moral compass is sometimes advanced to explain (even excuse) Guantanamo Bay and the US forces’ indifference to massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some people forget that exactly a decade before ‘9/11’, in September 1991, Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted by a US-sponsored military junta who slaughtered uncounted thousands of his supporters in full view of the world media. Hitherto, the Bush I administration had forcibly repatriated Haitian asylum-seekers; now this programme was put on hold for two months to give the shocked media time to move on (they usually recover quickly from such shocks). Meanwhile the junta’s mass-murdering had increased mass-migrations in small boats. As many as six thousand were simultaneously at sea and repatriation was equivalent to a death sentence, as the UN High Commission for Refugees and many other observers pointed out. Various legal bigwigs agreed with Professor Kevin Johnson of the University of California who repeatedly denounced ‘the Executive Branch’s unlawful treatment of the Haitians’. Eventually, after a shameful Supreme Court judgement in favour of the Executive Branch, the Haitians’ champions secured a grim compromise: imprisonment on the ‘Gitmo’ base for an indefinite period (almost two years in some cases) instead of instant repatriation.

Scores of tents were hastily erected, encircled by barbed wire and swarming with rats, snakes and scorpions. The tents leaked and there were no lavatories, washing facilities or exercise areas. According to the
New York Times
, ‘The military and Coast Guard emphasise that theirs is a humanitarian mission’. (Just as NATO’s bombing of Kosovo and Serbia was ‘a humanitarian intervention’.)

Soon rumours of mistreatment were rife but hard to confirm; the military discouraged visitors. Their anodyne press briefings provoked several independent journalists (now a seriously endangered species) to seek access to Guantanamo Bay through the courts. Thereafter Ingrid Arnsen of
The Nation
interviewed someone who had been imprisoned (or ‘detained’) for thirteen months and who eloquently contradicted the mainstream US media’s depiction of Gitmo as ‘a haven for refugees’:

Some of those prisoners were personally known to Paul Farmer, Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. In
Pathologies of Power
he wrote:

As public unease increased, the administration felt obliged to ‘explain’ Guantanamo. A legal team loyal to Bush I was directed to develop an argument based on flagrant contempt for both US laws and internationally accepted norms. For the first time, Washington was anxious to make it clear that the US does not
own
Guantanamo Bay – it has jurisdiction over the territory but no sovereignty.

Time passed. In 1994 thousands of Cuban ‘rafters’ were held in Guantanamo; they had illegally fled towards Florida from the privations of what then looked like an indefinitely prolonged Special Period. In 1996 an unknown number of Chinese would-be immigrants were flown to Guantanamo from Bermuda and imprisoned under appalling conditions
before being sent home via Mexico. In November 2001 the first ‘terrorists’ arrived. ‘Where,’ I asked Rachel, ‘do you think the next consignment will come from?’ Her reply was seemingly trite – but only seemingly. ‘Wherever oil or gas supplies are imagined to be most at risk.’

The Trio awoke in time to marvel at the stark arid beauty of this coastal road – their first view of semi-desert, the vegetation gaunt cacti. On our left, beyond expanses of harsh red earth, miles of high golden cliffs were fissured and erosion-sculpted. Ahead loomed the richly-forested bulk of the Sierra del Purial, an obstacle so formidable that no road linked Baracoa to the Caribbean Sea coast until the 1960s. The road begun under Batista was abandoned when the workers’ union demanded a fair wage.

At Cajobabo we turned inland. This town’s fame far exceeds its size; here, in 1895, José Martí and Maximo Gomez came ashore to launch their three-year War of Independence. At that date – and until 1959 – no road served Cajobabo; it depended on sea transport. Now it marks the beginning of Cuba’s most spectacular motor-road, La Farola – ‘the beacon’. It seems a poet named it, seeing its improbable engineering feats as beams of light, flowing through space.

The abrupt transition from semi-desert to riotously lush greenness (a myriad shades of green) feels unreal, like moving from one dreamscape to another. And – I speak as a mountain connoisseur – this sierra’s configuration is unique. The mountains rise not to peaks but to long serrated ridges – scores of ridges, so close-packed that canyons rather than valleys lie between their almost sheer slopes, seamlessly clothed in subtropical forest.

Frustratedly I lamented, ‘We should’ve walked this stretch!’

Rose frowned, said nothing. Zea observed, ‘It’s a very long hill!’ (That I couldn’t dispute: some eighteen miles up, before the twelve-mile descent to Baracoa.) Clodagh calculated, ‘We could’ve walked slowly for four days, camping at night.’ Rose viewed the precipices on both sides and noted a lack of off-road camp-sites. The consensus seemed to be that Nyanya was fantasising.

On the way down we passed a few clusters of
bohios
and at intervals could glimpse slivers of blue sea. ‘When can we swim?’ asked Clodagh. ‘In about an hour,’ replied Rachel. ‘I want to eat first,’ said Rose. ‘Then you can’t swim for
ages
!’ Zea reminded her. ‘Maybe there won’t be anything to eat,’ warned Clodagh. ‘Maybe the restaurant will be closed.’

Baracoa’s location protected it from Fidel’s ardent industrialisation campaign and at sea level the suburban streets seemed more rural than urban. We were driving along the Malecón, past little houses where dogs
played on flat roofs, and a youth was wearing a six-foot snake corpse around his neck, and Mickey Mouse cartoons decorated the walls of a children’s play park. I had fallen in love with Cuba’s oldest town before we reached the bus terminus on the tip of a mini-promontory, where Irma’s friend Beraldo was waiting to guide us to his
casa particular.

Near Baracoa, in 1492, Christopher Columbus became the first European to set foot on Cuba. On 3 December he eulogised in his diary:

The villagers were Tainos, skilled farmers, potters and weavers whose many coastal settlements have recently been identified by the
Archaeological
Society of Baracoa. Other excavations, near Mayari, show that Cuba was inhabited as early as 5000
BC
by hunter-gatherer cavepersons who migrated from the mainland by canoe. The Taino, comparative newcomers, seem to have been more advanced than the indigenes. They introduced Columbus’s crewmen to tobacco smoking, their cave drawings include a sophisticated map of the solar system and their society was classless. In 1530 one Spanish chronicler, Martirde Angleria, reported the Taino belief that ‘the earth as well as the sun and water were common property, and that there should not exist among them
mine
nor
yours
’. This was a ridiculously primitive attitude to Europeans determined to make everything in sight
theirs
, completely excluding the Indians. (I dislike using ‘Indian’ to describe any American or Caribbean natives – it’s such a silly misnomer, commemorating Columbus’s obsessional insistence that he had arrived in Asia. But when a usage has been so generally accepted for so long inverted commas look equally silly.)

The Tainos were peaceable, not at first inclined to challenge their mysterious visitors. (‘They are very free from wickedness,’ wrote Columbus.) However, the colonists’ plans became disturbingly obvious in 1511 when Velasquez was dispatched from Hispaniola (now Haiti) to conquer Cuba. At
once resistance was organised by Hatuey, a Taino caique from Hispaniola who, in 1503, had witnessed Spanish atrocities on his own island, then fled with his followers to the mountains around Baracoa. For years he organised guerrilla warfare (long before the term was invented) against Velasquez’s settlement on the shore, thus inspiring other communities to defend their homes and land. Then one of his own betrayed him, tempted by a ‘bounty’. The Spaniards made much of his capture, took him hundreds of miles to Bayamo, displaying him on the way, then with maximum publicity burnt him at the stake. Of course there was a Franciscan friar in attendance, offering baptism; a repentant Christian criminal could enjoy an eternity of bliss, after the brief ordeal of being roasted to death. Hatuey declined the option, preferring to avoid an eternal association with Spaniards.

Reading Richard Gott’s
Cuba: A New History
(an exhilarating display of scholarship as entertainment) I was dismayed to learn that Ireland
contributed
dogs to the conquest of Cuba. ‘Hunting dogs were among the most fearsome weapons used by the Spaniards in the early days. Irish greyhounds were introduced on to the island, and bred to search out and slaughter the Indians.’ Here I suspect a mistranslation: surely those dogs were wolfhounds? At that date both wolves and wolfhounds operated in Ireland and the much smaller greyhounds (even smaller then than now) would have been far less effective murder-machines.

These man-hunts, and the Spaniards’ guns and horses, terrorised and demoralised the defenceless Tainos and other Indians living along the Cuban coast. (‘Shock and Awe’ operations were not invented by the Pentagon.) An angry Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, the illustrious Dominican ‘Protector of the Indians’, recorded, ‘Some began to flee into the hills, while others were in such despair that they took their own lives. Men and women hanged themselves and even strung up their own children.’

The abuse of man’s oldest friend spread to Central and North America. In 1539 Hernando de Soto sailed from Havana to Florida accompanied by ‘very bold, savage Irish dogs’ and his secretary elucidated what might have been, to some of his readers, an unfamiliar word. ‘“
Apperrear
” (to throw to the dogs) is to have the dogs eat him, or kill him, tearing the Indians in pieces.’ Also from Havana, thirty-six hounds and twelve handlers were deployed to help ‘ethnically cleanse’ Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast.

In 1763, when the English Colonel Henry Bouquet was pursuing North American Indians, he enviously wrote, ‘I wish we could make use of the Spanish method. To hunt them with English dogs, supported by Rangers and some light horse, who would, I think, effectually extirpate that vermin.’
A generation later, in 1795, the Havana authorities displayed white solidarity by sending a killer dog team to Jamaica where the maroons had launched yet another rebellion. By then, in Cuba, hounds were often used to track and recapture runaway slaves. For this job another, more rigorous, training was required; you wouldn’t want to risk having expensive slaves eaten.

Baracoa is said to be one of the few corners of Cuba (Bayamo is another) where Taino genes are still visible to the discerning eye. The rapid
elimination
of Cuba’s Indians is questioned by Richard Gott. Given their number in 1500 (estimated at about half a million), and the remote expanses uncontrolled by the Spaniards for centuries it does seem likely that isolated communities survived for much longer than conventional historians allow. As late as 1901 an American anthropologist, Stewart Culin, photographed a few settlements of pure Taino in hard-to-reach valleys near Baracoa.

In the sixteenth century certain vested interests were involved. Imperial Spain’s arm had been twisted by the passionately pro-Indian Las Casas whose books, translated into all the major European languages, were on bestseller lists for years. These shamed Madrid into decreeing that no Indians anywhere were to be deprived of their communal lands. In reaction, Havana asserted that as Cuba’s Indians were virtually extinct all their land could be colonised with a clear conscience. By the nineteenth century, as Richard Gott explains, ‘Progressive Cubans were happy to downplay the survival of the Indians since those who sought to praise and promote Cuba’s Indian heritage were usually conservative racists who wanted to … downgrade the contribution of the black African element in the population.’

Few women had accompanied the pioneering Spaniards and throughout their empire white fathers and Indian mothers bred many
mestizos
. During the first half of the sixteenth century these became a distinctive strand in Cuba’s population while in Hispaniola, the Spaniards’ original Caribbean colony, a 1514 census lists forty per cent of the settlers’ officially recognised wives as Tainos. For unofficial partners, the percentage was around ninety. Most
mestizos
spoke Spanish and used their paternal names but for a long time remained reluctant to abandon their maternal culture.

Other interesting progeny came from the unions, permanent or temporary, of Taino women and escaped slaves who had eluded the hounds. In inaccessible locations these formed
palenques
, independent communities some of which survived into the twentieth century, having provided sustenance and shelter to generations of freedom-fighters.

Outside Baracoa’s bus terminus no vehicles waited – not even horse-buses or bicitaxis. Most passengers walk to their destinations which can’t be too far away. Following Beraldo through two narrow streets of single-storey houses I found it impossible to think of Baracoa (population forty-two thousand) as a city. On the little pillared verandah of No. 137 Isabel – plump and white-haired – greeted us with open arms, then led us into the living-room furnished only with three cane rocking-chairs, a dozen potted plants and a large TV. To the left was the family bedroom; ahead, beyond a curtain, the small kitchen-cum-dining-room and off that an even smaller guest room with less than a yard between two double-beds. By night the loo-bound had to step over me in my bag – or, more usually, fall over me. To gain a
casa particular
licence, Beraldo himself had added a tiny bathroom (shower cubicle and loo) sparsely populated by cockroaches after dark. The ballcock often needed Rachel’s expert manipulation: my timid interventions only made things worse. A back door led to a small concrete yard-cum-utility room, softened by a lovingly cultivated jungle. Over a capacious stone sink hung a sociable budgie who engaged in prolonged dialogues with his owners as they gutted and filleted fish for sale at the Saturday morning market. (Beraldo was a part-time fisherman.) A steep shaky ladder gave access to the flat roof of a neighbour’s annex where Rachel and I – in retreat from the TV – enjoyed our evening beers.

When we registered for three nights, explaining our plan, an argument ensued. At first we assumed that Isabel and Beraldo were merely being over-protective when they chorused ‘No! Impossible to trek to Jauco!’ But the problem was real: Guantanamo Bay’s proximity. Although Baracoa district doesn’t feel like a military zone, part of it is just that – and the rest is a Reserva Biosfera, forbidden to unguided visitors whether Cuban or foreign. Our friends were adamant that hereabouts we couldn’t get away with camping and no
bohio
dwellers en route would dare to shelter us. Or if they did – being moved to pity by three tired children – it would be unfair of us thus to overtax Cuban hospitality.

I thought positive, recalling Columbus’s encomium about Baracoa’s environs, and we booked in for nine nights.

Downcast, Rose asked, ‘What are we going to do with all that tinned stuff?’

Pretending not to be downcast I promptly replied, ‘Eat it on long
day-trips
around Baracoa – up in the mountains, along the coast.’

Clodagh also thought positive. ‘Then we needn’t take our rucksacks, Mummy can carry enough for one day.’

Zea urged, ‘Let’s go for a swim
now
!’ At not quite six one lives very much in the present.

On our way to the beach we walked half the length of the Malecón, away from its western end which has been slightly marred by three five-storey residential blocs, ugly evidence that Fidel’s housing reforms neglected no corner of Cuba. A large, well-equipped playground separates these blocks from long rows of little houses, some receiving post-hurricane attention. On flat roofs women often wash clothes while their menfolk sit nearby puffing cigars.

One can imagine Columbus’s rejoicing as he first sailed into this wide bay. Its sheltering green hills stretch far into the ocean and El Yunque (‘the anvil’) rises some eight miles away to the south-west. This conspicuous limestone outcrop – 1,885 feet high, about a mile long and one-third of a mile wide – was for centuries a navigators’ delight. Now we were walking east, towards low ridges that merge into close-packed, forested mountains dominated by two pointed peaks known (some might think irreverently) as St Teresa’s breasts.

Near Columbus’s statue (not a thing of beauty) we descended to the main beach, passing a long, low Wilma-stricken café, closed for repairs. Baracoa remains as yet ‘undeveloped’, though several ominous plans lurk in pipelines. Near the Malecón this
playa
is overlooked by houses losing their stucco, built almost on the sand; numerous fowl peck amidst the squalid surrounding litter. Then comes a mile-long beach, smooth and golden, strewn with exquisite shells and a magical variety of bright stones: red, yellow, green, pink, orange, purple. This
playa
offers a choice of swimming places, the turquoise Atlantic or the olive-green Rio Miel, a river flowing parallel to the beach before quietly joining the sea. Here the sea is so shallow that the Trio preferred the Miel, its red-earth banks crowded with almond trees and glossy coconut palms. Next day we discovered a more distant, deep-water cove.

Baracoa’s charm is independent of its architecture; Cuba’s ‘oldest town’ lacks impressive colonial buildings. The tourist brochures present it as the island’s first religious and political capital but this more than slightly overstates the case. True, Velasquez founded Cuba’s first European
settlement
here in 1511, naming it ‘Nuestra Señora de la Asuncion de Baracoa’. However, he soon moved his capital to the more accessible Santiago, leaving Baracoa with little to show for its moment of glory. During the next two centuries nothing of architectural consequence happened, apart from three forts built between 1739 and 1742 in reaction to increasing Anglo-Spanish
hostility and pirate activity. As a convenient harbour for lone ships trading with Havana, Baracoa became largely dependent on smuggling pigs, poultry, honey and precious woods – irresistible pirate-bait. French corsairs first plundered the port in 1546 and frequently returned thereafter.

No. 137 was just around the corner from Antonio Maceo, the ‘mainest’ (as Zea said) of Baracoa’s two main streets, both long and straight and lined with nineteenth-century two-storey buildings raised high above road level to reduce hurricane damage. For lack of public lighting those broken, arcaded pavements could be tricky after dark and caused the Trio much anxiety on my behalf. (‘Watch out Nyanya! There’s a bit missing!’ ‘Careful Nyanya, here’s a big
hole
!’ ‘Slow down Nyanya, you’ve got to
jump
over a drain!’)

Antonio Maceo leads to Independence Park, not really a park but a laurel-shaded concreted triangle. Here an idealised (one suspects) bronze bust of Hatuey faces the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asuncion – of modest dimensions, its pink-wash faded, its squat twin towers more military than ecclesiastical, its windows Moorish. Built in 1833 on the site of its 1512 predecessor, hurricanes and post-Revolution indifference have left their mark. The imperial religion soon waned when its rich flock migrated to Florida, its
peninsulare
shepherds were banished to Spain and Fidel nationalised all Cuban schools. On our Sunday in Baracoa only a few dozen worshippers attended Mass but the recently restored Evangelical church, large and bright, was thronged three times – the afternoon service for children – and those enthusiastic hymn-singers could be heard on the Malecón.