Island that Dared (14 page)

We set off early to find the deep-water cove, on the far side of the eastern promontory, following a sandy shaded path between the sea and the Rio Miel. Here tiny agitated crabs scuttled to and fro in apparently pointless perpetual motion and Zea wondered, ‘Are we scaring them?’ Footprints and bicycle-tyre marks led us to a wooden pole stuck in the mud to help those who couldn’t easily leap aboard the estuary ferry, a broad-bottomed canoe serving hamlets hidden amidst jungle on and beyond the promontory. This is a busy route (fare NP1); we used it three times and always had to queue. The canoe seats six plus cargo: a bicycle, or a new fridge, or a sack of something, or a trussed piglet – or, on our first crossing, the motorised wheelchair of a legless young man who was gently lifted aboard. Cuba’s care for all its disabled citizens is not exaggerated. Where else in the Majority World does a government provide free wheelchairs for peasants
living in the back of beyond? The black ferryman, small and grey-bearded, wore his sombrero at a rakish angle and sang softly as he punted: a plaintive air, in time with the graceful, seemingly effortless swaying of his supple body.

On the other side gallant hands were extended to hoist the
abuela
on to a long causeway, half its planks missing, its width just permitting bicycles to be wheeled. A step-ladder led to a wider causeway where little boys sat fishing. Meanwhile the canoe was putting the legless young man ashore where his backyard met the water.

We passed four
bohios
, their sows and piglets rooting along the edge of a mangrove swamp or rolling in ponds of green and black liquid mud. Overlooking the track a scrubby precipice swarmed with goats and loudly bleating kids. ‘Are they losing their mothers?’ Zea asked anxiously. ‘Don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘They’re just looking for attention the way small things do.’ Zea frowned up at me, rightly suspecting an unkind dig. When we hesitated at a junction a buxom young woman paused in her chopping of plantains to direct us up a steep path traversing a rocky hillside. Outside a battered two-roomed
bohio
a litter of kittens played with the tail of a tolerant lurcher, while several small, sturdy golden-skinned children, sharing a homemade wooden tricycle, paused to stare at the Trio and giggled shyly when greeted.

The path widened on level grassland separating us from the invisible sea. There stood an assembly of royal palms, far apart, rising to 120-130 feet and taking regality to its limit: silver-grey boles flawlessly smooth and straight, elegantly drooping five-yard fronds glistening emerald against an intensely blue sky.

‘They look like very high concrete posts,’ Clodagh prosaically observed.

On our right vegetation only half concealed high terraced cliffs, weirdly eroded, pitted with caves. One free-standing rocky outcrop, a cylindrical towering mass swathed in vines, eerily resembled the temple ruins of some forgotten people. A not too fanciful thought: many local caves and grottoes contain petroglyphs, and more recent rock carvings, indicating their religious significance for indigenous tribes. I could have spent hours wandering happily along this track but the Trio were swim-fixated.

‘Where’s the sea?’ demanded Rose. ‘How do we get to it?’

Ernesto soon answered her question. He overtook us on his way to the shore, dragging a handcart to collect sand; a second storey was being added to the family home. Tall and well-built and copper-coloured, with an aquiline nose and deep-set green eyes, he eluded racial labelling – as
do many Cubans. (Not all Spanish colonists were pure-bred Caucasians; the Moors had been around for several centuries and by 1500 more than one hundred thousand African slaves were toiling in Andalusia.) On invitation, the Trio gleefully hopped into the handcart for a short ride to the beginning of the faint cove pathlet. Without Ernesto, we might never have found it. He invited us to visit his home on our way back, then took another path with his cart.

Here traces of military activity surprised us, concrete trenches prepared soon after the Revolution when a US-sponsored invasion was expected. But the invasion happened on another shore, in 1961, at the Bay of Pigs.

One approaches Paradise Cove (my name for it) through a belt of ancient, wind-twisted trees where piles of sharp rocks obstruct the path – so sharp that they must be climbed with care, as Zea found out the hard way. But she is not one to wail for more than a moment about bleeding knees. Then comes another line of defensive trenches scarcely forty yards from the sea; invaders trying to sneak ashore via this secluded cove would be easy targets, trapped between cliffs. The ‘beach’ is no more than a patch of coarse Wilma-littered sand sloping down from the trees to a short channel in the rocky shore. There the waves’ back-pull was strong enough to be exciting but not dangerous, though Rachel had to time the ebb and flow for the Trio lest they might be thrown against the channel’s rough walls. Immediately the water was deep and, while swimming, the cove’s long protective ridges of volcanic rock looked like mythical monsters with snouts uplifted from the surging foam.

It was easy to spot Ernesto’s house; not many locals could afford a second storey. His parents’ home was a cream-washed 1960s dwelling from which the younger generations had recently moved to the new ‘upstairs’. Soon, he explained, an outside staircase would replace the unnervingly flexible ladder leading to a balcony-in-progress. Sitting around a long palm-wood table (made by Ernesto, smelling new), we drank ice-cold guava juice and ate
cucurucho
, a toffee-like Baracoa specialty served in a cone woven of palm fibre. Our hostess listed the ingredients: grated coconut, ground cocoa beans, guava, banana, honey. The stock of cones in the fridge suggested ‘cottage industry’ but our attempt to buy half a dozen failed. Unless licensed to run a
casa particular
, Cubans are strictly forbidden to trade in cocoa, coffee, coconut; all must be exported to earn hard currency.

When Ernesto offered to guide us around the caves of the nearby National Park (entrance forbidden without a guide) we arranged to meet at the junction two days hence.

As we were being punted back across the estuary, at sunset, I decided that if exiled from Ireland (for leading a revolution against the Celtic Tiger?) I’d settle in Baracoa. A silver sheen lay on the still water as our tiny canoe silently glided through a tranquil space encircled on every side by dense greenery. A simple scene: no bright colours or dramatic cliffs – but ineffably beautiful under a dove-grey evening sky.

Baracoa’s weather was kind to me; sometimes the clouds never broke all day and as the temperature dropped my energy level rose. Occasionally it even
rained
– cool, delicious rain …

On long day-trips into the forest we had no fixed destination – just wandering from mountain to mountain, we assumed that if we didn’t lose sight of the sea for too long the town would be accessible by sunset. Rachel has an acute sense of direction, not inherited from her mother, and a feeling for the terrain’s idiosyncrasies enabled her to sense when an unpromising path was in fact the right one. Often we followed streams instead of paths, clear sparkling streams, their beds a treasure-trove of minuscule multicoloured pebbles. Once we came to a short waterfall, cascading into a deep pool where the Trio swam and competed to find the biggest of the umbrella-shaped leaves that decorated the banks. Rachel and I swigged Buccaneros while admiring those three lithe naked bodies being energetic. When I took photographs, as fond grandmothers are wont to do, Rachel issued a grim warning. ‘Don’t have those developed in London or you might end up in court.’

In inhabited areas most streams have laundry-pools where convenient rocks serve as washing boards and women gather; sometimes their songs and laughter led us to a stream. Twice we saw water being collected by muscular teenagers (boys and girls), each carrying two buckets on a yoke. Both Beraldo and Ernesto expressed concern about the predicament of those
campesiños
should the drought worsen and their streams dry up. As it was, some Baracoa households had become dependent on water-tankers delivering a ration every other day. Local ecologists were making the obvious deduction. They quoted Professor Enrique del Risco, a founder member of Cuba’s Institute of Forest Research:

On levelish land, between the mountains, we came upon a few
lacklustre
cacao plantations – the trees ungainly, the long pods lumpy and drab though a few had half-opened to reveal scarlet beans. Cacao has flourished hereabouts since its introduction towards the end of the seventeenth century when the
peninsulares
unkindly identified it as ‘well-suited to Cuba’s workers, needing little care’. It never spread island-wide but became one of Baracoa’s main nineteenth-century exports. The others were meat, beeswax, coffee and bananas, those last the most lucrative crop. By 1900 more than three million hands were being sold annually to the US.

Most slopes were too steep to be inhabited but we sometimes passed a
bohio
on a ledge, or clusters of three or four dwellings. Twice we met firewood-laden horses, their owners at first taken aback by the out-of-place foreigners, then quickly asking if we were in trouble – lost? With worried frowns they listened to Rachel’s explanation – we were simply enjoying Baracoa’s beauty – then urged their horses on, looking unconvinced and likely to report our presence to their CDR president. For Rachel and me, those hikes were slightly overshadowed by our awareness that as foreigners we should not be roaming alone. For the Trio, being warned to keep quiet as we passed
bohios
added to the fun: they relished the drama of silently skirting ‘dangerous’ areas. And then they discovered a new thrill: one-treetrunk bridges across narrow ravines.
Slim
tree trunks, at that – not Nyanya’s idea of fun. But happily those short cuts were avoidable by going a long way round. In Nepal and Laos, where there were no long ways round and the ravines were very much wider and deeper, I straddled the tree trunks and ‘rode’ across.

Thrice our rambles were curtailed by low, sagging wire fences hung with faded little boards saying ‘Military Zone’. Beyond those signs, Bernaldo had warned us, land-mines might lurk. If travelling alone I wouldn’t have taken those warnings too seriously but grandmotherhood (not to mention motherhood) activates caution. We never once saw a uniformed soldier, nor did I see many identifiable soldiers elsewhere in Cuba, perhaps because of Fidel’s ‘rectification’ programme. After the 1984 US invasion of Grenada, when the Reagan administration was considering repeat performances in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Fidel decided to arm all Cubans of a suitable age instead of depending on a regular army. This
was a reversion to 1960s thinking; until Cuba foolishly modelled its economic planning and defence system on the Soviet Union’s, the
government
had believed that all citizens should share in the Revolution’s defence.

To equip the new ‘Citizens’ Army’ Cuba tripled its imports of military hardware, then trained more than three million men and women. To ensure a ‘rapid reaction’ should the US invade, weapons were distributed throughout the island – to each small town, to each city zone and mountain hamlet, to farms, factories, universities, hospitals. At a date when ‘rectification’ was seen to be essential because Soviet-style planning had bred major problems, this arming of the population astonished many
Cuba-watchers.
No leader not sure of the support of the vast majority of citizens would dare to put them in control of arsenals stashed in every corner of the country.

Returning home one afternoon, our zig-zagging red earth path suddenly brought us on to open ground – the forest long since felled, only orange trees and banana groves surrounding pathside
bohios
. Pausing for a final snack, we were directly overlooking the town, its buildings half-smothered by its trees. Under a cloudy sky the iron-grey Atlantic was white-flecked, its cats’ paws becoming rollers near the rocky shore, then rearing up to drench the malecón. From our height it seemed the whole coastline had been trimmed with white lace.

When three
campesiño
women appeared, slowly ascending, their leader waved at us from a distance. Balanced on her head was an enormous cloth-wrapped bundle; this African skill has survived in Cuba and ever since our arrival the Trio had been practising it. (‘Very good for their deportment,’ commented Rachel.) An older woman carried two tin pails heaped with pig-feed, vegetable refuse from El Castillo – originally a Spanish fort, now a tourist hotel, visible far below on a ridge above the town centre. The third and youngest woman was doubly loaded: a year-old son on one hip, a half-sack of rice over the other shoulder. Beaming, they stopped to admire and caress the niñas’ blonde hair, a ritual to which the Trio had by now become accustomed. As Rachel was satisfying their friendly curiosity a young man came bounding down the path, causing the babe to wriggle and gurgle ecstatically. When handed over he was vigorously kissed, while he as vigorously tugged at the paternal curls. I glanced at his mother, hoping she would also hand over that sack of rice. But no … Swiftly Pappa carried his son home, tossing him in the air as they went, leaving Mamma to toil in his wake.

Ten minutes later an elderly man came hurrying after us to present the Trio with half a dozen oranges. Another of those slightly awkward situations – a gift, or was he hoping for a ‘convertible’? One can only play it by intuition. Afterwards, Rachel and I agreed that his courteous manner and kind eyes suggested ‘gift’. Pesos might have been regarded as a hurtful misinterpretation of a generous gesture.