Island that Dared (24 page)

I had thought I was alone but now a patrolling policeman appeared in the distance, at the end of his eight-hour shift. As he saluted me amiably I wondered if he really spent the night pacing to and fro on that long, high, concrete platform supporting both Ché’s statue and its attendant
bas-relief
depicting the Battle of Santa Clara. The expansive Plaza de la Revolucion looked neglected, most of the benches broken, the star-shaped flower-beds weed-dominated, the conspicuous ornamental fountains defunct, their basins half-full of litter. Far away around the periphery,
house-sized
hoardings showed Che in various moods and poses; some had been not only weather-beaten but vandalised, which perhaps explained the twenty-four hour guard. One can imagine the iconoclastic fury with which some of today’s frustrated young non-consumers might attack Ché’s memorial.

Back on the platform, approached by steep flights of steps at each end, I waved at the new cigar-smoking policeman, then sat at Ché’s feet to scribble in my diary:

I’m not often drawn by big occasions, when crowds gather to celebrate something momentous. Yet here and now I’m deciding to return to Santa Clara in October 2007 for the fortieth commemoration of Ché’s death.

No. 374 was a polyglot household – Tania speaking English, her son Ed fluent in French, his wife Carmel able to get by in German, their son and daughter, aged ten and twelve, attempting Mandarin Chinese at school – despite having heard a rumour that Chinese children must spend fourteen years learning how to write. Ed and Carmel lectured at Santa Clara university, Cuba’s third largest, described by Tania as ‘our city’s main industry’. Conviviality happened in a minimally furnished kitchen behind the living-room. A crowded
organoponico
, visible from the kitchen window, produced more than enough vegetables to feed the family. Proudly the children informed me that in 2005 urban Cubans had grown over four million tons of vegetables. On their way home from school they collected supplementary feeding (weeds) for the four hens who scratched, clucked and laid at one wire-fenced end of the small garden.

In the 1980s, Tania remembered, eggs were plentiful enough to be unrationed and factory chickens were part of the weekly meat ration and also available on the open market through a cafeteria chain (‘Pio Pio’) modelled on Kentucky Fried Chicken. But many of those birds, including ‘starter chicks’, and almost all their feed, were imported. Come the Special Period, the government distributed chicks to be raised free-range and bred from – hence the numbers of happy poultry now foraging all over rural Cuba.

Cuba’s Revolution was the opposite of green, whatever shade that may be. (‘Orange!’ I hear some of my Irish friends shouting.) If Fidel read
The Silent Spring
in 1963 – quite likely, given the breadth of his reading – he didn’t heed Rachel Carson’s warnings. He and Che and their advisors truly believed in agriscience and the land and people of Cuba have suffered accordingly. From the Soviet Union came thousands of massive,
soil-compacting
machines and countless tons of hazardous chemical inputs accompanied by platoons of agronomists – whose domestic record Fidel should have scrutinised before bowing down before them.

Thirty years on, when the Special Period ousted agriscience, not much
knowledge of traditional farming remained to be resuscitated. Most labourers were descended from slaves who had cultivated efficiently within their homelands’ subsistence economies but, within a generation or two, had lost skills no longer relevant. Although Cuba has always been capable of amply feeding itself from its own soil the imposed monoculture prevented that.

Even before the Special Period, some outspoken young agronomists had been blaming their leaders’ ex-colonial mind-set for a too respectful acceptance of Soviet advice, given by ‘experts’ totally ignorant of local conditions. By the early 1980s Fidel & Co. had begun to fear that Cuba was en route to catastrophe, being so dependent on food imports, and from then on ‘the Alternative Model’ of agriculture was encouraged. When the necessary research was funded, factions formed. The keen young researchers advocated and devised microbial formulations, biofertilisers and biopesticides non-toxic to humans, the Soviet-revering Agriculture Ministry bureaucrats scorned their discoveries. A prolonged controversy ensued, incidentally contradicting the widespread notion that Fidel ruled as an all-powerful tyrant. A Castroist government is in fact a complex institution; Fidel’s backing for the young researchers secured their funding but did not enable them at once to defeat the bureaucrats. Victory rewarded them only when COMECON cut all trading links with Cuba.

When the going got tough Fidel didn’t hesitate to admit his past mistakes. Addressing the fifth Congress of the National System of Agriculture and Forestry Technicians, in 1991, he avoided fudging the issue as our politicians invariably do when their great schemes come unstuck:

Shades of Che! This direct talking to the public helps to explain how Castroism survived the Special Period. As Tania boasted, ‘He was like Britain’s Churchill, during World War II! He got people feeling though the situation was desperate they could win!’

At that stage, what are emphasised as some of the worst horrors of ‘Communist Cuba’ were used to good effect: state control of the food supply and the media, plus a population amenable to being organised from the centre for the common good.

When we moved to the living-room, in time to hear the end of Fidel’s evening communication, I remarked, ‘He looks and sounds much stronger that in November.’

Tania smiled. ‘He knows how much we need him, with McCarry touring Europe!’

Caleb McCarry contributed significantly to Haiti’s 2004 ‘regime change’. Recently on Radio Four I had heard him explaining his European mission – ‘It’s my job to persuade our allies to support opposition to the Castro dictatorship
within
Cuba.’

We watched preparations for the morrow’s protest march against Radio Marti. Men using street plans and pointers explained where and when groups should assemble, which streets (including San Rafael) would be closed to traffic from 6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m., where to find first-aid posts, how to summon ambulances, which routes to follow when dispersing. Civilian monitors would be responsible for crowd control – a revealing reversal of the procedure in our democracies where demos require the deployment of extra police units. Radio Marti’s transmissions began during the Reagan era and have become ever more seditionary, prompting many with serious reservations about Castroism to close ranks around their leader.

When Carmel asked why I hadn’t remained in Havana for this event I explained – ‘Friends warned me tourists may not march, will be confined to certain supervised vantage points’.

Next day the family were at first amused, then impressed by my seven-hour TV marathon – 8.00 a.m. to 3.00 p.m. ‘You take your job very seriously,’ said Ed, not realising that I was riveted by this skilfully presented TV spectacular. It took all of those seven hours for one point four million Cubans to pass the US Special Interests ten-storey block. Every sort of Cuban processed cheerfully along the Malecón, waving little flags, chanting
slogans, singing songs, blowing whistles, carrying toddlers on shoulders, linking arms with shuffling oldies, sharing bottles of water, munching peanuts, occasionally leaping in the air or performing an impromptu dance. The anti-Radio Marti chanting became strident as people approached its source – strident but not threatening. We saw several close-ups of groups grinning broadly while shaking clenched fists at ‘Special Interests’. If there were angry frowns, we weren’t shown them.

Thrice Fidel descended from his podium to walk with the crowd, holding himself erect, vigorously striding out for a hundred yards, not looking like a man who five months later would be in intensive care. As he spoke with those who chanced to be around him, nobody seemed in the least awed – as I most certainly would be, were we to meet. Is this a consequence of ‘no personality cult’?

As the hours passed I found myself wondering how to interpret such demos. Many would assert that I was looking at rigorously regimented Cubans doing what they had been ordered to do, fearful of staying at home. Or had they been conditioned to see these mass rallies-cum-fiestas as a fun day off work or school and a proud expression of
cubania
? If they weren’t enjoying themselves they deceived me – and surely the cameras could not have been manipulated to avoid all discontented faces? Then I thought, uneasily, ‘Perhaps Cuba really is a uniquely one-man show, Fidel still holding it together?’ – even after the Special Period hardships, after the dual currency revival of class divisions, after the birth of a generation to whom the Revolution is history, not perceived as their own achievement …

Was this demo’s message being heard across the Straits of Florida? Here were thousands of men and women, all trained to use guns, displaying their resentment of US interference in Cuban affairs. They may covet the tourists’ designer clothes, digital cameras, iPods, scuba-diving equipment – yet most remain protective of their Cuban identity. Military intruders, inhibited by world opinion from bombing a Caribbean island into
submission,
would find themselves up against ‘insurgents’ of a very different calibre from Iraq’s. The comparison is allowable; in both cases the name of the game, on Washington’s own admission, is ‘regime change’. And the united Cubans (united against the US threat to the republic’s independence, whatever their domestic squabbles) would form a resolute and disciplined defence force.

When I said as much to the family, Tania observed that the Bush II administration is not known for its sensitivity to world opinion. And Carmel apprehensively pointed to the Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan
as obvious examples of what cleverly spent dollars could achieve. But Ed dismissed the notion that eighty million US dollars (the sum of tax-payers’ money by then at the Commission’s disposal) could divide and conquer a Cuba so aware of the Revolution’s benefits, however critical of its restraints.

Tania added, ‘It’s sure the
Yanquis
couldn’t even try to set up a
government
run by returned exiles, like they tried in Kabul and Baghdad. That’s when rivers of blood would flow!’

By then my hostess and I had established a certain rapport and when we were alone I ventured to ask, ‘Can you guess how many of those marchers remain loyal, in their hearts, to the Revolution, to Fidel’s internationalism, to Ché’s “New Man” ideal? How many would have marched spontaneously against Radio Marti?’

Quietly Tania replied, ‘We don’t ask ourselves such questions. If we could ask them we’d be living in another sort of country. Maybe better than what we have, maybe a lot worse.’

During the demo Elián Gonzales and his father Juan Miguel had briefly joined Fidel on the podium and been rapturously cheered – the beautiful six-year-old child now a handsome fourteen-year-old youth. To Tania I mentioned my disapproval of this too-famous boy being kept in the limelight for an apparently petty motive: to remind Miami’s fanatics of their defeat.

Tania corrected me; the motive was far from petty, Elián’s extraordinary seven-month ordeal had given him a no less extraordinary and permanent political/social significance.

‘Mostly,’ said Tania, ‘such dramas get blotted out soon by something new. But our reaction to Elián’s tragedy actually
changed
Cuba, gave the whole country an injection of vibrant
cubania
, reinvigorated the Revolution. Cintio Vitier wrote a poem to Elián about the
Yanqui
bungling and one line says – “What fools! They have united us forever!” Foreign reporters said the government forced us to make a fuss but not so! It was an explosion of passion and debate and patriotism – spontaneous, all over the island, among all sorts. Psychologists and philosophers, factory and farm workers, artists and lawyers – gathering impromptu in streets, schools, conference halls, warehouses – everywhere! After three weeks our television started a series of
Mesas Redondas
, Round Tables, and millions watched qualified people looking at every side of the crisis. With Elián safely home,
la Batalla de Ideas
, our Battle of Ideas, grew out of those programmes. And that led to what we have now,
Tribunas Abiertas
, Open Rostrums, big open-air meetings all over Cuba for people to plan and communicate and argue about all sorts of social
and cultural activities and political worries like the Miami Five – how to help them and their families? That’s why Elián has to be noticed and cheered and loved! He was the catalyst for this renaissance of the Revolution.’