Island that Dared (25 page)

That evening we had yet another conversation about the fostering of dissident groups by CIA agents and their infiltration by Cuba’s State Security officers. Again I felt a time slippage: socialism and capitalism still playing their Cold War spy games but on a shrunken stage – one little Caribbean island instead of two hemispheres.

Santa Clara university is privileged by location, its tranquil campus some seven miles from the city, wide parklands separating the faculties, a variety of mature trees shading the pathways. This campus has been much
extended
since Che established his base here, on the eve of the Rebel Army’s famous Last Battle, yet further extensions are urgently needed. In the hostels, four must share a small room; in the canteen, meals must be served in three shifts.

I arrived at lunch-time, not by design but because the bus service is so infrequent – for which reason the students do not consider themselves privileged. From Key West I bore a letter to one of the academic staff (let’s call him Juan) who received me with palpably mixed feelings. As his cousin’s friend I was affectionately welcomed, as a foreign contact I made him jittery. Even in a Cuba that is fast changing, institutional xenophobia endures.

Awkwardly, Juan explained that before entering any building, or meeting any of the staff or students, I must be vetted as an ‘international visitor’. He hurried me to the relevant office, past buildings all crying out for paint and minor repairs, but we found the door locked – ‘
Hora de comer
,’ said a notice. Even more awkwardly, poor Juan asked me to wait nearby for the registrar while he took his turn in the canteen. When I had been ‘approved’ we could talk in his faculty’s staff-room.

I sat under a ceiba tree and reflected that a country vilified for so long, in the world from which I come, has every excuse for official xenophobia, for suspecting any foreigner of being a counter-revolutionary snooper. We in the generally unsympathetic West have created this situation;
xenophobia
doesn’t come naturally to the laid-back, warm-hearted Cubans. Sometimes I regretted having approached the island as I approach every country, being an anonymous stranger, wanting only to enjoy the company of whomever I chance to meet. In Cuba’s case, I might have been wise to acquire ‘references’ from those of the Revolution’s distinguished foreign friends who are also my friends.

Punctually at 2.00 p.m. the registrar returned, an elderly white woman, hair dyed auburn, tight-lipped and narrow-eyed. She viewed me with acid suspicion. Why should a
tourist
be interested in a
university
? The implication was that tourists should stay on their beach reservations enjoying Operation Three Ss. But now all is in flux and the bureaucrats are not always sure of their ground, having been told that tourists, however deplorably independent, are an important economic resource. Reluctantly, and very slowly, the registrar computerised my passport and visa details, then handed me a long form to be filled in – which task I could have completed while she was computing. (The questions included, ‘How many years have you been at your present occupation?’ I wrote, ‘65’.) Finally a junior clerk took my ‘entry permit’ to some apparently distant office for the registrar’s signature to be rubber-stamped and counter-signed. Meanwhile Juan was sitting under the ceiba, picking his teeth with a matchstick.

In a large, high-ceilinged, airy staff-room, where the bookshelves were sadly uncrowded, Juan introduced me to a few of his colleagues, and several students, and for two hours a bland discussion of Eng. Lit. was enjoyed by all.

Towards sunset the university bus put me down opposite Santa Clara’s colossal, ungainly Coppelia palace and I was tempted – but the evening queues stretched out of sight, around the corner. Moments later, near Parque Vidal, capitalism reared its ugly head in the shape of a giant plastic ice cream cone advertising one of those Nestlé pavement fridges I’d first noticed in Havana – inscribed ‘Why wait when you can have it NOW?’ It enraged me to see Nestlé targeting Coppelia, for forty years the Cubans’ source of affordable, wholesome ice cream. However, these mobile fridges accept only convertible pesos for their much inferior product and are therefore unlikely to shorten Coppelia’s queues in the immediate future. But their presence crudely illustrates the divisive power of Cuba’s dual currency.

Back at No. 374 it was packing-up time; I would be on the road before dawn. My plan to walk across the Sierra del Escambray to Trinidad appalled the family – in those mountains there was nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat! I soothed them as best I could and they looked pleased (though sceptical) when I spoke of returning to Santa Clara in October 2007.

I set out for Manicaragua in darkness yet already Santa Clara was awake and noisy: shod hooves raising sparks from the cobbles, pedestrians and cyclists exchanging shouted greetings, favourite son tunes emanating from bicitaxis’ transistors.

Beyond a straggling, semi-moribund industrial zone I watched the sun rise above those low, bare hills mentioned by Che. From numerous
bohios
, scattered across arid slopes, immaculately uniformed children were
descending
to the road where horse-buses or bicitaxis awaited them. The tall, buxom senior girls looked decidedly nubile in their navy-blue mini-skirts and pale blue blouses. The boys wore scarlet shorts, white shirts, scarlet neckerchiefs. Several fathers and mothers came pedalling towards me with a small child (or two) on the home-made carrier and cross-bar seats.

A night of heavy rain had brought perfect trekking weather: high bright clouds, intermittent sunshine, a strong following breeze. The wide grassy verge spared my feet and all became greener as the road climbed gradually through cattle ranches and canefields. No more than a dozen vehicles disturbed my twenty-mile walk. Each of the few villages had its primary school (named after some local hero of the Revolution) and its whitewashed health centre displaying lists of dates for the next round of children’s inoculations and adults’ AIDS-education sessions. CDR leaders make sure everyone attends.

At noon I ate a tin of sardines and watched pairs of oxen ploughing at the base of forested hills. Then suddenly the Escambray were quite close, a dusky blue unbroken wall, by Cuban standards real mountains – Pico San Juan reaches three thousand seven hundred and sixty-two feet.

At 5.15 I trudged wearily into Manicaragua; it was a long time since I’d carried a loaded rucksack so far. This smallish market town is unlikely ever to find itself on the tourist trail and I didn’t look for a
casa
particular
. There was however a shabby two-storey hotel and, rather to my surprise, the friendly young man at Reception offered a single room for NP40. An equally friendly young woman led me upstairs and pointed out the communal bathroom. The hotel served no meals but there was a pizza stall around the next corner and the
organoponico
market would open at 7.00 a.m.

Ten minutes later the mulatta manageress arrived, overweight and breathless, looking flustered and embarrassed. It was all a mistake – she pressed those NP40 into my hand. This was a ‘Cubans only’ hotel, the nearest tourist hotel was Hanabanilla, twenty miles away – or I could return to Santa Clara. Behind her stood a small, slight, scowling man, grey-haired and xenophobic, wearing a track-suit and baseball cap.
Stepping
forward, he demanded to see my passport, checked the visa, said I must stay at the Hanabanilla. A taxi was about to leave, CP10 the fare, I must hurry – he gestured impatiently towards my half-unpacked rucksack. The manageress gave me a quick sympathetic look, then disappeared. My captor (as I thought of him) escorted me across the road to an antique Chrysler already packed with hotel workers who had been shopping in Manicaragua. When ordered to make room for me a slim young waitress seemed quite pleased to find herself on the lap of a handsome young waiter.  

In the 1970s a small inoffensive dam created a reservoir some eighteen miles long, embedded in lush green forested mountains and curiously shaped; on the map it looks like an emperor poodle with an erection. It is now known as Lake Hanabanilla and the road ends at the hotel, a crass building on a bluff above the water. Although listed as a tourist hotel the management seemed unaware of foreigners’ expectations. In my diary I noted, ‘no bedside lights, erratic plumbing, grumpy staff, vile expensive food in a pretentious restaurant. I’m reliably informed the four hundred rooms are all booked up, mainly by Cubans, for the hot season. At present there are about forty here, all rowdy young convertible-peso-rich people whose competing transistors create a discordancy around the swimming-pool below my balcony.’  

Then I met Miranda, a thirty-year-old from St Lucia who had just completed her medical training in Havana, all expenses paid by the Cuban government. She had an agreeably bouncy four-year-old daughter, a razor sharp mind and no inhibitions about analysing race relations in Cuba, a subject rarely discussed by the Cubans themselves. I shall have more to say about her views in the next chapter.  

Miranda was one of my two reasons for not returning to Manicaragua next morning. The other was Lake Hanabanilla, its deep clear water almost cold in January, its surrounding mountains exhilaratingly beautiful. My fellow-guests were horrified to see me plunging into the ‘dirty’ lake – in their view a form of attempted suicide by hypothermia. Some looked affronted when I condemned their heated pool, reeking of chlorine and
full of everybody’s pee – as filthy and unrefreshing. In between swims, Miranda and I walked and talked in the woods while Rina played in the hotel crèche.  

A ferry sometimes operates between the dam and Jibacoa, twelve miles down the lake on the Manicaragua-Trinidad road, but for lack of fuel this ten-person motor launch was currently inactive. Instead, a three-hour downhill walk took me to the main Cienfuegos-Manicaragua road. When I crossed the dam before sunrise a colourless mist veiled Lake Hanabanilla and as the road wriggled around hills too steep for cultivation the rising sun showed their bushiness flecked with red and yellow blossoms. Dwarf palms studded narrow valleys where horses grazed on nothing much. Then isolated
bohios
appeared and distant shouts seemed to emphasise the silence as men guided humped oxen to the scattered fields where their ploughs awaited them. A joyous content filled me in this hidden little corner of ‘undeveloped’ Cuba but too soon a sharp bend revealed the plain below. There old tobacco fields and new eucalyptus plantations surrounded the town of Ciro Redondo with its incongruously urban
apartment
blocks and obtrusive munitions factory.  

From the junction I walked on hoping for a lift but the few passing vehicles were overcrowded. My plan was to get well away from Manicaragua before nightfall, into the Escambray’s foothills, and there to find a secluded camp-site. For another two hours I plodded on, now feeling the lack of breakfast but reluctant to deplete my rations; such luxuries as sardines and olives can’t be replaced in small
tiendas
.  

Near the little town of Espejo a kind old man, thin and
round-shouldered
with bright blue eyes in a chestnut-brown face, beckoned me on to his mule-cart. He was taking two churns of milk to the market and in Manicaragua would accept no pesos.  

Half an hour and two large pizzas later I was on the town’s outskirts, relieved to have escaped the attention of the baseball-capped xenophobe. The road dipped to cross a trickling stream, then gently climbed around low hills – promising camping territory. But soon heavy blue-black clouds began to gather –
not
promising weather for the tentless. As I prepared for an unpleasant night, the Fates offered shelter: an abandoned
bohio
some way above the road with no other dwelling in sight. Climbing the steep path, I realised that I was very tired. It seemed this home had long been abandoned: its thatched roof was in shreds, its latrine collapsed. Happily the wide verandah had a sound tin roof (odd that nobody had appropriated
it) and I was unrolling my flea-bag when a shout startled me. A young man was hurrying up the path, carrying a kid with a broken leg. For a moment he stood staring silently at me, understandably flummoxed. Then he became assertive in an amiable way and twenty minutes later (the rain by then torrential) I was the wet guest of the nearest CDR president.  

My hostess, Maribel, and her family were non-bureaucratic and flexible. They didn’t ask to see my passport and visa, were curious about but not suspicious of an Irishwoman’s Cuban journey. Of course they all
disapproved
of my walking to Trinidad, but for humanitarian rather than political reasons. Maribel spoke broken but graphic English. ‘You has small pesos no problem, I has able get free car for Trinidad.’  

I explained that the issue was not pesos but my liking for walking alone over mountain ranges. At this point one could see Maribel diagnosing a nut-case, possibly senile but harmless. Next morning she sent me on my way with three hard-boiled eggs, five homegrown tomatoes and a chit to her colleague in Jibacoa asking him to shelter me for the night. She ordered me not to go beyond Jibacoa: I
must
stay with Carlos. An unnecessary stricture given that day’s gradients; twelve miles was quite enough.  

Another wet night had made for another almost cloudless sky with a coolish breeze. The badly broken road curved around wooded slopes, then dived into deep clefts – briefly climbed – dived again – each descent testing my brake muscles. I sauntered, often stopping to gaze over the jumble of hills on my left, separated by shallow irregular valleys, all green and glistening after the rain. Beyond those hills rose a phalanx of forested mountains, their crests irregular.  

Near Herradura a barn-like coffee factory appeared – the region’s only industry, a simple enterprise where beans are dried and packed. This village was a recruiting centre for the ‘bandits’ (Castro-speak) or ‘patriots’ (Eisenhower-speak) who fought on in these mountains until 1966, the terrain helping local militia to set up deadly ambushes while evading capture. The Escambray conflict, small scale but embittering, dragged on only because of lavish US air-drops: weaponry and food and medical supplies.  

Jibacoa, an agreeably ramshackle little town, swarmed with pigs and poultry but in mid-afternoon people were absent. Eventually a trio of youths, astonished by my arrival on their baseball field, led me to Carlos’s house (breeze block, 1970s), then hung around to observe my reception. A tall, muscular, light-skinned mulatto was sitting at the living-room table dealing with documents. He read Maribel’s chit with comically raised eyebrows,
then removed his spectacles to study me silently before summoning Rafael, his grown-up English-speaking son who shook my hand before translating. ‘My father says you are not a tourist, not living like that. Why in Cuba did you not drive car? Every city have cars for tourist hire.’ Carlos did want to see my passport and visa. Then his wife Carmen, black and plump, came bustling in, asked to see Maribel’s chit, told her husband to relax, invited me to sit and have a cup of coffee. Whereupon the three youths, who had been listening from the doorway, returned to their baseball practice.  

Sipping my coffee, I hypocritically admired the family dog, of a
repulsive
breed seen occasionally in Havana – completely hairless, looking more porcine than canine. I certainly wouldn’t want to live with one yet Hoalla’s engaging ways soon won me over. He was named, Rafael informed me, after some famous baseball player.  

In many Cuban schools the English language is poorly taught and Rafael apologised for his limited vocabulary, then put it to good use while explaining the importance of his job as the Public Hygiene officer in the polyclinic. Preventative health-care underlies Cuba’s impressive medical statistics. You don’t ignore people until they’re sick, you teach them how to stay healthy for as long as possible.  

Carmen, a primary school teacher, spoke of her concern about the spread of STDs around tourist areas (Trinidad, for instance) where young girls, craving the things convertible pesos can buy, forget their sex education and are easy prey. At that Carlos frowned, muttered angrily and abruptly changed the conversation. Given tourism’s current importance, any criticism of its negative side-effects could, I suppose, be seen as counter-revolutionary.  

One hears rumours about CDR members having exceptional access to luxuries but neither of my sample households showed evidence of this. Supper was cooked on wood stoves and the breakfast coffee brewed on small electric rings such as we used in Ireland during the Second World War. In both homes the evening meal was identical: rice, beans, pork fat and a tomato salad.  

Despite my protestations Rafael insisted on vacating his bed and sleeping on two large sacks stuffed with palm fronds and inscribed in English ‘Vietnamese Broken White Rice’.  

The most blissful and most gruelling stage of this mini-trek (a not unusual combination) took me from Jibacoa to Topes de Collantes. Two faded notices marked fourteen percent gradients, a third warned: Pendientes y Curvas Peligrosas.

For much of the way, sub-tropical forest pressed close to the road. The fungi were multi-shaped and multi-coloured – some massive three-storey growths, some tiny fragile spots of crimson or orange. Six-foot-high ferns drooped gracefully, their fronds inhabited by busy blue-black beetles. Instead of the previous day’s breeze, a strong wind tossed the trees, swaying their curtains of tangled lianas, and a few detached epiphytes lay on the road – grotesquely beautiful bundles. Occasional shafts of sunlight gilded patches of lichen, their sudden glow amidst the green shadows seeming almost artificial. Two cars overtook me, and a van that coughed loudly as it tackled the gradients. All three drivers offered a lift and seemed worried as well as baffled by my preference for walking.  

As I gained altitude the many unfamiliar trees were gradually mixed with, then replaced by, tall spindly pines; here the wind changed its tune to that distinctively mournful conifer music. When I found myself, unexpectedly, on a wide level shoulder, the trees thinned and below me lay vast expanses of summits and linking ridges – the very heart of Sierra del Escambray.  

Then – a severe shock. Standing still, I could feel rage pushing up my blood-pressure. A mile or so ahead, on Topes de Collantes’ highest ridge, loomed a monstrous edifice of incomparable ugliness. Perhaps to do with hydroelectricity? Or a factory? Or a high-security jail? That mile was ‘as the crow flies’. Where the road dipped, before a final climb, the edifice disappeared. An hour later, around a sharp bend, its ten storeys loomed above the road, approached by scores of wide steps, stretching the whole length of that dominant ridge. It presented a curiously blank façade despite rows of small, square, close-together windows. Nothing indicated that this is the Kurhotel, built by Batista in 1936 as a luxury TB sanatorium and given spa hotel status when the Revolution had eradicated the disease. In Trinidad I borrowed an
Eyewitness Guide
and was diverted to find this Batista souvenir, which had so raised my blood-pressure, described as an ‘anti-stress centre’.