Island that Dared (39 page)

At sunrise I was dismayed to hear an argument about a compulsory guide for the tourist. Sofiel sided with me, I’m not sure why. The dynamics between the elderly farmer and the young doctor were interesting, Sofiel’s role in the community and his academic/urban background being finely balanced against seniority and CDR authoritarianism. When Sofiel won I went happily on my way as the eastern sky blazed, sheets of fiery cloud glowing through the treetops.

The descent from that ledge was tricky and one couldn’t toboggan – too many tree roots and boulders. It led to a wider than usual valley where the shallow San Cristobal river had to be forded. Beyond, the way was
unmistakable
: no more junctions and instead of going straight up and down the path zig-zagged humanely. As on the previous day, clouds half-filled the sky.

I met four solo
campesiños
, all men, and felt liberated enough to greet them cheerfully. Two muttered nervous responses while hastening past me, two stopped to satisfy their curiosity and one insisted on presenting me with a banana leaf package containing fried malanga, the homemade local equivalent of potato crisps.

By 6.30 I was beginning to dread a penitential sloping camp-site amidst dense vegetation of the thorny sort. Then the last of the light showed a tiny isolated
bohio
perched on stilts and occupied by a young black family, the father a provider of palm fronds ready for thatching. A three-year-old daughter shrieked in terror as I emerged from the bushes and initially her parents seemed almost hostile; but when I sought permission to sleep on the porch (some three feet by six) they offered the living-room floor.

Here were disturbing family vibes: a bullying husband, a cowed wife and child. I pretended to be asleep in a corner long before I was.
Thereafter
, itch and hunger pangs woke me repeatedly; it had seemed tactless to gorge on expensive delicacies (sardines, bread, chocolate) when there wasn’t enough to share – perhaps a silly inhibition.

Day Three started with breakfast, once beyond sight of that hut. Soon after a riverside hamlet appeared, far below me, and ahead lay new terrain,
the hills grassy, only dotted with dwarf palms. Therefore no shade … But a strong wind was blowing off the sea, pushing comforting clouds inland. I assumed such open hillsides – though broken by occasional bush-filled gullies – would be easy to negotiate. Not so: within an hour my distinct path had become a maze of pathlets, looking from a distance like a tangle of brown rope thrown on the green slopes. Twice I followed the least indistinct pathlet only to find it petering out in a gully. For over an hour I was flummoxed and in mid-afternoon mightily relieved to see one wide track going directly down to the Bahia Honda-San Cristobal motor road – never far from my route though now visible for the first time. Given my time constraint it seemed sensible to descend here. Thus I came to the road some fifteen miles from San Cristobal and ten miles short of Los Arroyos.

Where paths from opposite mountainsides met the road I joined five men and three women sitting on massive tree-root ‘stools’. Some had been waiting since morning and one couple were prepared to go either way; they could do their business equally easily in Bahia Honda or San Cristobal. When a huge ancient open truck approached – less than half full – everyone cheered except me. How to get safely on board? This Soviet monster lacked a movable back, or steps, and its rusty, thin, wobbly metal sides were so high one could barely see the passengers’ heads. My practiced companions scrambled up, using the colossal wheels as ladders while grasping a length of wire rope. Those already in situ shouted encouragingly and helped to haul them aboard. Eventually warnings about no other vehicle appearing overcame my solicitude for old bones. Up I went and two strong men heaved me over the loose, sharp side.

Whatever cargo this truck normally carried was oily and leaked; the floor resembled a black ice-rink and several women complained at length about their ruined clothes. Six people climbed off at Los Arroyos, nine climbed on. As we lurched slowly over potholes, I was just tall enough to be able to appreciate the panorama on our left – ranks of bleakly magnificent rock ridges, utterly unlike the mountains nearer the coast. When the wind became a gale a silver veil was drawn over those ridges and moments later rain drenched us and my shivering companions wailed and cursed. But the deluge was brief. Soon the distant plain came into view, its expanse gold-tinged in the evening light. San Cristobal’s industrial outskirts looked, from afar, more important than the centre. Yet the middle-aged man who had moved to stand beside me, to practise his English, lamented the city’s joblessness. Cuba’s new industry wasn’t helping, no tourist ever visited, the
hotel was not for foreigners. But I could try my luck – he scribbled the address on my notebook cover – they might admit a stranded
abuela
.

When we stopped in a previously prosperous suburb two strong knights picked me up and delivered me over the side, like a sack, into the
truck-driver
’s muscular arms. As my rucksack was being handed down a youth who had registered my accommodation problem shyly offered to help me find a
casa particular.
Sergei was no
jinetero
(a species endemic to tourist zones) but a typically kind Cuban who lived in this suburb and hoped one of his neighbours might shelter me. A false hope: we knocked on three doors and three householders understandably declined to break the law by entertaining an inexplicable old woman wearing a battered and by now oil-stained rucksack. I then had to dissuade Sergei from guiding me to the hotel, far away in the centre.

San Cristobal (as big as Pinar del Rio) became notorious for a few weeks in 1962 as a Soviet nuclear base but is ignored by all my guidebooks and by the numerous Cuba-related volumes in my library. Unquestionably, this is Cuba’s dreariest city; its dependence on heavy industry made it
extra-vulnerable
during the Special Period and now it feels and looks like a shunned place. If we may revert to vibes, San Cristobal’s are … peculiar.

A sprawling three-storey building, on a corner of a colonnaded
residential
street, had been the hotel but was now the city’s Social Services’ cultural centre. Outside the entrance fizzed an excited crowd; a
morale-boosting
visit from a famous Havana band had been organised for San Cristobal’s Social Services workers and their families. This was explained by a sympathetic young black woman as I stood wearily leaning on the receptionist’s desk. Looking around, I saw a half-collapsed sofa in a corner of the foyer – could I sleep on that? The young woman smiled, nodded, said ‘OK.’ At that moment a middle-aged white man appeared and was not sympathetic. Taking in the situation, he said ‘No!’, then tongue-lashed my ally before literally pushing me out on to the pavement. There he beckoned to an elderly black man with a hang-dog expression and a slight limp and ordered him to lead me to a lodging-house.

For a mile or so I followed José (a gentle character, clearly afraid of Señor Nasty) along broken pavements made malodorous by blocked sewers. The lodging-house proved to be a caravanserai where
campesiños
tethered horses and mules outside rooms forming three sides of a large courtyard. The proprietress, a frizzy dyed blonde, snapped ‘No room!’ and scowled at me. José pleaded for floor-space in her own quarters: he knew I was equipped to sleep anywhere. In reply she slammed the door. On his own
initiative José then tried three other
casas
– scattered, we were walking for half an hour. Obviously Señor Nasty had no power to order anyone to shelter me; José was on the same mission as Sergei. By now it was dark, San Cristobal’s minor streets are unlit and the pavements’ defects
presented
a real hazard. Back at the non-hotel Señor Nasty abused my guide for his ‘failure’, then ordered us to try again in another
barrio
. Whereupon I rebelled, sat on the steps and said, truthfully, that I was too tired to walk one more metre. At that José borrowed a bicycle from a by-stander and pedalled away into blackness.

By the light of a solitary tall street lamp I observed the passing traffic. One cyclist was transporting a large child on his carrier and the woman balanced on his handle-bars embraced a bucket. A pair of oxen were drawing a long creaking cart piled high with planks. Another cyclist pulled a wooden trailer containing two smallish pigs. Overhead, dozens of bats swooped swiftly. At ground level dozens of mosquitoes went for the Irish option – delicious new blood! Then two taxis (1950s vintage) delivered the Havana band plus Orestes, my saviour.

Orestes (small, slim, fortyish) was a senior provincial official and his presence at once subdued Señor Nasty. He spoke fluent English and asked, ‘What’s your problem?’

‘I don’t have one,’ I replied. ‘All I need is space to lie down, not a room with a bed. Someone else has the problem.’

Orestes laughed. ‘But here we have a room with a bed, not a tourists’ room but an OK place. And you’re no tourist, they don’t come here!’

Señor Nasty sulked in the background as Orestes led me up three flights of rickety stairs to an ill-lit canteen providing subsidised meals and Hatuey at NP10 per bottle. My host urged me to eat but I was too tired, craved only Hatuey. Over two bottles it transpired that Orestes came from Baracoa, where his wife and sons lived, and for eight months he hadn’t been home ‘because of our transport problems’. It impressed me that a senior official accepted, sadly but resignedly, his share of the Cuban people’s hardship regime.

Orestes showed me to my room, one of many leading off a high gallery overlooking an enormous quadrangle/patio in which the
habaneros
were testing their sound equipment. This room’s door was off its hinges, the walls didn’t meet the sagging ceiling, all the electric fittings had been removed and both single-bed mattresses were blood- and semen-stained. It was a hot night so Orestes now called upon that Cuban ingenuity and adaptability of which Fidel so often boasts. A youth hurried in with a fan lacking a plug and
I watched in horror as he attached it to naked wires protruding from the wall. I hadn’t seen such a contraption since my last visit to India some thirty years previously. Its noise resembled a grinding snore; occasionally it faltered, as though pausing to regain energy, then ground on relentlessly. I considered silencing it by pulling on the frayed flex but feared
electrocution
. Then, as the over-amplified band began its first number I realised how useful that fan would be, as a toothache is useful in conjunction with gout. Sleep was impossible until the party ended at 4.30 a.m.

At sunrise I could find no one to unlock a door – until, exploring beyond the patio, I almost fell over José, asleep on a pile of old carpets with a key around his neck.

Now San Cristobal’s drab streets were enlivened by colourful groups of chattering, laughing schoolchildren, as well turned out here as elsewhere, the seniors wearing heavy satchels – some beautiful, woven of palm-fibre. I passed two schools, most teachers arriving on bicycles. At the
autopista
junction two women and two men were already waiting on the north side (for Havana) and several more on the south side (for Pinar). One woman grumbled about the Mustards being late because of that Social Services party …

From here the old nuclear weapons site was visible and it occurred to me (only half in jest) that perhaps San Cristobal has never quite recovered from that traumatic episode. But how valid is the general perception that all of humanity was then at risk? I reckoned (aged thirty-one, politically ignorant) that the superpower leaders were playing silly buggers. Now, reading and comparing Robert F. Kennedy’s
Thirteen Days
and Carlos Lechuga’s
In the Eye of the Storm,
‘silly buggers’ seems to sum it up. Some US generals did yearn to press the button but neither Nikita Khrushchev nor John F. Kennedy was insane enough to go over the edge. Then, as now, it suited MIC (the military-industrial-complex against which Eisenhower famously warned his compatriots) to keep irrational fears on the boil. The
self-authorised
nuclear powers have never even pretended to abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. No wonder rational people everywhere are enraged by the illogic of Iran and North Korea being forbidden nuclear weapons while others ‘enhance’ their arsenals. What gives the present nuclear powers the right to a deterrent others may not acquire? Had Hans Blix discovered nukes ready to go, would Iraq have been invaded in March 2003?

My east-bound group numbered sixteen by the time two Mustards arrived with their STOP signs, tin whistles and pouches for pesos. I always enjoyed watching them at work, a fine example of crisis management.
Here NP3 was their reward for securing an
automovil
lift; truck passengers didn’t have to pay but usually dropped a few centavos into the pouch. That morning most
automovils
were tourist-driven, therefore not stopped. Having been an early arrival did not entitle me to a seat in the first two
automovils
because our Mustard, an efficient elderly mulatto, had
established
that I wasn’t in a hurry; men with important appointments in the city got those seats. A crowded Havana-bound farm truck was stopped, then condemned as unsuitable for the foreigner; even at a distance it reeked of pig manure. Senor Mustard urged me to wait for the next
automovil
and looked annoyed when I climbed aboard, far preferring a slow open truck to enclosure in a speeding car.

Two young women with infants on their laps squatted in corners; everyone else stood. Near me, leaning against the cab, a stressed-looking old man held a squirming, half-grown trussed pig between his legs. Three women were cherishing cartons of agitatedly cheeping chicks. Two young men were cherishing nylon sacks, each containing an indignantly crowing fighting cock. When one broke loose pandemonium preceded his capture. He was of an unattractive breed, his underparts featherless, all naked scarlet skin. Having once attended a cock-fight, in Ecuador, it shocks me that this barbarism persists in Fidel’s Cuba.