Island that Dared (46 page)

The Cubans jailed in 2003 were guilty of such crimes. In reaction to the international outcry against their convictions Havana moved fast. On 24 June 2003 the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Felipe Perez Roque, launched a volume entitled
The Dissidents.
It had been put together in ten days and was based on sixty hours of interviews conducted by two well-known professional writers assisted by twenty-four researchers. The interviewees were twelve State Security agents who had infiltrated some of the groups from which the contentious convicts emerged. When the agents gave evidence in public their secret careers ended; most were not sorry to resume normal life and be reconciled with families who for years had been distressed by their apparent betrayal of the Revolution.

The Dissidents
is valuable despite the high speed, high-tech manner of its production. It provides a verbal and pictorial record of the experiences of ‘amateurs’ (ordinary citizens from varying backgrounds) who because of chance contacts became spies for Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior. All concerned seem to have been amateurish. The US Special Interests officials happily handed out open passes to any Cuban who presented him/herself as a counter-revolutionary. Thus equipped, such people could and did wander in and out of the Special Interests building, together with up to three companions, using its computers and snooping at will. One
almost feels sorry for those obtuse US officials, so sure of the Revolution’s unpopularity that any apparent counter-revolutionary was assumed to be genuine and made welcome not only in their offices but in their homes.

This Mickey Mouse scene in no way resembles the bad old commando days when many lives were lost and huge damage was done to Cuba’s vital installations. As the spies infiltrated numerous small dissident groups they found ideological squabbles, jealousy about who gained what from the Special Interests hand-outs, fierce personality clashes and a rapid
turnover
in memberships as coveted ‘refugee’ visas rewarded not very tangible achievements. Few projects with genuinely destabilising potential were uncovered. Going by the letter of the law, those subversives jailed in 2003 were undoubtedly guilty and needed restraint – but surely not
imprisonment
? When I said as much to Alberto he argued rather implausibly that their sort could become a menace if used by McCarry’s threatening ‘Commission’.

In his launch speech, Felipe Perez asked, ‘Will this book be known beyond the borders of Cuba? Will it enjoy the same front page coverage as the media campaigns waged against Cuba? We will have to wait and see if newspapers print reviews, if television networks come to seek the truth and interview the people who have revealed this truth.’ As far as my observation goes,
The Dissidents
is virtually unknown outside Cuba. Yet in another political context it might have become a bestseller, given its extraordinary blend of ‘human interest’ and the tensions that go with spying – however amateurish. The narrative has a peculiarly Cuban flavour; it is light-years away from the noxious world of CIA/KGB activities. As Felipe Perez notes, ‘This is not the story of a repressive regime that obtained confessions through torture … The Revolution has used the method of infiltrating the enemy; it has used intelligence, shrewdness, covert activity, but within certain limits … ’ He also points out that Revolutionary Cuba is the real ‘dissident’, its counter-revolutionaries the conformists allied to ‘savage capitalism’, seeking ‘to impose a single system on the world, a single way of living, a single model of conduct’.

I was crossing the Bay of Havana to visit Normando, a genuinely
independent
dissident to whom I had a letter of introduction from my Pinar friends. During that twelve-minute ferry ride early clouds glowed
rose-pink
and old-gold above the two fortresses – Castillo de Moro and Castillo de la Punta – massively guarding the deep channel linking bay to ocean. Here one fully appreciates Havana’s contribution to Spain’s
empire-building.
This wide, sheltered bay might have been custom-built to protect treasure fleets from well-armed pirates. Now an occasional cruise liner, defying the blockade, moors briefly at an Old Havana terminal near the Plaza de Armas while freighters regularly deliver cargoes of containers – some brightly painted and variously logo’d, seeming alien amidst the drab dilapidation of the docks.

Many of my fellow passengers were cyclists who pedalled away on the narrow wooden pier. Across the road stands a small, recently restored early nineteenth-century church dedicated to Nuestra Señora de la Virgen de Regla, who has a dual personality. She is also Yemaya, the Santería patroness of the sea and mother of all men. This statue arrived from Spain in a hermit’s luggage in 1696 and fourteen years later was appointed patroness of Havana and of all Cuban fishermen; nobody knows its origin. Two black hands hold a fair, pink-cheeked Infant Jesus on the Virgin’s lap and her shrine is surrounded by a bank of white and blue artificial flowers – Yemaya’s colours. Each Santería
orisha
has his/her own combination of colours. (In West Africa’s Yoruba religion
orishas
are spiritual messengers from Olofi/God.) I sat for a little time in the comparative coolness of this agreeably simple church, watching Yemaya’s worshippers offering half a cigar, a banana, a bunch of blue and white wild flowers, a sprinkle of rum. Two old men came together, and three young men wearing dockers’ uniforms, and a few women on their way to the market.

Regla is a compact, attractive, tranquil town, founded as a fishing port in 1687. It grew with the sugar industry; colossal warehouses dominate the shore south of the pier. Many freed slaves settled here and the Santería ambience is perceptible as one strolls on broken pavements through quiet pot-holed streets lined with paint-hungry eighteenth- or
nineteenth-century
houses, often handsomely tiled, not grand but suggesting a sufficiency. Some tourist dollars must percolate through from Havana, but not enough to trigger economic renewal. No householders were selling coffee or buns or ham-rolls from their doorways, no pizza stall catered for the long bus queue on a neglected plaza – its flowerbeds empty, its fountains dry and littered. The bus, when it came, was not Chinese. As Normando put it, ‘Regla stays stuck in the Special Period’. The Municipal Museum, said to provide a particularly interesting exposition of Santería, was closed for repairs. Likewise the Liceo Artistico y Literario where Martí delivered one of his most famous and stirring speeches on Cuban
independence
. However, the natives were friendly and cheerful. A lanky black youth went out of his way to guide me to Normando’s home on a low
hilltop where a ten-foot-high Lenin (a guru not often commemorated in Cuba) surveys the port from a rocky inset.

Normando lived alone in a newish two-roomed clapboard dwelling built on the site of a
bohio
; young banana plants formed a ‘hedge’ around two
organoponico
beds made of timbers salvaged from a derelict warehouse. We sat indoors, on either side of a revolving fan, and I mopped with an already sodden sweat-rag while Normando gave me news of our mutual friends in Pinar.

My host, I had been warned, liked an argument; with
fidelistas
he tended to excoriate Castroism’s failures, with anti-
fidelistas
to praise its successes. His ‘CV’ was remarkable. The Revolution orphaned him – a mother killed by Batista’s bombing of the Sierra Maestra in 1958 when he was a toddler, a father killed four years later during the Escambray ‘civil war’.
Grandparents
reared him, the Revolution educated him, he grew up a loyal
fidelista
, graduated as a biochemist, then came to resent ‘Sovietisation’ and migrated. In the US he was employed for twelve years by a biotechnology company listed on the stock exchange and found it hard to take the influence of commercial pressures on his own and his colleagues’ work. Post-Comecon, he chose to leave his secure job and return to experience the Special Period. ‘I always believed in the Revolution,’ he explained, ‘and now we Cubans had got it back.’ A Miami-born wife and twin sons were abandoned without, it seemed, too much heartache on Normando’s part. In the mid-1980s he had heard about the discovery, by Havana’s Finlay Institute, of an effective meningitis B vaccine – a world first. This breakthrough inspired the establishment in 1986 of the Centre for
Biotechnology
(CIGB) and Normando’s homecoming coincided with the government’s decision – at once reckless and shrewd – to invest vast amounts in those biotechnology industries generally presumed to be the preserve of Minority World scientists.

In 1994 the Centre for Molecular Immunology (CIM) was opened and quickly justified its existence. ‘By 1999,’ said Normando, ‘we were
exporting
medical products to India, China, Russia, Latin America – over fifty countries. The First World of course locked us out – an alliance of US blockaders, pharmaceutical bullies and complicated drug protocols. Then Canadians came to the rescue, helped us develop international clinical trials for six products now selling all over North America and Europe. An English friend who often visits’ [Professor Michael Levin, head of the Paediatric Unit, St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington] ‘says our doctors, scientists and laboratories are world-class in spite of a crashed economy.
This year Chinese oncologists are using CIM’s Theracim Hr3. Two other CIM therapies are being manufactured in India and China under Cuban supervision. And guess what – the State Department has allowed one US company [Cancervax] ‘to carry out clinical trials for the US market! Still the
Yanquis
can’t focus on our advantage … it’s not true you only get monkeys if you pay peanuts.’

Cuba’s on-a-shoe-string successes (twenty-six discoveries, more than a hundred international patents granted) rile those who lavish billions of dollars on medical research with, proportionally, far less impressive results. According to Normando, this outcome should baffle nobody. ‘In the First World,
accountants
decide whether or not new formulae are developed as medications.’

The dread word ‘accountants’ gave me an opening to moan about the calamitous role of that breed in the twenty-first-century publishing world where full-time professional editors (‘not cost-effective’) are threatened with extinction.

Suddenly Normando’s mood changed and he spoke frankly as an unorthodox but committed son of the Revolution. To him the fateful spring of 2003 marked a turning point at which the government lost its compass. Jailing the dissidents, he believed, was a mistake, because their collaboration with a foreign power didn’t really matter. ‘They’re a shoal of feeble no-goods, best ignored – rounding them up played the
Yanqui
game. Then we looked scared and they seemed influential. Which they weren’t and could never be for one obvious reason. However we resent the way things are, we do not – repeat
not
– want to become again a US colony!’

I asked, ‘Why d’you think they lost the compass?’

‘Cason rattled them –
de facto
US ambassador but not keeping the diplomatic rules. He arrived in September ’02 and personally, publicly, tried to organise dissidents. Didn’t Rene and Luis show you their shots of him delivering books to Pinar’s “independent library”? Everyone could see him in action, in his own residence he ran workshops for “independent journalists”. When Perez Roque sent warnings about “breaches of
diplomatic
status” he ignored them, went on taunting Cuba. He even invited foreign journalists to meet him at sedition-stirring sessions in dissidents’ homes. I guess our guys thought they’d look weak, at home and in Washington, if they let him get away with insulting his host government.’

‘Then why not send him home? Wouldn’t that have been wiser than jailing seventy-five who could be used as “prisoners of conscience”?’

Normando’s gesture expressed impatience and some anger. ‘Sure we should’ve packed him off and shown the media the evidence against the traitors shown in court. Governments like diplomats to keep the rules in public. We could’ve got international sympathy instead of being kicked up the backside. I don’t know why our guys couldn’t see that. I’ve heard rumours Fidel favoured the
persona non grata
route. If so, there’s another example of him accepting collective decisions – something Cubans know about and outsiders refuse to believe! Since ’59 it’s been a war of nerves with the US. But keeping us twitchy is two-edged. Having to think so much about defence weakens us, having to be united against aggression strengthens us. Being always on guard against saboteurs, we’ve never had space for political-ideological open debate – the enemy could turn it into a weapon.’

After a lunch of cold roast pork and tomato salad Felix escorted me down to the ferry. On the way we paused to drink rum with a Santería friend of his who was also a librarian and had much to say about
US-funded
‘independent libraries’. These became a focus of controversy in the US after the mass-jailings. Allegedly, ten of the seventy-five were ‘independent librarians’, highlighted by the media as cultured literary folk muzzled by communists. However, the prestigious sixty-four
thousand-strong
American Library Association, which has long-term links with Cuba, thought otherwise.

Back in 2001 Rhonda L. Neugebauer (Bibliographer, Latin American Studies, University of California) led a delegation of librarians to Cuba where, since 1989, she has been regularly meeting colleagues and touring libraries. Subsequently she wrote a long paper for the ‘Information for Social Change Journal’ (No.13, Summer 2001). It concludes: