Island that Dared (47 page)

As this 2001 report makes plain, ‘dissidents’ (though always under surveillance) were not harassed until James Cason took over at the US Interests Section.

In December 2003, eight months after the round-up, Nat Hentoff wrote an article in the
Village Voice
(‘In Castro’s Gulag – Librarians’) deploring ‘Castro’s crackdown on Cuba’s dissenters for the crime of advocating freedom of thought’. He criticised the American Library Associations’ annual meeting in Toronto where ‘Cuban independent librarians were denied a speaking place on the program while Castro’s librarians were given the freedom to speak for nearly three hours’. A week later Nat Hentoff ’s contribution was entitled ‘Criminalizing Librarians’ with special reference to Victor Rolando Arroyo ‘who directed an
independent
, private library before being sentenced to twenty-six years in prison and also belongs to the Independent Cuban Journalists and Writers Union’. In Pinar del Rio, Arroyo led all the US-funded groups including the Centre for Trade Union Studies which every Saturday ran lectures (thinly attended) on how to be a successful subversive. In his mother’s home in the Jacinto district he met with Cason and his predecessor, Vicky Huddleston. He regularly misinformed the outside world that two million Cubans, out of eleven million, were dissidents. An extreme hard-liner, he urged Cason to suspend family remittances from the US and cancel all flights between Havana and Miami. The principal evidence against him
was documentary, including receipts for funding that had come directly from CANF. Among Pinar’s other counter-revolutionaries he was
unpopular
but tolerated because of his exceptionally close links to the US Interest Section. Nat Hentoff asks, ‘Is Victor Arroyo a “Traitor to Cuba”?’ The answer is ‘Yes’.

On 6 October I walked to the railway station between heavy showers, and got quite a shock; since my last journey to Santa Clara this service had been transformed. Punctually we departed in a conventionally comfortable train: open-plan, well-lit, unvandalised coaches, our tickets checked by a cheerful middle-aged conductress who dispensed complimentary salami rolls, bottles of Tukola and that morning’s
Granma
. I didn’t grumble, though I do prefer corridor trains; they allow more freedom of movement – and more bonding, in face-to-face carriages. My seat companion, a slim young woman clasping a large drum, slept all the way. Our conductress had suggested putting the drum in the luggage annex but evidently it was too precious to be deserted.

Granma’s
front page commemorated this being the thirty-first
anniversary
of the fatal bombing of a Cubana Airways plane taking seventy-three passengers to Havana. Another article outlined the latest injury inflicted by the blockade. Inside pages reported the many events being organised throughout Latin America for the Che anniversary, Lula’s fuzzy comments on privatisation, the misdeeds of DynCorp in Puerto Rico, plans for the conservation of historic monuments in Cienfuegos and the killing by US forces of Iraqi women and children. One page was devoted to brief theatre, ballet and book reviews, another to baseball, boxing and fencing prospects. The back page extolled, with reams of statistics, a co-operative building project being undertaken in Granma province as a tribute to Che and Camilo Cienfuegos, his second-in-command during the Battle of Santa Clara.
Granma
does not strive to entertain.

It was good to be back in a city centre where human voices are the dominant sound and ‘traffic noise’ means hoof-beats. Surprisingly, no municipal contributions to the Che ‘event’ were visible; I had been
expecting
banners, bunting and scrolls. Santa Clara’s first commemoration was happening on 8 October, forty years after Ché’s wounding and capture. On the 9th, the date of his execution, Acting-President Raúl had to be M.C. in Havana. Five days later he would return to Santa Clara with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela for the most solemn
commemoration
, to be attended by Ché’s family. This I had discovered
belatedly, after arranging to meet an important friend of a friend in Camaguey – someone I couldn’t contact to try to change our appointment, and he would be travelling from elsewhere to meet me.

By 7.30 a.m. on 7 October the Plaza de la Revolucion was all action. Dozens of ebullient schoolchildren, directed by two adults, were neatly arranging thousands of dark blue plastic chairs on the concrete expanse overlooked by Ché’s statue. Pathways were being vigorously swept with twig brooms. Teams of sound technicians were erecting pylon-like
amplifiers
that arrived in bits on trucks, their reconstruction reminding me of childhood struggles with Meccano. (I pre-date Lego.) This whole area, quite dejected on my first visit, had been spruced up: weeds gone, fountains splashing, grass clipped, flower-beds glowing, broken concrete steps mended, faded billboards renewed, though Ché’s exhortations remained the same:
Hasta la victoria siempre.

I turned towards the inconspicuous museum and mausoleum, closed for repainting during my last visit. At a nearby kiosk one exchanges one’s bag for a ticket; here the tourist industry defers to Ché’s principles and entry is free – as to a synagogue, church or mosque. The museum exhibits are standard: Ché’s weapons, pipe, camera, binoculars, field-radio, beret, combat jacket, the asthmatic’s inhaler he so desperately needed, the dental instruments he used in his camp clinics. Seeing his uniform, one realises he was a smaller man – less tall and broad – than one imagines him to have been. But what counts in this museum is the collection of enlarged family (and other) photographs illustrating Ché’s transformation from beloved, pampered baby to defiant, emaciated guerrilla warrior. One notices his mother’s large strong hands as she poses with her infant son in his long christening robe. The toddler, sucking two fingers, looks serious and determined. The schoolboy in short trousers sits on a car bonnet, the adolescent enjoys rugby, golf, basketball, the young man motorcycles the length of South America – by now a famous journey. A much-reproduced Sierra Maestra group photograph shows Celia smoking a cigarette, as do many other shots of Fidel’s most significant friend. (She died in her fifties, of lung cancer, whereupon Fidel ‘became convinced that the ultimate sacrifice I should make on behalf of public health in Cuba was to quit smoking. Teach by example.’) My favourite in this collection shows Che reclining on the ground in an African hut reading Goethe while cuddling a pup.

From the museum one enters the mausoleum, a shadowy cave-like chamber. Here Che and seventeen other guerrillas occupy ossuary niches
in the cliff wall. An eternal flame, lit by Fidel on 17 October 1997, flickers amidst boulders and greenery suggesting the jungle in which these
compañeros
fought and died. The atmosphere is reverential – and powerful. Those rare places where emotions, positive or negative, are palpably concentrated have always intrigued me. I’ve come upon them in Nepal, Coorg, Eastern Turkey, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, the Russian Far East but in Santa Clara, a mere decade after the entombment, this
concentration
was wholly unexpected. We have wandered on to contentious territory, the way ahead obscured by a cloud of unknowing. Politics,
propaganda
, the packaging of Che as a ‘celebrity’ don’t adequately explain the atmosphere, generated by an accumulation of individuals’ responses to Ché’s message. I left with a lump in my throat.

On the other side of the city, at the site of Ché’s battle-winning train ambush, the wrecked wagons had recently been repainted – a bad idea, they looked much less authentic. The adjacent example of ‘public art’, a singularly ugly irregular conglomeration of long concrete slabs, was being dutifully photographed by Viazul tourists. Two Canadian matrons were registering outrage at the cost of the ‘museum’ wagon ticket. To feel a thrill at Blinidad one needs an intimate knowledge of Ché’s military exploits.

At 6.00 a.m. the old moon lay in the arms of the new and, nearby, Venus shone lustrously in a starless sky. Seeing children on their way to school took me aback; I had expected this to be a Special Day in Santa Clara. Between Parque Vidal and the Plaza large cheerful crowds were gathering at each street junction, apparently awaiting leaders, and as the first sun rays touched Ché’s bronze form I was approaching three skimpy barriers blocking the road – the sort a child could move. These were manned by a quartet of young toughs – evidently marshalls, though wearing no uniforms, badges or arm-bands. I walked ahead on the verge, ignoring the barriers, but was ordered to return and await their removal. Just then all those crowds I had passed earlier could be seen processing towards us, filling the long, wide street. I joined the vanguard, noticing that everyone carried a postcard-sized blue and green pass or ticket. When a marshall demanded mine I stared at him, nonplussed – then showed my passport. He shook his head: without a ticket I could not proceed. My first reaction was disbelief: there must be some misunderstanding. I stood silent, stunned and bewildered – then began to plead, expressing devotion to Che,
explaining
that I had come all the way from Ireland for this occasion. The marshall shouted at me, rudely, making a dismissive gesture. At that a
mixture of rage and disappointment brought me close to tears and for a wild moment I considered walking on, testing the marshalls’ authority – which would have been stupid, inviting deportation. Instead I sloped off to try my luck elsewhere, with little hope of success though I knew the environs quite well and could think of three peripheral places where the Plaza merged into the surrounding fields. But of course each possibility was now being surveyed by a policeman – all three young, lightly armed, friendly and polite. They listened to me attentively, looked sympathetic, seemed genuinely to regret having to do their duty.

Back at the road-block, tension had gathered. For Cuba’s tourist
industry
, this was a PR mini-disaster; pass-less Che-worshippers, from four continents, were protesting against their exclusion from the Plaza.
However
, this wasn’t an anti-foreigner rule; we were surrounded by furious
pass-less
Cubans who expressed their fury between themselves, not directing it at the marshalls. One young Australian woman sobbed as she begged for mercy; she spoke fluent Spanish and a Cuban friend stood beside her, giving useless support. She was writing her thesis on Ché’s ‘New Man’ concept and had been saving up for two years to be in Santa Clara for ‘the fortieth’. My own rage was refuelled by the marshalls’ insolence as they glared contemptuously at us foreigners while yelling abuse at any
argumentative
Cuban.

Had we been allowed to remain at the original barrier site we could have seen a fraction of the ceremony (though not the ‘stage’, the enormous plinth on which Ché’s statue stands) and heard the speeches led by Raul’s panegyric. But now the bullies herded us far down the road and spitefully summoned three gigantic trucks from some nearby depot to block our view. Hatred flared then amidst the frustrated locals, reminding me of incidents during that long visa wait in Havana. Petty officials drunk on a little power bring out the worst in everybody. It was easy to imagine those marshalls harassing dissidents and greatly enjoying it. Later, Tania slyly observed that I perhaps needed this experience to blunt my scepticism about certain human rights violations.

With hindsight it was obvious that for this occasion I should have overcome my allergy to group-travel and joined fellow-members of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in London. It’s an uncomfortable fact that official Cuba can’t cope with independent solo travellers – unlabelled individuals. As a member of a group that is expected, one is shown everything: schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories – even prisons. The group can be indiscriminately labelled: teachers, musicians,
brick-layers,
historians, doctors, chefs, cyclists, nurses, architects, artists,
philosophers
, organic farmers. All are welcome – if expected, their names filed and their movements pre-arranged. The individual traveller is of course also welcomed by the individual Cuban but excluded from all institutions. Several teachers and doctors wanted me to see their workplaces but my being unlabelled disqualified me from crossing those thresholds. This rigidity feels unCuban, a too durable residue of the Soviet phase. Tania saw it as ‘a sharp weapon for our enemies. Cuban institutions have nothing to hide. We’re not and have never been like the Soviet Union. But this stupid behaviour gives another impression’.

One of the high, wide billboards overlooking the Plaza de la Revolucion said, ‘Be more efficient every day, be better every day’ – a Che quote obviously heeded by Santa Clara’s municipal workers. At dawn on 9 October I had the Plaza to myself and, astoundingly, not even one Tukola tin or scrap of paper littered this space where 45,000 people had assembled twenty-four hours previously. An even greater gathering was to take place five days hence yet the chairs had vanished and the sound system had been dismantled.

I was on my way to Santa Clara’s recently renovated bus station where, in a cubby-hole partitioned off for tourists, a beautiful young woman laid down the law with a charming smile: I must use Viazul and I could book a seat now but I could buy my ticket only one hour before departure for Camaguey at 2.00 p.m. on the morrow.

A bicitaxi took me to Immigration on the city’s far side. Because Cuban visas are granted for thirty days my five-week visit required an extension for another thirty days. In Dublin I had asked the Cuban ambassador (H.E. Noel Carrillo, a congenial and helpful character) if he could provide me with two thirty-day visas to spare me another encounter with the Ministry of the Interior. That, however, was impossible; the extension must always be obtained within Cuba. But I could get it at any provincial capital’s Immigration Office on any date that suited me.

I have mixed feelings about bicitaxis. As a ‘green’ alternative and a healthy source of income for many men put out of work by factory closures, I applaud them. But, being myself a cyclist, I found it quite embarrassing to sit behind the pedaller watching other legs transporting me. This chatty young man was a vigorous pedaller who played baseball for Santa Clara and paused en route to show me a photograph of his infant son.

The Ministry of the Interior occupies a 1920s villa on a street corner.
Across the road an off-duty bus horse was enjoying the lush grass of the verge and in the front garden a palm tree had shed glistening red berries to the delight of a toddler who was being warned not to touch them. Here was a short queue, relaxing on the verandah’s two benches while the toddler’s mother shadowed him around the garden. Through an open door we could see two tall, handsome mulatto officers in well-tailored brown uniforms doing their bureaucratic things in a drab little office. Their secretary was a dumpy woman of uncertain age, sharp-voiced and weary-looking.

The petitioner on my left was being summoned repeatedly into a side office; after each brief interview she looked more anxious. An overweight woman, her movements awkward, she had copper-dyed hair, a prominent nose, wide-set grey eyes. Having been recently widowed, she wished to live with her daughter in Havana but some arcane regulation was blocking the mandatory ‘change of residence’ permit. Her final interview, on the verandah, was with a tall young woman, stylishly dressed in mufti, who spoke to her kindly but could offer no reprieve. She hurried to the gate with head bowed, holding back tears. Then, as she passed along the pavement, I could see her face crumpling and hear anguished sobs. This denial of the ‘human right’ to move house does smell of dictatorship.