Island that Dared (53 page)

Previously the public were excluded from Finca Las Manacas unless given a special pass by the Communist Party headquarters in Holguin, a pass not readily issued. Visitors could only stand outside the gate and stare towards a cluster of buildings mostly hidden within a wood planted by Angel. Only recently was it decided to open
el comandante
’s birthplace to tourists, a ‘personality cult’ gesture Fidel has always opposed. The entrance fee was CP10 and the same again for permission to photograph.

We were welcomed by a charming Interior Ministry officer, young and chubby-faced; to meet a charming individual in that uniform was a new experience. Two others (equally agreeable, scarcely out of their teens) hung around at a little distance keeping me within sight whenever I was out of doors – surely a superfluous precaution?

Finca Las Manacas has always been unfenced and unwalled, merging into the surrounding countryside, the small gate a mere token. An elegant young woman named Ruth led me past a rope barrier and at once my gaze was drawn to the tall, slender, long-winged angel who with bowed head looks sorrowfully down at the simple stone slabs of the family graves. Around them grows a profusion of wild flowers – red, white, yellow – while wreaths of artificial flowers drape the little headstones. Angel Castro died
in November 1956 when Fidel was in Mexico organising the Granma expedition. A few weeks later, after the shipwreck, his mother was reading government-directed press reports that Fidel and Raúl Castro Ruz were both dead. Lina was sceptical and told a journalist, ‘I suffer as a mother of soldiers and revolutionaries, but if Fidel and Raúl decide to die, I pray that they may die with dignity.’ She herself died suddenly at the end of July 1963, having seen the Revolution succeed. She had supported Agrarian Reform, though Fidel’s landowning eldest brother then found the Finca reduced, like all others, to four hundred hectares.

Not far from the graves, dwarfed by majestic guayacan, baria and acuje trees, stands ‘Escuela Rural Mixta: No. 15: BIRAN’ – a clapboard,
tin-roofed
, one-room state school where the three-year-old Fidel began his education. Being the youngest he sat at the front of the class on a nursery chair and soon became a nuisance, restless and defiant. A score of
ink-stained
, penknife-scarred mini-desks fill the room and photographs of the young Fidel almost cover the walls. ‘All is original,’ Ruth assured me. ‘Nothing changed only pictures added.’ The twenty or so pupils, children of Angel’s workers, were of different ages so some had to sit on the desk tops. Only Fidel and his siblings would go to another school; for the rest, once able to do manual work their studying days were over. That teacher must have been both patient and skilled; aged five, the disruptive Fidel could read, write and do his sums. A year later he and his eight-year-old sister, Angela, were despatched to faraway Santiago to be privately tutored in preparation for boarding-school. At this time Fidel and his siblings were baptised and their parents had a church wedding; both ceremonies were prerequisites for the children’s acceptance into Roman Catholic schools.

Inevitably the Finca’s present ambience is museum-like. Yet as Ruth led me through the house on stilts, to which rooms had been added as the babies came, I gained quite a vivid impression of the Castro family’s lifestyle. Despite their prosperity (employing six hundred workers at harvest time and attaining ‘Don’ status in the Biran area) Angel and Lina were uninterested in ‘upward mobility’. Fidel recalled, ‘There was no feudal or bourgeois society in Biran. My father was an isolated landowner.
Sometimes
a friend visited him but we hardly ever visited others. My parents usually stayed at home, they worked all the time.’ A simple peasant life contented them: servants eating with the family, milking cows tethered under the house, wayward hens roosting in some of the permanently untidy rooms. The antique telephone and wireless set took me back to my
own early childhood. No other inessentials went to the furnishing and equipment of this home. The most expensive-looking possessions were the saddles and tack habitually used by Angel and Lina, kept well oiled and burnished. However, those frugal parents willingly paid high school fees to ensure that their children had the best possible education.

Surprisingly, Ruth restrained me from photographing the parental bedchamber, a smallish room resembling a side-chapel, crowded with statues, crucifixes, holy pictures, candlesticks and votive offerings with a strong Santería flavour. I asked, ‘Why no pictures?’ and was told ‘It’s disrespectful to religion’. A bizarre notion and Ruth herself didn’t seem convinced by it. Could this ban be to do with lingering Communist Party prejudice?

In one of his famous conversations with the Brazilian Dominican, Frei Betto, Fidel remembered his mother as ‘a very religious woman, a deeply religious woman, more religious than my father but not because she’d received any religious training … She was practically illiterate. She learned how to read and write all by herself. With great effort, she tried to learn. She couldn’t attend school or church, there wasn’t any church where I was born, far from any city. I think her religious beliefs had their origin in some family tradition for her parents were also very religious.’

In that same conversation Fidel looked back, with gratitude, to his years at Belen College. ‘The Spanish Jesuits inculcated a strong sense of personal dignity – regardless of their political ideas … They valued character, rectitude, honesty, courage and the ability to make sacrifices. Teachers definitely have an influence and the Jesuits influenced me with their strict organisation, their discipline and their values.’

Outside, we sauntered across wide expanses of short green grass, kept cropped by several horses and bullocks, all in fine condition. Remote Finca Las Manacas soon grew to be a private hamlet, the family home surrounded by numerous thatched
bohios
, a shop, a post office, a bar, a school, a teacher’s house (one-roomed), a wooden dower-bungalow built for Lina after Angel’s death and a circular cock-pit with a superbly crafted roof and wooden tiered seating for two hundred. I tried to imagine the scene when Angel was running his busy estate: Haitians cooking supper outside their huts, children dawdling to and from school, customers thronging around the shop on pay-day, week-end gamblers converging on the cock-pit where reckless men often lost their week’s wages. (Raúl is said to be addicted still.)

When Fidel was born, Don Angel was fifty-two and too focused on estate
matters to form close relationships with any of his children. But in a distant way he treated them kindly. And Fidel (politically minded from the age of ten) noted approvingly his father’s comparatively humane attitude to the poorest workers. Between harvests, the Haitian cane-cutters on
US-owned
plantations were jobless and destitute; Fidel often heard their hungry children crying and never forgot that sound. Don Angel heard it too and hired many of those men to weed canefields not in need of weeding. Fidel reminisced, ‘I can’t recall his ever failing to find a solution when somebody came to him for help. Sometimes he grumbled and complained but his generosity always got the upper hand.’

When Ruth noticed my heat-exhaustion, as we returned to Diego and his Lada, she reproved me for not wearing a hat. I explained that in Cuba I couldn’t find one to fit my extra-large (fat) head. ‘Then you buy a
sombrilla
(parasol),’ said she. I should have listened …

My signature was the first in the Visitors’ Register – a school exercise book. As we drove away Diego calculated the Finca will only take off as a tourist attraction after Chavez has fixed the province’s roads. I’m glad I saw the place before its tranquillity is shattered and its authenticity eroded by a café, a souvenir shop, public conveniences, a Visitors’ Centre, a kitsch coloured map of the region and a tarred car park.

Perhaps Fidel’s background – isolated home, unsociable parents – partly explains his distaste for private parties. His friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez has noted, ‘He is one of the rare Cubans who neither sings nor dances’. For recreation he reads and he has admitted ‘In my next reincarnation I want to be a writer’. His letters from the Isle of Pines prison (not written for publication) reveal an extraordinary depth and breadth of reading for a man in his middle twenties. Discussing books kept him a happy prisoner – Shakespeare and Thackeray, Kant and Freud, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, Descartes and Marx, Varela and Martí, Cervantes and Plutarch. From dawn to dusk he read, mentioning in a letter dated 18 March 1954, ‘I fell asleep finishing
The Transcendental Aesthetics of Space and Time’
. Most of us would have fallen asleep beginning it.

In the late afternoon a slow walk on a rough muddy track took me beyond Mayari to where much reeking garbage is indiscriminately dumped on open ground. Then, strolling between banana groves, I reflected on Fidel’s various writings, read over the past three years, and found myself
regretting
, as do many
fidelistas
, that he sometimes leaves himself open to ridicule by pronouncing on international matters of which he has a limited
understanding. He hands his enemies a whole arsenal of weapons by, for example, sounding naïve (the EU), or wildly over-emotional (Serbia) or
ill-informed
(Tibet). He is (or chooses to seem?) unaware of the EU’s
fundamental
flaws – breeding bureaucrats on a scandalous scale, condoning gross internal corruption even after it has been exposed to public view, enabling those transnational corporations he so detests to have their way regardless of individual member country’s real economic/social needs and long-term environmental welfare. Maybe the EU does constitute a threat to US global hegemony, but it’s certainly no threat to the free marketeers’ stranglehold over member states.

NATO’s 1999 attack on Serbia was the sort of ‘asymmetrical conflict’ we’ve since become accustomed to in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. Why does Fidel describe it as a ‘war’? Not one NATO life was lost during that shameful and ruthless bombing of a country that posed no threat to the bombers. Yet this was no ‘genocidal’ attack on the Serbs, as he alleges. It directly served particular US interests in the Balkans and was incidentally useful for the testing of new US weaponry – a motive Fidel identifies while distorting the main motive.

As for Tibet – in a speech made in Havana on 11 June 1999, coinciding with the end of that ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Serbia/Kosovo, Fidel considered the implications of NATO’s playing a new role, far beyond the North Atlantic, and concluded:

Tell that to the Tibetans!

I returned to Casa Eduardo by a different route. Along the high river embankment old men dozed in the shade of even older ceibas while children romped in a spacious playground, some of its elaborate
equipment
needing replacement. In a big bookshop half the dusty shelves were empty and the stock, priced in national pesos, consisted mainly of Party publications, their pages yellowing. Behind the counter two middle-aged
women were trying to mend a dented electric kettle. They explained that new books, priced in convertible pesos, didn’t sell in Mayari.

Vigorous hymn-singing drew me to a Methodist Friday service being briskly taken by a mulatta minister in a partially restored church originally built in 1926 for United Fruit Company employees. (During the pseudo-Republic many US churches expanded into Cuba.) There was much joking interaction between the minister and her congregation of a hundred or so and several new pews had been installed for the hundreds more who worship on the Sabbath. The nearby Roman Catholic church was firmly locked, its grounds neglected. Attendance is poor, said Eduardo, an atheist who regarded all the imported US churches as ‘subversive’ and the Vatican as an ally of the imperialists in Washington.

I planned to spend Sunday 21 October – municipal elections day – in Manzanillo before continuing down the coast to Playa Las Colorades. But how to get from Mayari to Manzanillo? Perhaps a return to Holguin (going in the wrong direction), then a bus to Bayamo, forty miles short of Manzanillo. But no one knew when a vehicle would leave for Holguin – and it might well miss the one daily service to Bayamo. When Diego offered to do the direct three and a half hour drive to Bayamo for CP50 – with a stop on the way to visit the remote Dos Rios Monumento Martí – I didn’t hesitate. This journey is measured in time rather than distance because of the road’s condition.  

We were off before sunrise, accompanied by Diego’s forester son, Carlos, who normally cycled the ten miles to his tree nursery job. He was an effervescent young man, proud of Cuba’s reforestation programme and aware of its importance. An educated population can produce many young workers who feel so personally involved in their project that a sense of achievement compensates for low wages.  

Everywhere colonists inflicted deforestation on their new properties but in Cuba the process went slowly. Columbus landed on an island
eight-eight
per cent forested; as late as 1774 that figure had been reduced by only five per cent. Two centuries later is was down to fifteen per cent. Then a vigorous reforestation programme, adhered to even during the Special Period, raised the wooded area to twenty per cent by 2005. ‘And maybe twenty-one per cent by now!’ said Carlos.  

Our first hitch-hiker was a voluble policeman with a grievance about the unavailability of hinges for the wooden cupboard he was making as his sister’s wedding present. Soon after leaving the main road we picked
up a distraught young mother carrying a very sick baby. Her village doctor had diagnosed a condition needing specialist treatment and a Bayamo ambulance was on its way but precious time could be saved by our meeting it. This meant no détour to Monumento Martí. I had begun to feel jinxed. Thwarted by bureaucrats in Santa Clara, the Camaguey ballet cancelled by rain damage, the Holguin baseball match postponed by humidity, the Dos Rios interlude thwarted by a sick baby … And in fact there was worse to come.