Island that Dared (7 page)

That same morning, on my way down Enramada, Santiago’s main commercial street, I heard a dog howling strangely in the near distance and saw a crowd gathering. As I drew closer and the howling became more frenzied, four policemen appeared and herded everyone on to the
pavements.
A little red garbage van sped past me, a closed van with a smallish
door in the back. I could now see the mad (rabid?) dog, a mangy
medium-sized
lurcher. Mercifully the Trio were not present. Out of the van leaped a very tall man wearing thick dungarees and long leather gauntlets. Seizing the dog by one hind leg he whirled it around and around until it was too dizzy to bite, then tried to open the rear door by flinging the unfortunate creature against it, causing shrieks of pain to replace the howling. When the door remained shut there followed another bout of whirling and flinging, also unsuccessful. I wanted to scream at the nearest policeman – ‘Open the bloody door!’ At the third attempt it did open, the dog vanished and the indisputably brave dustman pushed one shoulder against it while fighting a rusty bolt. Swiftly he drove away and, glancing around, I noticed many in the crowd looking as queasy as I felt.

That day’s quest, for the Casa de las Religiones Populares, took us east from Parque Cespedes, up and then down along Sueno’s wide, traffic-free, tree-shaded avenues. This district’s art nouveau villas and roomy 1930s bungalows, with tiled facades and colonnaded verandahs, have long since been converted into flats, schools, clinics, kindergartens, government offices. We also passed rows of unassuming old wooden houses (‘Caribbean vernacular’) recalling the arrival of all those French refugees in 1791. En route I tried to not see the garishly decorated fifteen-storey Hotel Santiago which seems to jeer at a nearby white marble monument to the ascetic Che Guevara and the
compañeros
who died with him in Bolivia.

In the Casa de las Religiones Populares, a discreetly crumbling mansion encircled by ceiba trees, the exhibits are not conventionally displayed but carefully arranged, in three rooms, to give a sense of their ceremonial significance. Cuba’s popular religions include Santería, voodoo and a cult somewhat ambiguously known as ‘spiritism’. Of these Santería is by far the most popular, its adherents outnumbering Christians. It has evolved from a merging of West African cults with elements of Spanish Catholicism, the former the dominant ingredient.

The Trio (being reared as agnostics) were baffled by Santería’s
interweaving
of Christian statues, images and candles with small animal skeletons, a stuffed eagle hanging from the ceiling, weirdly carved walking sticks, intricately embossed drums, cauldrons containing a variety of dead leaves, feathered dolls with forbidding expressions, ebony masks with glaring red eyes and long shaggy manes, votive offerings of fruits, grains and glasses of rum. As we moved from room to room Rose looked increasingly addled while her juniors seemed almost apprehensive. Rachel and I later agreed that this was not our most productive educational effort.

Emerging into the noon heat, the Trio suggested turning towards Coppelia, forgetting Loma de San Juan, a significant small hill which once formed part of Santiago’s outer defences. There, on 1 July 1898, fewer than a thousand Spaniards held out for some twelve hours against more than three thousand US troops recruited – according to Theodore Roosevelt, who was present – ‘from the wild riders and riflemen of the Rockies and the Great Plains’. This was the only major land-battle of the invasion and Richard Gott records the Cubans’ subsequent resentment:

Rose chose to celebrate her tenth birthday, on 10 November, by
returning
to Playa Siboney and the mango-shaded restaurant. Despite a long wait for the bus we were on the beach by 9.00 a.m.

Two hours later the royal palms suddenly became wildly agitated, reshaped by a gale, all their fronds pointing south as masses of low charcoal clouds poured over the Sierra de la Gran Piedra and whiteness flecked the sea – now jade green. We made for the nearest shelter, an improvised café two hundred yards away where the awning was irrelevant because the gale drove the rain horizontally across the tables. Happily the storm passed as quickly as it had arrived and we strolled to the restaurant through a fine drizzle, the slight drop in temperature compensating for the mild
discomfort
of sodden clothes.

That was a jolly birthday party, if not gastronomically memorable (noodles, pork steaks, grated carrot). Inevitably I recalled Rachel’s tenth birthday, celebrated in the little town of Andahuayalas towards the end of our three-month Andean trek. There it took over an hour to find a cake – any kind of cake. That evening we ate steak, onions and chips in a large grotty restaurant lit by an oil-lamp. The bottle of Peruvian wine spotted on the top shelf of a dusty shop was challenging – as was that hard-won sponge cake. But aged ten the symbolism of a birthday cake is what matters.

The clouds began to break up as we returned to the junction, sniffing a medley of strong scents released by the rain: unfamiliar herbs and blossoms, rotting vegetation, ripe pig manure, over-ripe papaya. Outside
the long, low junction shed, where locals collect their rations, several groups stood around awaiting transport though no bus was expected for the foreseeable future. Soon a 1950s jeep stopped to pick up two young men carrying tool bags. Some time later an already overcrowded car, minus both rear doors, found space for two slim elderly women. Their fat friend was left behind but her protestations held no rancour. Meanwhile swarms of day mosquitoes were tormenting us though the Cubans seemed indifferent to them. As our itch bumps multiplied, even Rose complained.

Shouts of joy greeted the arrival of an open-backed empty farm lorry and we were urged to climb aboard – easier said than done, for the uninitiated. This was a high truck, without steps, but a strong young man locked his hands together for me and kind arms stretched down to help the Trio. We stood at one side, holding a bar, able at last to appreciate the landscape – and to see Granjita Siboney.

From this little farmhouse Fidel and his hundred and twenty companions, wearing army uniforms bought on the black market, set out by starlight on the morning of 26 July 1953 to assault the Moncada barracks, hoping to equip the Rebel Army by robbing its armoury. Most men were armed only with .22 rifles or shotguns; a few carried heavier weapons. During the previous weeks, as the Movement surreptitiously assembled its volunteers and weaponry on Granjita’s two acres, Ernesto Tizol, a poultry farmer who had rented the premises, told the locals that he was building a new
battery-hen
unit. Now, viewing this tranquil pastoral scene, it seems little has changed since that convoy of motor cars and buses moved off, led by Fidel in a large hired Buick which had just taken him the five hundred and sixty miles from Havana, a black lorry-driver at the wheel, posing as the young white lawyer’s chauffeur. Soon more than half those volunteers would be dead. When the Moncada raid failed, many were shot after enduring extreme forms of torture – so extreme that some of Batista’s soldiers (not sensitive types) couldn’t bear to watch. Moncada’s commanding officer, Colonel Chaviano, had demanded ten rebel lives for every one of the nineteen soldiers killed. The rebels had lost six. Several military doctors and junior officers, appalled by what they saw and heard, tried to rescue some of the rebels but were warned not to interfere. One doctor, Mario Munoz, protested so vigorously that he was shot dead. Photographs of the tortured bodies were circulated throughout Cuba and these, like Britain’s execution of Ireland’s 1916 leaders, did much to help the Revolution on its way – more than the contents of any armoury could have done.

Above Granjita Siboney rises the steep blue bulk of the Sierra de la
Gran Piedra where Fidel took refuge after Moncada, while spotter planes and ground troops sought the surviving rebels. Of the forty who returned to Granjita during the afternoon of 26 July several were wounded and/or demoralised, wanting only to be safe home in Havana. That evening, when Fidel set out to climb the Gran Piedra (four thousand feet and precipitous) only nineteen followed him and only two, Oscar Alcade and José Suarez, were able to stay the course until 1 August. Then, at dawn, sixteen Rural Guards found the fugitives asleep in a remote hut. When a corporal suggested killing them on the spot half a dozen men eagerly volunteered for the firing squad. Rural Guard conscripts were black and uneducated and favoured Batista, a mulatto former sergeant, rather than these white middle-class rebels. Just in time, Lieutenant Pedro Sarria realised what was about to happen and ordered the Guards not to fire. Aged fifty-three, he had been among the courageous minority who
attempted
to halt the Moncada torturing. When he died in 1973 his funeral was attended by both Fidel as President of Cuba and his brother Raúl as Commander-in Chief of the armed forces.

At a junction halfway to Santiago we joined two weary-looking women sitting on empty sacks. All around stretched undulating pastureland, yellowish-brown when it should have been green, and in the distance co-op dairy buildings were visible, our lorry’s destination. In Havana we had heard about the drought, Cuba’s worst since 1901. Some two million citizens, out of eleven point two million, were currently dependent on water-tankers. Forty-two of the island’s two hundred and thirty-five reservoirs were dry, the rest were down to thirty-two per cent capacity, on average.

The Trio fretted as desperate horned cattle pushed their heads under a wire fence to reach the unappetising roadside growth. Soothingly I remarked on these bullocks’ fine condition; their glossy golden-brown coats suggested ample supplementary feeding.

The first bus ignored us; it was packed to danger point and swayed erratically as it took a nearby bend. I admired the Trio’s reaction to life as it is lived by the average Cuban: no whining though by this stage all three looked exhausted. The next bus stopped only when the women ran after it, shouting what may have been voodoo curses. A genial mulatta offered Zea a seat on her lap, the rest of us stood. At the terminus I suggested a taxi but in unison the Trio said – ‘No! Walking is better.’ Their age-group readily absorbs parental standards: if walking is feasible one simply doesn’t use motor transport. I hope that in ten years hence they won’t be
competing
for men with Porsches. Back at base they enjoyed an unexpected
reward. Generous Irma had baked a fruit and cream birthday cake, as large as it was luscious; by then she had the measure of their appetites.

Cuba and rum go together, like Scotland and whisky. ‘The cheerful child of sugar cane,’ wrote Fernando Campoamer, one of Ernest Hemingway’s drinking
compañeros
, and this child, though born in Haiti, was reared in Santiago. The industry’s development at first alarmed those who imagined that Haiti’s slaves must have been rum-empowered to kill so many of their French owners before driving the survivors into exile. But in time the
santiagueros
became proud of their association with Bacardi rum.

The Rum Museum riveted the Trio with its graphic displays showing in detail how rum is made, from the planting of cane to the bottling, corking and labelling of the refined finished product. I was more interested in a short history of the Bacardi distillery. It seemed suggestively noncommittal and prompted me to probe on my return to Ireland.

In the late 1850s, when Germany and France began to extract cheap sugar from beet, the US suddenly became Cuba’s main customer, able to name the price, and many Oriente planters and merchants found
themselves
on or near the breadline. But not the Bacardi family, who plunged into the rum alternative.

In 1862 a French-born distiller, José Leon Boutillier, transferred his equipment and expertise to the brothers José and Facundo Bacardi who then registered a liquor company, ‘José Bacardi y Cia’, in Santiago’s Town Hall.

Twelve years later, Facundo bought out his brother and Boutillier, and eventually two of his sons, Emilio and Facundo Jnr, inherited the distillery. In 1894 their immensely rich brother-in-law, Enrique Scheug –
part-educated
in England and with City experience – joined the partnership.

Bacardi was among the few Cuban companies to profit from the island’s satellite status. Their official historian records:

Only the naïve were puzzled when the fateful Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution left Bacardi undamaged, though Prohibition
outlawed
the production, sale, import and consumption of alcohol. The
ingenious gangs initially known as bootleggers, then as the Cosa Nostra, operated with the least hindrance on what they called ‘the rum route’: Jamaica, Cuba, New Orleans.

On 5 December 1933, when Prohibition ended, Cosa Nostra millions had been swirling around the US for some twelve years, leaving tell-tale stains on the bank accounts of a few powerful politicians, senior security service officers and eminent churchmen. Early in 1934 Batista’s friend, Mayer Lansky, a gambling consultant and much-feared Cosa Nostra leader (almost on a par with Lucky Luciano and Al Capone) was granted the exclusive right to run Cuba’s casinos, legally established, after years of controversy, in 1919. Opposition had come from two disparate but
sometimes
overlapping sources. Florida’s tourist industry feared competition, religious leaders feared US citizens being further corrupted in Cuba, already notorious for ‘naked women gyrating on a public stage’ (entrance fee, less than a dollar). Hearing of Lansky’s new job Lucky Luciano, soon to feature prominently on the Cuban scene, proclaimed triumphantly, ‘This is Cosa Nostra’s first opening in the Caribbean!’