Slow Train to Guantanamo (14 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sun, Sand and Rain

The next morning it is still raining. Santa Clara is a sea of umbrellas, which the locals of course call parasols. They mostly use them ‘
para sol
’, for the sun. Funny then that we in England who have practically adopted this ancient device as national costume call it an umbrella, a ‘little shade’. It takes the French to call it what we should: a
parapluie
. For the rain!

And when it rains in Cuba, it rains. It has been raining all night. Constantly. Heavily. Pablo’s inside-outside courtyard was on its way to becoming a swimming pool, watered from a green corrugated Niagara.

After a long conversation on the phone with the station Pablo has found what he believes to be the time of my next train connection, leaving at 9.30 in the morning, which would be a relatively civilized time if it weren’t that of course they recommend getting there at least two hours early. But Pablo
thinks
they might sell me a ticket any time on the same day, so in theory – a theory he miraculously believes will work – I might be able to pick one up just after midnight.

I walk up into the main square, with the idea of going to the bank to change money. The sign on the door says is open, but it is closed. A man inside shakes his head and points at the unlit fluorescent tube on the ceiling. The peso drops. The
power has gone again. And even in Cuba, no power = no tills.

An improvising taxi-driver hustles me while I am gesticulating at the man on the other side of the door. ‘Later, it will be open later,’ he says. ‘You like a nice ride, out to country, see old church.’ Normally I would have brushed him away, but he’s also rubbing his thumbs and forefingers together, indicating he can change. So with just a little reluctance I climb in the back of his car, a relatively luxurious fifteen-year-old Peugeot.

In theory Cubans are not allowed to deal in foreign currency, even to swap CUCs for national pesos; in practice everybody does it. Anything that brings hard currency into the country is tolerated. It ends up in the government’s coffers anyway. Locals are of course allowed to change CUCs into national pesos and vice versa in a bank. One CUC buys you 24
nacionales
but it costs 25
pesos nacionales
to buy one CUC. Even under communism, there’s always a margin. On the street, Cubans will cut you exactly the same deal. It’s just that the government feels it’s somehow morally corrupting for its citizens to do what the banks do. Given our recent experience in the capitalist world, they may have a very good point.

For my taxi driver, whose name is Santiago, it’s a doubly lucky day: not only does he change some euros into CUC for me, he manages to persuade me to give a large part of them back to him in exchange for a guided tour of the countryside north of the city, including the little town of Remedios famed for its ancient church with thirteen gold altars. Given that the rain still hasn’t stopped and the streets are filled with yelping schoolkids splashing in puddles, it seems a better idea than sitting soaking up rum all day in La Marquesina.

Also, Santiago is quite the conversationalist. It turns out he is a trained engineer who has not only been abroad, but
has a residence permit for the Canary Islands. But because he is not an EU national, he can’t get a work permit which means it is far too expensive for him to live there. Back home in Santa Clara he has a relatively decent car and because his family have a good sized house enabling them to let out a room for foreigners as a
casa
, he makes a reasonable living. Just about, he insists.

That does not make him a fan of the system. There is just one thing wrong with this country, he blurts out, in an admission I have not heard from any other Cuban yet: ‘Fidel Castro.’ And then, as if an afterthought, he adds: ‘And his brother.’

The irony is that Santiago is not necessarily a radical anti-communist, campaigning for the middle class to take back power from the proletariat: in some ways his attitudes are rather the reverse. ‘Look at our leaders. They’re all city boys. Or were. Lawyers. They make rules but they don’t understand how stuff works. What you need to make an economy run.’

‘Look at those fields,’ he cries almost in despair as we drive north from Santa Clara through scrubland where a few scrawny cattle are not so much grazing as mooching about with their mates wondering when the rain will end. ‘There are maybe 20 cows there. But it is a big field. Why not 200? We have sun, we have rain. It could grow grass for them to eat. But all the land belongs to the government. Then the government pays farmers just 80 pesos a month to work the land. Why would they bother?’

I take his point; 80 pesos is about £3 (US$5). ‘Without the
Libreta
,’ Santiago fumes, ‘they would starve. Sometimes they do anyway.’ The
Libreta
is the Cuban ration card, introduced in 1962, which is intended to ensure everyone gets subsistence rations. It guarantees an almost free supply of rice, black beans, sugar and potatoes. If you have a child under
seven years of age you also get milk. This is what 90 per cent of Cubans live on. Anything else is literally a luxury.

What annoys Santiago most is not communist ruthlessness, but an impractical romanticism: ‘The heroes of the revolution think jungle, savannah is more beautiful than farmland, more authentic. But you can’t eat that.’

‘Pah!’ he says pointing to the propaganda signs every few kilometres. One declares boldly: ‘The young are rich with new ideas.’ In his early forties, Santiago is young – by the standards of the octogenarians in power in Havana anybody under pensionable age is young – and he has ideas. I just don’t think the men in Havana are going to like them.

He complains that the price of fuel no longer makes such a sought-after job as driving a taxi as profitable as it was, even if things are much better than they were in the early 90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Thanks to the ‘revolutionary friendship’ between the Castros and Hugo Chavez, the late Marxist president of oil-rich Venezuela, Cuba has had an adequate supply of fuel. Cuba trains Venezuelan doctors and dentists and gets oil in exchange. It was only later, after leaving the country, that I discovered Chavez had been in Cuba at the same time as I was, at a top government hospital in Havana receiving treatment for cancer that prolonged his life even if in the end it couldn’t save it.

Under Chavez Cuba and Venezuela have had what is widely referred to – in a phrase that has a certain irony to British ears – as a ‘special relationship’. But that does not mean that ordinary Cubans get cheap fuel: ‘Petrol is 1.30 CUC a litre and diesel 1.10,’ Santiago complains. You simply can’t buy it for ‘national’ pesos. It sounds unimaginable to our ears, but then owning a car is unimaginable to the vast majority of Cubans. Those few who have access to a vehicle as part of their job get a free fuel ration, as do farmers and
factories. Selling fuel to private individuals is effectively a supertax on people like Santiago effectively running private – theoretically illegal – taxi services. It is unlikely to earn him much sympathy from the masses to whom owning a car is the equivalent of being an investment banker.

‘What about sugar?’ I ask naïvely, looking for some successful branch of the Cuban economy and vaguely aware that the price has risen on world markets of late.

‘Hah! We gave the Russians all the sugar they wanted,’ he snorts. ‘Everything was devoted to sugar. We produced millions of tonnes. Millions more than we needed. When the Soviet Union collapsed it was all we had to eat. So what did they do? They got rid of all the sugar plantations and refineries. And what did they replace them with?’ He points at the scrub landscape. ‘Nothing. Maybe a few goats.’

To make the point he swings by what was once a flourishing sugar refinery and is now – poignantly – a museum of the sugar industry. ‘Come,’ he says, ‘I will show you.’

We pull through a wide gateway and the woman in the gatehouse beams when she sees Santiago. This is clearly not the first time he has brought her a customer. I realize I am being strung along a bit here, but in a way that’s what I’ve paid for. I hand over my entrance fee (in CUC) for my guided tour of the demise of Cuba’s sugar industry.

Still unable to wipe the smile off her face, the gate lady beckons us over to what looks like an ancient industrial mangle over a water tank. She takes a thick piece of sugar cane about two foot long and feeds it between the rollers squeezing it to produce a greenish-grey juice. It takes three canes before there is enough to fill a glass and I sip it gingerly. Unsurprisingly it is sweet. Very. And a bit warm. Not really my cup of tea.

By now the guide has been summoned, a bright-eyed pale-skinned woman with green eyes, who could almost be
Irish, who is thrilled to have a customer, if a little uncertain about her English. I tell her I can manage a decent bit of Spanish, but she is desperate for the practice. Monica is thirty-five years old and not only has she – understandably – never been abroad, she has never been to Havana; in fact she’s never been further than Caibarién, the coastal town at the end of the road.

She’s one of the few people to be still working at what was once the province’s major industry. The sugar mill here closed more than a decade ago, which she says also proved a kiss of death to Caibarién, which used to be a major seaport.

She shows me into a little room converted into a makeshift cinema while she pushes a button marked ‘Inglés’ and disappears outside for a smoke. For the next 10 minutes I sit through a dull little documentary on the rise and fall of the sugar industry from its slave trade origins to today’s ‘modern revitalization’, which has little in common with the rusting relics outside.

Then Monica takes me on a tour of various bits of machinery, some of which are obvious antiques brought in to display but most are just left as they were when the mill ceased functioning. It’s not so much a working museum as an industrial ghost town. Or perhaps I should say ghost train: she tells me there is normally a little steam train that runs to Remedios. Only not today. When was the last one? She’s not too sure about that either.

One day, she says as we leave, she’d like to go to England. Or the United States. She seems a little hazy about the difference. But not today. And not tomorrow either.

Remedios is only a few minutes drive away. One of the oldest little towns in Cuba, it was founded some time between 1513 and 1524. The 1524 date is the first known because that is when a captain in the army of Spanish conquistador Diego
Velázquez de Cuéllar (the conqueror of Cuba and no known relation to the later painter of the same name), married the daughter of a local Taino Indian chief. Allegedly he went on to father 200 children. Presumably not all by her.

With the rain still pouring down, there is little incentive to admire its faded colonial architecture other than from the car window. But the church is another matter. In fact, there are two of them, both several hundred years old, though one is in a serious state of decay, while the other, the
Iglesia Mayor
(main church) has been expensively maintained. Santiago drops me at the door, and says he’ll go for a smoke while he waits.

Inside the dark church porch a man in civilian clothes pounces on me almost immediately, describing himself as the priest, even though he is in civvies, and offers me a guided tour. Free? ‘Of course, it is the house of the Lord.’ I’m sceptical, but accept.

Dominating the interior is the vast golden High Altar which strikes the eye immediately not least because this floor-to-ceiling baroque wonder is covered with gold leaf. For much of its existence the ordinary parishioners would not have known that, because for most of its history Remedios was plagued by real-life pirates of the Caribbean, who turned up to loot and pillage more times than Johnny Depp has reprised Captain Jack Sparrow. To stop said pirates slicing chunks off the altar, it spent several centuries covered in whitewash.

It was only during a 1944 restoration project, financed by a local millionaire philanthropist (in the days when Cuba had such things) primarily intended to preserve the magnificent seventeenth-century mahogany ceiling that the whitewash was chipped and the gold underneath discovered.

The priest leads me around the church pointing out the other altars and their attendant images. The Iglesia Mayor
in Remedios is remarkable because there aren’t just a few of these. Including the High Altar there 13 in total. The priest is at some pains to point out that each has at least two names. These are not just saints in the orthodox Roman Catholic sense, deceased holy human beings who have influence with God. In the exotic landscape of Cuba’s unique contribution to human religions, they are demigods in their own right. Welcome to the wacky world of Santería.

It is a concept I am vaguely familiar with but this is the first time I have heard someone who appears to be a Roman Catholic clergyman discuss it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. An Afro-Caribbean-Latino fusion as exotic, diverse and individual as the music that sprang from the same ethnic roots, Santería is one of the greatest examples of
laissez-faire
pragmatism in religious history.

Basically the slaves imported to Cuba, mostly from the Yoruba tribe of what is now Nigeria, did not want to give up their old gods, but were forced by the Spanish to convert to Christianity. The lucky thing for them was that it was not the Christianity of the puritanical stern and serious Protestants, but the far more colourful Roman Catholic version, with its plethora of saints often worshipped by the devout in their own right. The Yoruba simply grafted their own gods onto them.

‘This is Saint Francis of Assisi. But some people prefer to call him Orula,’ he says, pointing to a gilt, tonsured figure. In the version I learned at Sunday School, Saint Francis of Assisi was a sort of humble, balding, berobed Doctor Doolittle who could talk to the animals (and favourite of the present pope). In Santería he has a few other things to deal with: for a start, Orula is fond of coconuts and black chickens, his favourite number is sixteen, he is a seeker after knowledge and the patron of all priests (known as
babalawos
). Is Orula/Francis who knows the future and facilitates
communication with the gods. His worshippers wear necklaces of green and white beads.