Slow Train to Guantanamo (19 page)

It’s not exploitation, it’s not communism, it’s not even capitalism, it’s just a way of life. It might even be a curious form of Christian ethics: ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.’ Live and let live. Not so much dog eat dog as share a spot in the shade on a sunny day.

The hooch, by the way, is horrible. Probably not
poisonous, but with at best the delicate flavour you might get from adding a spoonful of honey to half a pint of white spirit. I do my best not to retch. Then order another Naranja to wash it down. Juanito looks envious so I buy him one too. He cracks open the can and gulps at it as if it were nectar. Naranja too is available only for CUCs. Emboldened by my seemingly lavish hospitality, he glances at his bag again, clearly wondering if it might be worth one more go at flogging the wooden totem pole. I shake my head, making clear a dead horse would be a better bet.

He smiles, shakes his head, and before I know it we are into a discussion of life in Cuba and life in what he likes, somewhat wistfully, to call ‘the real world’. He’s as keen to learn colloquial English as I am to get a handle on the Cuban dialect, and delighted to hear I can help him with a few phrases of German too: ‘German tourists have much money.’ I nod. These days, that’s a given.

‘No “s”,’ he tells me. ‘
Qué
?’ I reply, à la Manuel in Fawlty Towers. What do you mean, no ‘s’? It turns out he means Cubans don’t pronounce it. Two months, in Spanish ‘
dos meses
’, in Cuba sounds like ‘
doh meh
’, instead of
dos mayses
. They aren’t very big on ‘b’ either, which is why the ubiquitous phrase that accompanies every shoulder-shrugging explanation of the way things are sound like ‘Cu-a e’ Cu-a’. In fact, Juanito makes clear, Cubans aren’t keen on over-precise pronunciation at all. Not only is the Castilian lisping ‘th’ sound for ‘c’ or ‘z’ unknown, given half a chance most Cubans will elide any consonant they can get away with.

‘Particularly where you are going –
el oriente
,’ he tells me. It would appear, to my surprise, that Cuba has an east–west divide much the same way England has a north–south divide. Camagüey is pretty much the middle market.
Los
Habaneros
, he explains, look on people further east pretty
much the way Londoners look at anyone who lives north of the Watford Gap, while the inhabitants of Santiago de Cuba, which was the first major Spanish settlement and is still revered as the birthplace of Castro’s revolution, regard the capital’s pretensions with the same disdain British Geordies heap on ‘soft southerners’.

The accent, he tells me, is also more pronounced in the east, with a greater historical influence from neighbouring French-speaking Haïti. There is no doubt where Juanito’s sympathies lie: people from Havana, he tells me, call easterners
Palestinos
. I’m not sure what sort of statement – if any – that might be on global geopolitics but then Cuba is pretty much in a bubble of its own these days.

It’s just occurred to me that this is a pretty serious esoteric little conversation I’m having with a bloke who’s basically a hustler. Daringly I take it just a little bit farther and ask him if he doesn’t have a regular job. He gives me a look of extreme disdain. ‘For pesos? There’s no job in this country that’s worth doing for money. Money that’s worth shit, and you don’t even get much of that!’

Not exactly what I had been expecting to hear. But doesn’t everybody have to have a job? I mean, the state boasts zero unemployment, apart from deadbeat dossers like Miguel back in Matanzas, or wherever he might be crawled under a bush now.

Juanito gives me a sideways look and touches his nose. ‘It depends who you are,’ he says enigmatically, then adds, ‘I have connections.’ He’s unwilling – fairly understandably – to be pushed into revealing more detail, even taking an oblique glance at the barman who’s doing his best not to appear to be listening to our linguistic mishmash of a conversation. But from Juanito’s facial expression and body languageit’s fairly plain he means his family have enough ‘pull’ that nobody asks any questions. It’s the supreme irony:
in this communist system you have to be hard wired into the system in order to opt out of it.

I try to pussyfoot around the subject for a few minutes, looking for any reaction to mentions of communism in general, the state of the economy, even Fidel’s health, all of which gets little more than sceptical looks from my conversation partner. Until, that is, I mention Cuba’s great global icon, the hero of a million student bedroom posters: Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara himself. That gets me a reaction, even if it’s not remotely what I had been expecting. Juanito throws back his head and roars with laughter. ‘Che Guevara?’ he says, and then in loud and perfect English: ‘That man was a fucking lunatic!’

I immediately notice the expression on the barman’s face, but even that isn’t quite what I expected. Not exactly shock, or offence, or terror, more a sort of highly surprised, hard to suppress amusement. He quickly turns to face the wall studiously polishing a glass.

I’ve obviously touched a nerve here. Within minutes Juanito is giving me a tirade, not against Che or communism but against foreign tourists. ‘You know what I hate? I hate the rich bastards from Spain or Germany or wherever who come here and tell the likes of me, I live in a paradise after they’ve spent a week lying on their arses in some all-inclusive hotel in Caya Coco that’s off-limits to most ordinary Cubans.’

A bit like this bar, I suggest warily, though of course it’s not off limits, just out of the ordinary local’s price range. He gives me a wicked smile of acknowledgement. He offers me another shot of hooch. I take it, and in return buy him a packet of 20 local cigarettes, made from the sort of black shredded tobacco that never gets near a Cohiba or Romeo and Juliet but is all most Cubans can afford, it they are lucky. They cost me 0.60 CUC, barely 60 US cents, but enough to
put a smile on Juanito’s face. We’ve done a deal, of sorts. We are equals. Even though I’m still not going to buy his totem pole. Nor, frankly, finish his hooch.

‘Hey,’ he says, ‘do you want to help me?’ I nod, politely, though at this stage non-committally. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says, eyes bright now as if he’s just thought of a world’s best wheeze, ‘I could sit out there, on the square, with my figurines, and you could come over and look impressed, and if some foreigner comes up, you can tell them how good my stuff is, and how you’ve watched me work. You could even buy one. Or pretend to.’ He adds the last phrase with a roll of his eyes in response to the sceptical expression on my face. ‘Why not?’

I’m laughing. And then I think about it. Why not, indeed? What do I care if some tourist on a day-trip from the all-inclusive zone can be persuaded to part with a few CUCs to make Juanito’s day a bit better? I shrug and say, ‘Sure’, and he high-fives me again. I’ve just signed up to be a hustler’s apprentice.

So, I say, thinking the best way to get the measure of my new business partner is to ask him the age-old interview question, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?’ It may seem silly but it’s a pretty loaded question in a country where the law – and almost every aspect of society – has been laid down by one man, now in his mid-eighties, and his brother still in power and only a year or two younger.

His eyes fall. Like so many of his compatriots, old and young, Juanito just can’t imagine life without the Castros. Then he lifts his head again and looks me in the eyes and I know that what he is about to say is the complete and utter truth. ‘What I would really like,’ he says, ‘is to go to Bangkok and fuck girls the way the Italians do in Cuba.’

I’m tempted to burst into laughter, but I don’t, because I realize he means it.

And as if on cue, we are suddenly joined by a bouncy young black woman in a flouncy skirt who kisses Juanito on both cheeks and, having had a rapid fire shake down on the state of his newly acquired friendship with
un extranjero
, and apprised of my linguistic skills, leaps into the conversation with a question of her own:

‘How do you say in German, “I want to make love with you”,?’ she asks with alarming directness. I’m about to ask why she wants to know, when I realize just what a stupid question that might be. ‘To say nicely,’ she adds, almost primly, before spoiling it just a little by the clarification, ‘Not fucky, fucky, I won’t want to be crude.’

I help her with the correct pronunciation of ‘
Ich will mit dir schlafen
,’ which is still the rather quaint euphemism that the majority of German tourists will probably want to hear, even though it would be obvious that neither she nor they would be intent on doing too much sleeping.

Under the circumstances maybe there is some excuse for me being just a tiny bit surprised when a few minutes later she mentions the fact that she is married. I know Cuban men can be remarkably broad-minded but I doubt that they are wholly immune to jealousy. ‘Is okay,’ Juanito smiles and says, ‘He is Canadian. Lives in Canada.’ And his lady friend beams too, as if that explains everything. Married to a foreigner, she can get an exit visa whenever she wants, – which is what most Cuban women want from foreign men – but she couldn’t find a job in Canada and chooses to come back to Cuba often. I don’t like to ask if it’s for the work!

‘Come,’ she says to Juanito, grabbing him by the arm. ‘It’s time to party, have a real drink.’ He shrugs and beckons me to join them. I want to know where we might be going, but he just says, ‘Come on, you’ll see.’

About five minutes later we have wandered through the dark streets of Camagüey’s labyrinth to a rather dingy bar
on the edge of what looks like a small park behind railings. This, it turns out, is an outdoors peso bar, a place Cubans can actually buy cheap rum or expensive beer in their own currency, although even here some things have to be paid for in CUC. This is where the hustlers hang out with after hours hotel bar staff, paid ‘dancers’ in hard currency bars, anybody loosely connected to the parasite industry that lives on the back of the mainstream tourist economy.

Juanito is clearly amused at having brought me here – to the slightly scandalized reaction of the others, until it kicks in that even if I have got beneath the surface of their society, I’m still fair game. Maybe even more so, I realize as I get pinched on the bottom and turn round only to discover that it’s a tubby little lady in her 60s bursting out of an over-tight dress and smiling in a manner she can only assume to be winsome. Behind her I see Juanito roaring with laughter, his hand round the married Cuban-Canadian’s increasingly revealing décolleté. ‘I tell her you need dancing lessons,’ he shouts. I smile daggers back. The dumpy granny in front of me is rubbing my leg and suggesting she could be ‘my friend’. I make my excuses and run. For the bar.

There’s no safety to be had there either. I order a beer, only to find that the barman is adamant I should pay CUC. It’s not absurd – he isn’t trying to cheat me on price, just make sure there’s more ‘convertible’ around (nobody really puts any value on pesos at all, it seems). I hand him a CUC 5 note. He charges me CUC 1, the going rate in cheaper provincial towns, but gives me change in ‘national’ pesos, with a mock apologetic smile. The sight of the money, however, has already brought me company, although I suspect the giggling Juanito across the room generously handing out the cigarettes I bought him may have played a hand in it. Not least because one of the two blokes so eager to make my acquaintance is barely five foot tall, has no eyebrows, dyed
platinum blond hair, and a wasp waist clad in silver micro-mini shorts.

Just in case I’m in any doubt, he manages to lisp – the first time in Cuba I’ve heard what is a typical trait of Castilian Spanish even in the most macho men – and pout simultaneously. He may not be the only gay in Camagüey, but he is the first ostentatiously camp man I’ve come across.

Homosexuality is not illegal in Cuba. This genuinely is, after all, a supposedly liberal, ‘progressive’ – to use that horrible word beloved of English
Guardian
-readers and Labour Party luvvies – society. But there is a feeling that Fidel, the ultimate big bearded macho man famed for his big cigars, and wielding AK47s and baseball bats with equanimity, somehow doesn’t quite believe it exists. And whether for that reason or not, it’s not much in evidence.

That doesn’t mean that ‘Xavi’, as he introduces himself, isn’t glad to be gay, and pretty self-confident with it. As is his ‘partner’ – my command of the language here doesn’t quite let me know in what, or how many, senses he means that – who happens to be a rather large, slightly tubby, balding, bespectacled guy in a faded brown suit. We chat nonchalantly enough for a few minutes, long enough for me to buy them both a beer, and to give me an excuse to leave. It’s one thing to get under the skin of a society, but another altogether to get stuck there.

There’s no getting away, however, before Juanito has dragged me on to the dance floor – actually a square area of dusty tiles set into the ground between the trees – first for a samba of sorts with his dark-eyed improbably Canadian housewife, then – inevitably – with my dumpy little would-be pension age dance teacher. Determined to strut what remains of her stuff – which is actually quite a lot – she proceeds to display her proficiency at what most Cuban dances invariably default to: a sort of vertical lap-dancing where
the female grinds her posterior against her partner’s crotch. And in this case there is an awful lot of posterior, even if thankfully it is closer to my knees.

After that, there’s no stopping me heading for the door, but Juanito is there, with me, an arm round my shoulder, determined, he says, to make sure I get home, but also, I somehow feel, to make sure I am actually staying in a
casa particular
, in other words that I am what I say I am. Actually, I’m glad, not so much for his company by this stage, but because I genuinely was getting worried about finding my way back to the
casa
, because I can no longer remember precisely in which direction it is from here, nor how to get back to where we started.