Slow Train to Guantanamo (2 page)

My elderly host grandly throws open the double doors on the right to reveal a room with high ceilings, a four-bladed fan and, most importantly of all, a wide welcoming double bed.

‘Buenas noches,’
he bids me with a smile, and I collapse onto a mattress as hard as Brighton beach but more than welcome.

That old Phil Collins anthem to the homeless is running through my head as I hit what passes for a pillow: ‘Oh, think twice, it’s just another day for you and me in paradise.’ I drift off into confused dreamland wondering just how the hell I got into this in the first place.

CHAPTER TWO

Don’t stop me now …

Just five days earlier I had arrived in the relative luxury of a Virgin Atlantic premium economy at Havana airport, where most foreign visitors make their first acquaintance with the curious reality of life in Cuba. For most of them – whooshed off in luxury air-conditioned coaches to coastal resorts all but hermetically sealed off from the rest of the island – their last. But it is still unmistakably Cuban. For a start the security checks are on the wrong side.

Most airports are worried about you taking bombs onto airplanes; the Cubans are worried you might be bringing bombs off one. After five minutes doing my level best to give an unwavering smile in response to the unwelcoming stare of an immigration official in the shortest skirt I have ever seen on an immigration official anywhere, the woman behind the glass window handed back my passport brusquely and gestured to the scanners ahead, and said: ‘
Seguridad
.’ Security.

Despite Ronald Reagan adding Cuba to the US State Department’s list of ‘state sponsors of terror’, Havana’s record on that score is actually better than Washington’s. The White House – or at least the CIA – was behind one proxy invasion of Cuba, more than eight attempts to kill its head of state, and almost certainly one bomb which brought down an aircraft (of which more later), killing all on board. And that is without even mentioning that the greatest
number of people considered terrorists by Washington itself has for several years been held on the bit of Cuban soil US armed forces still squat on, at the far end of the island: the goal of my present odyssey, Guantánamo Bay.

The dark days belong to the distant past – most incidents were in early 1960s. But the Cuban authorities, perhaps more than ever given the advanced age of their leaders and a growing sense of
fin de régime,
are not taking any chances. Anyone entering the socialist paradise of Cuba is necessarily subject to scrutiny.

Which was why half an hour after landing, and five days before being decanted into Santa Clara in the bleak hours before dawn, I found myself standing in a queue of incoming passengers watching an immensely large lady from Santo Domingo dressed in what looked like a tent arguing loudly with a stern-faced customs official in an even shorter skirt than the immigration lady had worn.

The argument, improbably enough, was as to whether or not she should be allowed to bring six one-litre cans of banana milkshake mix unopened into the Socialist Republic of Cuba. ‘How do I know what’s in there?’ the customs lady was asking, clearly suspicious that it might be anything from gunpowder to cocaine. On an island where milk itself is usually only available on a state-issued ration card to certified mothers of small children, a large tin of powder claiming to contain banana milkshake mix is something regarded with deep suspicion.

There may be no flights or ferries to the United States (indeed US travel websites such as kayak.com or expedia.com won’t even give you information about flights to Cuba, as if the huge island on their doorstep wasn’t actually there). But from all over the rest of the Americas, flights pour into Havana daily, from Caracas, capital of Venezuela, which under the late – and in Cuba sorely lamented – Hugo
Chavez, had become the country’s best friend, but also from Panama, from Lima, from Buenos Aires, from Santiago in Chile, from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, whence the lady in front of me was trying to import the banana milkshake.

A glance at the arrivals and departures board illustrates that if the United States thinks it has cut Cuba off from the world – despite Barack Obama’s softer line, the punitive embargo remains in force, and citizens of non-Cuban ethnicity are banned from visiting – it is sorely deluding itself. Cubans see themselves as part of a much broader, largely Latin American world.

They refuse to use the word
Americano
for the citizens of the big country to the north of them, preferring instead the cumbersome
Estados-Unidosenses
(roughly: United-Statesians). They see themselves as
Americanos
, like most of the other passengers arriving at or transiting through Havana airport.

That did not, however, make for much obvious tolerance for the large lady from Santo Domingo. I never did discover if she managed to import her curious cargo. She was taken aside into a separate room – possibly to be strip-searched for any other curiously flavoured corrupting capitalist comestibles – just as I was beckoned forward. To my relief my little backpack of bare necessities was rubber stamped through and I passed into the steamy, tropical, complicated chaos that is the gateway to what is probably the most magical, quixotic, complicated and confused island in the world.

Havana airport, like a lot of other things in Cuba, bears the name of José Martí, a nineteenth-century poet and idealist, revered almost as much as Che, even if he was decidedly less successful. Unlike the Argentinian revolutionary, José Martí’s first glimpse of action was also his last. Aged just forty-two – three years older than Che when he
was executed in the Bolivian jungle by CIA-sponsored government troops – Martí led Cuban rebels into battle against their Spanish colonial masters, heroically, romantically (and extremely stupidly) dressed in his trademark black suit, on the back of a white horse. He was immediately shot dead by a sniper.

This is one of those apocryphal but true stories that tells you a lot about Cuba. Martí was a Cuban nationalist who had a love–hate relationship with the United States, a socialist who was also a dandy, a charismatic romantic revolutionary, a poet and a nutcase. Today he is an airport.

Having sailed through immigration and security, my one moment of stress before heading for downtown Havana, was tipping the clutch of toilet ladies gathered purposefully round the door to the gents. I had 45 British pence in small change, which seemed an adequate sum though I doubted they would recognize the currency. They didn’t, but all that mattered was that it was foreign. Converted into the money nearly all Cubans are paid in, that is about as much as the average worker might earn in a day. In Cuba’s curious economy, the foreign currency tips alone make being a toilet cleaner at Havana airport a much sought-after profession.

Taxi drivers make more, a lot more, especially, as everywhere in the world, taxi drivers based at the airport. A ride into central Havana in what turned out by ordinary Cuban standards the height of luxury – a ten-year-old Peugeot 306 – was going to cost me, the cab driver grinned, 25 US dollars. At least, that was what he said. It wasn’t actually what he meant. In Cuba, money, like everything else, is complicated.

Prior to Castro’s revolution the Cuban peso was pegged to the US dollar, afterwards it was pegged to the Soviet rouble. When the USSR collapsed in 1990, the Cuban peso went into freefall, but in the bleak years after the collapse of the Soviet Union when even the Spartan supplies from the rest
of the communist world dried up, the only option was to use the currency of the hated enemy. Cubans duly dragged out piles of dollars sent from relatives in the US and hidden under mattresses and for half a dozen years the
dolar
became the only money worth having.

Then, in 2004, George W. Bush decided he would do his bit to win the vote of anti-communist Cuban exiles in Miami and increased sanctions against Havana. In an admirable (if rash) fit of pique, Fidel responded by banning the use of the dollar. Its place was taken by the ‘convertible peso’ (already in circulation but not so widely used as the greenback). Ever since that has been the currency of necessity for foreigners and desire for Cubans. It is pegged to the US dollar, which means there are 25 ordinary (or
nacional
) pesos to every one convertible peso. The former are officially designated CUP (but universally simply called ‘pesos’) while the latter are designated CUCs, and usually called that too, phonetically pronounced ‘kooks’.

It sounds complicated, and it is, but it can be literally a matter of life and death in Cuba. There is not a whole lot you can buy with CUPs. Most bars in Havana and shops selling a limited variety of goods you get anywhere in most other countries deal only in CUCs, which means no ordinary Cuban can afford them. A doctor earns 500 national pesos a month – the equivalent of roughly US $20 (less than my cab fare). As the US-Americans say, ‘go figure’.

The important thing is not to get the two confused. If you do, despite the intrinsic honesty of most Cubans, it’s not hard to get taken for a mug, or to use a word that in the vernacular is almost equally insulting: a gringo.

On the way into the city my cab driver tells a caller on his mobile phone – the latest Cuban must-have but subject to interesting restrictions – to ring back because he has a gringo in his cab. To his surprise I immediately object. My
Spanish is not great but nor is it non-existent and I resent being referred to by what I have always considered to be the contemptuous term for a US-American.

The driver looks abashed for about half a millisecond then shrugs, and says no, it’s not just Yankees, it’s, ‘You know …’ and then dries up. I suddenly realize he is struggling to avoid racial stereotypes. Eventually by a mix of body language, gestures and euphemisms he conveys his meaning: a gringo is any pale-skinned northern European-looking bloke. It is the only form of, albeit mild, racism I am to perceive in my whole Cuban adventure.

He admits to being surprised I understood. Most gringos, I gather, don’t speak much Spanish. Most of the pale-skinned northern European-looking blokes he meets come from Canada, so-called snow geese fleeing the winter. They too are, however, allowed to be called
Americanos
, which must make Cuba about the only place in the world where Canadians (if they understood) might take it as a compliment.

This got us talking enough for him to point out – if only to save his embarrassment by changing the subject – that the black BMW hurtling past us on the inside belongs to the South African ambassador. He knows this because Cuban number plates have a colour code. Black is for diplomats, with a number to signal their country, white is for government ministers, red for the tourist industry including hire cars, brown for the armed forces, green for agriculture, blue for all other state-owned vehicles (which in a communist country accounts for a huge proportion), and yellow for private vehicles, which by the bizarre logic of Cuba’s economy makes yellow the rarest colour.

So how is Cuba these days, I ask him, meaning, without spelling it out, post-Fidel, a world that as yet most Cubans are not quite sure has really arrived? I’m not really expecting
an answer other than ‘wonderful as ever’, the sort of North Korean-style ‘dear leader’ reply that was common among the few Cubans who would talk to foreigners a decade or so ago. Since the man who
was
the Cuban revolution stood down from power in 2008 in favour of his younger brother, there have been some reforms and rumours of reforms. Change is afoot in Cuba, even if it is not exactly generational change: Raúl turns eighty-two in 2013 and Big Brother, heading for ninety, is still watching.

My driver’s answer, though not exactly critical, surprises me: ‘Better.’ Better? I ask in astonishment. Better under Raúl than under the sainted Fidel? In what way? ‘There are big changes,’ he offers voluntarily. ‘Now it is okay to do business.’ Isn’t that just the tiniest bit capitalist, I hint, using the dreaded ‘c’ word. He shrugs, thinks a second and gives me one of those gems of wisdom that on the right day cab drivers the world over are capable of producing: ‘Greed is not good, but making money is never bad.’

Then he drops me at the corner of Plaza Vieja, and with a broad smile pockets his 25 CUC, more money than a brain surgeon would make in a month.

I am a few yards’ walk from my hotel along cobbled streets too narrow for motor vehicles. The Plaza Vieja, literally Old Square, is one of the most atmospheric in all Havana, popular not least because of the Austrian joint venture brewpub in one corner, and the inevitable
trova
³
band playing on the terrace. It is teeming with tourists: French, Spanish, German, Italian, most of them European, including a few Brits, and a goodly number of Canadians, although as it is summer, most of the snow geese have flown back up north.

La Meson de la Flota is the smallest of the hotels operated
by Habaguanex, the state-run company that runs most of Old Havana’s hotels. La Meson in reality is little more than a pub with three upstairs rooms. It was once an old pirate haunt and now prides itself on a nightly flamenco show.

After dumping my bags and an ice-cold glass of Cristal, one of the two main Cuban beer brands aimed at those wealthy enough to be able to pay in CUCs (the other is the stronger, sweeter Bucanero), I stroll out into the warm sticky afternoon heat to reacquaint myself with a city that is forever being built and forever falling down.

Since 1982 Havana Vieja, the heart of the city founded by the Spanish and one of the most important staging points for their conquest of the New World, has been a UNESCO World Heritage site. It receives UN funds and restoration of its historic centre is a national priority, not least because since the early 1990s and the demise of the Soviet Union, one of the prime props on which Cuban communism depended, tourism has become a keystone to the economy. Or what passes for an economy.