Slow Train to Guantanamo (27 page)

One way or another 15 minutes later we are off again at a – relatively – cracking pace, hitting at least 50 k.p.h. (30 m.p.h.) to gain momentum to crawl up the sides of the lush green hills and down the other side into a countryside far more benevolent than the harsh dry savannah. We pass a village with a team of teenage lads kicking a football around between two sets of rusty goal posts (at least here it is the global rather than US version of the game), with a pair of oxen freely grazing in what ought to be the pitch and a man in full gaucho-style equestrian rig galloping to keep pace with the train, waving a lasso in the air. He’s applauded by a farmer sat atop an ancient tractor with a big straw hat to shade his eyes, a few kids about seven or eight years old in crimson
school uniforms wandering home and a young woman in cut-off jeans and a black satin bikini top, not exactly the typical country girl, the
guajira Guantanamera
.

But all of a sudden the train whistles, as if to express the relief and exuberance of its passengers. As far as I am concerned Santiago will have to wait. For the moment I’ve got here, to the end of the line. Guantánamo. And a pretty grim place it looks, too.

8.
Cubans were finally given the right to by and sell property for the first time since the revolution early in 2012.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The City (not quite) by the Bay

My first sight of a town that became famous around the world for a song about a pretty girl before it became synonymous with a prison camp is of something rare in Cuba: a traffic jam.

There are road works outside the station and a vast array of taxis, private cars acting as taxis, hustlers offering rooms, people come to meet people and
bicitaxis
circling in their hundreds getting in everybody’s way and shouting at passengers, looking for fares. The arrival of the train from Havana, it would seem, is something of a big event: hardly surprising, as there is only one every third day. More or less. Usually less, I suspect.

I wouldn’t mind so much if the
bicitaxi
men actually knew their way around their own city. The one I light on has no idea how to find the
casa particular
I’ve booked even though I have the address and know it’s little more than a kilometre from the station. Forty minutes after clambering into his rear seat – at least there is one – he’s still pedalling round in circles. At first I think it must be my pronunciation of the address, but even when I show it to him written down, we spend so long circling that eventually I work out where it has to be and direct him there. I suspect he’s done it just to push the fare up, but there isn’t a meter on a
bicitaxi
and when he charges me 2 CUC I can hardly blow a fuse,
even though I know that its probably four times what he’d have got from a local paying in pesos. I’m just glad to get out of the heat, noise and dirt.

The
casa
itself is more like a full-time boarding house than any of the others I’ve stayed at. There are a varied and random selection of thickset black guys who look like they might be retired or aspiring boxers lounging around on chairs by the usual wrought iron gate. One of them lets me in, takes me upstairs to a sitting-room with more boxing types on the sofa watching television and shows me my room – improbably lacy and oddly reminiscent of a bedroom from a 1960s American television programme (remember
I Love Lucy
?). He tells me Lissett, the landlady, will be back later and suggests I check out the roof garden, which turns out to be a few plastic chairs with the landlady’s washing hanging on a line above them.

I could do with falling flat out on the bed but there’s a problem: I’m starving. I wish I’d had some of the guava jam stuff on the train. Luckily – I think – I’m fairly close to the town centre. Not that it’s particularly impressive. Guantánamo itself is a rather dull provincial town, not even as pretty as the supposedly unloved Las Tunas.

Despite being – for all the wrong reasons, and none of them to do with the current Cuban regime – one of the most notorious names in the world, Guantánamo’s history is relatively brief, even in New World terms. Christopher Columbus himself sailed into the now infamous bay in on one of his follow-up voyages to the New World in 1494 but decided not to hang about. The British stuck their noses in during the mid-eighteenth century Anglo–Spanish War of Jenkins’s Ear – so charmingly named because a Spanish customs vessel intercepted a British merchant ship and cut off the ear of its captain Robert Jenkins to teach the British a lesson. The British changed the original Taino Indian name of
Guantánamo to Cumberland Bay. But by the 1790s, a second garrison had succumbed to yellow fever, and they decided it just wasn’t worth the human cost and abandoned it.

Stuck at the far end of the island – the only settlement beyond is beautiful, exotic Baracoa and that wasn’t accessible at all by land until Castro blasted a motorway through the mountains in 1964 – Guantánamo wasn’t founded until 1819. Even then it wasn’t Cubans who settled here. The original founding fathers were French plantation owners evicted from neighbouring Haïti, which is one of the explanations for the local accent which even more than in the rest of Cuba ignores the letter ‘s’ at the end of words, and rises with a French lilt towards the end of sentences. The original name was Santa Catalina del Saltadero del Guaso. It soon began to expand – the present population sprawled along the three rivers, the Guaso, Jaibo and Bano is a quarter of a million – and in 1843 changed its name to the one known worldwide today. But we will get to that shortly.

My first priority is to find a bank and change some more of the euros I have secreted in a money belt. By the time I find one it is, of course, closed, but as usual there’s a character loitering by the corner who’s more than willing to change a couple of €10 notes into pesos. Pesos, not CUCs. At least he is changing them at the going rate of 25 to 1 and not trying the scam of foisting
nacional
pesos on me at the CUC rate. Guantánamo town is not exactly on the main tourist trail. Down here, at the end of the line, CUCs, so familiar on the streets of Havana, are a relative rarity, and I reckon I can live on the same currency most natives have to make do with.

As if he’s reading my mind, my moneychanger – his eyes continually flicking one way and the other to be sure our transaction hasn’t been observed – tells me, as if it is a great secret, that there is a
paladar
just a few streets away. I shrug.
Okay, so the privately-run
paladar
restaurants tend to be grouped mainly in the big tourist towns but there is no reason why Guantánamo shouldn’t have one. Then he taps the side of his nose and reveals the big secret:
‘Un peso paladar.’
A private restaurant where you can pay in pesos? This is a real rarity. I’m not even sure it’s legal. From the government’s point of view the whole point about legalizing private restaurants was for them to provide a service that the state couldn’t – cooking half-decent food – and sell it to foreign tourists in exchange for their sorely needed hard currency, a goodly proportion of which has to be paid to the state.

The idea, as with
casas particulares,
was to get ordinary Cuban citizens to act rather like licensed collectors of tax from tourists, while providing said tourists with a useful service as an accidental, if useful, by-product. The idea of providing a service for Cubans in their own currency would make no sense at all to the communists: the only obvious point of buying things at one price, adding value and selling them to your fellow citizens is surely to make a personal profit. And that sounds dangerously like capitalism! Which is against the law.

However dubious I may be about what I’m going to find, my moneychanger’s directions are good. When I find the place it looks like somebody’s home, which of course is exactly what it is. There is no sign outside but the lights are on and the door is open and sticking my head round it, ready to apologize and retreat if I find I really am peering into somebody’s parlour, I find half a dozen tables with green plastic tablecloths, three of them occupied, and on a stand by the door half a dozen typed sheets of paper which on closer inspection are menus.

‘
Hola
,’ a smiling man in his early 40s, comes forward to shake my hand and usher me to a table. ‘
Para comer
?’ he says. Something to eat? Yes please.

The menu is not exactly extensive. In fact apart from the offer of a cheese salad – my memories of rubber cheese in Havana are still disturbingly fresh – there is only one dish: pork fricassee. I’m dubious about the pork, but at least having only one option makes choosing what to have easy.

When it comes it is surprisingly good. Possibly not quite as hot as I might have liked but when the ambient temperature – in the room – is 32ºC, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. What was advertised as a ‘fricassee’ is in fact little pork kebabs fried in oil, served with some crunchy fried plantain chips and a side salad of coleslaw and a bit of cucumber. For which the more than acceptable price is 40 pesos (about $1.50, less than one British pound!). But adding a couple of beers from the fridge – Mayabe or Cacique, the two mainstream peso beers which in any case I prefer to the CUC alternatives, more than doubles it.

Bodily needs satisfied, it’s time to head back into town to pick up on the nightlife, not that I’m actually expecting there to be any. The reason I am here is not the city itself but the barbed wire fence down the road. But I haven’t got there yet, and I am not really sure whether or not I am going to be able to. The Castro government has never been happy with Uncle Sam squatting on a corner of its coastline, and in the circumstances one would imagine they ought to be wryly amused at being able to point the finger so close to hand at Washington’s biggest international embarrassment. Oddly, the reverse seems to be true.

The best view to be had of the US base from Cuban territory used to be the scenic viewpoint of Mirador de Malones, set on a hilltop to the west of the bay looking down on it. For a long time, the Cuban army used it as an observation post to keep an eye on the goings-on beyond the barbed wire, primarily because they have always feared the base could be used to prepare some new Bay of Pigs-style intervention.
The army would, for a few CUCs and after extensive security clearance, allow foreign tourists to share their view of the ‘imperialist enemy’ and even offer them a cocktail while they borrowed the telescope.

But for several years now, curiously sensitive that Guantánamo Bay has become notorious in its own right, rather than revel in offering a bird’s-eye view of the world’s most controversial concentration camp for unconvicted prisoners, perhaps for fear of being accused of deliberate provocation, the viewpoint has been closed to foreigners. The closest it is now possible to come to the base – though it is in fact very close indeed, much closer than the Mirador but without the raised viewpoint – is the sleepy little port of Caimanera, several kilometres beyond Guantánamo town. But even that requires an escort and official clearance and I am not going to get any further down that road tonight.

The walk back into town from the
paladar
is an object lesson in the eccentricity of Cuban urban architecture, though that is hardly the right word to describe buildings usually more in a state of dilapidation than construction. Here there is what might be an extravagant hotel from some grand Spanish imperial fantasy: high-ceilinged with tall windows, the outside a riot of pastel blue-painted colonial pillars, both Doric and Corinthian, supporting a flat roof upon which as ambitions grew and then dwindled an equally grand second storey has been added, then a jerry-built third. Its next-door neighbour could be something straight out of a spaghetti Western, low-slung with swing doors. And then another riotous palace of pillars and mirrored walls with a second storey utterly decrepit, windowless, with peeling green paint on the walls and a single flickering strip light on the ceiling illuminating a bare-chested fat man in knee-length shorts sitting on a rocking chair as if on the porch of his home, which this probably is. He looks like some tenth-century
Bedouin who has set up tent in some deserted Pharaonic necropolis.

In front of it, squat and stubby next to the kerb, stands one of those iconic items that screams out twentieth-century urban America in the same way a red telephone box once did for England; a fire hydrant.

The next street is pure 1930s art deco, all Odeon lines and curves and the same peeling paintwork, until I come to a bar that could be a subtropical incarnation of some New York or London epitome of urban cool: a great three-storey, barred-window, base-thumping beast of a building covered in creeping vines and largely without a roof. It is called, without the slightest streak of street-savvy urban irony, La Ruina.

I stroll in and settle down with a beer only to be almost immediately plagued by hustlers, trying to sell me ‘Che’ three-peso notes, yesterday’s edition of Granma and in some cases, themselves. ‘You want
chica, chica
?’ asks one young woman of around thirty, all but thrusting her bosom in my face. ‘
Spasibo, nyet,
’ I reply, reverting to my old pre-1990 stand-by for avoiding unwanted hagglers, and speak Russian at her. It works here too. ‘Humph,’ she flounces off, ‘People say I pretty.’

To my surprise, however, the Russian has encouraged one older man to come over and talk to me. He has passable Russian, about as good as my Spanish, and for a few minutes we get along swimmingly until it becomes clear he too wants to sell me something: old Cuban postage stamps. And he is determined to haggle for them, even when I make clear I have absolutely no interest. He only gets the message when I pull out a handful of pesos, rather than CUCs. He jerks his thumb in the direction of a back room with a separate street entrance, as if to say, that’s the place for the likes of you.