Slow Train to Guantanamo (28 page)

Maybe it is too. On the assumption that if it operates in
pesos rather than CUCs there will be fewer hustlers in there, I give it a go. There are four staff but only two customers, sharing a coffee. In the other, hard currency side there were more than half a dozen, but as far as I could see they were all hustlers rather than customers. I order a Mayabe and drink it slowly, relieved by the lack of hassle until, somewhat nervously, the barman plucks up the courage to ask me for something. I sigh and try to work out how to tell him I’m not buying, but when he opens his mouth all he says is, ‘Please, would it be possible for you to buy us a soft drink?’ By ‘us’ he means himself and his optimistically smiling female colleague.

It is such a small request that for once I agree. He is as good as his word taking one can of Naranja, the local fizzy orange, and pouring it not just into two glasses but four, handing one to the table waiter, who currently has no tables to wait, and the man by the door who might be described as security if there were ever any people trying to come in. I am so touched that I decide there and then on an act of spontaneous generosity: Naranjas all round. Hey big spender! It’s cost me less than the price of a pint of real ale in London, yet it’s hard to believe the little ray of sunshine it’s brought into these people’s lives. Or the torrent of conversation it unleashes. It had not occurred to me that none of the staff waiting in a bar like this, a peso bar, earns enough to buy a can of the cheapest drink they sell in their own currency.

The smiling barmaid Maria is the most forthcoming. My brief question about how they get by leads to hearing half her life story: she is thirty-four and has a four-year-old child but hasn’t seen the father for three years. She lives with Marco, the barman who asked for the drink, and earns 250 pesos a month. That is approximately $10, about £7.50. A can of Naranja costs 20 pesos, more than two days’ wages. The economics of course are not quite ours, to say the least: the
state ration of basic rice, beans, sugar and bread is free as is cooking oil. She also gets a free milk ration because she has a child under six. Although she says she lives with Marco, she basically means she sleeps with him, because she still actually lives with her mother. The flat costs next to nothing while electricity and water costs are minimal, not that the electricity works all the time. She gets a state ration of toothpaste and soap too, but the stuff we take for granted: meat, fresh veg, fizzy drinks and alcohol are all luxury items to be savoured rarely if at all. Like my hustler back in Camagüey, most people make their own sugar-based hooch.

So how late do they work, I ask? Bar closing times in Cuba seem to me extraordinarily liberal. I have never heard anyone ring a bell or call ‘last orders’.

Marco looks amazed: ‘Twenty-four hours, of course, what else?’

I hadn’t thought about it, but the only bars I have seen closed looked closed for good. Possibly decades ago, though given the general state of dilapidation of Cuba’s built environment it can be hard to tell. Ruina’s back bar, for example, where we are now standing, has no roof and only ivy climbing the walls for decoration, apart from the fridges of cold drinks.

‘How can we close? If we went away, people would come in and steal everything,’ says Maria, as if it was the most obvious statement in the world and the idea of a bar having a closing time the absurdity.

But then putting a roof on the bar would probably cost more than the government pays the staff. A roof would require real materials. The staff just get pieces of paper that are literally barely worth the paper they are printed on. And not enough of those.

I refer to the hustlers in the CUC bar next door, and my new peso bar friends are sympathetic, but to both parties.
‘People have to sell something else to get by,’ says Marco. ‘Including the girls selling themselves?’ He shrugs. ‘Are you sure they are all girls?’ I give him a sceptical look. I know about the ladyboy phenomenon in Thailand, but in Cuba? ‘Oh, yes, there are many
travestidos
. Often you can tell because they have pet dogs. It is a thing for some of them. But they have to have money to afford them. How do you think they earn it?’

I feel more than glad I gave short shrift to the buxom lady trying to press herself on me, although if she was really a bloke what my old editor at the
Sunday Telegraph
used to call ‘her embonpoint’ was remarkably impressive.

Bang on topic Marco says; ‘
Cuanto cuesta una chica en Londres
?’ How much is a girl in London? It’s one of those questions that throws you, not so much because he is enquiring about the going rates of sleazy escort agencies, of which London has as many as any big capital city, but because that’s not really what he means at all. He might as well be asking how much an orange costs, or a bar of chocolate. Maria is looking at us attentively, not because she’s shocked by his question or my reaction, but out of casual interest, as if she’d also like to know the going rate too.

‘It’s not like that,’ I try to tell him, then add: ‘Probably a couple of hundred pounds an hour or a lifetime of bondage.’ I’m joking but I’m not sure he gets it.

Bill Clinton’s election campaign team coined the phrase, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ They should have come to Cuba. They had no idea!

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Hotel GTMO

Lissett, owner of my Guantánamo
casa
, which seems to double as home from home from a variety of almost exclusively beefy-looking black local lads who spend much of the day lounging on her floral chintz sofa watching soap operas (including the inevitable
Mujeres de Nadie
) and baseball, tells me the only way I am going to get to Caimanera, the closest point to the US base, is with an official pass, a taxi and a ‘licensed guide’. I assume that means one guaranteed to toe the official government line on the base and relations with the United States. And the only place I am going to put all that together, it appears, is on the outskirts of town at the government-run Viazul hotel.

A
bicitaxi
pedalled by someone who actually knows his way round town gets me there in barely 15 minutes. And there is no mistaking where you are. On the approach road is a big blue roadside sign that uses language which would be ironically familiar to the US forces on the other side of the wire:
HOTEL GTMO
. I hear The Eagles in my head reworking Hotel California: Welcome to the Hotel Guantánamo. You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.

The hotel itself, is a nondescript 1970s box behind railings. The road sign may label it
HOTEL GTMO
but the malfunctioning neon sign outside has a version of its own: Hotel *uan**namo.

We are clearly in a suburb at least partly reserved for the party élite. On the right is a slab-like concrete building which at first glance, misreading the sign as
policlinico
, I take to be the local hospital, which makes the slogan on the banner above the door somewhat worrying: ‘Socialism or death’. It turns out to be
politic
and this is the headquarters of the local communist party. Which I suppose makes it okay. Sort of.

Opposite is a big green expanse of parkland, dominated by some colossal statuary in pink granite, reached by a flight of steps. At first sight it is mind-bending. Think Stonehenge reinterpreted by Salvador Dalí: an arrangement of huge great vertical stone obelisks that then suddenly bend and intertwine with one another, here and there sprouting heads and bodies. Into the columns are carved the names to go with some of them: Mariana Grajales Coello
⁹
(after whom the square is named), as well as Antonio Maceo Grajales and Máximo Gómez, and of course, José Martí, all heroes of the late nineteenth-century conflict which eventually led to independence from Spain. It is a stunning piece of architectural sculpture, bold, modern, similar in size and dramatic effect to some of the more grandiose pieces of Soviet statuary, yet at once strikingly different, unmistakably Latin.

And just to reassure us that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, next to the hotel is a huge billboard poster of Castro. Not Fidel but Raúl, looking for all the world like your favourite bespectacled smiling uncle playing soldier with, in giant letters below, the most audacious slogan I have yet seen in Cuba: ‘
EN GUANTÁNAMO, SI SE PUEDE
!’

‘In Guantánamo, Yes We Can!’ I can’t not love the fact that here in this Bizarro World, Latin mirror-image of the US, Barack Obama’s slogan has found a second home. Or the irony that one of the first things that President Yes-We-Can said he was going to do was close down the detention camp at Guantánamo. And so far, already in his second presidential term, no, he hasn’t.

No doubt Raúl has taken the same comfort as Obama did from the slogan’s magnificent vagueness.

At the hotel reception desk I’m told the man I need to talk to is called Yanossi and he isn’t there. But if I wait he might turn up. In fact he does, in little more than a quarter of an hour, and puts on a grave face when I tell him what I want.

‘Yes, it is possible,’ he says at length, not looking like he means it. ‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe. Or yes?’

‘Maybe yes. I will have to ask.’

‘When?’

‘Maybe tomorrow.’

I have a horrible premonition of
mañana
sickness coming on.

‘Please,’ he adds. ‘I need your passport number. Then I will ask and I will call you. This evening.’

I supply what he needs and the phone number of Lissett’s
casa
. ‘But when,’ I ask, ‘might I be able to go?’

‘If yes, then tomorrow.’

‘Really?’

‘Maybe. Maybe yes.’ He smiles.

It seems about as optimistic an answer as I’m going to get as I head back into town with ‘Guantana-mayra’ running through my brain, though it occurs to me that this is the first place I haven’t actually heard it being played.

In the mean time I may as well take in the sights
Guantánamo has to offer, chief among them the city museum, which allegedly offers an unusual view of the US base. The museum is congenial quaint little colonial building with a courtyard fringed with palm trees at its heart. As in Matanzas, I am the only visitor and the attendant feels obliged to follow me round each room, not so much to be sure I don’t steal or damage anything, nor to offer any supplementary information on the exhibits, but simply because it’s marginally less boring than sitting by the desk which is what she does for most of most days.

There are some interesting enough exhibits about the history of slavery in ‘
oriente
’ – eastern Cuba – and the usual collection of machetes and blunderbusses plus a few ancient photographs of landlords and revolutionaries from the turn of the last century. But when I ask her about the ‘other’ photographs, the more recent ones, she pretends not to know what I am talking about.

‘The ones with
los Americanos
,’ I say, then correct myself, remembering Cubans are proud to be
Americanos
too – ‘
los gringos
?’

‘Ah,’ she says eventually with a knowing smile. ‘Not here. Gone.’

I give her a sceptical look but she just smiles back and shrugs.

I find it hard to hide my disappointment. This has to be all part of some strange new attitude to the Obama administration. The pictures I had hoped to see were of rows of naked US marine buttocks. Not for any lascivious gratification, I hasten to add, but because they represented one of those hilarious moments of Cold War culture clash. Back sometime in the 1970s the marines stationed at Guantánamo Bay thought the most hilarious thing they could do to show how they felt about communism was to demonstrate one of the latest capitalist crazes: mooning. An entire platoon of them
had, for a laugh, turned their back on the watching Cuban guards, bent down and dropped their trousers.

But rather than take offence at being faced with such a gesture of imperialist disdain the Cubans apparently thought it hilarious and took photographs which they then for several decades hung on the walls of this very museum. If you want to see what capitalism looks like, the message was, here you go. If US citizens had been allowed to visit Cuba, I always wondered if they would have been proud of their armed forces. Or if the servicemen themselves, had they been allowed to visit, might not have regretted ‘posing’ for Cuban cameras in quite that position. Sadly, it seems, now that a few US citizens are finally being allowed to visit, we may never know.

That leaves the main attraction in Guantánamo museum as a very different if rather more salubrious exhibit, and one that commemorates a more daring feat. One with a room all to itself. At first glance it looks like the rusting hulk of some antique diving bell, a great lump of grey metal about three metres high with a porthole, a hatch and a bright orange bottom, on which are stencilled the letters that give it all away: CCCP.

This primitive-looking chunk of heavy-duty ironwork is the grim reality of the Soviet version of that supposed ultimate example of twentieth-century futuristic technology: a spacecraft. To be more precise this is the re-entry module from a Soyuz spacecraft in which on September 18, 1980, along with a Russian colleague, Guantánamo-born thirty-eight-year-old Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez became simultaneously the first Latin American, and first person of African ethnic origin to go into space. He and colleague Yuri Romanenko spent just over a week on board the Salyut 6 space station before returning to earth in this diabolically unsafe looking spherical iron lung, landing in the dark
somewhere in the desert of what is now Kazakhstan. Rather him than me.

Back out in the baking heat of Guantánamo town I try to go to the bank again only to find this time it’s closed because, as in Santa Clara, there’s a power cut and the tills have closed. I exclaim in despair to the man blocking the door, ‘
La economía de Cuba es muerta!
’ This country’s economy is dead. He shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘
Si, Señor,
’ as if I’m an idiot for only just noticing it.