by Norman Lewis
‘What do you expect?’ he asked. ‘There’s a rebellion going on here. You’re carrying a uniform around—OK, you’re probably a rebel. These guys are getting tired of being shot at. You have to see it through their eyes.’ You have to see it through their eyes. This was from the man who had championed the cause of the underdog in Spain, and what was happening here was worse than anything Franco had done.
There was no avoiding it. Ian’s question had to be asked. I took the plunge. ‘How do you see all this ending?’ I asked. ‘Can Castro pull it off?’
Comrade Massart’s cautious, watery, doubting eye was on me again. ‘My answer to such questions is bound to be that I live here,’ Hemingway said.
In my letter to Fleming, I wrote, ‘There was something biblical about the meeting with Hemingway, like having the old sermon on the vanities shoved down your throat in the middle of whatever you happen to be doing with your life in the workaday world. They give funny names to the buses in this town and there’s one that runs past the hotel that says We just ran short of greatness, which just about sums him up, although perhaps understating the case. This man has had about everything any man can ever have wanted, and to meet him was a shattering experience of the kind likely to sabotage ambition—which may or may not be a good thing. You wanted to know his opinion on the possible outcome of what is happening here. The answer unfortunately is that he no longer cares to hold opinions, because his life has lost its taste. He told me nothing, but he taught me more even than I wanted to know.’
By January 1959 Fidel Castro was in Havana, and I, too, was back. A single incident revealed the mood of a public intoxicated with the champagne of victory. Castro addressed the crowd from the palace terrace and as he began to speak someone released two white doves, one of which flew up and alighted on his shoulder. I could never find anyone who disbelieved this story, offered everywhere as a portent of the biblical kind. I, too, although I missed this sign from heaven, was astounded in my own way. Village boys, grabbed up and put into uniform as the rebels advanced, had taken over the city’s marvellously tessellated pavements to play marbles. I stopped the taxi and got out to watch, and to listen to the nostalgic click of a marble striking an alley, bringing pleasant memories of a game I had no idea was played outside British shores. Dismissing the taxi, I walked on, passing young soldiers playing their guitars, then listening to the twitterings of Batista’s canaries in the trees. The streets were scented with lilies. I made for the Parque Central where I suspected the guarachas would still be hurling their criticisms in verse (although probably toned down on this occasion) at the heads of those in authority. Whatever had happened I was certain that in the best possible way this was still the Havana of old.
It was a month since the rebels had taken over, but Havana was still full of bearded warriors—surely the politest who had ever carried a gun—who bowed civilians through doorways, waited at the back of queues and rushed to help old ladies with their parcels. Such was the current of civic enthusiasm that even longstanding opponents of the revolution fell into line. Ruby Hart Phillips, who had doubted Castro’s sanity in the past and quoted in the New York Times the opinion of a Boston psychiatrist describing him as an outstanding case of schizophrenia, was won over. ‘As I watched Castro I realized the magic of his personality,’ she wrote. Edward Scott shifted the stance of the Havana Post slightly to the left and was photographed wearing his Dale Carnegie smile in the presence of Che Guevara. The new regime had turned out less puritanical than he had feared. He was a little sad that bingo, to which he was addicted, should have been included in the blanket disapproval of gambling, but had soon located clandestine operators of the game to whom he was happy to lose a little money.
Although it had so far been unsuccessful in its attempts to undermine the capital’s renowned appetite for pleasure, a certain Calvinism was nevertheless in the air. The guardians of public morality moved cautiously to the attack. Those citizens, for example, who insisted upon displays of drunkenness in public places were not arrested but trundled off to centres of disintoxication, and prostitutes who drew too much attention were packed off for short courses of re-education. A drive for literacy was on. Socialist newspapers suggested to the public that they should study more and pray less. Church attendance went down, and the public rooms of such hotels as the Sevilla, where I had checked in once again, were emptied of hotel guests and crammed with docile students, mostly middle-aged, learning to read propaganda posters and cope with the paperwork created by a socialised regime.
I went to see General Velez and found him as hale and cheerful as ever. The year had passed off well with the exception of a break-in by a band of demoralised soldiers in the last days of the Batista retreat. These had done no damage but had stolen his stuffed pike. Pigeons had got into his flat while he was away and eaten his aspidistras. And now the great news—he had received a letter from the Ministry of the Interior announcing that he was to be created a Hero of the Revolution. With this had arrived a large bunch of lilies which by their perfume quite suppressed the soft, melancholic odour released by his collection of Edinburgh Journals.
‘There is to be a victory parade,’ the general said, ‘in which I am expected to take part. A state landau will be provided and my friend Loynaz tells me that in the absence of one’s wife on such occasions, a stylish young lady will be included in the carriage. I am now ninety-five and a half,’ he said, ‘and I have rejected the suggestion as preposterous.’
Watching his expression I believed that Loynaz’s reference to this matter might have set off pleasant memories. Moments later, inevitably, he went in search of the famous album.
Two of the liveliest and most charming thoroughfares of Havana were side streets of the Prado, a short distance from the Sevilla, and it was perhaps to be expected that these, in which the majority of the best whorehouses were located, should have been named Virtudes (Virtues) and Animas (Souls). Part of the definition of a brothel in this city was that it provided beds, and in anticipation of a crackdown, the establishments in Virtudes and Animas sought to protect themselves by ceasing to do this. Instead it became normal for them to offer the clean, bare rooms, each containing curtained booths, hospital-style, with notices saying ‘A respectful silence is solicited’. In the salon economico, sexual activities were en pie—standing up (time limit fifteen minutes). The second categoria mesa put into the booths tables previously employed for a variety of games. Agents of the Brigada Social occasionally called to check on this scene and departed after a nod, of tolerance if not of approval.
The demand for casual sex on a more sympathetic level continued to be satisfied largely by the numerous laundresses employed by the leading hotels, most of whom worked a 12 to 14-hour-day for extremely low wages. The villain of the piece was the old-fashioned guanabera shirt with its innumerable pleats and twenty-four buttons, and a statistic in the official newspaper, Granma, claimed that 6,000 girls in the capital alone were kept hard at it laundering them every day. A high percentage of these helped to make ends meet by surreptitious and diffident sexual activities which could hardly be termed prostitution. Any solitary male checking in at one of the leading hotels such as the Sevilla could expect the discreet approach by a male member of the staff mentioning that certain of the hotel’s laundresses were on offer. ‘None of your bedizened harpies, your honour. These are honest girls straight from work, in the smocks they wear, and the smell of the soap still on their bodies.’ Scott claimed, although I did not necessarily believe him, that it was adventures of this kind that had attracted JFK when he slipped away to the island for a weekend.
All the cars that had been tucked away out of sight during the emergency were on the streets again. Following Scott’s suggestion, the information people sent a flashy chocolate-coloured Cadillac with a horn that played the first bar of ‘Colonel Bogie’ to take me for a quick glance at socialism at work. An English-speaking guide born in Miami was provided and our first stop was at a building in the suburb
s, once a school, but now with a high fence round it and poster picture over the door stating with assurance, ‘Together we face the future with confidence’. We were shown into a room in which a number of men in their early twenties sat at desks scratching away at copy books under the eye of an instructor. All present wore military-style uniforms, and nothing showed in these students’ expressions except a kind of frowning concentration with whatever they were writing.
‘Buenos dias, companero,’ the guide said to the instructor. ‘I have brought an English friend to see how socialism is working with you today.’ Turning to me, he said, ‘This re-education centre is part of an experiment in which we bring about reform without repression. No-one is compelled. Participation is regarded as a privilege.’
‘By them?’ I asked.
Oh sure. Does that surprise you? In the new Cuba we are all learning new lessons together. My friend José here is teaching these men but he is learning at the same time. It is a privilege for him.’
‘It’s a refreshingly novel way of looking at it,’ I said. ‘What are they in for?’
‘Living on immoral earnings,’ the guide said. ‘What also is new in our method of teaching is that José himself has been sentenced for this thing. He has spent one year in the Isle of Pines. He has good qualifications to teach now his life is changed.’
‘I can see that. What is he teaching them at this moment?’
‘At this moment he is teaching them self-criticism. When they have finished their written work those who wish to do so may discuss their progress with the class. In this way the level of auto-criticism may be raised.’
‘Why are some of them wearing red stars?’ I asked.
‘This is to signify that they have offended more than once. The number of stars indicates the number of times the offence has taken place.’
‘In one case I see three. Isn’t that discouraging?’
‘Not at all,’ José said. ‘His self-criticism is now very strong. We have all learned from him.’
He was a man with haunted melancholic eyes and a nervous twitch that widened his mouth slightly at intervals of about ten seconds. ‘Sir, will you be staying in Havana long?’ he asked as he followed us to the door.
‘Unfortunately, no,’ I told him. ‘Not long.’
‘A pity,’ he said. ‘I should have liked you to put a few questions to the students now, then perhaps talk to them again in a month’s time.’
‘That would have been interesting.’
‘It is self-criticism that is interesting. It is not easy to learn this unaided. This can help all of us even if we commit no offence.’ He smiled thinly and shook my hand. ‘Anyone can benefit from these courses and they are easily arranged.’
On our way back we pulled up at a single-storey building plastered with propaganda posters, and climbing some steps I found myself at the edge of what might have been a large, badly maintained swimming pool from which arose an odour of stagnant water, decaying vegetation and mud. The guide waved at it in what seemed a surprisingly proprietorial manner. ‘May I tell you, sir,’ he said, ‘this island grows nothing but sugar-cane. Some tobacco for cigars too, also rice—but not much. This is mono-culture and it is our ruin.’ He turned his back on the water and the dank vegetation and threw up an arm in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘Half our people work in cane-fields. For three months they work and then what must they do? They sit down—forgive me—on arses. They are hungry for food. Their children are crying. At least that was in the past. What I am to tell you now is we are saved. You will ask me how is that? And I tell you the answer—by tomatoes.’
I followed him through the door into a small room where he picked up a shallow basket holding five tomatoes and held it out for my admiration. ‘These tomatoes I have picked yesterday,’ he said. ‘Tomatoes from water. This is hydroponics. Science of future. Today I show you five tomatoes. Next year we are exporting them in thousands. This is diversification. Next year we have a frog farm on the way.’
‘But do they eat frogs here?’ I asked.
‘We have to look ahead to the way things are,’ the guide said. ‘Now they don’t eat but no-one must say they can’t.’ He took a sheet of paper from his pocket and held it out. ‘Here is leaflet on the subject,’ he said. ‘This tells us frogs contain maximum nutrition as well as being delicious when cooked right. The government says frogs are good for us and frogs are what we shall eat.’
The carnival mood of the capital lasted a month or two, till the slow and almost imperceptible tightening of food supplies warned that the holiday might be drawing to an end. The country had been too busy with war to devote enough energy to the cane harvest upon which, at the bottom, everything depended. With less cash to buy imports the prospect of tomatoes grown in water and casseroled frog could not be altogether ruled out. The government developed a craze for ‘intervention’, as nationalisation was called. When this was at first applied to such generally unpopular institutions as banks, the outcry was muted, but it became a different matter when small businesses of all kinds were submerged in the craze. At this time, for example, the best restaurant in Havana was run by a Chinese. Originally an astrologer in the service of Chiang Kai-Shek, he had done so well he had fled the country with diamonds tucked away in various parts of the body. From the sale of these the restaurant took its beginnings, offering a variety of culinary masterpieces that even managed to be cheap. It was explained to the owner of the Jade Pavilion that the revolution was opposed to luxurious foods, and from that time on all his dishes would be based on chicken with either beans, rice or chips. Shortly after the owner committed suicide and the place closed down.
My last day with Scott—and in Havana—was packed with activity. He was in a good mood because his powerful competitor, the Diario de la Marina, had overstepped the mark in its publication of so-called revelations about Castro’s sex-life, and with that the brief honeymoon with the capitalist press had come to an end. Scott, who was careful to keep out of the political arena, had nothing to worry about, and we set out for the Colon cemetery. Laid out like a town, with streets and squares and a little park, all for the dead, this was an extraordinary place. What Scott proposed to show me was an avenue, strictly out of bounds, in which were located the tombs of the very rich. These took the form of the dignified miniature villas of the kind built by the richest of millionaires. Scott had the key to one of them. It possessed a lift, air-conditioning, a telephone, and a projection room for the showing of home movies, and so convinced were the family concerned of the reality of resurrection and even of its imminence that the fridge-freezer bore a notice recommending the interval at which perishable food-stuffs should be renewed. The furnishings, intended to be sumptuous, were in poor taste and the reproduction Ingres pictures seemed to emphasise the pleasures of the flesh. Until recently, Scott said, these tombs had been used to store almost all the world supply of drugs, by the celebrated Sicilian gangster Lucky Luciano, now in custody and awaiting deportation.
From the cemetery we moved on to the Cabana Fortress where the much-advertised trials of war criminals were in progress. They were held in a large hall that might have served as a church, for entering it I breathed in the remnant of a stale, churchy odour, which dispersed as we moved forward in search of seats into the depths of the building into which so many persons were crammed. Most of those occupying the rows of benches were relatives of prisoners. A number were women with young children. Spaces had often been made for them to lie down, and some were asleep. Scott attempted to take photographs but was dissuaded by gestures of disapproval from adults in the vicinity. The place was surprisingly quiet, and despite the provision of microphones I had to listen intently to follow the details of what was going on, especially when prisoners under examination replied to questions, as they usually did, in a low-voiced, hesitant fashion. Two small birds fluttered continuously under the roof.
Numerous atrocities had been committed by Batista’s army and police in the course of the war. Neverth
eless, on the threshold of victory Castro announced that the government of free Cuba would reject a policy of reprisals and indiscriminate vengeance, but that the people’s justice supported by courts of law would be unflinching and swift. In the chaos of collapse and defeat most of the important torturers and killers had fled the country, leaving only the criminal small-fry to be rounded up and brought to trial. Such was the savagery of many of these men that even the examining judge sometimes showed signs of being startled by what he heard.
José Cano, aged eighteen, was charged with ‘homicide with atrocity’. He appeared younger than his age, had a chirping treble voice, and sometimes risked a doubtful smile.
Judge: Cano, it has been stated by the witness Bonet that he was present when you stabbed Sanchez through both eyes. Do you deny this?
Cano: No, your honour.
Judge: Then you admit to murdering him?
Cano: I didn’t murder him, your honour. I couldn’t have. He was already dead with a bullet through the neck. With respect, sir, the custom of the country people when a man has been killed is to put his eyes out, or maybe just stick a knife in them. If you believe in Chango you’ll do this, otherwise the spirit can still see you and you’ll be haunted.
Judge: According to the testimony of Alfonso Galau, who examined Sanchez’s body in the mortuary, he died of knife thrusts. There is no mention of a bullet wound. I reject your story.
Someone sitting nearby sighed loudly but otherwise the silence was unbroken. Another murder committed by a young soldier was under investigation. This time it was Gregorio Gonzalez, aged twenty-two, charged with the murder of a woman of seventy-three.
Judge: Why did you enter this house in the first place?
