Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  Where this gradual climb ended the Trio were at first more interested in raisins than in the panorama ahead. Far below stretched a narrow valley, its exuberant vegetation vividly lush, and for miles beyond – as far as one could see – silver cliffs, sharp and sheer, rose from a sparkling sapphire sea.

  ‘It’s all too rocky!’ complained Clodagh. ‘Where can we swim?’

  Rose heaved a melodramatic sigh. ‘Seems we’ll be stuck on this road all day.’

  ‘And it’s getting near the too hot time,’ Zea grimly reminded us.

  Rachel reassured them, indicating the flat land where the corniche ended. ‘Somewhere there we’ll surely find a cove.’

  During our descent my main concern (unspoken) was food: how to find it. Adults can live off their fat for several days but the Trio couldn’t be expected to keep going on handfuls of raisins. I foresaw starvation aborting this trek. We should have listened more attentively to Irma.

  Down on level ground, at 11.15, Zea voiced what we all felt – ‘I’m boiling!’ Here undulating pastureland separated the nearby foothills from the coast and we paused by a rudimentary gate on our left. The pathlet beyond traversed a grassy slope and led to a bohio dwarfed by its palm grove.

  ‘Let’s go this way,’ urged Clodagh. ‘I can hear a beach.’

  ‘But the path goes to someone’s home,’ objected Rose, always punctilious on such matters.

  ‘We can go round the house,’ argued Clodagh. ‘We won’t disturb them.’

  ‘We’ll be quiet as a mouse,’ guaranteed Zea.

  I looked at Rachel – what would our leader decide?

  At this crucial moment Miguel appeared, trotting eagerly towards us along the verge, a small wiry mulatto with a big smile and a big heart, wearing only white cotton shorts and sandals. Introducing himself, he stroked the Trio’s uncombed locks (one doesn’t waste the cool hours on toilettes) and offered water, shelter, cena (an evening meal). ‘I’m a teacher in this school’ – pointing to a solitary building on a ridge-top – ‘and I live in this house’ – pointing to the bohio. ‘Now is too hot to march, you must rest by the sea with coconuts.’

  It later transpired that Miguel shared the tiny bohio with his mother, his eight-year-old son Raúl, his sister and her nine-year-old daughter and two-year-old son. His dentist wife was on a two-year ‘internationalist’ mission to Venezuela, based in a high village near the Columbian border. One can understand why Cuba’s medical and educational teams are such a success in the Majority World’s remoter regions and are so praised for their adaptability. They bring with them Minority World skills but take in their stride living conditions that our pampered aid workers would find intolerable.

  Just beyond the empty bohio, where we left our gear, we were suddenly on a beach. This cove must have been a buccaneer’s favourite – concealed from above by dense palm groves, its half-mile crescent sheltered to east and west by high wooded promontories. Miguel helped Zea over a barrier of hurricane detritus, then set about providing refreshment. Well-aimed stones brought down three coconuts, with his machete Miguel topped them and, when we had drunk the milk, shells were split and bits used to scoop out the white jelly lining. Coconuts come free, scarce pesos must be spent on the mandatory boiling of water. Countless discarded shells lay under the trees: acceptable fast-food litter.

  Now the sea was subdued, only a slight swell recalling the night’s tumult, and the swimming Trio were soon joined by Raúl. When they all emerged Miguel encouraged his son to speak English with the visitors, a suggestion not adopted. Later, I noticed the four conversing at length in whatever hybrid language children devise for themselves.

  In mid-afternoon Miranda appeared – Miguel’s sister – looking worried. She welcomed us enthusiastically, then the siblings retreated to the bohio and twenty minutes later Miguel returned to announce a change of plan. Miranda was worried because only casas particulares are legally entitled to entertain foreign guests. Therefore we must move to their father’s bohio, also near the shore but west of the cove. It no more resembled a casa particular than Miguel’s home so what was going on? Were local politics (in Cuba even more opaque than elsewhere) somehow involved? Perhaps Father belonged to this zone’s CDR and could give himself permission to break the law. When Miguel gallantly offered to carry both our rucksacks I handed over mine – now tragically light, minus Buccaneros.

  For the building of Father’s three-roomed bohio enough concrete blocks had been available to raise half a house, neatly plastered and white-washed with a tin roof. The more attractive half, of rough-hewn planks, had a redtiled roof. When Hurricane Dennis badly damaged one plank wall, jagged scraps of rusty corrugated iron, washed ashore by the hurricane, were used to replace it. The floors were of polished cement, flimsy six-foot partitions served as interior walls and curtains served as doors. The unglazed windows had wooden shutters but no insect screens. Two cane rocking-chairs, a long bare wooden bench and a TV set furnished the living-room. A double-bed and a large unsteady cupboard filled one bedroom, the other held only three charpoy-type beds.

  We were graciously received by Father, a well-built, broad-browed, soft-spoken man in his fifties, several shades darker than his café-au-lait children. Grandad, a tall, thin, vigorous octogenarian seemed shy of us; he looked pure Creole, his strong regular features recalling portraits of those eighteenth-century grandees appointed to rule Cuba. The island’s racial mix increasingly fascinated me, a mix only acknowledged as an advantage when Castroism fostered pride in being Cuban.

  When we were shown to the double-bedded room Clodagh frowned and wondered, ‘Where will our friends sleep, if we’re in their bed?’ Rachel insisted that we could sleep outside, that we liked camping under the stars. As Zea began to contradict her, expressing a preference for a bed in a house, Rose said ‘Shush!’ Then Father decisively dismissed our scruples and Zea relaxed.

  On the back verandah stood a wooden trestle ‘dining table’, its ‘chairs’ a few shaky stacks of crates. Nearby was the charcoal fuelled mud-stove, built on to the outer wall and recently augmented by an electric rice-steamer which shared the living-room’s one socket with the TV set. A freighter-load of Chinese rice-steamers had been recently imported by the government and made available to all Cubans at affordable prices. After sunset the whole bohio depended on that room’s solitary 15-watt bulb. The pathway to the plank earth-closet (roofless and doorless) led through a banana grove but was now blocked by one of Wilma’s royal palm victims which Miguel would deal with as soon as he could borrow a suitable saw. When Rachel sought the loo Grandad hurried after her to provide a few squares of newspaper.

  With this family we immediately felt at home, being readily accepted as oddities and causing no alteration in the domestic routine. As Raúl showed us around the compound I noticed two hens on the table, industriously pecking. Soon after, Grandad could be seen shooing them off before pouring rice and spreading it widely, then carefully flicking aside bits of grit.

  Meanwhile Miranda was drawing water from the very deep well, its contents disconcertingly murky but safe to drink when boiled. Beside it grew two spindly orange trees, their fruit small, bitter and dry. Raúl warned the Trio not to enter the grassless paddock, shaded by several spreading mango trees, where six white short-horned cows and a black bull spent the hot hours. At sunset Raúl drove the cows on to pastureland and fed grass clippings from the roadside to the bull. In contrast, a small flock of slim, long-legged sheep – light brown with dark brown lambs – then returned home to another fenced paddock. ‘Are you sure they’re sheep?’ asked Zea. ‘They look more like goats!’

  Next came the excitement of our supper being hunted. Miguel, Raúl and one of four dogs pursued a hen all around the compound before cornering her. When Miguel had swiftly strangled her Miranda immersed the corpse in boiling water, then plucked and gutted it – and two sows quarrelled over the guts.

  The sow’s mate, a massive boar, was confined in a small smelly sty, roofed with banana fronds,
and was allowed out only to beget piglets. When Miguel complained, ‘He can be very dangerous!’ I thought, ‘Wouldn’t you be dangerous if imprisoned in darkness unless procreative?’ The sows and their numerous offspring roamed all over the compound and far beyond, eating a prolific weed found in shady places.

  As Richard Gott records, pigs arrived in Cuba with the earliest Spanish settlers, many of their progeny escaping and wandering all over the island. Soon pork had become, as it remains, an important source of protein. From the natives of neighbouring Haiti, Cuba’s ‘Indians’ learned how to preserve meat for sale to pirates and smugglers – first dry it in the sun, then lay it on a rack (known in the native language as a ‘boucan’ or ‘buccan’) above a smokey fire of green leaves and sappy branches. ‘Those who prepared and sold the meat were referred to as “boucaniers” or buccaneers.’ Thus ‘the word became associated with the pirates themselves, the men who brought home the bacon.’

  While the aged hen was being simmered to tenderness, Miguel, Raúl and several other children led us to the nearest beach – under mango trees, through a bean field, across an acre or so of desiccated pasture. We forded a clear shallow river just below its homemade dam, the locals’ bathroom and laundry. Again the wind had strengthened (evidently an afternoon phenomenon) and white breakers were being driven towards an exposed shore from which a line of dark battlemented rocks extended far into the ocean. This sand was unusually soft and deep and Zea flagged, requesting a piggy-back. Intuiting my silent disapproval, Rachel reminded me, ‘She’s not yet six!’ I forebore to remind her that when not quite five she herself had to negotiate the jungle paths of Coorg for many miles without piggy-backs.

  Craving a little solitude I fell behind the rest and strolled by the waves, enjoying an orange and purple sunset (presaging thunder, said Miguel) while thinking backwards, as is my wont. This district’s sadly eroded state has a pre-Revolution cause. All the coastal land west of Santiago once formed part of the Hacienda Sevilla, belonging to the cement-making and ship-building Babun brothers, from the Lebanon. They also exported mahogany and cedar, stripping the mountains of magnificent forests, now replaced by almost valueless secondary growth. Perhaps the Babuns had second sight; fourteen months before Fidel’s victory they sold their hacienda for a million dollars. Three Babun sons, eclectically named Santiago, Omar and Lancelot, soon after joined the CIA’s surrogate ‘regime change’ militia and in 1961 went ashore at the Bay of Pigs. Other Sierra Maestra latifundos belonged to the aristocratic (sort of) Cespedes family, to several members of the Castillo family and to the New Niquero, Cape Cruz and Beattie Sugar Companies. The local campesiños grew coffee, burnt charcoal and lived permanently on the brink of destitution. Traditionally, hereabouts, food cultivation was limited to river beds – where their configuration permitted it.

  On our way back we saw Father having his evening bath in the dam, soaping himself all over. ‘You like to wash?’ asked Miguel. ‘This soap you can use’ – a touchingly generous offer, given the soap shortage. We declined it, being less keen than the Cubans on personal hygiene and feeling adequately cleansed by the sea.

  In the dusky compound we watched a bedtime ritual, much squawking and fluttering and pecking as hens and cocks flew and climbed to their perches high in a mango tree. Clodagh marvelled – ‘I didn’t know hens can fly! Ours can’t.’ ‘Because we chop their wings,’ explained Rose. Zea asked, ‘Is the dead hen cooked yet?’

  It was and in near darkness we sat around the table and were urged to help ourselves from the rice-steamer and a battered tin saucepan. Only two tin plates and three spoons were available; fingers replaced knives and forks. Given a skinny hen and a starved Trio, Rachel and I restricted ourselves to token spoonfuls of rice and delicious gravy. A basin of water and a threadbare towel stood by the table for hand-washing before and after. Having made all the suitable noises, we retired as the family sat down to ample helpings of rice and beans. The Trio had stripped the chicken bones even of their gristly bits.

  On the narrow floorspace between bed and wall Rose and I spread our flea-bags amidst a lively population of giant cockroaches, happily not noticed by Rose who slept instantly. When all three were asleep Rachel and I conferred in whispers about a suitable farewell gift; it’s stressful being capitalists in a society conditioned not to think in terms of profit. We were carrying no presents (a major mistake) and because this affectionate, demonstrative family was treating us not as tourists but as new friends we feared money might strike a discordant note. Yet we couldn’t leave without contributing something to the household. And after all this wasn’t a traditional rural Muslim community with a strict ‘no payment from guests’ code. We decided on CP20, to be discreetly slipped from Rachel to Miranda as we left – ‘for the children’.

  The family’s addiction to Yanqui films on TV kept us adults awake until midnight and thereafter our slumbers were uneasy. Clodagh and Zea frequently kicked Rachel and I sweated in my bag but was deterred by those hyperactive cockroaches from lying on it. At dawn we quickly packed up but Father insisted that we must wait – the Trio must have milk for breakfast. Clearly an immediate departure would have given offence: we had to resign ourselves to losing the cool hours. In our room Rachel furtively fed raisins to the again hungry Trio. Desayuño consisted only of very sweet herbal tea, two chipped enamel mugs being filled from that battered saucepan and passed around casually as people went about their morning chores. Before dressing for school, Miranda’s daughters herded the sheep to their grazing while Raúl fetched the cows. Father and Miguel went first to the dam; twice-daily ablutions are de rigueur. Before following them Grandad fetched firewood while Miranda cleared the stove, dumping its ashes in the long-drop, an effective and environmentally sound ‘air freshener’.

  Pedro arrived then, a handsome youth wearing baggy jeans and a baseball cap and riding a piebald mare with foal at foot. He had come to collect milk and offered the Trio rides. Zea hesitated when her turn came, then objected, ‘There’s no saddle, I might fall off!’ ‘Don’t be silly!’ snapped Rose. ‘She’s not going to gallop!’

  Meanwhile Father was milking, squatting by the pail, quietly crooning, leaning his head against a hind leg. ‘Why doesn’t he have a stool?’ wondered Clodagh. ‘Daddy sits to milk goats.’ ‘Different countries have different habits,’ pronounced Rose, looking wise. Zea had long since fallen for Miguel and was now watching him washing the churn by the well, scouring it with handfuls of sand, a procedure which might disturb EU dairy inspectors. Then pails of frothy warm milk were poured into the churn through a sieve and I envied the Trio. Milk straight from the cow is my second-favourite drink.

  At departure time (8.15) Zea rightly remarked, ‘It’s nearly too hot already.’ We walked close to the cliff edges where noisily pounding waves flung spray so high that momentary rainbows fascinated Zea, usually the first to notice such fleeting details. Cacti – mainly prickly pear – bristled along the cliff tops and low grassy foothills sloped up from the road with many rocky outcrops. Few dwellings were visible but numerous livestock grazed high up – mingling together, not in fields – and over all circled Cuba’s omnipresent turkey vultures, unlovely but useful. Although the Sierra Maestra closely accompanies this coast, rising to eight thousand feet and more, the visual drama is lessened by an odd feature – natural terracing, each terrace six or seven hundred feet high.

  Where the road briefly curved inland barbed wire fencing appeared on our left, displaying little ‘Military Zone’ notices. Soon we saw an army barracks, no bigger than a villa but flying the flag. At my suggestion we hurried past in silence. ‘Camping wild’, as the ridiculous phrase has it, is illegal in Cuba, hence our need to avoid official attention as much as possible. In fact the only sign of life was a young woman hanging nappies to dry on a line strung between two basketball stands without nets. However, three large raised vegetable beds, well tended, indicated troops in residence.

  By 11.15 all were wilting and as we approached a Dennis
-shattered bus shelter I suggested waiting for motor transport to Uvero, the nearest possible source of food. Apart from those rotting bananas, I had eaten almost nothing since leaving Santiago, Rachel’s Chivirico lunch was two days past and the Trio’s breakfast milk intake, though generous, seemed an aeon away to them.

  This short-haul open lorry, uncrowded by either people or sacks, dated from the Khruschev era and its rattling precluded conversation with our jolly fellow-passengers. Around the first corner we turned on to a winding, shady track and had to crouch to avoid overhanging branches. Banana plants at varying stages of growth surrounded a few concrete post-Revolution dwellings. We stopped outside a large compound – sending teenage pigs squealing into the undergrowth – to deliver an elderly man and his sack of manioc. Plaintively Clodagh asked, ‘Why can’t we stay on paths like this? It’s so nice and cool!’ I pointed ahead: the track ended below a precipitous terrace accessible only to goats. As the lorry turned (a tricky manoeuvre) two mothers carrying babies hurried towards us, relieved to get a lift to Uvera’s polyclinic where the infants were due to have some inoculation. Come economic hell or high water, no Cuban baby goes uninoculated.

  Ten minutes later, in a straggling little town, the driver refused any payment and directed us towards the restaurant, one of a row of drab two-storey 1960s houses set back from the road. At 12.30 p.m. it was firmly closed: peering through the window we saw four tables on which chairs had been upturned. The next-door state bakery sold unlimited fresh lime juice, served ice-cold in small jam jars for NP1. Its day’s stock of ship’s biscuits was gone but we rejoiced to see, on otherwise bare shelves, two long yellow-brown cakes, each weighing half a kilo and costing NP10. These were stodgy and over-sweet (I sampled a fragment) but the Trio fell upon them as Rachel asked if there were any more, or anything else edible. No, not until mañana, but sometimes the tienda across the road stocked tinned food. Leaving the Trio under a mango tree finishing those revolting cakes, Rachel cruised around in search of fruit while I investigated the tienda. Even in Rachel’s estimation, our current state of malnutrition would surely justify the purchase of those junk foods we had so improvidently spurned in Chivirico. But Uvero’s residents, lacking tourism-generated convertible pesos, apparently couldn’t afford junk food. They could however occasionally afford beer and ruthlessly I bought the entire stock of nine half-litre tins. The amiable and very beautiful young woman behind the counter assumed that I was on my way to Uvero’s Rebel Army monument – some way up a hillside, guarded by a stately grove of royal palms. But I lacked the energy to pay my respects and anyway the others weren’t interested.