Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  Candida looked both pleased and worried when I booked a room for 17–20 January 2006 – worried because she thought it inappropriate for an abeula to roam alone in the Escambray, the Sierra Maestra and the Sierra del Rosario. Solo travelling disconcerts the gregarious Cubans, especially when the traveller is past her sell-by date.

  I, too, had mixed feelings about my return. Cuba was now so closely associated with a light-hearted family holiday that changing gear might be difficult. Yet part of me eagerly anticipated that change; without the Trio I wouldn’t have to worry about food supplies, landmines, staying too long in museums, travelling by train, getting lost, being arrested. As a traveller, I’d be back to normal.

  This holiday had been an experiment of sorts, my first journey with the adult Rachel. When last we trekked together, in Cameroon in 1987, she was only legally an adult, aged eighteen. It pleased me that now, when she was the leader, we remained on the same wavelength as travellers, wanting to do the same sort of thing in the same sort of way. And again I marked the peculiar value of a shared sense of humour; with nobody else do I laugh as much as with my daughter, a bond dating back to our Baltistan trek. Then she was aged only six but we both saw the funny side of various set-backs, like having to survive for days on apricot kernels, and thinking our morning tea tasted odd because before daylight I’d filled the kettle from the wrong bucket. When the temperature is -40°F one doesn’t go out to pee …

  PART TWO

  January–March 2006

  Chapter 7

  In January I zig-zagged back to Cuba via Miami, Key West and Jamaica. Miles Frieden, Director of Key West’s Twenty-fourth Literary Seminar, was responsible for this circuitous route. My London-Miami return ticket cost the Seminar three hundred and twenty pounds, my Miami-Jamaica-Havana return ticket cost me five hundred and eighty pounds. Thus was I directly exposed to the US embargo which since 1961 has been condemned fourteen times by the UN General Assembly.

  After 11 September 2001 the US administration shovelled billions of dollars into its new Department of Homeland Security. So why were ten of Miami airport’s twenty immigration stalls closed at 1.00 p.m. when two flights had just arrived from London and one from Lima? That cost-cutting gave me more than ninety minutes to absorb a singularly unwelcoming atmosphere. Obese black-clad security officers carrying large guns strolled around surveying us all as though we were prisoners in transit who might at any moment make a dash for freedom. As the silent jet-lagged queues slowly shuffled forward, immigration officers snapped at those, like me, who coped clumsily with the finger-print and eye-print equipment. What happens to all those millions of records? Exactly what purpose do they serve? Were I to join al-Qaeda now, and return to the US in 2011 as an octogenarian terrorist, would an immigration officer immediately pounce on me? Seems unlikely …

  All the airport staff were other than Caucasian. During the flight I had talked with an aged Miami resident, another varicose veins victim so we met while taking exercise. He was tall and stooped and brooding, with watery blue eyes and a toupee. In the past decade, he informed me, Miami has been infested with many thousands of ‘illegals’ from Columbia, Peru, Brazil, Panama, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Nicaragua – ‘all those places’. They deal in drugs, they smuggle, forge, cheat, mug, rape and murder. But when he agitates, demanding their deportation, he’s told they’re needed because Cuban-Americans breed slowly and dodge all the dirty jobs. But of course the Cubans stay in control, politically and economically, and that’s unlikely to change – the administration trusts them. (As well it might: their votes – plus the non-votes of those deviously excluded from the register – put Bush II in the White House.)

  When stereotypes come alive one feels illogically taken aback: and I was soon to meet a few more.

  At Miami airport an immigration queue delay caused me to miss, by five minutes, my 3.00 p.m. Greyhound bus to Key West. Next departure, 7.00 p.m. – what to do with this four-hour wait? A quick trip to the city centre? No, bad idea when jet-lagged: to face down-town Miami one would surely need reserves of resilience. Moping through acres of concourse I noticed a Cuban ‘Hair Stylist’ and drifted in for a trim.

  While snip-snipping the senior ‘stylist’ introduced herself: Bertha, forty years an exile. In response to my murmuring that forty years is a long time to be away from home she looked ahead: with luck her three children and seven grandchildren could move soon to Havana. ‘That crazy man is nearly ninety (sic), when he’s gone we’ll be free.’

  ‘But will they want to move?’ I asked. ‘Weren’t they all born here? Marvellous of course for them to visit, I only wonder if they’d want to settle in Havana?’

  Bertha bristled. ‘We had a fine apartment in Vedado, when there’s democracy we can get it back. My children know they’re Cuban. There’s going to be big opportunities, reconstructing. They can be happy working on that.’

  ‘And will you return with them?’

  Bertha hesitated, frowned, sighed. ‘I figure I’m too old to leave my home. But I’ll be free to vacation with them.’ I nodded sympathetically, wondering how the younger generations really felt about Granny’s vicarious urge to return.

  Bertha had taken it for granted that a European tourist would be anti-Castro and so did the Miami-born mulatto who sat beside me in the Cuban Bar where he seemed to have spent some time. Five minutes into our conversation he was proclaiming, ‘That island is my place, not belonging with Communists! My grandmother stays in Havana – very old, soon one hundred. She dies, he dies, I go back and live in her home. Four big rooms, in Centro, here I never get money for more than two rooms.’

  ‘What’s your job?’

  ‘I mend electrics, that’s a good job for Cuba. They have no men with this training, nobody educated.’ When he suggested that I might stand him a rum and coke I ordered a coffee instead.

  Two hundred years ago Key West, then known as Caya Hueso, was no more than a coral and limestone reef, some four miles long by one and a half miles wide, without arable land or fresh water, populated by flamingos, deer and turtles, conveniently free of indigenes – or anyone else. In 1819 John Whitehead, son of a New Jersey banker, happened to notice this reef. He had just survived a shipwreck and when the captain of the rescue vessel praised Caya Hueso’s natural harbour (wide, deep, sheltered) Whitehead quoted his friend John Simonton – ‘Capitalists will always go where profit is to be found.’

  This harbour, a mere ninety miles from Cuba, promised much profit if developed as a naval and commercial port. True, Florida and its keys were Spanish possessions, as they had been for over three hundred years, but the US was gleefully watching that empire’s decline and Whitehead was prepared to wait. He didn’t have long to wait; in July 1821 Spain formally transferred Florida to the US.

  Key West’s history is so short that every drama counts; my town map marked the spot, near Fort Taylor, where Narcisco Lopez’s failed 1850 expedition came to its climax. Lopez (born in Venezuela) was a former Spanish army officer and governor of the Cuban province of Trinidad who had been inspired to change sides by Bolivar’s plan for Cuba’s liberation. Early one May morning a crowd gathered to watch his steamer, Creole, being pursued by the Spanish gunboat Pizarro. As the gunboat came almost within firing range the steamer slowed and seemed doomed. The anti-Spanish crowd groaned in sympathy. Then suddenly black smoke began to pour from the Creole’s funnel and her wheels rapidly revolved: the crew had stoked her with crates of bacon and hacked-off bits of her woodwork. She escaped into the harbour leaving the frustrated Pizarro ‘a few yards away, with port holes open, and broadsides grinning, like the fangs of a bloodhound balked of his prey’. So wrote an over-excited observer.

  Key West gave Lopez and his ‘gallant band of liberators’ a tumultuous welcome. He and his officers were lionised by the town’s leading families while the Creole’s Cuban crew intimidated the respectable Spanish residents and looted saloons and grocery shops.

  Fifteen months later, at Havana’s Playa el Morri
llo, Lopez led two hundred and twenty-three men against one thousand three hundred Spaniards and killed their commander, General Enna, before being captured with fifty of his followers. They were shot and Lopez was garrotted beneath the Punta fort. Hundreds assembled to witness his strangulation and the authorities, oddly enough, allowed him to address them – ‘It was not my wish to injure anyone, my object was your freedom and happiness’.

  Cuba’s Ten Year War (1868–78) overtaxed the Spanish garrisons and ‘volunteers’ – murderous bands of white racists, mostly not long arrived from Spain – were recruited to terrorise the population. Throughout the 1870s their atrocities drove thousands of asylum-seekers to Key West and among the earliest migrants was Vicente Martinez Ybor, a wealthy Spanish cigar-maker based in Havana. He reacted to the ‘volunteers’ by opening a branch factory across the straits and when the authorities, suspecting him of disloyalty, put him under ‘volunteers’ surveillance’ he moved himself, his family and all his assets to Key West. His factories employed generations of exiles and soon the island’s economy was suffering. All over the US, Key West-made cigars (the tobacco of course Cuban) were outselling their Havana-made rivals because they were free of import duty.

  By the 1890s more than one-third of Key West’s 18,000 residents were Cuban, their community centre the San Carlos Hall. The original building was the starting point for Key West’s cataclysmic 1886 fire; spread by a gale, it roared for hours from one street of wooden buildings to the next and most of the town centre was lost. Then as now, conspiracy theories flourished in the sub-tropical climate; many accused Spanish government agents of arson, without any direct evidence.

  This charge, however, was not wholly implausible. Key West had become important to the Cuba Libre movement after the Ten Years War when the clandestine Cuba Convention began to organise another armed uprising. The Convention’s leaders were war veterans; its members were academics, businessmen and professionals with a leavening of factory workers. As this Cuban colony donated more than its share to help buy weapons, boats and supplies, the burning of its cigar factories and colossal tobacco warehouse seriously depleted Cuba Libre’s coffers. Before the fire, at a fund-raising meeting in a packed San Carlos Hall, even the lowest-paid workers eagerly donated dollars and ladies impulsively unpinned brooches from their bosoms and slid rings off their fingers. One American, Colonel F.N. Wicker, Key West’s Collector of Customs, contributed US$100 (then an enormous sum) to ‘strengthen the sinews of war’ – in defiance of the official US façade of ‘neutrality’. Next day the Spanish Consul informed Washington, by telephone, and the day after Colonel Wicker was sacked – also by telephone.

  Soon after, Havana charged Carlos Aguerro, a Key West Cuba Libre leader, with ‘rapine, arson, highway robbery and murder’. His extradition was sought but a US District Court refused the application because the alleged offences were associated with a revolutionary movement. Aguerro’s friends carried him on their shoulders from Key West’s packed courthouse and thousands of cheering Cubans formed a procession behind him through the town centre. He then armed a schooner, was joined by a dozen other patriots and sailed for Cuba confident of being reinforced on arrival. Within hours of landing he and his followers had been, as the Spanish put it, ‘exterminated’.

  A decade before the fire Carlos M. de Cespedes, son of the Great Liberator, was elected Mayor of Key West. By 1892 it had been realised that the Cuban colony here produced shrewd politicians as well as keen revolutionaries though most tended to vote for friends, relations or colleagues, feeling no particular affinity with either US party. Accordingly, both Democrats and Republicans ran Cuban candidates, all of whom were elected, leaving Monroe County without even one American representative. But this, interestingly, caused no discernible bad feeling in Key West.

  My map also marked the spot where José Martí landed on Christmas Day 1891. Cubans thronged the banner-draped dock, cheering and singing, waving flags, weeping for joy. All Key West’s exiles – men, women and children – soon belonged to one of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC) branches, controlled by a central committee of veterans. For the next three years, until Martí ordered military action to begin on 24 February 1895, those clubs collaborated in the various tasks assigned them. It helped that most Key Westers were, like Colonel Wicker, on the Cuban side.

  The most conspicuous monument in Key West’s cemetery is the USS Maine plot, its bronze statue of a solitary saluting sailor surrounded by twenty-seven white marble headstones, simple and nameless. Only twenty-seven, though two hundred and fifty-eight US sailors were lost when the battleship Maine, at anchor in Havana harbour, blew up on 15 February 1898 and quickly sank.

  Two months earlier the Maine, apparently on her way to pay a courtesy visit to Havana, had docked at Key West and on Christmas Eve, when the crew hung illuminations from bow to stern, thousands crowded the shoreline marvelling at this jolly display of advanced naval technology. Key West’s elite then entertained the officers while the crew made merry in taverns, gambling saloons and (we can assume, though the coy local historians don’t say so) burdels.

  In January the mood changed. From Havana came news of anti-American rioting and when the rest of the US North Atlantic Squadron joined the Maine many suspected that this Squadron was not so far south merely to take part in warm-water exercises. But nothing could prepare them for the news telegraphed from Havana on 15 February. As the New York Herald reported, ‘Key West is in the deepest gloom’.

  The future President Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, blamed a Spanish mine and wrote in his diary: ‘The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery’. The Spaniards insisted, ‘Undoubtedly an accidental internal explosion’. In the 1970s, when US Admiral Hyman Rickover closely re-examined all the evidence, he agreed with the Spaniards. But in 1898 no US citizen would accept this explanation. (At least, none who dared to speak out; there must have been a questioning minority.) Inflamed by a stridently nationalistic press, the public clamoured for revenge and on 25 April the US declared war on Spain – a war long under consideration, but the Maine causus belli ended all dithering.

  Earlier in April, when volunteers were besieging every recruitment centre, John Black Atkins landed in New York and reported to the Manchester Guardian:

  The United States flag was everywhere hung across the streets and from the windows. Warlike sentiments and war bulletins were stuck in the shop windows. Men and women and dogs went about the streets wearing American medallions or ‘favours’. Bicycles were decorated with the national colours as though for a fancy dress parade. Everywhere one saw the legend ‘Remember the Maine!’

  Does that remind you of anything?

  On 9 April three passenger steamers from Havana docked at Key West, each perilously overloaded with US citizens. They had been seen off by hundreds of Cubans yelling, ‘Get out, Yanqui Satan!’ Illogical hostility, you might think, when the US was about to declare war on Spain. But those demonstrators were well aware that the Yanquis did not have Cuba’s liberation at the top of their agenda.

  Exactly half a century before, in 1848, President James Polk had offered Spain one hundred million US dollars for Cuba and six years later President Franklin Pierce upped the offer by thirty million US dollars. But Madrid wasn’t interested and emphatically said so – whereupon President Pierce’s European diplomatic corps advised him, ‘If Madrid refuses to sell, then, by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain if we possess the power’. At that date Washington was unsure of possessing the power and took no formal military action. Instead, filibustering increased. ‘Annexationists’, from both Cuba and the US, were often willing to sponsor a few hundred adventurers to land on the Cuban coast where they would, it was hoped, be joined by thousands. In fact few ‘rebels’ ever turned up, being hopelessly disorganised and disunited until Martí asserted his leadership in the 1890s.

  Many of Key West’s rich Cubans hastened home when the Spanish withdrew (f
our hundred and seven years after Columbus landed at Baracoa), some to take high office in the new republic. Gradually the colony dwindled, but in 1960 new migrants arrived and turned the San Carlos Institute into a Cold War battleground. Built by the Cuban government in the 1920s, it became the only US public school (in the transatlantic sense) maintained by a foreign power. Because it was for the education of Cuban children, it was also among the earliest racially integrated schools in the US. Conspicuously Cuban-Spanish, San Carlos stands out on Duval Street like an exiled bit of Havana. The lobby’s majolica tiles are quite stunning, the auditorium is splendid in a restrained way and the curving mahogany staircase leads to a long, high-ceilinged library where any bibliophile interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cuba would convulse with excitement.

  In March 1961 the San Carlos directors proved their loyalty to Washington by cutting all links with Havana and spurning their regular annual subsidy, which Fidel was willing to maintain. A month later, Key Westers were baffled to see gigantic US Navy destroyers (‘half the size of our island!’) anchoring off-shore. Then the journalists arrived, packing every hotel and bar, poised to leave for Cuba to cover its rescue from Communism. When the Bay of Pigs invaders were defeated within seventy-two hours, the destroyers sailed away, leaving the journalists to deflect public attention from Washington’s humiliation by filing reports of colourful anti-Castro demonstrators marching up and down Duval Street.