Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  All this over-filled my hump and, having bought six tins of Brazilian tinned beef, the digestive process required me to lie under a fig tree on the town’s edge, watching a misfortunate horse scratching an open shoulder wound against the next tree. Beside me a hen was dealing with a hunk of coconut while across the road her week-old brood sought tasty morsels in horse manure. When a turkey vulture came gliding into view, just above the tree tops, Mother squawked a warning and hustled the chicks into a lean-to shed where a cow was tethered with her new-born calf. I had been told that these birds are valuable scavengers, not killers, but Mother Hen thought otherwise.

  At 2.30 I went on my sweaty way, the gradient ever more severe, the panorama on my right ever wider and grander – crowded green foothills sloping down to a distant hazy plain. On my left irregular deforested slopes were separated by stony gullies: no bohios, no fields, no paths. One vehicle overtook me, an open lorry, newly painted and carrying a score of Turquino-bound Dutch. It stopped to offer a lift and my ‘No thanks’ caused comic bewilderment.

  Where an earth track branched off I hesitated before noticing a small hand-carved arrow pointing to ‘Campismo’. Around the next mountain came a surprise – a steep, brief descent to a few concrete dwellings and a polyclinic. This hamlet was still visible when at last I saw a faint path on a wide grassy slope. It led diagonally to a perfect camp-site (level, not stony) on a ridge top overlooking a wooded ravine containing a few palm-thatched bohios. Happily I unpacked my flea-bag and used it as a stool while diary-writing. The young man who soon ascended from the bohios hurried past me looking scared, not returning my greeting. As he traversed the slope I admired the grace of his speedy loping.

  Forty minutes later a motor-bike’s snarl ravaged the silence, then stopped. A figure appeared, hastening directly towards me, ignoring the path, and without any exchange of words I was captured by a brown-uniformed forest ranger wearing a hostile expression. Of course he was only doing his duty, though he might have done it more pleasantly. It seems we really were lucky in November, perhaps because of the Trio’s disarming presence.

  I did not enjoy my four-mile pillion ride to the campismo at the end of that earth track. I suspected Grumpy’s accelerating around sharp bends was calculated to raise my fear-level (already high) and it displeased me to have to hold him in such a close embrace. As tourist resorts go, the campismo was innocuous, a score of thatched cabañas dotted around the sides of a bowl-valley with an alfresco restaurant overlooking many mountainous miles. Grumpy dumped me outside the reception office, then seemed disproportionately angry on hearing that Germans had occupied every cabaña. Much acrimonious debate followed; I wanted to sleep out, Grumpy insisted that I must register and sleep under a roof. He and the staff were not on good terms and as the light faded their quarrel widened to take in other topics. Finally I was led to a staff cabañas, the tariff reduced from CP26 to CP9 because it lacked TV, telephone, fan, bedside light, running water. When I tried to switch on the broken baño light it gave me the worst electric shock of my life – for an instant I imagined, ‘Heart attack!’ But I appreciated this cabañas’s isolation: it stood near a forested mountainside not too steep to be investigated at dawn, before Grumpy or his equivalent came on duty. Cuba’s tourist controls can be quite stressful when one isn’t of an age to enjoy Cowboys and Injuns.

  At Bayamo’s Casa de la Trova a retired history teacher, whose English dated from the 1940s, had propounded his theory that the Sierra Maestra is short of transmontane paths not only because of the range’s awkward configurations. Until comparatively recently, he said, most goods travelled from port to port; shipping cargoes from Santiago to Manzanillo or vice versa was both simpler and cheaper than driving mule-trains across the Sierra Maestra. Hence Cuba never needed the system of traders’ tracks I had used in Nepal, Ethiopia, the Karakoram, the Andes, Laos – where the mountains are so much more formidable but water transport is not an option.

  During the next three and a half days I was repeatedly baffled – but enjoyably so – by ‘awkward configurations’. Escaping from Campismo Popular was the easy bit. Directly behind my cabaña the dawn light revealed concrete steps built into a one-hundred-foot cliff, giving access to a natural swimming pool in a sluggish river. This ‘amenity’ seemed little used by the Campismo guests; vegetation was taking over. Upstream from the pool secure stepping stones led to a distinct path – With One Bound I Was Free!

  Any stranger focused on a particular destination would find these mountains frustrating. Several times, over the next few days, I had to retrace my steps: when an apparently purposeful path ended on a cliff-edge and I realised its only users were wood-cutters; or when the way was blocked by a creeper-entangled fallen tree, an obstacle I might have tackled ten years ago but not now with aged bones to be considered. As I had precalculated, water was no problem; a delicious stream ran through every ravine. The humidity was testing but the sun rarely touched me. Amidst these dense, damp forests I was moving through a green twilight, emerging at intervals on to open terraced slopes where two or three families cultivated coffee, their crop flourishing in the nearby shade. My CDR apprehension was not justified; the astounded campesiños were of course curious but never interventionist. I got no whiff of the suspicion and hostility encountered by the exhausted Granma survivors who struggled into the Sierra Maestra in December 1956. Soon they were reunited with other survivors and recruited four locals, bringing the platoon up to twenty by the end of the month.

  At that date no government had provided the Sierra Maestra farmers with either protection or social services and most families, though they might have been occupying their homesteads for over a century, were regarded as squatters by the big landowners who claimed the right to evict them without warning. Many were in more or less permanent conflict with the authorities and therefore disinclined to help Batista’s rebel-hunting Rural Guard. However, in early 1957 they were not yet ripe for revolution. Volunteers from the cities joined the Rebels in far greater numbers and Che found the campesiños’ apathy depressing. Fidel patiently set about overcoming it, emphasising that the Revolution would not only redistribute land but provided education and medical care for all. He also took a genuine interest in personal problems and listened to individual’s opinions, a new experience for peasants so accustomed to being abused and humiliated. Moreover, the Rebels paid for food and other assistance, in contrast to the Rural Guard and National Army who helped themselves to whatever they fancied and sometimes requisitioned precious pack-mules. Fidel’s execution of Chicho Osorio, a peculiarly vicious mayorale (land agent), also helped the Rebel cause. Usually the mayorale was a region’s most detested man.

  The family who sheltered me on Night One consisted of a thirty-ish couple, two small boys who soon overcame their shyness and invited me to play baseball, and a grandfather, Angel, who initiated me into the art of palm thatching. Unusually, they allowed me to sleep on the verandah, perhaps judging it kindest to give in to the whim of a daft foreigner who didn’t know where she was going.

  A new bohio was being built nearby, on the edge of the forest, to house Angel’s younger son and his bride. It was to be three-roomed, all wood, earthen-floored, palm-thatched; the bamboo rafters were already in place. One tends to equate palm thatching with putting up a tent but in fact, as Angel demonstrated, preparing the fronds is labour-intensive. First you must find those of exactly the right quality and length and let them wither naturally in the sun before spreading them on wooden slats under a roof of other fronds and saturating them with water (in Angel’s case hauled up from the bottom of a ravine on a fearsomely steep path). Three soakings are needed, leaving a day between the fronds drying out (not in the sun) and being resaturated. During this process unsuitable fronds are detected, those that might be responsible for future leaks. It’s cheering to know that in a few places people retain the skills, and have access to the necessary materials, to build themselves a sound new home – for free.

  The Sierra Ma
estra is famous for its shortage of zig-zag paths, despite such very steep slopes. Each day I came to a few dodgy stretches, some with unnerving drops into ravines – though given so much vegetation one wouldn’t fall all the way. The main hazard is the friability of the soil in places – loose and dry, without boulders or roots to bind a path together. This makes for difficult ascents and terrifying descents, best accomplished on one’s bottom. During the second afternoon I had my self-esteem restored by a campesiño who was doing the same thing, sitting on a wooden tray evidently designed for the purpose. I was then crawling up, clinging to shrubs, and on seeing me he grabbed a branch to halt his descent and expressed extreme concern. Where was I going to? Coming from? And why? My idiotic replies didn’t reassure him and he went on his way – having offered me his toboggan – looking so worried that I feared he might contact a park ranger.

  Some of the vegetation, varying with altitude, was unfamiliar: aggressive-looking bromeliads brandishing swords and spears, acres of blue-green thorny thickets, exuberant fountains of ferns, orchids large and small (given as one reason for guides being mandatory), and numerous, bizarre, contorted plants stirring memories of fairytale illustrations. As in Laotian forests (of which these reminded me) the bird-life was tantalising: flashes of red, blue, white, green, chestnut, only glimpsed through the obscuring foliage. In November the ornithological scene had disappointed us – but then, the chatter of tiny tongues does not facilitate bird-watching.

  At most I walked six hours a day, slowly, and spent the other hours enjoying my immediate surroundings and chewing raisins while saluting the Rebel Army’s energy. One exceptional journalist, Enrique Meneses, writing for Paris Match, spent four months with the guerrillas (other journalists gave up after four days or less) and reported that Fidel changed camp almost daily, leading his men up and down these gruelling gradients for at least twelve hours with occasional stops if they came to a bohio offering coffee. Whenever food was accepted (this happened rarely) the host received a hundred-peso gift.

  Everybody around the few bohios I passed was friendly and invited me to rest but the usual gestures of welcome – water, coffee, homemade snacks – were absent. (I recall the same unavailability of refreshments at odd hours in rural Cameroon, far from all motor roads, where strangers are a novelty.) All these homes were earthen-floored and without running water but each had electricity. This is in telling contrast to the situation in many African countries where ginormous corporate-sponsored pylons span hundreds of miles of remote territory while beneath them thousands of homes are still lit by rags soaked in kerosene. There’s no profit for generating companies in the wattage used by hut-dwellers.

  These mountains are not camper-friendly (the Rebels used hammocks) and Night Two was sensationally uncomfortable. Having seen no bohio since noon I walked too far, hoping to reach one, then had to make my bed across a precipitous path where the law of gravity precluded sound sleep. My own fault: stupidly I had climbed out of a ravine where I could have slept soundly on the stream’s level bank. Then the sun set and I dared not descend in darkness. However, the night noises almost made up for my perpetual motion. By day only bird calls break the silence, by night one becomes aware of a bustling population – croaks, hisses, grunts, wauls, squeaks, whines (some insect other than mosquitoes) and much rustling through the dead leaves. Of course nothing alarming: Cuba’s fauna is benign, the ants and mosquitoes merely tiresome.

  In the summer of 1958 Batista, emboldened by the failure of a badly organised general strike, announced a major assault on the Sierra Maestra. Against Fidel’s three hundred or so guerrillas, General Eulogio Cantillo deployed ten thousand US-armed troops. By then there were quite a few foreign journalists around and a watching world could scarcely credit the news from Cuba. Cantillo’s thousands were not winning quickly … Time passed and they were not winning slowly … Could it be Fidel was right when he insisted ‘the people are with us’? Those ten thousand came from ‘the people’ and, if not yet ‘with’ the Rebels, they were unenthusiastic about opposing them. Especially on a battleground where the ‘enemy’ had had time to become intimate with every ridge, precipice, track, river and ravine. Cantillo’s ill-trained men had never been required to operate on such demanding terrain.

  On Day Three I was close to this battleground and, looking up at two of the highest crests, I wondered which one prompted Fidel’s Thermopylae remark. Hereabouts a small band of hand-picked sharp-shooters, concealed on a crest, killed hundreds of troops as they clambered up these slopes, their heavy arms more of a hindrance than a help. No Rebel could ever be targeted amidst the trees, no conscript could hope to reach the crest alive. Thermopylae with knobs on …

  In July 1958 two hundred and twenty soldiers were trapped in a ravine and disarmed. Fidel then asked Che (an excellent chef) to prepare lunch for them while he was making arrangements to hand them over to the Red Cross – with maximum publicity. Another battalion, surrounded and captured in August, received the same treatment. Fidel then wrote to General Cantillo (one of several letters):

  … After all, we are your compatriots, not your enemies … Perhaps when the offensive is over, if we are still alive, I will write to you again to clarify my thinking, and to tell you what I think you, we and the army can do for the benefit of Cuba.

  The Comandante also wrote to a battalion commander whose men had been put in Red Cross care:

  It would have been hard to imagine when we were together at university, that one day we would be fighting against each other, even though we perhaps do not even have different feelings about our country … I have often wondered about you and the comrades who studied with you. I said to myself: ‘Where are they? Have they been arrested in one of the many conspiracies?’ What a surprise to learn that you are here! And although the circumstances are difficult, I shall always be glad to hear from you. I write these lines on the spur of the moment, without asking you for anything, only to greet you and to wish you, very sincerely, good luck. All your men will be treated with the greatest respect and consideration. The officers will be permitted to keep their weapons.

  Those who talked and wrote of ‘Cuba’s civil war’ were missing the point. Civil wars have a different flavour.

  By the end of Cantillo’s eleven-week campaign it was clear that Batista would soon be replaced. His army was falling apart, many getting the Thermopylae message and refusing to fight on, many others simply deserting. The prospect of Rebels in government – even as part of a coalition – horrified the head of the Caribbean desk at the US State Department. When reminded that most people regarded Batista as a son of a bitch, he achieved immortality of a sort by exclaiming – ‘At least he’s our son of a bitch!’

  On Day Three I twice came upon vestigial ruins, bombed bohios and outbuildings on ledges where coffee was still being cultivated. Throughout Batista’s offensive, bombing was not confined to the Rebels’ real or imagined positions. Campesiños’ homes were attacked with equal ferocity, whether or not particular families supported Fidel. (There’s nothing new about NATO’s brutality in Afghanistan.) These bombers and bombs had been provided by the US with the sickeningly hypocritical proviso that they would be used ‘only in external defence’ – shades of Britain’s sales of armaments to Indonesia and elsewhere. When in need of refuelling and rearming the Cuban Air Force was made welcome at Guantanamo Bay naval base. However, the US anti-Batista lobby was gaining strength and in response to its pressure Lyman Kirkpatrick, the CIA’s inspector-general, feebly protested to Cuba’s Minister of Defence about ‘the extreme nature’ of BRAC’s favourite tortures. (When is torture not extreme?) Hugh Thomas has described BRAC as Batista’s ‘anti-Communist bureau which was practically a branch of the CIA’. More effective than Kirkpatrick was the US refusal to replenish Batista’s armoury, though the British soon hastened to his rescue with the sale, in September 1958, of seventeen Sea Fury aircraft and fifteen Comet tanks. One of Batista’s best buddies, the General Manager in Cuba of the Shell Oil Comp
any, promoted this deal and we hardly need to be told (by Leycester Coltman) – ‘The motives for the contract at the British end were commercial rather than political.’ Before this deal was concluded Fidel telegraphed Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, begging him to stop the sale because those weapons would be used against innocent civilians. His communication was ignored.

  On the morning of Day Three I had to think about where I was, in relation to any road. I had made provision for a three/four-day trek and my rations were dwindling. The Sierra Maestra paths demanded lots of raisins and those utterly repulsive tins of Brazilian beef contained more cereal than protein. I intuited that I had been going around in circles and wasn’t very far (thirty miles?) from my starting point – which proved to be the case.

  At noon I washed in a stream, lunched sparsely off those dwindling raisins and considered my options. Here two routes converged: the easier, narrow path went downstream through dense vegetation, the other was a wide boulder stairway. Then I noticed horse-droppings on the stairway, quite fresh, suggesting a bohio not too far away.

  An hour later – above the stairway, close to a ridgetop – the path ran level across a bare, red-brown cliff-face for some fifty yards. I was nearly over when the earth began to crumble beneath my feet – and here a falling body would hit boulders rather than bushes. That was a nightmare moment. I completely lost my nerve and when I put a hand on the cliff to steady myself it too crumbled. I should then have hastened forward (safe ground lay scarcely five yards ahead!) but in panic I froze, leaning on my umbrella which of course sent more of the cliff gently dribbling down. At that I regained my nerve and proceeded, the path continuing to crumble in my wake. Back on safe ground something unusual because man-made caught my eye: a sign (white paint on wood) hanging from a branch. It said: PELIGRO DE MUERTE, pointing to the cliff. Where the stairway ended I had taken the wrong path.