Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  Pinar del Rio planters whose land had been redistributed tried to achieve comparable crops in the US, Honduras, Nicaragua and Santo Domingo. Their total failure proved that this region is uniquely suited to growing the world’s finest tobacco. In 1717 the colonial government established a monopoly and all tobacco had to be sold to Spain. Now the state is the sole manufacturer and distributor of cigars but individual vegueros are allowed to own seventeen-acre plots.

  Both tobacco-growing and cigar-rolling are presumably immune to corruption, but I wondered to what extent it has affected ‘distribution’. On Pinar’s outskirts one of a new rash of wayside hoardings warned: ‘Through corruption we can destroy ourselves and it would be our fault – Fidel.’ According to Aida, twenty-eight thousand students had recently been recruited, all over Cuba, to combat corruption. In Cienfuegos and Pinar I saw some of those youngsters, always moving in pairs, wearing black T-shirts saying ‘Social Worker’ (a trifle bland, given their duties) and looking rather self-important as well they might. Some supervised petrol stations and reported that approximately fifty per cent of sales went unrecorded, were ‘on the black’. Economics students, sent to audit state companies, found many cooked books and much evidence of deft pilfering on a daily basis. Garcia looked up his file of Granma cuttings and informed me that in 2003, during the last anti-corruption campaign, the police had found five hundred and twenty-five clandestine factories, three hundred and fifteen disguised warehouses and one hundred and eight-one illegal workshops. A government economist, having read this report, noted: ‘With our crisis, and in view of wage levels, little can be done to stop embezzlement and corruption.’

  To some Cubans of my generation the need for this Student Inspector Brigade marked another phase in the waning of Castroism’s moral code. In Aida’s view, those Oldies were talking nonsense because not all who operated ‘dishonestly’ (most Cubans) were corrupt counter-revolutionaries. Why – she demanded – should factories be clandestine, warehouses disguised and workshops illegal? Cubans were just using their energy and ability to create private sector opportunities. Garcia added that you can’t produce a highly educated population and then expect people not to use their brains when their families are hungry. A strong point, I thought.

  A three-hour walk – dull apart from the tobacco interest – took me through populous countryside on a squalidly littered minor road. My abrupt transition from one end of Cuba to the other spotlit the ‘two Cubas’ image: the allegedly more Caribbean-flavoured Oriente and the more (let it be said in a whisper) US-flavoured Occidente. In 1859 Anthony Trollope foresaw Havana becoming ‘as much American as New Orleans’. Being ignorant of the rest of the Caribbean, I wouldn’t know myself about Oriente’s flavour but Pinar del Rio’s country dwellers are noticeably less outgoing than the Sierra Madre campesiños. They also seem less racially mixed and their fellow-Cubans tend to depict them as backward, slow-thinking, bucolic. However, tobacco farming requires immense skill and slow-thinking doesn’t mean unintelligent – or I hope it doesn’t. (My own thoughts move at snail’s pace, hence literary festivals and suchlike unnerve me; I think of the appropriate thing to say ten minutes after it would have been appropriate.)

  At noonish I turned on to a four-mile earth track leading towards the base of the sierra and ending at a small hotel – tree-surrounded, standing on the shore of a reservoir created around 1990 and stretching to the horizon. Aida and Garcia were responsible for my living, during the next two days, in a style to which I am not accustomed. They had arranged for me to meet Oscar, another of their ‘dissident’ friends, in this secluded spot where three multi-course meals were included in the daily tariff – the most delicious food to come my way in Cuba. As I was to be on very short commons for the subsequent three days, this reinforced my faith in the camel system.

  The lodging was less satisfactory because of the lake’s proximity on three sides (one couldn’t think of it as a reservoir). At breakfast-time clouds of mosquitoes dined voraciously before retiring for the day; rarely have I been so comprehensively bitten from ears to toes. By night their whine sounded like a CIA torture tool. My bedroom had one glass wall, net curtained, giving on to a wide balcony with a memorable view of the shimmering lake, the wooded plain and the looming mountains – now looking much less puny. The bed linen and three soft towels were brand new yet there was neither table nor chair, bedside light nor fan. The four bedrooms shared two large bathrooms without loo paper or soap, and the taps yielded a mere trickle. Figuring out those bathroom locks reminded me of the Rubic cube. When the doors closed they locked automatically and could be opened only from the other side which meant going through someone else’s room. If the someone else did likewise with their other door at about the same time that bathroom became inaccessible until Management intervened, using a corkscrew in mysterious ways. There were no keys involved. The solution was to leave both doors permanently ajar which didn’t bother me but the Dutch couple next door seemed shy about doing bathroom deeds behind unlocked doors.

  Oscar arrived at sunset; a sprightly black octogenarian, he had hitchhiked from his nearby home-town, then hired a veguero’s horse and cart to take him up the track. We sat on my balcony, using pillows instead of chairs, ineffectually blowing clouds of cigar smoke towards clouds of mosquitoes and drinking rum and coke – a detestable mix but Oscar had generously arrived with the bottles.

  I soon realised why my companion had been keen to talk with me. Researching Cuba’s esoteric involvements in Africa was his hobby and he enjoyed publicising this aspect of the Revolution – little understood within Cuba, he asserted, and often misunderstood elsewhere. He himself first experienced Africa in Guinea-Bissau in 1969, three years into Cuba’s ‘intervention’ and he spoke with reverential affection of Amilcar Cabral whom he knew well. ‘A very, very clever guerrilla leader. An inspiring organiser – and wise, with integrity. Even Americans, when they met him, were impressed. He told us he wanted his country non-aligned, we weren’t helping that tiny place to add it to the Soviet bloc. What’s to be remembered, please, is something important. The Soviets didn’t put us into our twenty-five-year cooperation with Guinea-Bissau, it started with Ché’s African journey. The Soviets had weapons there since 1962 but no personnel. All those backward tribes couldn’t use the arms until we came to teach them.’

  Oscar failed to conceal his personal hurt and anger at Guinea-Bissau’s later disloyalty. As the Special Period put an end (almost) to Cuban aid, the government, turning West, sought to delete their long relationship with the country which had been midwife to Guinea-Bissau’s birth – helping the guerrillas to defeat the Portuguese, then training the army, founding the medical school and providing half the state’s doctors. On the departure of Cuba’s main military and civilian missions, a small medical team was left behind, funded by WHO and a Dutch NGO, with a meagre input from Havana. As the Portuguese began to reassert themselves many of the local doctors set up in private practice, including some who had been trained in Cuba at no cost to themselves. Oscar proudly reported that the remaining Cuban doctors, by then living on the skin of an onion, continued to treat the majority for free, an idiosyncrasy deeply resented by the private practitioners.

  Between November 1975 and March 1976 more than thirty thousand Cuban soldiers went to Angola accompanied by two hundred doctors, including Oscar. His description of the post-colonial scene echoed stories I had heard in 1993 from Portuguese settled in South Africa. The retreating colonists stripped Angola of everything needed to run the administration and the economy – and of skilled personnel. By the end of 1976, one thousand four hundred Cuban experts – additions to the military and medical teams – were replacing some of the departed technicians at no cost to the Angolans.

  Oscar regarded the CIA reaction to Angola’s civil war as ‘predictable’. They hired the press agency Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly to ‘sell’ the right-wing UNITA and its leader, Jonas Savimbi, to the American public. Then, in cahoots with various European
secret services, a high-powered psy-ops campaign was launched, inundating Reuters, AP, UPI and over two hundred radio stations with lurid stories about the Cuban troops’ burning of villages, destruction of crops, mutilation of prisoners, raping of women, slaughtering of babies … ‘Of course there was some raping,’ said Oscar, ‘but not much because the punishment was painful. The rest was lies.’

  According to Roger Faligot, a French political analyst with a particular interest in secret services, this campaign (since exposed and condemned by a US Senate investigation) ‘was successful in that a large number of intellectuals, “independents”, “neutrals” and other noteworthies collaborated … many ignorant of the manipulation in which they played a part.’

  Soon ‘other sorts of Cubans’ (Oscar’s phrase) came on the scene. With the approval of the State Department and NSC, Black & Co. devised a working partnership between UNITA and CANF to frustrate the 1976 Clark Amendment, whereby the US Congress outlawed military support for either side in the Angolan Civil war. After the Amendment’s repeal in July 1985 heavy arms worth hundreds of millions of dollars were rushed to UNITA. On Savimbi’s arrival in Washington six months later he received a tumultuous welcome and CANF made a public announcement:

  Our ties with Jonas Savimbi and UNITA, his visit to the US and the material aid he is currently receiving from this country show the success of CANF’s efforts in properly educating and informing US public opinion.

  In April 1988 a group of CANF council members visited UNITA-held territory in Angola and signed a joint declaration. Point 5 promised: ‘UNITA is committed to providing its determined efforts to assist the Cuban people until liberty and democracy are restored in their country.’

  Come the ’90s, no one who mattered seemed to notice the UN’s repeated condemnations of UNITA’s barbarities. Black & Co. continued to earn fat fees as they strove to keep the Savimbi image shining brightly through the African gloom. UNITA continued to be supported by the US and (less obviously) the EU. Oscar was fascinated to hear that my son-in-law then spent time in Angola attempting to alleviate the sufferings of the displaced – misfortunates born into a country where for so long diamonds, oil and iron have caused blood to flow fast and frequently.

  During dinner we talked of things non-Cuban, though only the jolly mulatta waitress was present – a habanera, working so far from home because she had fallen in love with a veguero’s son. She sat on the edge of the next table as we ate, chatting non-stop, an amiable demonstration of democracy I had also noticed in the Hanabanilla and Playa Giron hotels. Taking Oscar as a sympathetic abuelo figure, she confided that her parents disapproved of her beloved because he couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) move to Havana – where she could earn far more, being a personable young woman, in any of the big tourist hotels. Afterwards Oscar told me he encouraged her to put love before convertible pesos. Being unable to follow their rapid conversation I was relating to Carlota, an enchanting half-grown tabby who could be heard raucously demanding breakfast before dawn and who frisked all day amongst the ceiling-high potted shrubs in the lobby-cum-restaurant. Her play was vigorous yet gentle; she kept her claws sheathed and her love-bites were nicely judged not quite to draw blood.

  Next day, between swims in the too-warm lake, Oscar talked Africa nonstop. The oddest feature of Cuba’s involvement on that continent was its seamless cloak of secrecy. The outlines of the internationalists’ contribution to the defeat of South Africa’s army had to be revealed – but not the details. Most Westerners know little or nothing about Cuba’s missions, military and civilian, in Benin, Ethiopia, Cape Verde, Guinea, Mozambique, Sao Tome, Tanzania, the Congo. Were I a betting woman I’d wager a hundred pounds on ninety-nine per cent of my readers never before having heard of Cuba’s crucially important role in Guinea-Bissau. And during the relevant decades uninvolved Cubans were no better informed. The internationalists, on returning home, followed their leaders’ example and kept mum about their endeavours and achievements – which in itself was an unusual achievement, given the numbers involved. In the areas of health, education and construction, tens of thousands of Cuban experts – far outnumbering their military colleagues – worked for years in punishing environments.

  ‘We were there to help free people,’ said Oscar, ‘not to make profit or propaganda for Cuba. All volunteers – able to choose if the salary stayed in the bank for our return or went every month to families. For the Africa bonus officers got US$30 a month and the rest US$20. Our food, except fruit, came from home – no luxuries, rice, beans, oil, coffee, sugar. Not the way Western aid workers live – big salaries, big hardship pay, fine houses, free vehicles and cheap drink! We lived same as Africans, all losing weight even if we didn’t get parasite diseases, and Washington called our missions “Cuba’s adventurism”!’

  Towards sunset a bicitaxi collected Oscar and as we were saying adios he gave me a slip of paper and said, ‘This book you must read, it tells everything honestly. Everything publicly known today, but there’s more to come.’ That was a very precise note, even giving the ISBN of Piero Gleijeses’s Conflicting Missions. I bought it on my way home, in a Miami bookshop, and it is, as they say, unputdownable. Possibly Oscar provided the author with some of his information.

  Chapter 15

  No doubt my subconscious organised the next few days during which I saw not one human being. I didn’t deliberately get lost but nor did I seek the most direct mountain path to Viñales, a small town half-an-hour’s drive from Pinar. By noon on the first day I was in uninhabited territory though I didn’t yet realise its extent. The area was without dwellings but not pristine; pre-Special Period it had been partially deforested and a few of my tracks were loggers’. These would have taken me more directly to peopled places but I was tempted by pathlets diving into densely wooded narrow valleys – untouched by loggers – and by mysterious stone cul-de-sac stairways leading to high precipices from which I gazed over apparently infinite expanses of ridges and ravines and summits.

  I’ve said that Cubans are Cuba’s main attraction yet this solitary interlude felt blissful. Perhaps I was an anchoress in a previous incarnation; I do need to be alone with a country to complete the bonding process. Barry Lopez understands this:

  My guess would be that someone someday will trace the roots of modern human loneliness to a loss of intimacy with a place, to our many breaks with the physical Earth. We are not out there much anymore. Even when we are, we often move too quickly to take things in. A member of the group who insists on lingering is “holding everyone else up” … The practice I strive for when I travel is to meet the land as if it were a person. To encounter it as if it were as deep in its meaning as human personality. I wait for it to speak.

  Day One, the toughest stage, took me to an altitude at which the midday sun was endurable and the breeze cool. Juana (she with the boy-friend problem) had kindly provided an early breakfast and at sunrise I was crossing the pine-clad ridge above the lake. After a steep descent, through thick mixed forest, I forded a slightly murky stream before climbing diagonally across rough pastureland where grazed a few sheep, goats, horses. Then suddenly a small oval valley lay far below, completely enclosed, intensively cultivated, a cluster of bohios at one end – the last dwellings on my route. Soon after the path vanished on the edge of a recently ploughed field so precipitous that no tractor could ever have violated its rich red-brown soil. Garcia told me that when the oil ran out the oxen-wise farmers in such mountainous regions were much in demand as agricultural instructors.

  Retracing my steps, I found a little-used level pathlet winding through jungle; here two hands were needed to cope with the dangling creepers. That led to another world, an open golden-grassed plateau marked by an extraordinary phenomenon, a track some two yards wide, made of massive slabs and boulders of smooth brownish rock. Yet not ‘made’ but embedded in the earth, matching the low outcrops visible all around between bottlebrush pines and an abundance of flowering shrubs: pink, yellow, blue. Until sunset I follo
wed this track wondering if just possibly, over many generations, the feet of indigenous tribes had defined it?

  I then gathered a mattress of pine branches; even by the most Spartan standards all this uneven rockiness threatened sleep-deprivation. During ‘supper’ (sardines and bread buns) the temperature dropped pleasantly and before slipping into my thin flea-bag I donned all my garments: three T-shirts, two pairs of trousers.

  An important part of the bonding-with-a-country process is sleeping out, feeling united with the totality of a place, sensing its nocturnal activities. Also, it helps to get our own planet’s worries in perspective if the stars are allowed to do their hypnotic thing. Rationally regarded, that twinkling universe reduces all human concerns to insignificance. But at 4.10, when I awoke shivering, my discomfort became of immense significance. One thinks of dew as something gentle and rather poetical. Given time, it isn’t – and now I was very damp. I considered walking on in the dark (no moon) but even by daylight that rock-track demanded caution.

  Three miserable hours later I was on my way and soon lamenting my camera’s recent breakdown. Although not a keen photographer, having no talent in that direction, I craved pictures where the track became strangely beautiful beyond verbal description. Erosion has wondrously sculpted all these rocks and now, underfoot, there was something else – eerily symmetrical designs. Imagine smooth expanses of pale grey and pale yellow rock, extending for miles, decorated with squares and triangles and oblongs and exact figures of eight – all drawn in brown, as though by someone using a broad-tipped marker, and in size quite uniform, from about six to twelve inches square. What force of nature could have produced such patterns? Again my mind went back to those indigenous tribes – but no! – too fanciful.