Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  A bicitaxi took me to Immigration on the city’s far side. Because Cuban visas are granted for thirty days my five-week visit required an extension for another thirty days. In Dublin I had asked the Cuban ambassador (H.E. Noel Carrillo, a congenial and helpful character) if he could provide me with two thirty-day visas to spare me another encounter with the Ministry of the Interior. That, however, was impossible; the extension must always be obtained within Cuba. But I could get it at any provincial capital’s Immigration Office on any date that suited me.

  I have mixed feelings about bicitaxis. As a ‘green’ alternative and a healthy source of income for many men put out of work by factory closures, I applaud them. But, being myself a cyclist, I found it quite embarrassing to sit behind the pedaller watching other legs transporting me. This chatty young man was a vigorous pedaller who played baseball for Santa Clara and paused en route to show me a photograph of his infant son.

  The Ministry of the Interior occupies a 1920s villa on a street corner. Across the road an off-duty bus horse was enjoying the lush grass of the verge and in the front garden a palm tree had shed glistening red berries to the delight of a toddler who was being warned not to touch them. Here was a short queue, relaxing on the verandah’s two benches while the toddler’s mother shadowed him around the garden. Through an open door we could see two tall, handsome mulatto officers in well-tailored brown uniforms doing their bureaucratic things in a drab little office. Their secretary was a dumpy woman of uncertain age, sharp-voiced and weary-looking.

  The petitioner on my left was being summoned repeatedly into a side office; after each brief interview she looked more anxious. An overweight woman, her movements awkward, she had copper-dyed hair, a prominent nose, wide-set grey eyes. Having been recently widowed, she wished to live with her daughter in Havana but some arcane regulation was blocking the mandatory ‘change of residence’ permit. Her final interview, on the verandah, was with a tall young woman, stylishly dressed in mufti, who spoke to her kindly but could offer no reprieve. She hurried to the gate with head bowed, holding back tears. Then, as she passed along the pavement, I could see her face crumpling and hear anguished sobs. This denial of the ‘human right’ to move house does smell of dictatorship.

  When my turn came the junior officer spent thirteen minutes (there was a wall-clock above his desk) filling in a form which the senior officer, after a quick glance, pronounced ‘invalido’. My visa could not be extended until 15 October, two weeks before its expiry. So much for the ambassador’s illusion …

  I walked the three miles back to Parque Vidal – slowly, with rest stops, being bludgeoned by the heat. I had long since abandoned my plan to trek from Holguin to Biran (Fidel’s birthplace). I would get there, but not on foot.

  Near Immigration the city’s main open-air food market covers acres of uneven ground and by midday was uncrowded. I admired the day’s left-overs which to me looked like prize-winners; Santa Clara prides itself on being a pioneer of Cuba’s organoponico movement. As Tania boasted, ‘When overseas people talked about the Revolution collapsing, its spirit was being revived here in this city by the new challenge of having to feed ourselves’. Those revivalists had Marx on their side. In Das Kapital he noted: ‘Capitalist production … disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing. All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the workers, but of robbing the soil.’

  By now Cuba is famous for the multi-faceted triumphs of its organic agriculture to which the Californian red earthworm energetically contributes. ‘Lumbri culture,’ explained Tania, ‘has made our urban food-growing possible.’ Whereupon she took the lid off her barrel of ‘assistants’ – as she affectionately called them – to reveal Californian reds in a state of perpetual motion as they converted waste matter to fabulously enriching fertiliser.

  Indulgence in Coppelia seemed an appropriate reward for my sweltering walk. After a twenty-minute pavement queue came a ten-minute cash-desk queue followed by a twenty-five-minute wait to be served, while staff members chatted together, their backs turned to the patient customers. Were one even slightly in a hurry, this would be unacceptable. But Cuba’s ice-cream addicts never appear to be in a hurry and I always enjoyed Coppelia’s non-profit-making ambience.

  In Havana one of my genuine dissident friends (that circle had widened) gave me a letter to deliver to a fellow-dissident in Santa Clara University. Boarding an early students’ bus, I was puzzled to find it almost empty. Then I remembered the date: 10 October is not only Clodagh’s birthday (Ten Today!) but a Cuban national holiday, the anniversary of Cespedes’s launching of the first War of Independence in 1868. To celebrate, government offices and educational institutions have the day off and I found those miles of campus deserted, all doors locked; but perhaps someone would appear a little later. For more than an hour I ambled around the green spaces between the blocks – park-like and tree-rich, the silence broken only by bird song. I needed the silence and solitude; I had been too long (twelve days!) in cites. Worryingly, no one appeared – and I had a bus to catch at 2.00 p.m. So what to do with that letter? Entrust it to Tania? Or return to sender? The latter, I decided: which says something about my relationship with the Revolution.

  That relationship has to be ambiguous. Mario explained why in Key West. ‘I left for the same reason you, as a writer, would have left. You wouldn’t be happy in a country where you couldn’t express all your true thoughts and feelings. So I sailed away not hating el comandante but seeing no space for me in his world.’ If born a Cuban, would I have had the courage of my socialist convictions and remained loyal to Castroism at the cost of my freedom to write and to travel? I doubt it. The real Heroes of the Revolution are the considerable minority who made that sacrifice to benefit the majority.

  On the half-full Viazul bus I rescinded all scornful references to ‘airconditioned luxury’; in that cool coach I could feel myself coming back to life. Our five-hour journey was agreeable enough, the driver taking the pot-holed roads slowly and allowing two longish stops, in Sancti Spiritus and Ciego de Avila.

  My only fellow-tourist was a Finnish OAP with a bald pate and a long white beard who had been holidaying annually in Cuba since 2001. He was uneasy about the Rapid Reaction militia. Was it not dangerous to train all the young how to fight with guns? Supposing another Bay of Pigs when Fidel dies – might not big numbers rise against Raul’s regime? Wanting their share of tourism benefits, having been taught the Revolution is all about equality … Was it not stupid to expect them to go on accepting the dual currency’s inequality? I suggested thinking more positively; such an uprising seems unlikely, however discontented the have-nots. Contemporary Cubans are disinclined to shed each other’s blood though they have been conditioned to shed any amount of invaders’ blood should that prove necessary.

  At first our road wound through low irregular hills: the ground broken, few bohios, little cultivation, patches of woodland, much scrub. Then came the fertile flatness of Camaguey province – Cuba’s largest, long famous as a source of enormous wealth (cattle and sugar cane). However, between Cuba’s Wars of Independence the international sugar crisis shattered the social superstructure of old latifundista families; in 1958 not one mill was owned by the descendants of a Spanish grantee. A few aristocratic Camaguey clans, like the Betancourts and Agromontes, retained shrunken cattle ranches but the largest and richest estates belonged to US companies.

  When the Revolution rather ham-fistedly appropriated about one-third of a million Camaguey acres (one hundred and thirty-one ranches), opposition to Agrarian Reform was unusually vigorous. In August 1959 the dispossessed tried to bribe two army majors to join a conspiracy to set up a provisional administration run by ranchers. Feigning enthusiasm for this plan, the majors assembled fifty armed men at Trinidad airport where the plot leaders were appalled to see Fidel sitting under a mango
tree. Within hours hundreds of conspirators had been arrested, all over Cuba.

  A month later internal dissension fractured the Rebel Army when Huber Matos, a multi-talented and popular guerrilla leader, resigned as Camaguey’s provincial governor and military commander. He objected to the Revolution being infiltrated by Communists and to the manner in which Agrarian Reform was being implemented – though not to the Reform itself. Fourteen other officers resigned with him. In a touching and dignified letter of resignation he warned el comandante: ‘It is right, however, to recall to you that great men begin to decline when they cease to be just.’ Fidel then labelled him ‘a traitor who has obstructed Agrarian Reform’ and on 20 October travelled to Camaguey personally to supervise Matos’s arrest – the compañero who less than a year before had been fighting beside him in the Sierra Maestra.

  Matos’s trial, in December, brought him a twenty-year sentence and the officers who had resigned with him received between seven and two years. The ensuing controversy threatened for a time to destroy the unity of Fidel’s following; the Camaguey newspaper, Adelante, supported Matos, defending both the validity of his criticism of Agrarian Reform blunders and his right to voice them. However, this self-inflicted injury soon healed; already most Cubans were benefiting from their fast-moving Revolution. For the first time in history what had been promised to the Cuban poor was being delivered.

  By mid-afternoon we were driving towards a dense mass of low black cloud – and then we were driving through it and my Finnish friend exclaimed, ‘Is like submarine travel!’ That torrential downpour lasted for seventy-two hours, slightly modifying the heat.

  Camaguey, one of the seven original Spanish settlements, was known until 1903 as Santa Maria del Puerto del Principe (Puerto Principe for short). In 1514/15 it replaced a large indigenous village whose inhabitants were briskly slaughtered to make space for farmers who arrived from Seville in 1516. During the seventeenth century it became city-sized, its development often interrupted but not much slowed by pirate raids. In 1668 Henry Morgan, the English ‘terror of the Caribbean’, occupied Camaguey for a week or so while his buccaneers were collecting jewels and gold from the homes of already wealthy cattle ranchers. To induce them to reveal their treasures’ hiding-places he locked them into the cathedral without food or water. Eleven years later the French pirate, Francois de Granmont, took over the city for four weeks, sacked it comprehensively and departed with fourteen women captives, all later released unharmed – hence his nickname, El Caballero. By the nineteenth century Camaguey was Cuba’s second largest city (since overtaken by Santiago) and always it was predominantly white – and noted, pre-Revolution, for its strict segregation policies.

  Alina and Max had invited me to stay in their casa non-particular. I didn’t ask why they felt free to entertain a foreign guest; they were friends of Juan (let’s call him) with whom I had that important though so inconvenient appointment for the thirteenth. At the bus station Alina awaited me with outstretched umbrella and we ran to an unlicenced taxi which cautiously negotiated dark narrow streets racing with water. Near the former Plaza de Armas (now the Parque Agramonte) Max opened a massive hall door flanked by carved granite pillars and leading directly into a high-ceilinged drawing-room. There the TV set and computer looked incongruous amidst an abundance of imperial mahogany chairs and chests, frail rosewood occasional tables and an escritoire inlaid with gold leaf.

  All the one-storey colonial mansions on this cobbled street have misleading façades: only two windows to one side of the entrance. In fact they extend far back and beyond my room were the dining-room, a smallish kitchen, a large baño and four other bedrooms. This was a three-generation family: two abuelas, the young couple, nine-year-old Lydia, five-year-old Patricio. An aloof smoky Persian was on bad terms with a furry golden mongrel (cocker-terrier?) who answered to the name of Guzzie when so minded.

  From the drawing-room Alina led me down a long corridor-cum-patio, the former roofed, the latter a jungle of shrubs, cacti, creepers, ferns and young trees, now being thoroughly washed through wire netting to Alina’s gratification. Superb tiles, brought from Spain in the eighteenth century but still unchipped, brightened both floor and wainscoting. Antique copper bracket lamps lit all the main rooms and delicately wrought grills protected the windows. The ten-foot-high doorways were narrow in proportion – the effect elegant, with finely carved wooden screens filling each doorway’s middle section, allowing air to circulate in the windowless bedrooms. Alina warned me that my 1940s air-conditioning didn’t respond for eight minutes after the switch being pressed – then it came on with multiple thuds, like an elephant step-dancing, before settling down to a rattle-and-whine duet. I sweated instead. Just outside my door a giant tinajone was still in use beneath a gutter. These bulbous clay jars, up to five feet tall and ten feet in diameter, are to be seen all over Camaguey – though usually, now, as ornaments. Invented to store oil, wine or grain, the Spaniards imported them to this drought-prone city for water storage; when half-buried in the earth their contents remain cool and fresh. In the seventeenth century Camaguey began to make its own tinajones and soon a family’s wealth was being judged by the quantity and quality of its water-jars.

  Non-stop rain, accompanied by hours of deafening thunder and blinding lightning, transformed me into a dutiful tourist. Instead of rambling for a day around this unknown city I ‘did’ the Iglesia Nuestra Senora de la Soledad (rebuilt 1776, faded baroque frescoes), the Iglesia del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus (1920, neo-Gothic, too much gilt and marble), the Convento y Hospital de San Juan de Dios (1728, superb arcaded cloisters), the Catedral Metropolitana de Nuestra Senora de Candelaria (1864, to replace Camaguey’s first church, built in 1530 but demolished by an earthquake) and Casa Natal Ignacio Agramonte, the war hero’s home, a solidly dignified eighteenth-century mansion furnished in a style made possible by large cattle ranches. Between churches I saw a man naked to the waist cycling fast through the downpour balancing a birthday cake in one hand with a dachshund, wrapped in a transparent plastic bag, sitting upright in his wire handlebar basket.

  Camaguey, though noticeably poorer than Havana or Santa Clara, has its quota of tiendas, their stock restricted by local demand. In one I queued with four tins of Buccanero and found myself shivering. Are these stores kept so very cold to reinforce their ‘affluent’ image? Such abrupt and extreme changes of temperature must endanger public health, apart from wasting energy. I began to sneeze when the young woman ahead of me caused a logjam by paying for a CP30 purchase with a CP100 note. All her ID details, and the note’s ID details, had to be handwritten in a ledger, which she and the assistant signed before the latter entrusted them to a computer together with details of the purchases (three children’s garments). For twenty minutes I stood waiting while behind me the queue lengthened and for once was not patient. But nobody blamed the system; the young woman was at fault for not having changed her note at the Cambio across the street.

  By a happy coincidence this imprisoning weather converged with a Cuban rarity, a short shelf of English books belonging to Irma, Alina’s mother, who had been nun-schooled in Philadelphia and became a Rose Macaulay fan. While rain loudly lashed the patio jungle I lay on my bed, sweat trickling steadily, and took refuge in three volumes of cool, supple prose. These transported me to a 1920s London where young married couples had two house servants and farthings were legal currency and Sudanese visitors were referred to as ‘fuzzies’. Not for the first time, I reflected that phrases hinting at sexual excitement can be more erotic than paragraphs describing orgasms.

  Twice Irma invited me into her shadowy bed-sitter, stuffed with heavy dark furniture. ‘I like to practise my English while I tell you my thoughts for Cuba’s future. We must mend fences with Washington, it’s for our gain. We’re always America-oriented, even before 1898. Talking about a love-hate relationship is silly, it’s not that complicated. We only hate what all US administrations have done and tried to do. I remember how it was when thousands
of Soviet helpers lived in ghettoes, more than twelve thousand technicians and soldiers with families. All stayed separate – schools, apartment blocks, restaurants, sports and social clubs – no dating or intermarriage. Even the children couldn’t bother to learn Spanish, we had to learn Russian or use interpreters. All the Party’s “eternal friendship” rhetoric got very boring. If those helpers were Yanquis, and Washington respected us, we’d have made real friends. See our young now, loving US films, music, clothes, IT gear – food if they could get it! But don’t be fooled, they’d not like the flavour of a US puppet government. That’s the message the State Department can’t hear.’

  Irma had high hopes of Carlos Lage Davila as a fence-mender. ‘He’s a good sort of age, mid-fifties, experienced but vigorous. A physician by training but by nature a very smart economist – and in touch with public feeling. He knows millions of Cubans are just dying to set up private enterprises and Cuba needs them all. Too bad if some people get richer than others – that’s the way of the world though Fidel won’t have it.’

  I felt a little buzz of shock as on touching a defective lamp switch. To hear el comandante named in a sentence implying censure is extremely unusual; in my case it happened twice in four months. As though to prove herself a sound nationalist Irma added, ‘Martí believed a country of small property-owners is a truly rich country. I agree, I’m not wanting the corporations back.’

  Juan arrived early on the Saturday morning, bringing sunshine with him, and after breakfast we strolled in Casino Campestre, Cuba’s biggest city park, blessed by two rivers – the Juan del Torro and the Hatibonico – and magnificently wooded. Each mighty tree is meticulously labelled in Spanish and Latin and many of the thick contorted roots extend twenty or thirty feet overground, seeming quite separate from their trunk. One set coiled down to the narrow Hatibonico – then reappeared on the far bank. Monuments to local notables abound and parents wishing to relax in the cerveza tent may safely dump children in an immense playground, carefully fenced. A vigilant superintendent sits in a wooden hut by the only entrance gate and allows small children to leave only with the adults who deposited them.