Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  By the end of 2005 sixty-three per cent of TV transmissions were educational and in the Battle’s first six years seven hundred projects were completed including an Oldies’ university, La Universidad del Adulto Mayor. By January 2008 one thousand twelve hundred more were nearing completion, half in the medical sector. This broadening of education will, it is hoped, to some extent inoculate Cuban society against the more deleterious effects of global pop ‘culture’. But in Camaguey Juan had sadly described the Battle as ‘Fidel’s last stand’, an unwinnable battle. Raul’s compromises would, he predicted, undermine the attitudes that make such shoestring campaigns possible – and attractive to people lacking material goods. I remembered his words when I heard the spokesman for some Washington think-tank commenting, ‘Raúl is more tolerant of the social costs of accepting market mechanisms to which his brother would never agree’ (BBC World Service, 18 December 2007).

  As one strolls and sits and observes, it’s obvious that Holguin has been hard hit by the closure of several factories and provincial centrales. I saw three ragged old men, pickled in alcohol, wandering unsteadily around the parks (in Cuba a very unusual sight) and a dozen seedy young men lounged on benches sharing bottles of rum before noon. In the city’s main bar – open-air, separated from the pavement by a trellis supporting a creeper laden with fragrant white blossoms – I was tentatively approached by two respectably dressed woman beggars; they reminded me of Siberia’s destitute pensioners in 2002 and 2004, victims of the Soviet Union’s collapse. However, in a capitalist-run city afflicted by Holguin’s recent misfortunes one would see considerably more poverty and distress.

  For someone who eats only once a day, casa particular breakfasts are made to measure. Example: large jugs of fresh mango and guava juice, three cups of milky coffee, two toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, a two-egg omelette, a pyramid of crisp oven-warm rolls with imported (from Germany) butter and local honey. Thus fuelled, I turned towards Holguin’s tourist challenge, Loma de la Cruz. Its four hundred and fifty-eight steps – wide, concrete, shadeless, heat-reflecting – did not tempt me though the reward is a panoramic view (say the guide-books) and a thatched restaurant. At the bottom of the steps I turned right to follow a rough track through a sprawling village on ledges of mountain overlooking the city. This was a post-Revolution settlement of terraced concrete block housing: one-storey, white- or pink-washed, unglazed windows barred, outside spiral stairways giving access to flat roofs with laundry-lines and herb gardens. Soon the track became a steep boulder-path (a stream bed after heavy rain), climbing between hedges of neatly clipped candelabra cactus and fiery crotons. Beyond the settlement, around a shoulder, a track descended to an invisible motor-road past a colossal obsolete water-storage tank (obsolete for lack of pumping fuel). Another path would have taken me past clusters of bohios on the opposite slope. More tempting was a barely discernible pathlet zig-zagging upwards through high, thick grass. This was an easy climb, the wet grass cooling and bushy shade available at intervals. Only crowing cocks, grunting pigs and frequent bird calls broke the silence. The last stage was a scramble over smooth boulders, then I was looking directly across a shrub-filled valley to the mini-fort and restaurant on Loma de la Cruz and could enjoy the panoramic view without having toiled up those four hundred and fifty-eight steps.

  During the descent I realised that the strong grass, through which I had to push my way, wielded a secret weapon – minute barbs that lodged tormentingly in one’s garments. Having extracted the two-inch stalks, it is very difficult to find and pluck out the barbs. This task occupied me for hours, using a borrowed pair of tweezers – work suited to the midday heat, demanding neither physical nor mental energy.

  Later I met Roberto and Rolando in the bar and sought their advice about transport to Biran, the village nearest Fidel’s birthplace. Hitch-hiking they wrote off; in this thinly populated region motor vehicles are a novelty. There might be an occasional bus from Mayari to Biran though they doubted that. Probably I’d have to take a taxi. Inwardly I winced – what a test of my fidelismo! The nearest main road village to Biran is La Guira – taxiless according to my advisors. But in Mayari, the municipal centre, about twenty-seven miles north-east of Biran, I could certainly find an unofficial taxi. That figure made me grumpy – only twenty-seven miles! An enjoyable day’s walk had the weather conditions been otherwise.

  Chapter 20

  A four-mile walk, begun in darkness, took me beyond a road junction to the relevant punto embarcacion, a small open-ended shelter with concrete seating for a dozen or so. When two Transporte officers came on duty at 8.00 a.m. I told them I would settle for any vehicle going to Mayari. My companions looked sympathetic; most who wait at that punto are en route to closer destinations.

  A mother and two high-spirited schoolgirls, aged perhaps four and six, were awaiting a horse-bus. As the children played happily – racing around the seats, swinging on the railings – I was puzzled by their total silence. Could it be part of the game? But that age-group is not noted for silent games, even when playing hide-and-seek. Then their mother communicated with them, in sign language, and they fluently responded. Both were deaf and dumb, attending a special school and already well equipped to cope with their handicap. I moved to sit beside their mother who explained – as the horse-bus approached – that special schooling starts at the age of two and special arrangements, varying with the circumstances, are made for rural dwellers.

  A century or so ago the German psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin, judged that ‘The development of a country can be measured by the manner in which it treats its handicapped and its mentally impaired’. Cuba’s internationally praised Psychiatric Hospital, near Havana, has about two thousand five hundred beds and a staff of seven hundred and eighty-five psychiatrists, physicians and nurses. On its one hundred and fifty-five acres some patients live in bungalows with flower and vegetable gardens, cultivated as part of their therapy. The list of occupational therapies is long: painting and drawing, handicrafts, computer studies to assist memory training, music, psycho-ballet, theatre and sports – the last including riding around the grounds, if appropriate. The hospital has its own theatre and stages frequent shows. It also has its own railway station for the convenience of family and friends. (In Ireland some of the families and friends of long-term patients, in any hospital, can’t easily afford the high car-park charges.) Child visitors are encouraged because so many patients find it easier to communicate with them than with fellow-adults. The hospital’s motto is: ‘With love and affection one achieves more than with medicines’.

  At 12.15 my Transporte guardian beckoned me and held out his STOP sign; the approaching vehicle would pass Mayari on its way to the nickel-smelting town of Moa. Incredulously I stared at this smart and only moderately over-crowded coach – a gift from Scandinavia with reclining seats and well-polished picture windows. The fare for this fifty-mile journey was less than two euro cents.

  Around Holguin several hillsides have been reforested quite recently. Then comes flatter terrain: cane and pasture. At the little town of Cueto we crossed a significant railway, built to serve the port of Antilla in securely sheltered Nipe Bay. For some reason the Spaniards had never systematically developed this corner of Cuba but its US colonisers moved fast. In 1901 and 1904 the United Fruit Company’s gigantic sugar mills, Boston and Preston, began operations – only made possible by the Cuban Railroad Company’s line to Antilla. Until 1959 four major US companies controlled this whole region. The Munson shipping line ran a fortnightly service from Antilla to New York. The expat workers had a polo club, swimming pools, US-stocked shops. The Rural Guards barracks and the post office were on United Fruit Company’s land and the company employed twenty mercenary soldiers licensed to carry arms. Between 1899 and 1953 the population of Mayari municipality increased tenfold while Biran and its hinterland went from five hundred and twenty-nine to eight thousand three hundred and five. The 1953 census revealed that very few of Mayari’s hundred and fifteen t
housand houses enjoyed indoor ‘sanitary facilities’. Only one per cent of the adults were university graduates and more than fifty per cent hadn’t even reached the first grade in primary school. Into this US dependency Fidel was born in 1927 – or 1926, if you accept his altered birth certificate.

  At the turn-off for Moa I disembarked alone. A twenty-minute walk past Mayari’s post-Revolution hospital, clinic, schools, municipal offices and five-storey apartment blocks left me heat exhausted. The old town, founded in 1757, struggles amidst much greenery on the banks of the Rio Mayari and was the Castro family’s metropolis, though too far away to be regularly visited. Most guidebooks ignore the place, yet I found it attractive, short of ‘grand colonial’ architecture but with a pleasing symmetry about its shabby streets and shaded, bohio-lined laneways. It has scarcely begun to recover from the Special Period. The Bitiri, a large motel surrounded by dignified trees and lavishly flowering shrubs, is now in ruins from which ‘home-improving’ locals have helped themselves. Previously it catered for Cuban holiday makers drawn by the nearby Taino caves and pine-forested mountains. For three months in 1967 José Yglesias lived here while collecting material for his classic In the Fist of the Revolution.

  I hadn’t expected to find a casa particular but in 2003 Casa Eduardo opened – very much my sort of place. Behind his cramped dwelling on the edge of the town Eduardo has contrived a cave-like bedroom, stone-walled and windowless with a tiny baño of unpredictable plumbing. The open-air dining-room is a circular palm-thatched space – ancient tree roots writhing in one corner, the table and benches of rough-hewn palm trunks. That evening was overcast with humidity off the scale and thunder rumbling for hours around the Sierra Cristal. Here I encountered the first mosquitoes of this journey, as active within my room as outside. Although I didn’t complain Eduardo heard me slapping my flesh and before I could intervene he had drenched my room from a giant can of spray – a frighteningly effective mix.

  Eduardo then telephoned his friend Diego who next morning would be my taxi-driver. We planned to leave at daybreak, for climatic reasons.

  Anti-Castroites often refer, misleadingly, to the circumstances of Fidel’s birth. Ed Vulliamy, for instance, writing in the Observer (21 January 2007) – ‘Born out of wedlock on a sugar plantation on 13 August, his father was the owner, his mother was the housemaid.’ Those English phrases suggest a certain sort of background (lecherous gentleman has his way with cowed skivvy) far removed from the facts.

  There is some irony in Fidel’s ancestry: the man who established Cuba’s independence is only half-Cuban, as two of Ireland’s best known revolutionary leaders were only half-Irish (Patrick Pearse and Eamon de Valera). In 1998 ‘an important US magazine’ – unnamed by Fidel – accused him of being ‘the son of a Spanish soldier who fought on the wrong side during the war of independence’ (1895–98). Fidel then angrily defended his father, a Galician peasant ‘who could barely read and write’ and ‘had been sent to Cuba as a teenage conscript to suppress the insurrection’. Declared Fidel, ‘My father fought on the right side, with the Spaniards … If he had fought on the Cuban side he would have been on the wrong side because that was not his country. He knew nothing about it. He could not understand what the Cubans were fighting for … When the war ended he was repatriated to Spain and he came back to Cuba a little later to work as a farmhand.’

  From Galicia, one of Spain’s poorest regions, thousands emigrated to Cuba where labourers (but not more blacks, thank you!) were urgently needed. The US settlers who had bought large estates at bargain prices from the departing Spaniards were planning to expand them. And US companies, as we have seen, were clearing enormous tracts of virgin land around Mayari. For the enterprising Angel Castro, Cuba proved an island of ever-expanding opportunities. Soon he was pushing a handcart through plantations and forests, selling barrels of homemade lemonade to canecutters and loggers. Then he got a job with United Fruit’s Railroad Company, saved his wages for a few years, opened a general store serving the campesiños, saved his profits until he could lease some land from United Fruits, employed a team of peasants recently arrived from Spain, set up a sawmill, sold wood to neighbouring sugar mills, continued single-mindedly to save and eventually bought about a thousand hectares (two thousand five hundred acres) of flat fertile land near Biran. Later he leased another ten thousand hectares, grew maize as well as cane, bred cattle, pigs and poultry of various sorts and built a small wooden house – on stilts, Galicia style, with stabling underneath.

  Then came a late marriage, to Maria Luisa Argota, a schoolteacher who bore him two children before being supplanted by Lina Ruz, one of the numerous children of a very poor peasant from Pinar del Rio. The Ruz family had travelled more than seven hundred miles by ox-cart to the Biran area where they scraped a living by carting cane to the mills. When Lina was fifteen, Cuba got a lucky break: her father begged the forty-five-year-old Angel to employ her and the third of their seven children was Fidel.

  Diego arrived with the first of the light wearing a ‘Venezuela’ baseball cap and a ‘Viva Chavez!’ T-shirt. Both his doctor daughters were earning oil for Cuba by serving with their brigade in some village near the Columbian border. His Lada had long since lost its side windows and door handles, an idiosyncrasy to which I was becoming accustomed, and its windscreen was in four pieces taped together. When a dense sunrise mist reduced visibility to about twenty yards Diego apologised for having no wiper. After the mist had risen a long, low bank of orange-brown cloud remained lying along the horizon above the coast and this threatening smoke from Moa’s nickel-smelting plants bothered Diego. A Canadian company wanted to set up another plant which Raúl seemed to favour but the locals were vociferously against it … That evening Eduardo commented that given the region’s poverty Moa can’t afford not to have it: the old, old story, heard on all continents in relation to profitable environmental destruction.

  I didn’t have to feel to guilty about emitting carbon to gratify my Biran whim. We never had fewer than three passengers, sometimes five, and at one stage five adults in the back plus two toddlers on my lap. Hereabouts Cuba’s transport problems reach their nadir: no buses, few camiones, fewer cars. Between the main road and Biran no vehicle of any sort appeared. Even bicycles are rare in this area where some campesiños wear ragged garments – a sight unusual enough to be shocking. Much of the main Mayari-Holguin road is a series of ‘volcanic craters’, as Diego resignedly complained, but bumping along at fifteen miles per hour suited me. On the minor road to Biran a knobbly surface kept our speed below ten miles per hour because the thirty-year-old Lada needed t.l.c. Diego and I agreed that Fidel certainly travelled by helicopter when visiting Finca Las Manacas. Diego added, only half in jest, ‘Soon Chavez will fix all our roads!’

  As yet Operation Alvaro Reinoso has made no mark on this landscape and we drove through mile after mile of level canefields, bounded to the east by a long, irregular ridge – the Altiplanicie de Nipe where, during school holidays, Fidel roamed happily, climbing escarpments and hunting with his dogs. Visually sugarcane is an unattractive crop – apart from one’s subliminal associations of it with the worst horrors of slavery. In 1840 one young cafetale-owner, the writer Anselmo Suarez y Romero, wrote to a friend:

  I do not like the ingenios. To have seen one is to have seen them all. Nothing more than vast light-green cane fields, divided into squares by straight boundaries, at whose edges are not seen – as one sees in the cafetales – the wide tree-tops, nor the mamey, nor the honey berry, nor the avocado; nor do they exude the citron flower fragrance of the lemon and orange trees.

  I don’t know when the Moors brought cane to Spain but by the time Velasquez introduced it to Cuba, in 1512, it was among Europe’s most precious commodities – ‘white gold’. Diego, who had worked all his life as a boiler repair man, told me that one ton of cane produces about two hundred and twenty pounds of sugar. During the zafra, centrales operate twenty-four hours a day and nothing is wasted. The mud from the cl
arifier, in which cane juice is initially boiled, makes an excellent fertiliser. Rum arises from the molasses. The pulpy fibres go to feed cattle, or make cardboard or wallboard, or fuel centrale boilers.

  Several people waved at Diego as we jolted through Biran, a scattered village owned by the United Fruit Company until the nationalisation of the sugar industry in 1960. Approaching Finca Las Manacas, on a narrow winding road, the canefields were replaced by more broken terrain – grassy patches, bushy patches, dwarf palms and a merry, sparkling stream where we paused to view Fidel’s boyhood bathing pool, overhung by fig trees. Into old age, swimming has remained his favourite form of regular exercise.

  As we continued, Diego informed me (boastfully, as though speaking of a relative or friend) that at the age of forty-eight Fidel had stopped smoking – having puffed through half a box of cigars per diem all his adult life. This feat was much publicised when he insisted on anti-smoking lectures being included in Cuba’s preventative healthcare programme: an admirable if ‘double standards’ stance for a leader whose country exports cigars as a valuable source of revenue. Nor did Fidel do anything to promote rum; for years his daily alcohol ration was one glass of whisky, sipped so daintily that it lasted for hours. Although something of a gourmet, his eating was equally controlled – of necessity, given a tendency to corpulence. According to Diego, and other of my Cuban friends, their leader’s reputation for self-discipline greatly enhanced his moral authority, putting him in a strong position to urge that virtue on the whole population ‘for the sake of the Revolution’.