Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  Soon Marc arrived, a burly young creole wearing a Stars and Stripes T-shirt. Spotting the foreigner, he sat opposite me and spoke bluntly. Taxes on the new private enterprises were too high and restrictions too tight. His grandparents used to spend weekends in Miami before the Revolution; he’d been confined all his life to the island. Sellers of snacks and drinks on peso transport (buses and trains) were forbidden to charge more than street prices so their initiatives went unrewarded while those catering for Viazul passengers could charge what they liked. I remarked that it was consistent with the Revolutionary ethos not to penalise peso-dependent ‘captive’ consumers. And consistent with the capitalist ethos to charge tourists as much as they would pay, taking advantage of their captivity. Marc shrugged and looked at my watch and got up to go. A later train would not get him to Bayamo in time for his appointment; there was no bus until next day and he couldn’t afford a colectivo. Friends told him transport was improving elsewhere in Cuba but Granma had always been a neglected region.

  Later, when Francisco sat beside me, we pooled our linguistic resources and he told me about his eighteen months as a paramedic with the humanitarian brigade despatched to Iran by Fidel during the 1980s war. Saddam Hussein, then a cherished US ally, was using chemical weapons (some of their ingredients supplied by Donald Rumsfeld’s corporation) and Francisco said he doesn’t expect ever to recover from the horror of watching so many gassed youths slowly dying in extreme agony. At the time he asked himself why Cuba was helping a country that exposed many thousands of mid-teenagers to such a fate. Later he came to understand that the object of his mission was not to help the Iranian government but to help relieve the suffering of its innocent victims.

  At 6.30 our train could be heard in the distance, jerkily reversing towards us. Pre-Revolution, its coaches must have been first class. The black leatherette seats, with headrests, were wide and soft and adjustable – but now involuntarily so, having come loose from their moorings. Compared with my Havana-Bayamo train of indelible memory this was indeed first class but it had its little idiosyncrasies. A cockroach Rapid Reaction Force swarmed just above my arm-rest, its divisional headquarters the crevices around the window, its reactions attuned to the opening of food parcels. Far worse were the mosquitoes; at sunset they zoomed hungrily through all the open windows and soon I felt like one big mosquito bite. Long before I needed the malodorous loo its defects were evident: a loudly banging unlockable door, a floor slithery with pee.

  All the way to Bayamo the train’s bucking was sensational, provoking much merriment. ‘Same like as we rode a wild horse!’ chuckled Francisco, sitting beside me. I thought it more like one of those dare-devil fun-fair machines that have you bouncing a foot off your seat but always landing safely. Between bounces Francisco reminisced about his only journey abroad, from Havana to Tehran via Newfoundland, Germany, Greece, Turkey. More than twenty years later he could remember exactly how long each stop had been, on both journeys, and what he had observed at each airport – one benefit of an uncrowded mental storehouse.

  At Bayamo I looked anxiously for the captain, clutching my passport and convertible pesos, but he was nowhere to be seen; only then did I scent a scam. During the fifty-minute halt, overlooking a busy road junction, not one motor vehicle appeared. There were criss-crossing flows of cyclists, bicitaxis and various models of horse vehicles – including elegant carriages, Bayamo boasting the finest range in Cuba. (Soon I’d be at home, missing the clip-clop of hoofs …) How unpleasant that wait would have been – smelly, ugly, noisy – at a major junction in a ‘normal’ twenty-first-century city! Here everyone was getting where they wanted to go, quietly, comparatively slowly, without pollution. Car ownership in the Majority World used to worry Fidel years before it occurred to most other people. Yet scant thought is given to its social effects. In Cuba, for instance, how would it change the quality of neighbourhood life? At present Cubans vivaciously converse, play dominoes and chess, make music and dance in their homes or Casas de la Trova, exercise together in the local stadium, work together in the local organoponico – always aware of each other, rallying around in times of crisis. Where almost universal car ownership provides mobility, entrepreneurs provide entertainments as commodities. Individuals or ‘nuclear’ families habitually zoom off in different directions to do this or that and communities become fractured. Neighbourhoods matter less as restlessness takes over. People feel an urge to move simply because moving is possible and relatively expensive entertainments work their own black magic, making free pleasures seem inferior. Instead of a walk in the woods, ‘caring’ parents take their children to a theme park. If you have to pay for something, it must be more valuable – right?

  At 10.20, when every seat had been filled, the engine whistled wheezily and we went on our jolting way. Then, by one of those improbable coincidences with which travellers are familiar, I discovered that the man across the aisle, in the other window seat, was a friend of the ‘independent dissident’ I had failed to contact at Santa Clara University. Moreover, Jesus already knew about my courier role which meant that he was someone to whom I could safely entrust that little packet, now in the depths of my rucksack. Extracting it on the carriage floor broke the monotony for my compañeros who exclaimed in awe as book after book emerged.

  At Santa Clara Jesus was replaced by Ernesto, a young man with one of those faces that look like a cartoon come alive – elfin ears, a sharp nose, a pointed chin. Before long he had joined the ranks of the many who told me that ‘all Cubans are trained how to fight, how to kill with guns and grenades and use camouflage’.

  Around midnight, when the lights were off and most passengers asleep, the captain appeared beside me and whispered a request for my passport and CP25.50. Pocketing the latter, he made much of noting my details, by faint torchlight, in a copybook. No ticket was given me but this didn’t matter; oddly enough, arriving passengers are not checked.

  By moonlight central Cuba’s wide flat spaces have a beauty denied them in sunlight. Gazing out at the black and silver tranquillity, I concluded that Fidel’s experiment, despite having been so maimed by US enmity and Soviet friendship, had much to teach the free-marketeers, not least about social cohesion and participatory democracy. Yet I had no easy answer for those (well-disposed towards Castroism) who anxiously asked, ‘How can the Cubans change their government?’ Even now most of us regard this as democracy’s acid test, though for decades its significance has been diminishing as all major political parties fall into line behind their corporate controllers.

  The foundation stones for a viable Western-style democracy are generally taken to be: a) a stable state with a competent (more or less) administration and disciplined law enforcement agencies acceptable to (almost) everyone; b) a united nation within settled boundaries, its citizens in agreement on who ‘belongs’; c) safeguards to prevent any religion from dictating legislation or policy; d) an economy sound enough to provide for the population’s essential needs. (On point c, it has to be said, Ireland was flawed until 1971 when we altered our constitution to abolish the ‘special position’ of the Roman Catholic Church. And Britain does have all those Anglican bishops in the House of Lords …) Europe’s senior democracies quarried their foundation stones gradually, over centuries, and had them in place long before full-blown democracy appeared. In contrast, throughout much of the Majority World they have only recently been carted from the quarry and remain not very securely laid. Yet the free-marketeers pretend ‘democracy’ can be quickly contrived wherever its façade seems likely to serve their purposes.

  Some of my dissident friends argued that by now Cubans are better placed than most Majority Worlders to adopt multi-party democracy, Castroism having laid the foundations while securing their economic and social rights – without which all others are elusive, if not meaningless. (Minority Worlders tend to forget that the rights to free expression and association, or to seek election or found a political party, are not usable by illiterate citizens suffering fro
m malnutrition, overcrowding and untreated illnesses.) It’s unsurprising that such dissidents impatiently ask – ‘Why not abandon Martí’s misunderstood one-party ideal, which attracts so much criticism, and let us all off the leash?’ But when I put this to Juan in Camaguey he countered that such an electoral venture could only succeed if undertaken by an unthreatened sovereign state. Which took us back to Mr Caleb McCarry and his Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba.

  In Ireland, if I protested against Fidel’s being sweepingly dismissed as a dictator, my friends knew how to silence me. Home births are illegal in Cuba, women cannot choose where and how to deliver their babies. Having witnessed the Trio’s arrivals as happy family events, free of the pressures exerted by medical ‘birth-managers’, I find the denial of this fundamental right enraging. Granted, to achieve a home birth on our islands a mother has to be doggedly assertive and lucky with attitudes at her local hospital; and in Ireland, relatively rich. She must ignore accusations of irresponsibility and challenge the medical profession, citing evidence that mothers with planned home births gain on all levels (physical, mental, emotional) by not being exposed to a hospital ambience at this rare and wondrous time in their lives. And she must ask, ‘Where in the research is there evidence that a healthy woman who enjoys a normal pregnancy and labour is safer giving birth in hospital?’ No one I met in Cuba seemed to remember that home births were standard practice in all countries until recently, when an expanding medical industry decided that pregnancy and childbirth are quasi-diseases requiring long-term high-tech surveillance followed by hospitalisation.

  As clouds sailed swiftly from the north-west, coalescing to veil the moon, my mosquito bites grew itchier and the loo fumes became more acrid. Even light dozing was off the agenda and I continued to speculate about Cuba’s future, recalling my three long journeys (1993-95) south of the Limpopo. South Africa was then in transition from white minority rule to what seemed like a model multi-party democracy furnished with a comprehensive Bill of Rights, an independent constitutional court, an all-party executive for the first five years, job security for the apartheid regime’s civil servants and immunity from prosecution for crimes committed by members of the armed forces. Since 1990 Nelson Mandela had been tirelessly echoing Martí – ‘Let everyone start from the premise that we are one country, one nation, whether we are white, Coloured, Indian or black’.

  On the day after the new President’s inauguration I wrote in my journal:

  President Mandela will be one of the three most highly paid Heads of State in the world, earning R734,350 per annum. All parliamentary salaries and allowances have been set by the Melamet Committee at private-sector levels. This is rumoured to have been part of the ‘deal’ with Nats. South Africa however is not a profit-making corporation run to benefit shareholders. Most of its citizens lucky enough to have jobs earn about ten thousand rands per annum while millions of jobless go permanently hungry. Nor is this a naturally rich country; the whites’ lifestyle gives a false impression …

  Yesterday [10 May 1994] President Mandela spoke of the need ‘to heal the wounds of the past’ and construct ‘a new order based on justice for all’. Those wounds were inflicted by whites in pursuit of wealth. And in 1994 the fragile national prosperity remains dependent on the exploitation of black labour. An increasing number of blacks will now have access to wealth but rich blacks are no more (sometimes less) sensitive to the needs of the poor than rich whites. Constructing a new order must involve wealth-sharing and that would sink the reconciliation boat. In the real world, ‘justice for all’ and Madiba’s noble ideal of reconciliation are incompatible.

  When South from the Limpopo appeared some critics reproved me for being insufficiently enthusiastic about South Africa’s ‘peaceful transition to democracy’. In 1995 I had ended that book with the words:

  I do have hope (hope rather than faith) that eventually justice will prevail – though the mechanism whereby it could do so at present remains invisible. It would be good to return one day and discover that my doubts were not, after all, well-founded. Sometimes it is exhilarating to be proved wrong.

  Unfortunately the fate of South Africa’s blacks in the intervening years has proved me right. Whites have retained most of the fertile land and they share other lucrative assets with a minority of ruthless blacks. In 2005 more than half the black population continued to live far below the official poverty line, still enduring inadequate housing, schooling and health care. Meanwhile unemployment is being exacerbated by migrants from other ‘democracies’ – like Zimbabwe. In 1959 Fidel chose ‘a new order based on justice for the majority’ – Cuba’s minority being allergic to reconciliation with the Revolution.

  At 2.00 p.m., as we approached the coast at Matanzas, the dark clouds sank lower and a gale sent the royal palm fronds streaming eastwards. The storm broke as we dawdled into Havana station, the engine seeming exhausted after its twenty-hour journey. By then Ernesto and I had had some revealing conversations; he was proud of being an ‘independent dissident’. Now he invited me to stay in his Vedado home – ‘we have room and I like to talk English’.

  A bicitaxi took us through an almost deserted Havana; on every street sheets of water rushed towards flooding gutters. To semi-shelter us, the young cyclist had rolled down two plastic sheets, tied to the canopy struts. He told us the storm was forecast to continue for at least thirty-six hours. Then, between thunder claps, he and Ernesto talked baseball.

  We stopped outside a three-storeyed balconied villa with a large front garden where the potted palms had already been overturned. Inside, archways divided high, wide rooms and a white marble staircase led to the first floor flat where Mamma advanced to greet her son – then paused, exuding hostility to his foreign guest. She was a small, slight, chain-smoking woman with narrow hazel eyes and a permanently pursed mouth. I would have left immediately but for the deluge; I was far from No. 403 and my aged rucksack, containing those precious books, is no longer as waterproof as once it was.

  A flustered Ernesto showed me to my room and explained, ‘We’ve no licence and my mother is scared of the police. She hates Fidel and she thinks they know that and watch her. That’s crazy, only family know. She goes to our CDR meetings and seems OK there, she acts well.’

  I said, with a hint of reproach, ‘But didn’t you realise she’d be angry about me?’

  Ernesto stared at his toes and replied, ‘This is my home, too. I want to live another way, not scared, able to have foreign friends. The government wants millions of tourists and makes publicity about Cubans giving welcomes. That’s good, but it’s bad to need a licence to give welcomes.’

  As Ernesto’s foreign friend I was dual purpose – a symbol of his defiance of government regulations and a weapon in this mother-son conflict. He apologised then; he hadn’t foreseen it would be so difficult … And it got worse. To my host’s extreme mortification Mamma asserted that there was no food to spare for a guest and Ernesto naturally didn’t believe my claiming never to eat in the evening.

  The baño was on the far side of a spacious living-room where an ancient, mildly senile abuela spent hours sitting in front of a soundless TV set, dim eyes fixed on meaningless images. Her son had long ago died in a car crash; Ernesto could scarcely remember him. I never saw Mamma again. Ernesto joined me for a time in my pleasant room, its french window leading to a square balcony furnished with a wrought-iron table and chairs. Our conversation was not lively; we both needed an early night.

  Thunder, lightning, a gale force wind and torrential rain continued until 9.50 next morning, by which time Ernesto had left for the university in a colleague’s Lada. It only half-surprised me that I was not offered a lift; Mamma would have blocked that courtesy. A black ‘daily’ let me out and between further heavy showers I walked to No.403 via the Malecón where the road was closed to traffic and a coconut hit me on the head. I was lucky, it might have been a stone; waves were hurling an awesome tonnage of litter over the wall and strewing it acro
ss the street – everything from planks of wood to bottle-tops. Interestingly, there was no broken glass: a valuable commodity, rarely discarded.

  Next morning I watched small earth-movers pushing all this litter into piles which were then loaded on to lorries by men using shovels and brushes. This labour-intensive procedure left the Malecón immaculate. Two days later an even wilder storm, with still higher waves, threw up only a few stones, fish and clumps of seaweed.

  I found many of my Havana friends seething because Bush II had just broken a four-year silence on Cuba to address that amorphous entity, ‘the international community’. Said he:

  Now is the time to look past Fidel Castro’s rule and help Cubans prepare for a new democracy after communism. Now is the time to support the democratic movement growing on the island. Now is the time to stand with the Cuban people as they stand up for their liberty. And now is the time for the world to put aside its differences and prepare for Cubans’ transition to a future of freedom and progress and promise. The dissidents of today will be tomorrow’s leaders. And when freedom finally comes they will surely remember who stood with them. The horrors of Mr Castro’s regime remain unknown to the rest of the world. Once revealed, they will shock the conscience of humanity and they will shame the regime’s defenders and all those democracies that had been silent.

  The President of the United States ended with a special message for the armed forces of another sovereign state:

  You must ignore claims that the US is hostile towards Cubans and turn on Mr Castro. You may have once believed in the revolution. Now you can see its failure.

  To this incitement to civil war Felipe Perez Roque, as Foreign Minister, responded calmly. He noted that Mr Bush wanted to reconquer Cuba by force but the notion of an internal uprising was ‘a politically impossible fantasy’. Next day Granma published Fidel’s latest essay – ‘Bush, Hunger and Death’ – in which Fidel wrote of the grim reality that ‘The danger of a massive world famine is aggravated by Mr Bush’s recent initiative to transform foods into fuel’ – an abuse of fertile land that Fidel has been condemning since 1985.