Island that Dared (30 page)

In the other direction, I enjoyed a three-hour shore-walk, setting out as a crimson sun rose behind a fretwork of palm fronds, confirming the validity of all those Caribbean postcards. At intervals a low wooded
headland
or a mound of hurricane litter forced me on to a narrow cul-de-sac road – ending where the track to Luz begins. Off this people-free coast nude swimming was feasible, the water deep, clear and only slightly too warm. On my way back fellow-guests were splashing in a chemically polluted pool and I asked myself yet again, ‘Why have people become so estranged from – or afraid of – the natural world?’

Developers were then making strenuous efforts ‘to enhance Playa Giron’s image’ but the hotel kitchen was not playing its part;
casa particular
would never serve such a meagre and disgusting breakfast.

I now learned that different provinces have different currency
regulations
. In a
tienda
opposite the hotel (one of a row of brand-new ‘facilities’) a saleswoman refused my CP100 note and a domineering security man requested ‘evidence of identity’. Returning from my
cabaña
with the
documents
, I watched another woman, called from a back room, inscribing all my passport and visa details in a massive ledger which I then had to sign, twice, before spending CP3 on two bottles of Buccanero. This can’t be the best way to enhance a resort’s image.

The Invasion Museum is reason enough to visit Playa Giron. Its intelligent lay-out and choice of exhibits are inspired (praise not earned by every Cuban museum) and its lucid introduction to the background fills an obvious need. By now ‘the Bay of Pigs’ means nothing to most people – and indeed, seen against the twentieth-century’s bloody backdrop, it was a minor affray. More people have been killed during football riots and political rallies, as one Australian tourist peevishly pointed out. Her guide tried to explain that the death toll wasn’t the issue but by then she and her group were impatiently edging their way towards the exit. In fact this attack so strengthened the Revolution that its CIA organisers did good for Cuba.

My guardian angel was on duty that day. In the hotel bar I
chanced
to meet a British Embassy official who
chanced
to mention, during a general discussion on visas, the importance of one’s return ticket – in relation to consular problems with British sailors who have entered Cuba illegally via Key West. That was a close shave; I had been planning to renew my visa in Bayamo but had left my return ticket in No. 403. Without those chance remarks, I would have arrived in Bayamo by slow train and needed at once to return to Havana by fast tourist bus to avoid the US$50-fine for each over-stay day.

It’s unlike me not to eat a meal I’ve paid for, but Playa Giron’s hotel breakfast would not have compensated for wasted cool hours. Before
dawn I was on the road to Havana, planning to hitch-hike when
overheated
.

During a four-hour walk, close by the deep, calm, pellucid waters of the Bay of Pigs, I counted one hundred and sixty-one roadside obelisks honouring those killed in defence of the Bay. These crude concrete monuments, not tended by anyone, seemed forlorn against their
background
of mangroves. Several breaks in this mangrove barrier gave access to the sandless limestone shore, where broken diving-boards and collapsed picnic huts – provided for snorkellers – recalled Hurricane Michelle. In 2001 an eighteen-foot wave devastated this coast, sweeping away hundreds of thatched huts, never rebuilt. The whole region had been evacuated the day before and these
cenagueros
(swamp people) now endure over-crowded conditions in Playa Giron and continue to burn mangrove charcoal. Before Michelle, this strip of coast was striving for a slice of the tourism cake. Outside its one small restaurant, closed at 8.00 a.m., I watched three turkey vultures, ungainly when grounded, squabbling over the scattered contents of garbage bins. A white-haired mulatta, hanging laundry on the restaurant balcony, invited me to rest and wait for a lift; but I wasn’t yet overheated.

No vehicle disturbed the peace until 10.45, when I was about to swim. I hesitated, then decided it would be rash to decline a lift all the way to Havana.

Eugenio was an outspoken young army officer-cum-agronomist driving a strange-sounding Lada, its back seat packed with tall potted plants, blocking the rear view. He stopped to pick up another passenger – luckily a slim youth – at Playa Larga, a bigger town than Playa Giron but not more exciting. Here the road turns inland to cross the vast Zapata swamp and National Park – still teeming, said Eugenio, with iguana, mongoose, wild boar and a treasure trove of rare birds including the Cuban pygmy owl. He often spent days there, alone, but unfortunately foreigners had to hire a guide. We joined the
autopista
near Australia, Fidel’s headquarters during the invasion.

Beyond a citrus plantation, covering many square miles, the land again looked underused. Eugenio was uninhibited in his criticism of incompetent direction from above, leading to abrupt changes of plan, incompatible adjacent projects, and bad advice (or none) for farmers when they receive seeds to grow unfamiliar crops.

Even on this
autopista
the traffic merely trickled and Eugenio picked up six village-to-village hitchers, one so bulky I had to sit with an arm around his shoulders. These hundred miles traverse what must surely be Cuba’s
most boring landscape: flat and colourless (at least in February), its few towns misleadingly named Buena Vista, La Esperanza, Nueva Paz.

Being unexpectedly back in Havana felt odd, the streets so bustling and noisy compared to where I had been – and nowhere else even approached Centro’s extreme dilapidation. But it was good to be hugged again by Candida and Pedro. Just as I arrived a downpour started though no rain is expected in February. And last April, Candida complained, when it should have rained every day, not a drop fell.

In Havana University’s Museo Montaine Antropologico I learned that ‘Huracan’ is a Taino word, the name of a deity who had to be regularly placated by music, song and dance. In Spanish the word soon became ‘huracane’ and by the late seventeenth century ‘hurricane’ was the accepted English form. Uncannily, meteorologists’ TV images of hurricanes closely resemble the Tainos’ rock engravings of Huracan.

During his 1494 voyage, Columbus recorded the first known European confrontation with a hurricane and found himself unnerved by the New World’s tropical excesses; even the toughest conquistadors suspected malevolent spirits at work or were cowed by an implicit divine threat. Fr Bartolomé de las Casas didn’t try to soothe them but characteristically identified the sixteenth century’s unusually frequent hurricanes as God’s punishment for cruelty to Indians – who themselves blamed the
newcomers
for an exceptionally violent 1511 hurricane.

Geography makes Cuba peculiarly vulnerable to tropical storms. Its seven hundred and fifty-mile east/west axis, stretching along the New World’s middle latitude, blocks the path followed by most hurricanes on their way from the Caribbean to the Gulf of Mexico. Powerful gales combine with low barometric pressure to lift mountains of water from the ocean basin and these gain height and momentum while moving towards land across shallow coastal waters. A liquid mountain can be fifty miles wide and, over flat terrain, its crests may penetrate up to forty-five miles inland. Hurricanes making landfall near estuaries commonly drive rivers backwards, causing catastrophic flooding. Heavy continuous rain invariably follows the quieting of the gale, provoking massive mud slides and more flash floods in the sierras and leaving the plains water-logged for weeks.

After the 1509 hurricane a pioneer colonist, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, could scarcely believe his eyes:

Exactly a century later Virginia-bound William Strachey, who had known many turbulent seas, lost his coherency:

Strachey’s vessel had been driven on to the Bermudas and his survivor’s tale is believed to have inspired
The Tempest.
(See Scene 1, Act I – ‘The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch, / But that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek, / Dashes the fire out.’)

The Havana archives list sixty-nine major ‘hits’ between 1494 and 1850 (severe storms not included). A hurricane’s effects precluded exaggeration; the most articulate found their vocabularies inadequate. Everyone emphasised noise. In 1772 Alexander Hamilton wrote to his father:

Eight years later the Reverend George Wildon Bridges marvelled:

In 1888 an anonymous journalist reported:

In 1910 a five-day hurricane, one of the longest ever recorded, hit Pinar del Rio. In 1926, at 10.45 a.m., winds above a hundred and fifty miles per hour reached Havana, killing more than six hundred and leaving tens of thousands badly injured. ‘Fishing boats floated down streets like deserted gondolas, dead cows dropped on rooftops and houses flew overhead like birds.’ In 1932 twenty-five-foot waves washed away the entire fishing village of Santa Cruz del Sur, drowning all but five hundred of its three thousand or so inhabitants. In 1944 winds approaching two hundred miles per hour were recorded in Havana.

Until Louis A. Perez produced his riveting
Winds of Change,
historians paid strangely little attention to hurricanes, despite their influence on Cuba’s economic, social and political development. Several times during the Wars of Independence (1868–98) ‘hits’ intervened. On 30 September 1873 de Cespedes’s diary laments ‘this horrific hurricane’s’ disruption of his transport and communications. Later, at a crucial stage in the final campaign, a hurricane helped the Cuban Liberation Army by entirely ruining the tobacco crop (including seeds) west of Havana. Ricardo
Delgardo
then informed the army planner, ‘These poor tobacco farmers find themselves today in the most desperate situation. They have nothing to do, nothing to eat, and would give themselves with a song in their heart if they could come over and join our ranks.’ General Maceo acted on this information and two months later triumphantly led his augmented troops into Pinar del Rio.

In Oriente the 1890s hurricanes had no such compensatory outcome. Around Baracoa the 1894 ‘hit’ totally destroyed every banana plantation and when all those small farmers went into production again, on borrowed money, an 1899 hit reduced them to bankruptcy. The United Fruit
Company
(of ill repute throughout Latin America) then bought all their lands – an enormous area – and planted it to cane, thus worsening Cuba’s sugar-dependency.

Every district, and each generation, has its own memories of terror and heroism, of tragedy, turmoil and triumph. Louis Perez comments on the extent to which ‘hits’ helped to forge a Cuban identity. All classes shared in
the fear and grief and, to varying extents, in the subsequent hardship. To survive, and then to pick up the pieces (often literally), everyone had to cooperate: black, white and mulatto, young and old, rural and urban, rich and poor, the illiterate and the scholarly. Thus hurricanes had
bonding-power
, making Cubans feel justifiably proud of their communal resilience. (There was one exceptional group; after each hit bands of slaves fled to the mountains, though not as many as one might have expected. Most were too debilitated for such adventures.)

By now meteorologists and modern communications have raised strong protective barriers between Huracan and the general public. Yet in 2005 more than three thousand died, the majority in the US, the world’s most technologically advanced country. During that record-breaking season fourteen hurricanes (plus twelve severe tropical storms) raged across the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Unusually, only two hit Cuba hard: Dennis and Wilma. In July the former twice made landfall in Central Cuba, wrecking more than a hundred and twenty thousand homes, killing sixteen people and felling Trinidad’s radio mast. In preparation for Dennis the local authorities evacuated 1.5 million human beings and four hundred and seventy five thousand animals. (The unfortunate citizens of New Orleans, it will be remembered, were told to make their own evacuation plans in preparation for August’s Katrina, though twenty-five per cent of the threatened population lived below the poverty line and twenty per cent of families were carless.) When Wilma hit Cuba in late October more than six hundred thousand people had been evacuated. Ten days of non-stop torrential rain flooded eleven of the fourteen provinces but no lives were lost. Nor were any lost in 2001, in Cuba’s most destructive hurricane since 1944. Or in 2004, when another 1.5 million (more than one-tenth of the population) were moved before Ivan demolished twenty thousand homes.

After Flora hit Oriente, in 1963, a week-long deluge swept away eleven thousand homes and killed more than a thousand
campesiños
though one hundred and seventy-five thousand had been evacuated. Fidel then said, ‘The hurricane has done its thing, now it is time for us to do ours.’ At present, Cuba is being held up to the world as a model. ‘The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their populations as well as Cuba does’ – so says the UN International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction. ‘The Cuban government’s zero-risk attitude and awareness raising programmes are leading the way in the Caribbean’ – so says the International Federation of the Red Cross.

Awareness raising begins in primary school where children are taught how to prepare calmly for a hit and how to play their part when it comes. All residents of endangered areas know where to find the nearest group shelters, holding stocks of water, food and medical supplies. Health workers keep lists of those most at risk: the handicapped, the elderly, pregnant women. Each municipal authority is obliged to identify buildings or homes with structural defects and organise evacuations accordingly. Public warnings are issued five days before a probable hit; two days later evacuations begin and well-trained rescue teams go on stand-by. Annually, at the end of May, the whole country participates for a few days in Mete-Oro, a hurricane simulation exercise. And all this ‘disaster reduction’ is achieved despite a petrol drought.

When Cuba is loudly praised by international organisations some people protest in righteous tones that only a dictator could organise such speedy mass-evacuations. Democracies can’t save lives by pushing
individuals
around, every citizen must be left free to choose how to react. These mean-minded inanities (and they are numerous) perhaps helped to inspire an Oxfam America report:

All night the downpour that had welcomed me back to Havana
continued
, water cascading off No. 403’s roof to swirl and gurgle in the patio. Next day the
habaneros
were depressed and I was energised by a low dark grey sky, a strong cool wind, ten-foot waves crashing over the Malecón and long showers that sent disillusioned tourists scuttling for shelter. On the Prado I overheard one Englishwoman exclaiming, ‘It’s like being at home!’ A plaintive cry; not for this had she spent good money leaving England in February.

The Immigration Section of the Department of Internal Security (open 9.00 a.m.–3.00 p.m.) is a brisk ninety minutes walk from No. 403. At 10.30 I joined a very long queue only to be told I must return next morning
because that queue was the day’s quota. No special office caters for tourists; they must merge with the multitude. I then discovered that cash is not acceptable. One has to buy special visa stamps at a particular guichet in a particular (distant) bank and get a signed and sealed statement from another guichet guaranteeing that you, personally, have bought those stamps. Yet Cuba’s London consulate can deliver a visa in
seven minutes
!

In the bank I queued for more than an hour; as customers accumulated, three of the eight guichets closed. There were however easy chairs and sofas scattered between the pillars, leading me to suspect ‘a joint venture’; the ascetic Revolution, left to itself, would never authorise such sybaritism. One’s time of arrival seemed irrelevant; a gorgeously uniformed six-
foot-six
security officer decided who would go to which guichet when. The etiquette for my second queue, to acquire the guarantee, required me to stand – beside an empty chair – for what felt like another hour.

Next stop – Cuba’s Central Post Office, by way of an experiment undertaken without much hope. In this enormous building I entrusted a fat envelope to the only person in sight, an amiable middle-aged black woman sitting behind glass at a bare desk. (Her isolation suggested a basis for my lack of hope.) When I asked ‘How much?’ she frowned anxiously, then made a soothing sound and disappeared with the
envelope
. Returning six minutes later she said, ‘CP0.85’ – which, given the letter’s weight, seemed absurd. The four stamps eventually found at the back of a drawer celebrated ‘Gatos Domesticos’ – a mother carrying her kitten – which would delight the Trio should this letter ever arrive. Carefully the clerk licked each stamp and took pains to place them symmetrically in the four corners, giving the impression that this was not an everyday task. Then that anxious frown reappeared: the stamps were not sticking. Another soothing sound and off she went on a nine-minute search for glue. Clearly she was committed to my envelope’s welfare. Having delicately applied the glue, she pounded each stamp with a fist, looking resolute. As I counted out the centavos in small coins, to get rid of a surplus, the stamps took anti-glue action – curled up at the edges. Distraught, my friend (as I now thought of her) removed them, produced a new set, applied glue only. She then used eloquent sign language to convey her theory that saliva and glue are chemically incompatible. That letter arrived in Italy seven weeks later.