Island that Dared (33 page)

In this secluded and well-tended little park, divided into sections by flights of marble steps, one suddenly feels close to the birth of the
Revolution
– much more so than around Santiago’s Moncada barracks. Groups of
abuelos
were relaxing under the palms, reading
Granma
or playing chess. Finding the museum locked I made enquiries, then got into conversation with two octogenarians; both had learned basic English while training Rhodesian guerrillas in the late 1970s and had been encouraged, back home, to maintain their acquaintance with the language. To my
astonishment
, I set off an explosive argument by referring to Lopéz as the man who introduced Che to Fidel. One
abuelo
furiously contradicted me,
insisting
that Raúl had introduced them. His friend took my side (not that I had any strong feelings on the matter) and as they continued their
argument
in Spanish I marvelled at the passion aroused by this detail. Later I discovered that Raúl was in fact responsible for that momentous
introduction
– but Che first heard of Fidel through Lopéz, then asked Raúl to introduce them. So in a sense both grandads were right. To my
disappointment
, neither was willing to reminisce about their posting abroad.
Velazquez’s settlement was built on a highish curving cliff-top overlooking the Rio Bayamo, a site close to Parque Cespedes but now occupied by
bohios
and a few shaky-looking two-storey dwellings. When I went that way at sunrise, pigs and poultry were foraging along the grassy cliff edge and the shallow river was hidden by a dense mass of water-lilies – a serious environmental deterioration, complained Miranda. No more fish … She disbelieved in the municipality’s plan to organise a clearance; they were spending too much on repaving General Garcia.

New Bayamo comes suddenly into view, most of it developed after the birth of Granma province. Here are the standard model four-storey
apartment
blocks, enormous schools, hospitals and municipal offices, sports grounds, playgrounds, a theatre, a cultural centre and dual-carriageways with thriving shrubs down their spines.

Beyond a suburb of substantial villas, a long walk took me to the
almost-rural
lakeside Parque Granma whence the Sierra Maestra, only rarely glimpsed in the city, is magnificently visible. Here grass grows high around tamarind and wild cotton trees, and an expansive children’s park is fully furnished. The longer I spent in Cuba the more clearly I saw
concern for children
as one of Castroism’s most significant features.

Returning by a different route, I passed under an incongruous
motorway
on stilts where squealing pigs were up for auction, arriving on bicycle carriers ingeniously adapted for the purpose. The bidding was brisk, men leading their purchases away on ropes. Pig manure is a precious fertiliser and two women carrying buckets and shovels were angrily disputing ownership of the various deposits. In New Bayamo other forms of litter were not being removed: evidently the historic centre keeps most
street-sweepers
fully occupied.

Even in February Bayamo is
hot
hot and by noon I was flagging and dehydrated. Wearily I plodded along a dual-carriageway, longing for a
tienda
. (Britain and Ireland, sharing a lurch into excessive drinking as a hobby, have much to learn from Cuba. Castroism has made drunkenness socially unacceptable and alcohol quite an elusive commodity – easily done, when a government is not in thrall to corporate interests.) I was about to take a horse-bus towards the centre when, outside the Astro bus terminus, a delivery man appeared carrying two crates of Hatuey. Following him into a bare little yard, behind a high blank wall, I saw five rickety round tables shaded by torn umbrellas. There was no counter, no shelving: one fetched Hatuey (only) from a small window in the bus station’s rear wall. The young barman hesitated to serve a tourist: I should have been elsewhere,
drinking Buccanero or Kristal. But he was a kind – and honest – young man who broke the law for this exhausted
abuela
and declined my profferred convertible peso, insisting on the correct Hatuey price: NP18.

The only other customer, a stocky white man in his mid-thirties, had observed my arrival with interest. On his way to fetch another Hatuey he paused to look down at my open note-book and asked, ‘
Pais?
’

‘
Irlanda!
My lovely country for reading! And you my first
irlandesa
to meet! Wilde, Shaw, Joyce – all translated I read! I am artist, painter, many pictures – and ten the inspiration by
Ulysses
! But
Finnegan’s Wake
makes too much problems for me … You have time to talk, we sit together?’

I was very happy to talk provided my companion did not expect me to solve his
Finnegan’s Wake
problems.

Nelson had learned his English working on the fringes of Santiago’s tourist industry and might be described as a ‘dissident’. ‘My parents named me for honouring Nelson Mandela, a better leader than ours. For his Africans he made many friends with big strong rich foreign companies. In South Africa everybody can buy everything they want in their own shops – not
tiendas.
’

It felt strange – almost shocking, yet reassuring – to hear a Cuban in Cuba referring to someone as ‘a better leader’ than Fidel. Then I wondered by whom (Radio Marti?) Nelson had been misinformed about the average South African’s purchasing power.

Both Nelson’s grandfathers had been imprisoned for a year or so in the early 1930s when they opposed Machado’s regime. His father, a
Communist
Party official, had retired a few years previously. Likewise his urologist mother, though she had immediately volunteered to work on in Venezuela where she was earning no more than her keep. The 1998 Papal visit had caused a family rift. Nelson became deeply emotionally involved, deciding that only Roman Catholicism could save Cuba and the world. His parents were not amused when he condemned Revolutionary Cuba as ‘a country of materialists’ where Catholicism has been ‘made dirty’ by ‘pagan superstitions’. He brushed aside my comment that his 72-year-old mother, working for nothing in some comfortless Venezuelan hilltown, could hardly be described as ‘materialistic’.

Nelson was married to a young woman gainfully employed in a tourist hotel. He wanted five children, she wanted two at most and none until she had saved up enough ‘to give them everything’. Nelson frowned at me and said, ‘That’s materialism!’ I agreed, but pointed out that it was generated not by the Revolution but by its enemy, consumerism. Nelson thought for
a moment, looking puzzled and worried: he was a very mixed-up young man. Then he fetched two more beers, refusing in a macho way to allow me to pay, and confessed that he was thinking about a divorce which would make him sad and guilty because the Catholic Church forbids divorce. However, it is also pro-babies – perhaps five babies would cancel out the divorce? What did I think? I suggested his seeking advice elsewhere, Roman Catholic moral theology being
ultra vires
for me.

Moments later the barman shouted a warning: the Santiago service was filling up. Nelson hugged me, thriftily poured the rest of his beer into my half-empty glass and rushed away. On his advice I spent the rest of the day in the Casa de la Trova where the most celebrated local group, La Familia, were playing – and where my impression of Bayamo as Cuba’s friendliest city was reinforced.

My plan for the morrow was to try to get an eight-mile lift on the Bayamo-Manzanillo highway, then walk into the Sierra Maestra on a minor cul-de-sac road, via the little town of Bartolome Maso.

The packed truck-bus would accept no pesos, because I had to stand on its steps, clinging to a bar. From this vantage point I had a good view of expansive ranches, their arched and crested hacienda gateways still in place though rusted, their cattle in prime condition despite desiccated pastures.

Where my trek began the landscape was hilly and partially wooded and the Sierra Maestra loomed seductively, its creased ridges now discernible. For miles this narrow, broken road was accompanied by a clear green river in which
campesiños
laundered and ducks swam. The humidity was punishing; I became a Niagara of sweat and needed frequent rests. Here
bohios
were scattered on open slopes, their livestock numerous: pigs, sheep, horses – no cattle. At noon I collapsed under a ceiba tree and for two hours read
The Fertile Prison,
Mario Mencia’s account of Fidel’s educational time in jail – foreshadowing those ‘universities’ that were to evolve in Northern Ireland’s jails. Meanwhile I was being persecuted by tiny ferocious red ants. How can creatures
so
tiny contain a weapon able to cause such pain?

By 4.30 the scene had changed: cane fields surrounded me and the road was shadeless. An hour later I arrived in the straggling village of San Antonio de Baja, fifteen miles from my starting point and five miles from my destination. Five miles too many: heat exhaustion had defeated me. Unhopefully I roamed around asking, ‘
Tienda
?’ But of course there was none. Then my roaming bore fruit. As I was leaving the village, in search of
a secluded camp-site, an anxious looking young mulatta pursued me. ‘You need food? Where you sleep? Come my house!’ Alicia was a school teacher, living with her parents in a large roadside
bohio
. There was, unfortunately, a spare bed: her brother lay in Bayamo hospital with a fractured spine having fallen off an ox-cart piled high with cane. Both parents worked in Bartolomé Maso’s
ingenio
– her mother as an accountant – and they farmed in a small way: three pigs, twenty sheep, uncounted poultry and four hectares of cane.

Over supper (the usual menu) Alicia translated her father’s childhood recollections of three of Fidel’s
compañeros
being hunted after the Moncada barracks attack, then finding refuge in this village. Alicia’s maternal
grandfather
had been associated with the Bayamo barracks attack, as a provider of weapons.

I soon realised that this was another amiable and paradoxical CDR intervention – the foreigner in the village being kept under surveillance, judged harmless, then cared for though the caring involved breaking a law which the CDR was formed to ensure was not broken. A fascinating paradox, with its nice balance between the letter and the spirit … The Revolution genuinely fostered humanitarianism and it’s reassuring to know that in places like San Antonio de Baja bureaucracy does not Rule OK.

Alicia assumed my destination to be Villa Santo Domingo, a small tourist centre deep in the Sierra Maestra, at the end of the road. From there groups are guided, at a price, to Turquino’s summit and/or
Conandancia
de la Plata, Fidel’s Rebel headquarters. I didn’t reveal my plan to get off the road long before reaching Santo Domingo and coming to officialdom’s attention. It irritated me to have to skulk when I only wanted to be alone in the mountains for a few days, possibly finding my way down to the coastal road where I had trekked with Rachel and the Trio, possibly emerging somewhere else. Exactly where didn’t matter.

Next morning I lost the cool hours, so determined was my hostess to strengthen me with an omelette and so long did it take to find eggs ‘laid wild’. By the time we said ‘
Adios
’, at 8.45, I should have been out of
cane-land
at the beginning of the climb to coolness.

The sugar mill’s survival explains Bartolomé Maso’s air of well-being. It is what I incoherently think of as ‘a big little town’, a place with a friendly intimate feel though its long streets of single-storey tiled houses, in untidy sub-tropical gardens, cover a wide area.

Here came another delay. Tinned rations were essential for the days ahead but the
tienda
(a metal shipping-container) functioned only from
1.00 to 3.00. When the restaurant opened at noon I ‘did a camel’ and in this large, dingy, welcoming establishment ate well for NP37: a mountain of rice and beans, at least half a pound of tender
lean
roast pork, a hill of sweet potatoes and a mega-salad of tomatoes and crisp lettuce. (That last was a rare treat; Cubans are not keen on their greens despite the urgings of generations of health educators.)

All this over-filled my hump and, having bought six tins of Brazilian tinned beef, the digestive process required me to lie under a fig tree on the town’s edge, watching a misfortunate horse scratching an open shoulder wound against the next tree. Beside me a hen was dealing with a hunk of coconut while across the road her week-old brood sought tasty morsels in horse manure. When a turkey vulture came gliding into view, just above the tree tops, Mother squawked a warning and hustled the chicks into a lean-to shed where a cow was tethered with her new-born calf. I had been told that these birds are valuable scavengers, not killers, but Mother Hen thought otherwise.

At 2.30 I went on my sweaty way, the gradient ever more severe, the panorama on my right ever wider and grander – crowded green foothills sloping down to a distant hazy plain. On my left irregular deforested slopes were separated by stony gullies: no
bohios
, no fields, no paths. One vehicle overtook me, an open lorry, newly painted and carrying a score of Turquino-bound Dutch. It stopped to offer a lift and my ‘No thanks’ caused comic bewilderment.

Where an earth track branched off I hesitated before noticing a small hand-carved arrow pointing to ‘Campismo’. Around the next mountain came a surprise – a steep, brief descent to a few concrete dwellings and a polyclinic. This hamlet was still visible when at last I saw a faint path on a wide grassy slope. It led diagonally to a perfect camp-site (level, not stony) on a ridge top overlooking a wooded ravine containing a few
palm-thatched
bohios
. Happily I unpacked my flea-bag and used it as a stool while diary-writing. The young man who soon ascended from the
bohios
hurried past me looking scared, not returning my greeting. As he traversed the slope I admired the grace of his speedy loping.