Island that Dared (35 page)

On the morning of Day Three I had to think about where I was, in relation to any road. I had made provision for a three/four-day trek and my rations were dwindling. The Sierra Maestra paths demanded lots of raisins and those utterly repulsive tins of Brazilian beef contained more cereal than protein. I intuited that I had been going around in circles and wasn’t very far (thirty miles?) from my starting point – which proved to be the case.

At noon I washed in a stream, lunched sparsely off those dwindling raisins and considered my options. Here two routes converged: the easier, narrow path went downstream through dense vegetation, the other was a
wide boulder stairway. Then I noticed horse-droppings on the stairway, quite fresh, suggesting a
bohio
not too far away.

An hour later – above the stairway, close to a ridgetop – the path ran level across a bare, red-brown cliff-face for some fifty yards. I was nearly over when the earth began to crumble beneath my feet – and here a falling body would hit boulders rather than bushes. That was a nightmare moment. I completely lost my nerve and when I put a hand on the cliff to steady myself it too crumbled. I should then have hastened forward (safe ground lay scarcely five yards ahead!) but in panic I froze, leaning on my umbrella which of course sent more of the cliff gently dribbling down. At that I regained my nerve and proceeded, the path continuing to crumble in my wake. Back on safe ground something unusual because man-made caught my eye: a sign (white paint on wood) hanging from a branch. It said: PELIGRO DE MUERTE, pointing to the cliff. Where the stairway ended I had taken the wrong path.

Resting on a mossy fallen tree-trunk, I remembered that potentially far more dangerous moment when terror immobilised me on a cliff-face high above the Indus river in the Karakoram while a six-year-old Rachel, unaware of my panic, trotted confidently ahead. An odd phenomenon, panic. Its paralysing illogic cancels out one’s instinct of self-preservation, supposedly our strongest instinct though I’ve never believed that. The sane and normal reaction to a shifting cliff-face is to get off it, fast – not to stand around poking it with an umbrella.

Soon after 4.00 I prudently accepted an invitation to stay in one of three
bohios
on a flat ridgetop scattered with boulders almost as big as the dwellings. From here – my highest point – I was overlooking a mass of lower ridges and beyond them glittered the sea. So these were the very mountains I had gazed at, longingly, during our coastal trek. As happens in close-packed ranges, Turquino was now too near to be visible. The sea was scarcely ten miles away, as the turkey vulture flies, but a four-day trek, said my host, with no reliable source of food on the way. Andres was an elderly muleteer whose four sturdy pack-mules carried coffee to the motor road for onward transport. By sheer chance (that guardian angel again!) I had come to the start of a track – rather than a path – leading directly to the village of Santo Domingo.

As Andres and I walked back to the
bohio
from the mules’ paddock two little boys pointed to me, burst into giggles and for this discourtesy were sternly reprimanded by their grandfather. It was easy to forgive them; tobogganing down long slopes without a toboggan had left my bottom on
public display. That evening I sadly discarded a shredded garment of much sentimental value, bought in Sarajevo in 2000.

Andres made unusual efforts to help me over the language barrier; in Angola he had had years of multilingual experience. His four-roomed
bohio
accommodated himself and his wife Dora, their only son and his wife and the grandsons who continued to find me vastly amusing though they stifled their giggles when
abuelo
was around. A table and four chairs, all homemade, furnished the kitchen-living-room. On one plank wall hung several
unidentifiable
antique tools, three machetes, various bits of mule harness and a picture of the Sacred Heart – that same picture seen in many Irish homes until very recently. Above the nineteenth-century iron woodstove hung dented and chipped enamel mugs and jugs, and dented but shiny clean pots and pans, and a green plastic sieve looking incongruously ‘modern’.

Dora was a vigorous septuagenarian able to carry loads of firewood I could hardly lift off the ground. She and Andres argued about my sleeping space, he being inclined to humour me, she definite that I must have the boys’ single iron bed in the smallest room. At bedtime Andres pointed to the ceiling – palm fronds visible between the rafters – and said not to worry about nocturnal noises; the cat had kittened up there.

No number of mewing kittens could have disturbed me after that night on the path. In fact I overslept: the sun was up before me. Then, setting off, I observed Dora retrieving those smelly trousers I had furtively thrust under a boulder. No doubt her beloved Chico (who looked like a cross between a poodle and a mastiff) had sniffed them out.

The downward track had some slow difficult stages, large loose stones on steep slopes which reminded me of the extraordinary agility of mules. (As if I could ever forget!) Otherwise this was a comparatively easy
seven-hour
descent. Now I was impatiently looking forward to Islazul’s tourist restaurant. I had eaten sparingly with the
campesiños
; no one I saw in the Sierra Maestra looked underfed but neither of those
bohios
had a surplus and rice served to a guest would mean someone going short.

The temperature rose horribly during the final hour. Villa Santo Domingo consists of twenty simple
cabañas
tucked away amidst tall trees, a restaurant/bar roofed but not walled and a tacky little souvenir shop with a despondent air – all of necessity on the right bank of the Rio Yara, this valley being almost a ravine. At 3.30 the receptionist explained that no food could be served before 6.00 p.m. And the
tienda
(a tiny hut) didn’t sell food. At 6.00 the menu was limited to pasta smothered in ersatz chemical-flavoured tomato sauce containing something minced. But just
then my only concern was quantity and to the waiter’s astonishment I ate two
cenas
.

According to the leaflet beside my bed: ‘Adventures are interesting, exciting and important facts that come our way and mark our lives forever. Santo Domingo Villa, from Islazul Granma, is where you can find your best adventure.’

One adventure takes tourists around Turquino to Las Cuevas on the coast. When the Villa’s English-speaking manager assured me that I could follow this trail solo, because I had no ambition to climb Turquino, I did a private deal with a friendly waiter. He had access to surplus cooked pasta and, thus provisioned, I set off before sunrise.

The Turquino National Park’s official border was no mere pole across the road but a two-storey wooden structure from which emerged a smiling, charming, stunningly handsome Park Guardian in a pea-green uniform. The manager had misinformed me. No walker was allowed beyond this barrier without a guide. (Had I been forty years younger, and had that Guardian been the guide, I might have said ‘Yes please!’) Motorists could drive on guideless to the end of the road, from where one path ascends Turquino and another descends to Las Cuevas. But throughout the park unguided walkers are
verboten
.

Señor Handsome, who spoke English on a par with my Spanish, seemed to understand, as few do, my wish to be alone with the mountains. (The manager had probably mistaken that wish for parsimony; guides are expensive.) On my map Señor Handsome pointed to the low ranges west of Havana – many footpaths, no guides required. Thanking him, I turned back towards Bartolomé Maso, toying with the notion of returning to that mule track and spending another few days (pasta-fuelled) going around in different circles. Then Señor Handsome (telepathy?) called me back. Gesturing towards the relevant area, beyond the Yara, he conveyed, with a kindly twinkle, his awareness that already I had been illegally going solo – an offence not to be repeated. The Sierra Maestra
campesiños
may be deprived of mobile phones but news gets around.

As promised by Fidel in 1957, the spread-out village of Santo Domingo has its school and its polyclinic and I paused to watch scores of cheerful pupils gathered around Martí’s bust chanting a vow to emulate Che. Their seniors go to a weekly boarding school in Bartolomé Maso.

The fifteen-mile San Domingo-Bartolomé Maso concrete road (one of Fidel’s pet projects) was completed in 1981 and may well qualify for the
Guinness Book of Records. Many gradients’ surfaces have to be deeply grooved, lest vehicles might fall off what can feel more like a cliff-face than a road. Despite being in reasonably good condition, I had to pause every thirty yards or so on the first ascent from Santo Domingo’s ugly bridge. (This replaces a graceful wooden footbridge, its photograph now
decorating
the Villa bar.) On several descents my brake-muscles ached and I envied those locals who sat on plank trays, with four tiny wheels, and scooted past me at life-threatening speeds. In this exceptional terrain their lightweight trays, easily carried up the next ascent, are more
energy-saving
than bicycles.

The large, shapeless village of Providencia marks the halfway stage and has grown since finding itself on a motor-road – though not enough to support a
tienda
. Below the village, on the valley floor, I sat under a mango tree near a weedy stream too polluted for drinking and lessened my load of pasta (much more palatable on its own). These fifteen miles are almost entirely shadeless, following the contours of foothills long since deforested, and one sweats accordingly. When my water ran out I remembered the Campismo Popular bar, not far off the road, but fortunately resisted that temptation. I therefore arrived in Bartolomé Maso at 2.20, as a truck-bus was beginning to fill up for Bayamo. It also carried livestock: small kids – beautifully marked and distraught – stoically silent adolescent pigs,
multi-coloured
cockerels tucked under arms, a duck and drake gagged and bound in a bucket.

Rapid movement by public transport is uncommon in contemporary Cuba but that was my lucky day. By 4.30 I was in the Astro bus terminus booking the last seat on the overnight service to Havana. As it lacked
air-conditioning
or perceptible ventilation I streamed sweat for fourteen almost sleepless hours – then immediately transferred to the 9.00 a.m. Havana-Pinar del Rio service. Apparently Astro and Viazul were no longer rivals; the former had passed me over to the latter and all my
fellow-passengers
were Viñales-bound: German, English, Scandinavian, Canadian, Italian. Pinar del Rio, I was to discover, is not on the tourist industry’s agenda for promotion.

Beyond Havana’s ailing industrial estates, which have leached out into Pinar del Rio province, the landscape is flat, deforested and intensively farmed. To the north rise the Cordillera Guaniguanico, my new
playground
, a long line of low blue hills running parallel to the
autopista
.

One has to struggle to imagine how this region must have looked in the nineteenth century when it was eulogised as ‘the Garden of Cuba’. Those eulogists were numerous; European and North American travellers found Cuba – so conveniently placed on the main Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico sea lanes – an attractive détour and quite a few stayed much longer than planned. A list of their books, in English alone, needs several pages – fat volumes explicitly entitled
Letters from the Havana During the Year 1820 Containing an Account of the Present State of the Island of Cuba
(London 1821),
Letters Written in the Interior of Cuba
(Boston 1828),
The Island of Cuba: Its Resources, Progress and Prospects
(London 1853) – and so on. During the first half of the century, when coffee was as important as (in this region more important than) sugar, the
cafetales
stimulated much purple prose. In 1844 John Wurdemann wrote:

Between 1792 and 1796 the world price of coffee had doubled and the
number of
cafetales
increased from two in 1774 to two thousand and
sixty-seven
in 1827. For years the three hundred thousand coffee trees on the Carlota estate yielded an annual harvest worth more than one hundred thousand US dollars. A
cafetale
cost much less to establish and run than an
ingenio
; less land was needed, and fewer slaves and livestock, and simpler buildings and machinery. Thus coffee enabled a minority of creoles, some starting with few resources, to enjoy a patrician lifestyle on tastefully landscaped garden-farms providing an agreeable setting for ‘cool and shady mansions … floored with marble, furnished with rich deep-hued Indian woods’ each surrounded by ‘its village of thatched huts laid out in a perfect square’. Levi Marrero noted that
cafetales
were designed as ‘centres of civilisation and gracious living for their owners and invited guests’.

In mid-century three factors contributed to sugar’s conquest of coffee: shifts in the international market, new technologies making cane the more profitable crop and the damage done by two major hurricanes, 4/5 October 1844 and 10/11 October 1846. (By then the custom of naming hurricanes after the saint’s day on which they began was well established; these were San Francisco de Asis and San Francisco de Borja.) All the tall trees essential to protect young coffee bushes were snapped in two or torn up by the roots and replacements would take decades to mature. The more resilient
ingenios
, though equally devastated, usually recovered within a season or so. Estimates of slave hurricane casualties are imprecise, the injury or death of such creatures being commonly included with loss of cattle and other ‘damage to property’.

Sugar’s victory spelt disaster for the
cafetale
slaves. Most resident owners were comparatively humane, usually providing adequate food and some basic medical care, as one looks after valuable sick animals.
Cafetale
slaves lived in soundly constructed huts, en famille, and were allowed to grow vegetables for their own sustenance, and to rear poultry and pigs, and sell any surplus. They worked no more than ten hours a day and quite a few were able to save enough money, from the sale of livestock, to pay for a replacement and thus become ‘a free person of colour’.

In contrast, on the fast-expanding
ingenios
slaves were crammed into fortified wooden barracks, some built ‘to contain one thousand negroes’. Many owners lived in Havana or New York, ignoring the methods used by
administradores
to produce maximum profits. During the same period, many Irish peasants were also being exploited by absentee landlords. As the numbers of imported slaves increased, their working conditions and accommodation deteriorated and tensions heightened. Not surprisingly,
the sale or lease to
ingenios
of ‘pampered’
cafetale
slaves provoked more frequent and desperate rebellions. The same Dr John Wurdemann quoted above, a visitor from the US, reported on how ‘people of colour’ were punished after the 1843 rebellion when the authorities suspected an
island-wide
conspiracy. Accused men

In the 1850s a British merchant, Jacob Omnium, echoed many other shocked observers of the
ingenios
:

Another Englishman, Robert Baird, commented that between 1845 and 1850:

British ships had been regularly patrolling Cuba’s coasts since the early nineteenth century when, for diverse reasons, Britain was leading the
anti-slavery
campaign. These patrols sought to enforce the new law against slave-trading, as distinct from slave-owning, and were so successful that smuggled Africans became ever more expensive. The Creoles sullenly resented what they regarded as Madrid’s subservience to London and this boosted ‘annexationism’. As Domingo del Monte, a prominent planter, pointed out in 1838, ‘The USA has since its founding enjoyed the greatest political liberty, and they still have slaves’.

The
autopista
’s twelve-foot-high roadside hoardings announced the local presence of various agricultural organisations and agencies: UBPC, CCS, ANAP, CPA, INRA. INRA is the Daddy of them all, the National Institute for Agrarian Reform which in 1959 and 1963 redistributed twelve thousand estates. (In 1958 seventy per cent of agricultural land was still owned by eight per cent of the population – if one may include in Cuba’s population those US citizens and corporations who were among the largest landowners.) The government converted forty-four per cent of all ranching and arable land to state farms on which former seasonal workers were permanently employed at a fixed wage. Small farmers retained possession of their land and the number of such farms increased from forty-five thousand to one hundred and sixty thousand.
Campesiños
may sell land only to the
government
(a safety device against the emergence of new large estates) but they may present or bequeath it to relatives.

In September 1993, when the Special Period was biting hard, the Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPCs) were formed to increase food production by replacing inefficient state farms with energetic co-ops. Hitherto the state had controlled seventy-five per cent of the agricultural economy. Now, under Decree-Law 142, the UBPCs gained the permanent right to use land (of course rent free) and to enjoy outright ownership of their produce. Each UBPC elected its own leader, managed its own bank account and was free to link wages and productivity. However, the state continues to demand quotas and fix prices. ANAP, the National Association of Small Producers, negotiates with the government about policies and prices. I never did find out what CCS and CPA do.

Pinar del Rio province, despite its fertility and nearness to Havana, lay undeveloped until the early eighteenth century when an influx of Canary Islanders first planted tobacco. (Cuba’s widespread development began even later; in 1774 the population was 172,000 (or so) and only in the 1840s did it reach one million.) To this day tobacco remains Pinar’s main crop; from here come the world’s most illustrious cigars. However, the factories moved to Havana in the late nineteenth century and ever since the provincial capital, founded in 1669, has been a backwater.

At 11.00 a.m. the half-dozen
jineteros
awaiting the Viazul coach rushed towards me. Firmly I explained that I had friends to stay with and did not want a taxi or a porter to carry my rucksack. They gave me a few sullen stares, and muttered amongst themselves, but hassled no more.

Pinar’s broken streets and pavements and paint-starved buildings
reminded
me of Centro Habana without the buzz – but with the stench of blocked drains and rotting garbage. The centre’s neo-classical buildings affirm lost prosperity, their Corinthian or Ionic columns austerely plain or lavishly decorated with bas-reliefs. The most striking edifice, on a corner of the arcaded Calle Martí, is the Palacio de Guasch – 1909, a late addition. This might be described as a souvenir of Dr Guasch’s travels. A wealthy globe-trotter, he acquired a taste for Gothic spires, Moorish arches, Baroque twirls, menacing dragons and other mythical monsters. The locals are very proud of this Palacio; I wondered what had been lost to clear its site.

A long walk took me to one of those dreary suburbs created when Castroism took on Cuba’s housing shortage. My Key West letter of
introduction
to Aida and Garcia was unnecessary; they had been warned. English-speakers both, and recently retired, they lived on minute pensions irregularly augmented by their only emigré relative, not himself well-off. I knew how much he worried about their being doomed to a lonely old age. They had no children, were not
fidelistas
and had been badly shaken when some of their dissident friends were jailed.

Only Aida was at home when I arrived – a tall, handsome, silver-haired woman evidently in poor health. Garcia was out working on their vegetable plot. This couple belonged to one of the categories most vulnerable to Special Period privations: unlinked to tourism with few incoming dollars and too many middle-class inhibitions to learn how to wheel and deal effectively.

No doubt my exhaustion was obvious; after the ritual demitasse of coffee Aida suggested a siesta and I slept for three hours.

Next, a shopping expedition, my least favourite occupation but now essential (trousers). Luckily an equine bus, rare in Pinar’s suburbs, soon overtook me; the other fifteen passengers were returning from some outlying market. Both mules looked over-worked and underfed; the Trio would have been outraged.

Calle Martí was crowded – with linking, chattering strollers, not with shoppers. Many wide windows displayed only a few pairs of shoes, or one length of fading curtain material, or a few saucepans, or two bras and a pair of briefs. In Sloane Street this use of space sends a certain would-be subtle signal, in Calle Martí the signal is different. Numerous young men were wearing brand new shoes – totally unsuitable, heavy brogues – which meant a supply had recently arrived; new imports are ipso facto coveted. Perhaps, I thought, this also explained the many skin-tight T-shirts, seeming several sizes too small. Aida later confirmed that the sloppy
model is no longer trendy and the latest fashion much prized because it emphasises well-developed biceps and torsos. In one
tienda
baseball caps were marked CP11.50 to CP14.80 and an Adidas track-suit CP66. All garment departments catered for the Cubans’ addiction to vibrant colours which somehow don’t look garish when worn by them. I had to settle for a pair of khaki trousers (male): it was that or scarlet slacks with orange and blue vertical stripes. I didn’t waste time seeking a new watch-strap; even in Havana such a luxury proved unobtainable. But a cobbler to mend my disintegrating sandal was spotted down a side street, sitting on his doorstep fixing a high-heeled slipper. A ten-minute job cost NP5.

Most guide-books ignore Pinar’s stark two-towered Catedral de San Rosendo, standing in a bare yard surrounded by high railings. Happening upon it, I surveyed the porch notice-board; most eye-catching was an announcement that at 7.00 p.m. that very evening a meeting would be held to promote the beatification of Felix Varela. Interesting – beatification is a long step on the way to canonisation and a Cuban saint could be seen, by some, as boosting the counter-revolutionary cause. It was then 6.30 and, finding the inner door locked, I strolled nearby for twenty minutes.

In 1998, when Pope John Paul II described Felix Varela as ‘the
foundation
stone of Cuban national identity’, he wasn’t greatly exaggerating. But the irony is that John Paul II might well have censured this brave Creole priest, a lecturer in philosophy and constitutional law at Havana’s San Carlos seminary and one of a small clerical team who imported the Enlightenment to his homeland. As a member of Cuba’s 1820 delegation to the Cortes in Madrid, he argued (without any support) that for the island’s well-being slavery must be abolished completely and soon. (It was abolished sixty-six years later.) In 1823, after liberalism’s collapse in Spain, Varela was exiled to the US where he published a newspaper,
El Habanero,
advocating Cuban independence. Although this had to be smuggled into Cuba, and distributed secretly, its message became so popular, especially among the young, that the Spanish authorities despatched a fortunately inexpert assassin to New York. Three years later Varela withdrew from direct political activity but his campaigning had already supplied a yeast to help the dough of nationalism rise faster.