Island that Dared (38 page)

Being again in a supervised area, my track plan was thwarted in the first hamlet en route. A panting middle-aged woman pursued me. Where was my guide? No guide? She frowned and sighed and patted my shoulder sympathetically before turning me around: I must follow the motor-road or hire a guide. In the Viñales Valley – she consoled me – there is much for tourists to do. Everyone likes to visit the village where healing waters are sold, and the caves where runaway slaves used to hide, and the
underground
lakes where the fish are blind – and so on. At one of the hotels I
could hire a guide. Thanking her for her advice, I took a short-cut to the main road, through tobacco fields.

The wide Viñales Valley and its numerous side-valleys (of which I was now being deprived) are populous and prosperous, the red soil fertile, the
mogotes
improbable – Nature at its most eccentric. ‘Mogote’ means ‘haystack’: an
ill-chosen
simile, lacking respect and dignity. Many of these freestanding, conical limestone outcrops rise to a thousand feet and one fantasises about their having been separately transported to this flatness from some sierra’s foothills. In fact their formation is estimated to have begun one hundred and sixty million years ago. All are domed and sheer-sided and vividly green, supporting an immense variety of trees, shrubs, lianas, mosses, epiphytes, ferns. This specialised environment wildly excites a whole range of ‘experts’. Here are more than twenty species of endemic flora, the cork palm grows nowhere else and
Chondropomete
is found only at a certain altitude on a few
mogotes
. This snail has long, fluorescent orange eyestalks visible by night from a considerable distance and a unique self-defence mechanism; extruding a length of elastic glue, it hangs beneath rocky shelves. (As I scratched, I wondered if my invaders are also something special, endemic to that sandy plateau.) Thrice I sat at a
mogote
’s base, gazing up in awe at its dense variety of vegetation, exhibited on so small a space.

Now hitch-hiking was inevitable; Cuba’s least hot months (January and February) were over and I couldn’t walk eighteen miles on that shadeless tarred road. At a junction ten miles from La Palma, I joined several
would-be
passengers in a collapsing bus-stop shelter surrounded by acres of tobacco, malanga, yuca, sweet potatoes. One man spoke English – Raúl, a high school teacher on his way home to La Palma. Within half an hour two young men had jumped aboard a horse-cart going towards Viñales, then a young woman got a ride on a motor-bike. When an ambulance appeared Raúl waved and shouted and pursued it, then vigorously beckoned me. We were in luck, the driver was his cousin and the ambulance was off-duty having just delivered a patient to Pinar del Rios’s cardiac unit. Proudly Raúl showed off the paramedical equipment which reminded me of the control room of a nuclear power station. According to the statistics, patients rarely die in Cuban ambulances, whatever their fate on arrival. Raúl remarked that if the government has to choose, because of the US blockade, between the health service and public transport, he regards spending hours by the roadside as a lesser evil. An admirable attitude, yet it worried me. Using the blockade to explain all Cuba’s difficulties is a thought-stopper. Cubans need to be asking, ‘What else has gone wrong?’

La Palma – about the same size as Viñales but off the tourist trail – has no hotel or
casas particulares.
As a leading citizen known to everybody (many his past pupils), Raúl set about breaking the law on my behalf with the assistance of a young army officer who recommended a certain
casa
on condition I paid in national pesos; were the family noticed spending convertible pesos they could be in trouble. The more I saw of the dual currency system the more it exasperated me.

As we walked through dreary streets to a pleasantly rural suburb, Raúl gave me some disappointing advice. I had hoped to find a track from La Palma into the Sierra Rosario but – ‘only with a guide … ’ Raúl, himself an enthusiastic hiker and amateur botanist, recommended instead a
three-day
walk from Bahia Honda to the little town of Los Arroyos a few miles from San Cristobal. He knew those mountains well, it was a clear path and if I kept well away from Soroa, where ecotourism was being developed, I should escape observation.

Outside the four-room
casa non-particular,
Raúl paused to ‘explain’ the family: a white octogenarian
abuelo
who had been senile for some years, his much younger mulatto wife, their two sons, a daughter-in-law and a grandson. The older son, Juan, worked in an agricultural co-op; his wife, Odelia, was a vet. Jorge, aged twenty, was jobless and a bit of a problem; Raúl left the problem undefined.

My arrival bewildered everyone but recovery was rapid. Raúl didn’t linger: he had to attend what he described as ‘a local democracy’ meeting.

Behind the living-room, with its TV set and floor of polished cement, a small dark kitchen held a large fridge (Soviet made, long since defunct, now a cupboard), a homemade tin wood-stove and a chipped sink. Everything looked dingy, rusty, cracked, dented – but spotlessly clean. As in Jagua, the fully furnished bathroom was waterless. The verandah served as a fifth room where
abuelo
sat in his rocking chair, dribbling slightly and wearing a vague, sad smile while his wife chopped vegetables and sifted rice, keeping one eye on the year-old who had just begun to walk and was often held up to kiss his grandfather. As the family went to and fro everyone (including the problematic Jorge) paused to greet
abuelo
, to check that he was sitting comfortably, to dry his chin, to ask if he needed a drink – or just to stroke his forehead. This was a poor household in material terms but otherwise rich.

At sunset Odelia summoned me to eat in the kitchen at a little table under which sat a hopeful black and white cat very like my own beloved Francis; he stimulated a rare pang of homesickness. Soon his hopes were
fulfilled: the boniness of the fish course defeated me. But the rice and chicken wing and green tomato salad were delicious.

Jorge didn’t seem to resent being ousted from his room, a lean-to shed off the kitchen, its camp bed beneath an unshuttered window. Outside, within arm’s length, a magnificent fighting-cock occupied a spacious cage and crowed aggressively from 12.50 a.m. but the tick bites were keeping me awake anyway. They bled that evening, surely a positive development – poison being eliminated.

The next day’s heavily overcast sky made it possible to walk the
twenty-four
miles to Playa La Mulata on an equine earth-track beside a traffic-free road. This was a subtly tinted landscape of palm-filled hollows and
goat-supporting
hillocks, new-ploughed tobacco fields, coffee groves, orange orchards and paddy-fields. From these last rose swarms of daytime
mosquitoes
– and whoever said mosquitoes don’t go for moving objects was wrong. That day’s most durable memory is of a pearly grey sky above the navy blue Sierra Rosario above sloping expanses of orange ploughland.

In the little town of Playa La Mulata the vibes were rather disagreeable. Why do I say that? What right does one have to judge a place on fifteen minutes acquaintanceship? But that’s too wide a debate for here and now. Let’s just say that at 5.40 p.m. on 7 March those residents of La Mulata I chanced to meet didn’t like me. (And come to think of it, why should they?)

A signpost directed me to the only
casa particular
(two kilometres) and to a simple cliff-top motel (three kilometres) – the latter, alas! forbidden to foreigners. Mentally I congratulated the authorities who had reserved for Cubans this superb coastal stretch, undefiled by developers. But Pedro, the son of the
casa particular,
later pointed out that jagged rocky shorelines do not appeal to tourists. Beautiful they may be, but not economically viable. That phrase caught my attention and I discovered that Pedro, through a cousin in New Jersey, was doing a business management correspondence course.

Outside this substantial tiled farmhouse, its six rooms high-ceilinged and bright, a flock of noisy turkeys gubble-gubble-gubbled under lime and mango trees while beside the verandah a sow nursed ten two-day-old bonhams. In the dining room and front parlour china cabinets were filled with cut-glass brought back from ‘reward’ trips to Czechoslovakia and gay tiles patterned the floors. Marta, a tabby cat, rarely left her cushioned chair in the parlour where a nylon rice sack draped the TV, even when Roberto and Angelica were sitting in front of the set, listening attentively.
Pedro explained. TV images greatly agitated Marta whose first litter was imminent. Her owners had diagnosed ultra-sensitivity to unnatural
movements
and lighting effects. Pedro, smiling indulgently at his parents, diagnosed premature senility.

The register revealed that I was the first guest in over three months. Hence the low tariff: CP19 for B&B, the breakfast a sustaining
three-course
meal served at 6.30 to convenience me.

An alarming weather forecast (
cloudless
!) made an early start essential though Pedro reckoned I’d easily get a lift to Bahia Honda. Luckily I couldn’t foresee that he was wrong; throughout that gruelling day hope sprang eternal. A few school buses overtook me but one should use them only in crises. None of the four truck-buses would stop; youths were clinging to the cab roofs.

Swayed by Pedro’s optimism I’d skimped on water and by 11.00 needed to approach a
bohio
with my empty bottle. Yes, the surly young woman would fill it at the communal well – for CP3!

In a rare patch of shade I read for two midday hours, an odd little book by a sociologist, Aurelio Alonso Tejada, entitled
Church and Politics in
Revolutionary
Cuba
– the theme fascinating, the translation execrable. For example:

I struggled on beneath my umbrella which gives minimal protection in such temperatures. By now the terrain was more hilly: on my right recently deforested slopes, dusty and naked, on my left flat scrubby land. Then for a few miles my view was restricted on both sides by a reforestation scheme, high brown embankments dotted with junior palms, their fronds dull and apathetic. Next came a hill, still pine-clothed, where charcoal-burners were at work. From this crest the sea suddenly took over, its glittering blue immensity making the coastal strip below seem curiously insubstantial.

My least enjoyable Cuban hike ended at a bus-stop where a faded sign said Bahia Honda: five kilometres. When a packed bus arrived many more squeezed aboard and I wondered how often ribs are fractured on Cuba’s public vehicles.

In an enormous town centre
tienda
, TRD Caribe, I stocked up for my
final treklet, then took a mule-bus to Motel Punta de Piedra. As Bahia Honda has no tourist accommodation foreigners are accepted, though not encouraged, in this motel two miles north of the town near the start of my mountain path. That night I was the only foreign guest, the rest being young Cuban labourers working on Soroa’s development.

By dawnlight I was off, feeling rather tense, keen to get away from Bahia Honda’s outlying
bohios
before the residents had rubbed the sleep from their eyes. A red-earth track climbed between royal palms and tall banana plants, passing several
bohios
entwined by pink and white convolvulus. Puzzled
campesiños
stared at me but none asked awkward questions. I ignored them, as is not my wont, and tried to look purposeful and authoritative, like a person on some important mission. (Botanical? Ornithological? Entomological? The Sierra Rosario attracts all sort of experts.) By noon I could relax: no habitations were visible.

Cuba’s sierras don’t lack variety: my three treklets took me into very different worlds. Here were conical hills separated by narrowish valleys, their vegetation so dense it seems impenetrable when seen from above, yet all these little paths are much used and well defined. However, Raúl had not warned me about the plural; he had spoken of ‘a clear path’ and left me with the impression one couldn’t go astray. In fact, at the many junctions, nothing pointed the way to Los Arroyos. And now I couldn’t afford to get lost; there was a plane to be caught, the sort that refunds nothing if you miss it. In such circumstances their sense of direction helps most people but not me; maybe hunter-gatherers didn’t need this sense as they wandered from cave to cave.

At 5.00-ish goats bleating in the distance led me to a long grassy ledge near a summit. Amidst the
bohios
stood a neat little thatched polyclinic; it really is true that Castroism brought health care to everyone. To camp so early seemed unwise but where was the next level space? Then an elderly woman noticed me, looked scared, called the doctor. He appeared in his underpants with soap suds in his hair; he had spent the day touring his district on foot – the paths were too steep for a riding-mule. A handsome young black, Sofiel towered over the stocky locals. Anxiously I asked if this was the path to Los Arroyos – it was. Sofiel’s English improved as he relaxed and stopped worrying about grammar but I don’t think he ever quite understood why an
abuela
was on the loose in these mountains.

In the
bohio
where Sofiel lodged his host – a blue-eyed, white-haired coffee-farmer – grudgingly agreed that there was no alternative to
sheltering
me for the night. Later he softened and wanted his guest to know that he had served for three years in Angola and without Cuban help South Africa’s apartheid regime would still be in power. (2006 was the thirtieth anniversary of the Cuban troops’ first deployment to Angola, an event officially celebrated. Therefore many veterans felt free to refer proudly to their own contribution, about which they had kept silent for so long.)