Island that Dared (45 page)

In 1989 more than four thousand titles (including schoolbooks) came off the presses: a total of fifty-five million copies, yet supply could never satisfy demand. By 1993 book production had fallen to 1959 levels and from the Casa de las Americas came many wails and much gnashing of teeth. Yet now I was again hearing good of the Special Period. Said Donatilo, ‘Comecon wasn’t only an economic storehouse, it was a cultural muzzle. Being left on
our own was liberating and stimulating. Subsidising books as much as we did was unhealthy – depressed standards. Recently we’ve had a good crop of vigorous young writers, not expecting subsidies, just wanting to be left to write as they think. Having no cash for foreign authors is a problem but some present us with their rights – like Gunter Grass and Alice Walker.’

Ediciones José Martí, the main publishers of political writings, could only bring out twenty titles in 1993. By now its commercial reincarnation, allied with foreign publishers for co-editions of poetry and fiction, is thriving – though without any foreign distribution network. When I
condemned
the poor quality of its expensive translations Julia urged me to complain to the Minister of Culture; later I discovered that she worked in his department.

Bus routes only serve the edges of widespread Miramar and it’s not bicitaxi territory; carless residents either hitch-hike or use car-owning friends as unlicenced taxis. Donatilo advised against hitch-hiking after dark. ‘A few years ago, always safe – not any more.’ Felipe telephoned a neighbour who drove me as far as the Malecón in a vintage Lada.

Next morning Candida lent me a detailed street plan of Necropolis de Colon’s one hundred and thirty-seven acres. Among the world’s largest cemeteries, it accommodates some two million dead Cubans, equal to Havana’s present population. The Church authorities bought this farmland in the 1860s, planning to provide enough consecrated ground for at least one hundred and fifty years, then ran a competition won by a well-known Spanish architect, Calixto Aureliano de Loira y Cardosa. His inspiration was a Roman military camp – everything rigidly symmetrical – which no doubt appealed to the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The construction took fifteen years (1871–86: there were money problems) and Calixto never saw his design completed. Dying at the age of thirty-three, he became, as it were, a pioneer corpse.

I set out on foot but even at 7.00 a.m. the humidity was obliterating. A CP 0.50 bicitaxi ride left me opposite the main entrance half an hour before opening time. Sipping coffee on a café verandah I contemplated Faith, Hope and Charity in Carrara marble, decorating the massive
triple-arched
portal. This is described in guidebooks as ‘neo-Gothic’ though to my eyes it looks closer to neo-Romanesque.

Here, alone on the verandah, I was exposed to another of Cuba’s sad recent changes: a child beggar, aged perhaps eight or nine, insistently pleading for ‘one dollar, pleeeze!’ He was well-fed, well-dressed,
well-shod
,
well-groomed and on a weekday morning would certainly have been at school. Sternly I told him he should be ashamed of himself, this was not how José Martí, or Che, or Fidel expected Cuban children to behave. That litany of ‘role models’ brought an interesting reaction. He blushed (he was a white child), stared at the ground for a moment, then ran away. I had seen several other little boys, equally sturdy and well-turned out, pestering tourists in
al fresco
cafeterias along the Malecón. Poor Fidel! It used to be one of his proudest boasts that there were no beggars in Cuba. Gloomily I reflected that those children represent the fraying edge of the
Revolutionary
ethos.

I ‘collect’ cemeteries (have done since childhood) and this necropolis is like no other. Disconcertingly, it seems part of the city – as might a recreational park – rather than the last resting place of two million. Avenida Colon bisects it, a tarred dual carriageway on which stands the octagonal three-tiered Capilla Central (1886). All the main ‘streets’ – many shaded by towering fig-trees and ceibas – are long and straight. The living are much in evidence – workers clipping shrubs, scrubbing monuments, sweeping streets – little groups strolling to or from family graves – cyclists, motor scooters, the occasional taxi. Two tourist coaches parked by the Capilla for their loads to admire its attractive cupola, very beautiful German stained glass and a Cuban artist’s less pleasing fresco, above the altar, in which fallen angels look more congenial than the Christ who is packing them off to hell. These unfortunate tourists were only given time to photograph the nearby Falla Bronat pantheon before being rounded up by a guide with a whistle.

A combination of great wealth and Roman Catholic mythology is no guarantee of aesthetic satisfaction and many prominent tombs, statues, vaults and pantheons had the unintended consequence of making me want to giggle. Among the more austere memorials, at the end of Avenida Colon, is the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, housing scores of heroes of the Revolutionary Armed Forces including Celia Sanchez, Fidel’s constant companion for twenty-two years. (Some say he has never fully recovered from her death in 1980.) Two pleasant soldiers were guarding these special bones and the young woman obligingly took photographs of me saluting the life-size bas-reliefs of Fidel and Che on the monument’s otherwise undecorated façade. Behind this pantheon lie the scores of
Granma
warriors slaughtered by Batista’s Rural Guard at Alegria de Pio on 5 December 1956. Having paid my respects to them I took a dirt-track going towards the as-yet-unused wilderness at the southern end of the
necropolis – whereupon the male soldier came hurrying after me, shouting agitatedly. I must turn back, stay on the
calles
, that area ahead was closed to the public. I could see no STOP sign or barrier and this bossiness irritated me; it seemed petty to try to exclude tourists from the untidy acres. However those soldiers, being on guard duty, were easily eluded.

Turning east, towards the Osario General (1886, one of the oldest constructions) I soon found another path into a semi-wilderness where the thorny
marabu
had been controlled but the grass grew long. Here were occasional simple, newish graves, adorned with bunches of dried flowers. Ahead loomed four ugly, incongruous concrete block edifices – enormous, doorless, with three floors, like open-sided car-parks. Before investigating, I looked around: there was no one in sight. Moments later I was walking along a narrow corridor surrounded by thousands of concrete boxes, about three feet square, untidily stacked from floor to ceiling, crudely inscribed in black paint with names and dates. Each bore a large ‘X’ chalked in white. Those close enough to be legible dated from the mid-1990s. Many lids were loose, several had fallen off, exposing jumbled skulls and bones – the spines of necessity broken. I was tempted by one femur which would have fitted neatly into my shoulder-bag and been a companion for the Tibetan
thigh-bone
bugle in my study. But sounds of an approaching funeral deterred me, thus averting a possible headline in
Granma
: ‘Irish Author Jailed for Stealing Cuban Bones’. Nearby were two other half-built ossuaries. From all my friends I sought information about this ‘not-for-tourists’ corner of the necropolis. How had all those corpses been so quickly reduced to clean bones without, apparently, the use of fire? And why had they not been buried, given the amount of unused land available? But blank stares gagged my questioning. I seemed to have come upon a Cuban family secret.

Every half-hour from 8.00 a.m. an ancient flat-bottomed motor-boat, carrying a hundred or so standing passengers, crosses the bay from Old Havana’s Muelle de Luz to Regla on the east coast. This ferry is the equivalent of a local bus yet the security checks in the rickety little
embarkation
shed recalled Heathrow. Inside the door a wand-wielding policeman checked each body – and not casually – though he did ignore the frantic bleeping provoked by my pocketful of coins. Then, at a long counter, every bag, box, bucket and sack was thoroughly searched by two young women in smart brown uniforms. This time-consuming routine must bewilder tourists uninformed about the notorious Regla ferry hi-jacking which had such momentous consequences in 2003.

On 1 April eleven men armed with a pistol and knives hijacked the day’s first crossing. There were twenty-nine other passengers aboard including one child and four tourists: two Frenchwomen, two Swedish women. The gang-leader was, as we say in Ireland, ‘known to the police’, having appeared in fifteen criminal (non-political) court cases and been jailed four times. As the hijackers veered towards the open sea in a vessel designed for inland waters the authorities decided against an interception but as usual notified the US Coast Guard. Soon after, the hijackers talked ship-to-shore on the marine band radio and demanded – while holding knives to several of the hostages’ throats – a fast boat to take them to Key West. If denied this request they would throw a few hostages overboard, beginning with the tourists.

At this stage (mid-morning) Fidel was informed – less than twenty-four hours after he had brought to a safe conclusion the hijacking, on 30 March, of an AN-24 plane carrying forty adults and six children from the Isle of Pines to Havana. That hijacker pretended to be armed with a hand-grenade, sham but realistic-looking, and negotiations were extremely convoluted, prolonged and tense. On 19 March, two hours before the invasion of Iraq began, another Isle of Youth-Havana flight had been hijacked by six men armed with knives who forced the pilot to fly to Key West. On the eve of the Regla hijack news broke that those six had been released on bail in Miami, where anti-Castro terrorists habitually enjoy ‘soft landings’.

When the ferry’s tank ran dry she stood more than twenty miles out and a ten-knots wind was raising a sea heavy enough to endanger her. The hijackers agreed to a tow and Fidel directed the Minister of the Interior and the border patrol chief to oversee the rescue from Mariel. Three boats and a tug were deployed. By the time the ferry had been moored to the pier with a line several yards long, Fidel was on the scene. The hijackers continued to demand a faster boat while keeping knives to the throats of several women. It was then midnight and Special Forces, intent on freeing the hostages, had replaced the Coast Guard. But Fidel ordered them to take no action lest lives be lost. Through a police cruiser’s radio, he and his colleagues then tested the gang-leader’s state of mind and concluded that he was a genuine hazard, unlike the solitary hijacker with the mock grenade. At intervals he held his pistol to a Frenchwoman’s head, the safety clip off and the hammer cocked.

At dawn the gang leader sent one of his men to the pier to open negotiations which continued all day, the troops ever alert on the dockside. Then the Frenchwoman who had had the pistol to her head sent an almost
imperceptible signal to an officer. By now the leader was showing signs of exhaustion and stress; as part of this psyops, all communication with him had been cut for more than an hour. As the two Frenchwomen suddenly jumped into the water, a hostage simultaneously grabbed and disarmed the leader, both men falling overboard as they wrestled. The pistol went off, but harmlessly. And near-tragedy became farce when everyone else – passengers and hijackers together – jumped ship. As the curtain fell on this bloodless drama, Fidel congratulated the Frenchwomen – ‘Very brave, very daring!’ Havana friends showed me film footage taken at Mariel during the final hours – harrowing shots of the little boy’s terror and a stupefied look on one Swedish woman’s face as she stood in a parody of an embrace with a long knife being held to her throat. But nothing justifies the execution of three of the hijackers nine days later.

The Regla trial and the thirty-seven trials of the seventy-five ‘dissidents’ arrested in March 2003 (not all were tried individually) came close together – close enough to thoroughly confuse the Vatican which
described
the hijackers as ‘dissidents’ rather than ‘terrorists’. Many of Castroism’s most distinguished friends (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Eduardo Galeano, José Saramago) also angrily condemned ‘Cuba’s recent violations of human rights’ – referring to the three hijackers’ summary executions on 11 April.

In Cienfuegos my legal friend Alberto (by no means an uncritical
fidelista
) had gone on the defensive about those death sentences. He recalled that Regla had followed on a spate of US-condoned aeroplane and boat hi-jackings, and other destabilising provocations. Therefore the government, a few weeks after the illegal and apparently successful ‘regime change’ in Iraq, was asking ‘Which regime next …?’ All eleven Regla hijackers were convicted under the
Law against Acts of Terrorism
(December 2001), hastily passed by the National Assembly in reaction to 11 September and extending the death penalty to include armed hi-jackers.

I am only ninety-nine per cent anti-death penalty (after the Rwandan genocide it seemed to me appropriate) but I found Alberto’s excuse wholly unacceptable. As was Fidel’s feeble and disingenuous defence of the executions, wrapped up in his 2003 May Day speech. Even after
forty-four
years of active US antagonism,
el comandante
cannot have been gripped by a real fear of US invasion – although he was said to have been genuinely rattled on 25 April when Cuban diplomats were officially informed that Washington saw the numerous recent hijackings as ‘a serious threat to the national security of the United States’. (Another through-the-looking-glass
statement, since the US courts declined to prosecute those hijackers who landed safely in Florida, whatever the degree of violence used en route.)

As I was often reminded by
fidelistas
, the US per capita rate of executions far exceeds Cuba’s and in the National Assembly the death penalty provokes angry debates. ‘Soon it will go,’ Alberto had assured me. ‘Our Supreme Court President [Ruben Remigio-Ferro] argues nothing justifies it; it’s against the Revolution’s humanistic ethos.’

In the context of Cuban dissidents, the US Penal Code of 2001 makes interesting reading: