Island that Dared (50 page)

At Sadler’s Wells in 1952 Alicia Alonso’s dancing in
Swan Lake
so enchanted me that I spent all my food money on a repeat performance. A few years later this prima ballerina returned to Cuba in Messianic mode and personally funded a small company, with foreign dancers. Here the narrative has a fairly-tale tinge. Fidel was intent on providing culture as well as food and medicine and one day he appeared without warning at Alicia’s side. Would she help the Revolution by founding a state ballet company? Fidel made two hundred thousand dollars available – at that date a powerful sum – and added a colonial mansion as headquarters.

Alicia immediately set about training local dancers while introducing the population to ballet. The latter task took her to many factories, collective farms, military barracks, universities and hospitals: everywhere she demonstrated her art under the most taxing conditions. (No wonder she and Fidel became life-long friends!) Recruiting pupils was not difficult; most Cubans respond to rhythm like trees to the wind and dance
spontaneously
as soon as they can toddle.

In parks and plazas I had often been puzzled by little groups of boys, aged perhaps ten to sixteen, practising turning very fast on a curved wooden board. Now Juan explained: they were striving to master
double-figure
pirouettes. Because ballet dancing is not mocked as an effete profession, Cuba produces an abundance of male talent. When Carlos Acosta was a very naughty nine-year-old his truck-driver father reckoned a discipline-plus-fun ballet school would sort him out – and so a star was born.

Alicia danced on stage into her mid-seventies but most ballerinas retire much earlier, then coach their juniors. Cuban ballet dancers’ dedication to their art is single-minded; it puzzles them to hear of retired dancers in other countries seeking second careers.

The bad news came at 5.30 in a note to Juan; rain-damage to the Teatro had forced a postponement of
Giselle
. However, compensation was just around the corner in Casa Agramonte’s gracious courtyard – chamber music with a programme I might have chosen myself: Beethoven’s ‘Archduke Trio’ and ‘Spring Sonata’, Mozart’s ‘Piano Trio in G Major’, Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ Quartet.

At 8.00 a.m. next day I was back in Casino Campestre because five-
year-old
Patricio insisted on taking me to the zoo, a routine Sunday treat and his elders seemed relieved to have a stand-in. Supplied with bread for the flamingos and biscuits for the monkeys we paid, respectively, half a national peso and quarter of a national peso, sums too minuscule for a euro
conversion
. This ordeal was even more harrowing than expected, the
centrepiece
a deep lion-pit recalling Dante’s
Inferno
as illustrated by Doré. An adult lion and three lionesses were confined in a stinking enclosure, some twenty yards by ten, with brick walls and stone paving – not a blade of grass to be seen. A jaguar and a puma, both alone, endured much smaller enclosures. The bedraggled flamingos shared their opaque lake and muddy islet with a variety of ducks, the only healthy-looking creatures around. Two baboons, a chimpanzee and several smaller monkeys seemed less unhappy, being fed by their regular visitors. A few children were allowed to tease them, which shocked Patricio; I couldn’t help hoping for nipped fingers. Desperate to escape, I offered three goat-cart rides – a successful bribe.

On the way home the streets were bicycle-busy as families pedalled to Sunday gatherings. Maximum load: pappa with three on board –
handle-bars
, cross-bar, carrier. Mamma followed with a prone infant roped to her carrier.

Glancing into the churches we passed, I saw meagre congregations and octogenarian priests. In one simple, half-restored small church eleven women and one man were standing in front of the tabernacle fervently reciting the rosary aloud. In an otherwise empty side-chapel of de la Soledad, Patricio lit a candle while I watched a semi-crippled elderly woman receiving some odd treatment from a stalwart forty-ish mulatta – much use of hands but they never touched the body, being slowly moved over its contours with murmured incantations. Throughout the city many Santería devotees were to-ing and fro-ing, recognisable by their all-white garb.

The open-air cafeteria where I was to meet Juan at noon overlooked an unprotected railway crossing on a main street and one could watch Neanderthal goods wagons indecisively shunting backwards and forwards. Tourists were scarce in Camaguey but two fat elderly Irishmen and one trim white-haired Canadian sat at this bar and had each acquired an early teenage
jinetera
– slim, honey-skinned, glossy-haired girls wearing very short shorts and bikini tops, expertly stroking and nuzzling their
sex-peditioners
. Why can’t I ever take this commonplace scene in my stride? Am I laughably out of synch with the real world? Those six were the only other customers. Then I saw Juan’s face as he came through the
vine-draped
entrance archway to find himself beside them. Obviously he, too, was out of synch. Grimly I remarked that we were looking at part of the cost of Cuba’s recovery from the Special Period – a part overlooked the day before as Juan dwelt on the island’s self-sufficiency.

By now I felt able to question Juan about the criticisms I had heard of Cuba’s ‘humanitarian internationalism’. A few people had hinted that not all the teams sent to work in remote regions are enthusiastic volunteers. Others had dismissed these missions as mere propaganda stunts, arguing that the money thus spent is needed at home, could improve housing and agriculture, could be spent on essential imports. Even those who seemed proud of Cuba’s capacity to help the victims of callous capitalism doubted if such programmes could continue, because the idealism fuelling them belongs to Cuba’s isolated past and can’t be expected to survive its
contamination
by free-marketeers.

The coercion hint infuriated Juan, on the whole an equable chap. How could thousands of Cubans, dispersed across three continents, possibly be controlled from Havana? ‘As for “propaganda”,’ said Juan, ‘even if our intervention is a sort of stunt, isn’t it a more civilised way of “power projection” than militarism? If the
Yanquis
sent medical brigades to Afghanistan instead of bombers – inoculations instead of stealth
missiles – they’d have friends all over the country helping them against the Taliban! Our “power projection” shows poor people what anti-capitalism means down on the ground, in their
barrios
and villages. That way, we do menace the neo-liberals. In the US, with money you get every best medical advance, without money you’re left to die.’

‘It is very extraordinary,’ said I, ‘that this small country is able to offer so much help to so many.’

Juan referred me to Fidel’s speech at the international medical brigades’ launch in 1998, immediately after Hurricane Mitch’s devastation of Central America. I easily located it and the punch lines were:

An ignoble scepticism tinges one’s reaction to such sentiments – then one feels ashamed. Has our profit-driven world corrupted us all to the extent that we can hardly believe in genuine altruism? Looking back, is there much difference between Cuba’s roving medical and educational teams and those countless Christian missionaries who spent uncomfortable lifetimes in isolated places (‘hardship posts’, in UN-speak) providing services for no material reward? But of course I’m overlooking a crucial difference: the missionaries were confident of a post-mortem reward, not on offer to Cubans.

Juan observed, ‘There’s a lot about Cuba capitalists can’t understand so they say it’s not true – like Fidel being honest, having nothing stashed away. They think leaders must get very rich very quick.’

We chuckled then over the
Forbes
boomerang episode. In June 2006 that magazine rashly listed Fidel as a billionaire and the global media gleefully circulated this misinformation, not even the
Guardian
pausing to check before playing Mr Forbes’s game. The shrewd Fidel offered to resign at once if anyone could find a single dollar belonging to him in any financial hidey-hole in any country. When no such dollar appeared
Forbes
had to admit that their guesstimate of Fidel’s personal wealth was based on the assumed value of Cuba’s state-owned assets. Now that Fidel’s indifference to money had to be recognised, it became a major character flaw, ruinous for Cuba’s economy. The media quoted such critics as Fred
Halliday – ‘He remains the prisoner of a moralistic hostility to material wealth’. And Angel Tomas Gonzalez – ‘Fidel’s problem is that he genuinely dislikes money. That’s why there was no problem between him and Pope John Paul.’

How many people believe what they read in
Forbes
? Malcolm Forbes, its owner (rich beyond computing and often described as ‘McCarthy incarnate’) was once a wannabe White House tenant. On 12 December 2005 his magazine recommended Israel as ‘the go-to country for
anti-terrorism
technologies’.

Without bluntly questioning Juan about Raúl, I could sense a hostile strand in his attitude to Cuba’s then Acting-President. However, he
approved
of the recent release of sixty-five ‘dissident’ prisoners, a move interpreted by some as a concession to US demands. Those freed included Armando Betancourt Reina, a journalist employed by Nueva Prensa Cuba, a Miami-based website, who had served fifteen months for concocting a story about a Camaguey dissident family’s eviction from their home – the sort of story US-funded journalists are paid to write. ‘Those agents have to be punished,’ said Juan, ‘but fifteen months is long enough.’

Back in Casa Max, we all sat around the TV to watch that morning’s Che commemorations at Santa Clara. Fidel, participating from his
convalescent
quarters, looked gaunt but cheerful, his voice sounded a trifle shaky – and yet, as Alina put it, ‘There’s not a marble missing!’

The Venezuelan President’s prominent role at these ceremonies evoked interesting reactions; in this bourgeois-tainted household Hugo Chavez seemed much less popular than among Cuba’s masses.

Irma complained, ‘That man is too demagogic. And too clever at using Fidel. Why is he cheered all over the hemisphere? Because we back him! I don’t understand why he’s treated like a favourite son and honoured guest – getting to see Fidel in hospital when no one else could!’

Alina, speaking English for my benefit, said to her mother, ‘Can’t you see, now it’s Fidel needing
him
! His public worshipping makes it look like our Revolution still leads the poor against the rich. And don’t forget oil! For any sort of normal living everyone needs this demagogue!’

Max spoke no English but Alina translated his brief remark. The bartering of fully equipped medical brigades for oil pleased him, he wouldn’t want Cuba to be accepting ‘aid’ from ‘that man’.

Juan had other concerns. He asked me, ‘Did you get what Chavez was saying? About possibly being able to give us some political help – I don’t like it! What does he mean? Some sort of formal alliance? Think how the
Yanquis
could manipulate that sort of talk! We’ve enough problems with them, we don’t need Washington-Caracas hostility polluting our space.’

As we were saying ‘adios’, out on the pavement, Juan murmured, ‘Some people don’t like Chavez because he’s a lower class mulatto. The
Revolution
couldn’t civilise everyone!’

In the railway station’s obscure little office for foreign passengers I was invited to sit on the spare stool while a tall, wide-smiling, bushy-haired young woman wrote all my details into a massive ledger before storing them on her computer. This belt-and-braces routine intrigued me; evidently official Cuba has not yet put its faith in the new technology. Departure time was 2.00 p.m.

At 1.00 I joined the long confirmation queue; at 1.40 we were told that the track to Holguin had ‘become broken’. A replacement bus would collect us, perhaps within an hour or two. The long, wide, crowded
waiting-room
had unglazed windows on either side yet no current of air moved through. The sky was half-overcast, the humidity extreme; almost
everybody
carried a much-used sweat-rag.

As the hours passed I could feel myself becoming zombified. From a nearby stall the peckish bought NP10 pizzas – stodge with a thin tomato and cheese topping. I ate a NP8 avocado, rugger ball-sized, and wondered why Cubans don’t snack off fruits instead of stuffing themselves with carbohydrates.

A small TV set, high on one end wall, showed a quartet of senior government ministers and President Chavez signing fourteen trade
agreements
. The ministers wore well-tailored white tropical suits, Hugo looked relaxed and informal in a loose red shirt. Raúl also wore civvies, was being the Acting-President rather than the Minister of Defence. He spoke in a dreary monotone and seemed an insignificant little figure, not just in contrast to Fidel but by any standards. A misleading impression; on the revolutionary scene Little Brother has never been insignificant. No doubt this was an historic occasion but the solemn signing and counter-signing and exchanging of fourteen documents, however momentous, has limited entertainment value. Between each document there was much apparently affectionate hugging and kissing and at least one long speech. Nobody around me looked even slightly interested until Hugo took over at the end and began to crack jokes, greatly appreciated by the crowd. (Would Irma have laughed? Somehow I think not.)