Island that Dared (11 page)

Pedro arrived then, a handsome youth wearing baggy jeans and a baseball cap and riding a piebald mare with foal at foot. He had come to collect milk and offered the Trio rides. Zea hesitated when her turn came, then objected, ‘There’s no saddle, I might fall off!’ ‘Don’t be
silly
!’ snapped Rose. ‘She’s not going to gallop!’

Meanwhile Father was milking, squatting by the pail, quietly crooning, leaning his head against a hind leg. ‘Why doesn’t he have a stool?’ wondered Clodagh. ‘Daddy sits to milk goats.’ ‘Different countries have different habits,’ pronounced Rose, looking wise. Zea had long since fallen for Miguel and was now watching him washing the churn by the well, scouring it with handfuls of sand, a procedure which might disturb EU dairy inspectors. Then pails of frothy warm milk were poured into the churn
through a sieve and I envied the Trio. Milk straight from the cow is my second-favourite drink.

At departure time (8.15) Zea rightly remarked, ‘It’s nearly too hot already.’ We walked close to the cliff edges where noisily pounding waves flung spray so high that momentary rainbows fascinated Zea, usually the first to notice such fleeting details. Cacti – mainly prickly pear – bristled along the cliff tops and low grassy foothills sloped up from the road with many rocky outcrops. Few dwellings were visible but numerous livestock grazed high up – mingling together, not in fields – and over all circled Cuba’s omnipresent turkey vultures, unlovely but useful. Although the Sierra Maestra closely accompanies this coast, rising to eight thousand feet and more, the visual drama is lessened by an odd feature – natural terracing, each terrace six or seven hundred feet high.

Where the road briefly curved inland barbed wire fencing appeared on our left, displaying little ‘Military Zone’ notices. Soon we saw an army barracks, no bigger than a villa but flying the flag. At my suggestion we hurried past in silence. ‘Camping wild’, as the ridiculous phrase has it, is illegal in Cuba, hence our need to avoid official attention as much as possible. In fact the only sign of life was a young woman hanging nappies to dry on a line strung between two basketball stands without nets. However, three large raised vegetable beds, well tended, indicated troops in residence.

By 11.15 all were wilting and as we approached a Dennis-shattered bus shelter I suggested waiting for motor transport to Uvero, the nearest possible source of food. Apart from those rotting bananas, I had eaten almost nothing since leaving Santiago, Rachel’s Chivirico lunch was two days past and the Trio’s breakfast milk intake, though generous, seemed an aeon away to them.

This short-haul open lorry, uncrowded by either people or sacks, dated from the Khruschev era and its rattling precluded conversation with our jolly fellow-passengers. Around the first corner we turned on to a winding, shady track and had to crouch to avoid overhanging branches. Banana plants at varying stages of growth surrounded a few concrete post-Revolution dwellings. We stopped outside a large compound – sending teenage pigs squealing into the undergrowth – to deliver an elderly man and his sack of manioc. Plaintively Clodagh asked, ‘Why can’t we
stay
on paths like this? It’s so nice and cool!’ I pointed ahead: the track ended below a precipitous terrace accessible only to goats. As the lorry turned (a tricky manoeuvre) two mothers carrying babies hurried towards us, relieved to get a lift to Uvera’s polyclinic where the infants
were due to have some inoculation. Come economic hell or high water, no Cuban baby goes uninoculated.

Ten minutes later, in a straggling little town, the driver refused any payment and directed us towards the restaurant, one of a row of drab two-storey 1960s houses set back from the road. At 12.30 p.m. it was firmly closed: peering through the window we saw four tables on which chairs had been upturned. The next-door state bakery sold unlimited fresh lime juice, served ice-cold in small jam jars for NP1. Its day’s stock of ship’s biscuits was gone but we rejoiced to see, on otherwise bare shelves, two long yellow-brown cakes, each weighing half a kilo and costing NP10. These were stodgy and over-sweet (I sampled a fragment) but the Trio fell upon them as Rachel asked if there were any more, or anything else edible. No, not until mañana, but sometimes the
tienda
across the road stocked tinned food. Leaving the Trio under a mango tree finishing those revolting cakes, Rachel cruised around in search of fruit while I investigated the
tienda
. Even in Rachel’s estimation, our current state of malnutrition would surely justify the purchase of those junk foods we had so improvidently spurned in Chivirico. But Uvero’s residents, lacking tourism-generated convertible pesos, apparently couldn’t afford junk food. They could however occasionally afford beer and ruthlessly I bought the entire stock of nine half-litre tins. The amiable and very beautiful young woman behind the counter assumed that I was on my way to Uvero’s Rebel Army monument – some way up a hillside, guarded by a stately grove of royal palms. But I lacked the energy to pay my respects and anyway the others weren’t interested.

Uvero earned its place in the history books on 28 May 1957 when it was the scene of a guerrilla victory described by Che Guevera as having ‘a greater psychological impact than any other in the history of the war’. Yet this battle lasted only two and three-quarter hours. A small wooden barracks almost on the beach, beside an enormous Babun lumber storehouse, was defended by fifty-three Batista troops and attacked by eighty guerrillas. These included one US citizen named Charles Ryan and Celia Sanchez, the first woman to fight in the Rebel Army’s front line. A doctor’s daughter from nearby Media Luna, Celia had supplied most of the weaponry used on this occasion. The Batistas lost fourteen dead, another fourteen captured, nineteen wounded – and six who ran away. Six guerrillas were killed and two seriously injured. In our day of proliferating small (and not so small) arms, and the indiscriminate bombing of ‘suspected terrorist’ homes and villages, Cuba’s civil war seems a mere skirmish.

Che wrote:

The victors took with them to their mountain hideouts the fourteen prisoners (soon to be released: their nuisance value was considerable) and a loggers’ truck with all the medical equipment and weaponry they could collect. Then as now, but for different reasons, Uvero was not where one stocked up on food.

Some of the easiest Sierra Maestra tracks were (and still are) those gouged out by loggers. Throughout this area the Rebel Army received much help from a childhood friend of the Castro brothers, Enrique Lopez, who worked for the Babun brothers – close friends of Batista & Co.

Rachel’s cruising had been fruitless and we held an emergency meeting under the mango tree. Without food we could walk no further. Our
guide-book
mentioned a
campismo
with canteen at La Mula, some ten miles to the west. Most
campismos
are off-limit for tourists but surely three starving children would soften official hearts – Cuban hearts being peculiarly susceptible to juvenile charms.

‘Let’s swim before we hitch,’ pleaded Rose, echoed by her sisters. That cake had worked wonders. But Uvero’s sloping beach proved swimmer-unfriendly just then: romping waves were ebbing too fast. Back on the road, our luck changed; a grossly over-crowded truck-bus was about to depart for Pilon, via La Mula. Boldly we forced our way on, having got the message that every stationary truck-bus is a challenge to be overcome.

A large black man took Clodagh on to his knee, I took Zea on to mine, Rachel and Rose stood. The young woman who formed the other half of a Rose sandwich guessed our destination and was sympathetic. She doubted if the
campismo
, wrecked by Dennis, had yet reopened. But perhaps we’d be allowed to sleep there because of the niños …

We were put down on a long bridge spanning a gorge between high
spurs, their bases palm-fringed. Here began another cornice and below lay the
campismo
, looking dormant, its wide gate closed. Most of the concrete cabins had new tin roofs. Slithering down a dusty embankment we surmounted piles of hurricane débris, found an opening in the damaged fence and were not warmly welcomed by a pot-bellied caretaker with a crew cut and a livid diagonal scar across his golden-brown back. No, we couldn’t camp here and there was no food – or electricity, or running water. Nor could we swim (tempting waves sparkled twenty yards away) because Dennis had piled tons of mingled seaweed and
tree-trunks
against the malecón. And there was no nearby beach. At this point a Trio riot might have been forgiven but all three stoically accepted how things were, shared a litre of water (happily we’d been able to refill our bottles in Uvero’s bakery) and asked for their
sudoku
books and pencils. Grudgingly, the caretaker had agreed to our heat-dodging in the spacious circular pavilion, furnished with new café tables and surrounded by badly mangled palms. When functioning, this simple
campismo
must be an attractive spot. Where else in the world are such affordable resorts now provided by the government?

Rachel and I pondered the ethics of the situation. If we waved a CP20 note (a fortune in rural Cuba) would the caretaker suddenly find himself able to feed us? Probably yes, but perhaps only by depriving others of their rations. The
libreta
system undoubtedly works; we saw no Cubans anywhere looking undernourished. (Only during the worst of the Special Period did malnutrition strike, for the first time since 1959.) It would therefore be cruel (‘unethical’ too weak a word) for relatively rich foreigners to rock the rationing boat.

In a report for the organisation ‘Sustain’, by Courtney Van de Weyer, we are reminded that in Britain, from 1940–1953, ‘Rationing resulted in a restricted, yet nutritious, diet for the wider population. Limited as it was, it is often suggested that the British population has never been healthier than during those years. Certainly infant mortality decreased and children’s general health improved. The rations provided the poor with more protein and vitamins, and the rest of the population ate less meat, fats and sugar.’

Rachel now proposed going backwards for a mile or so to a tiny cove glimpsed from the truck-bus. There we could swim, eat raisins and sleep before continuing west to Las Cuevas, the next village. If it proved foodless we’d have to admit defeat and take a vehicle – if possible onwards to Marea del Portillo, otherwise back to Santiago.

The Trio approved of that little cove, its patch of sand separated from
the ocean by a climbable rock barrier through which waves surged to form a pool some three feet deep and fifteen yards wide. Our arrival was observed by a young woman who immediately hurried down from her hillside
bohio
, with toddler at foot, to warn us that beyond the barrier flowed dangerous undercurrents. Appalled by the notion of our camping out she invited us to stay – but tentatively, uneasily, not with Miguel’s
light-heartedness.
We hesitated, thinking ‘rice and chicken’. She would however be taking a risk by entertaining us and she looked quite relieved when we declined her invitation.

A low headland, grassy and scrubby, overlooked our cove to the east and there I found an ideal – by my standards – campsite. The Trio had other standards. ‘It’s not level,’ objected Rose, ‘we could roll over the edge while we’re asleep.’ ‘There are lumpy stones under the grass,’ reported Clodagh after an inspection. ‘The grass has prickly things in it,’ added Zea.

Rachel and I, underfed and short-tempered, ignored all this, unrolled five flea-bags and said, ‘Bedtime!’ We then finished the Buccaneros, slapping at mosquitoes while a swollen golden moon slid upwards through diaphanous streamers of cloud. Nearby rose some of the Sierra Maestra’s highest ridges along which, on the night of 27–28 May 1957, Fidel led the amateur Rebel Army to attack Uvero’s barracks. Following a loggers’ track, in total darkness and moving silently as cats, it took them eight hours to cover the ten miles from their La Plata camp.

In
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War
Che recalls that at other times the Rebels endured extreme thirst and hunger:

At dawn the others were somewhere else, not where their bags had been laid. Rachel, I deduced, had had a testing time, coping with Rose’s
paranoia about falling off the cliff and Clodagh’s absurd sensitivity to a few pebbles. Only Zea and I were feeling bouncy after a sound night’s sleep. With no breakfast to delay us, we were marching west by 6.45 as the sky behind us brightened.

Here was an austerely beautiful corniche. Its sheer naked cliffs – streaked ochre, silver, pink – towered above us as we walked by a narrow pebbly verge, devoid of vegetation, overhanging the dazzling blue sea. This sparsely inhabited area generated little traffic of any sort. We often rested and doled out raisins but those cliffs acted as storage-heaters and by 10.00 exhaustion threatened.