Island that Dared (12 page)

‘Let’s have a long rest,’ begged Clodagh. ‘Where?’ demanded Rose. ‘There’s no shade.’ ‘I’m hot enough to
die
,’ announced Zea. ‘Best to keep going,’ said Rachel, ‘Las Cuevas must be close.’ And it was.

Around the next bend the corniche ended in a short, wide valley where a few score scattered dwellings, linked by stony paths, clung to steep slopes. Alas! there was no beach; fifty feet below the road rough seas swirled over sharp rocks. Here the Trio took refuge under a row of puny wayside trees while their seniors foraged.

Las Cuevas was dusty, grey, arid and quiet; occasionally a distant figure appeared as we passed the polyclinic, local government offices and a school with the customary playground bust of José Martí, leader of the 1895-8 independence struggle against Spain – reminding me of the BVM statues once common in Irish school grounds. Only water was available in the bakery where a memorably handsome young man interrupted his domino contest to fill our bottles – for free. He regretted having no ship’s biscuits, or anything edible, and informed us that Las Cuevas is shopless.

Rachel broke the bad news to her hungry offspring. ‘Seems it has to be Marea de Portillo or back to Santiago.’ I marvelled as the endlessly resourceful mother produced a box of coloured chalks and at children’s limitless energy. Short of food and sleep, having just walked eight miles – the last hour in punishing heat – the Trio now set about chalking the
tree-shaded
bit of road and playing hop-scotch. Their parents, I suggested to Rachel, could make lots of money by using them in a TV advertisement for Californian organic raisins.

A trickle of energetic foreigners passes through Las Cuevas, one of the officially approved starting points for the ascent of Pico Turquino, Cuba’s highest mountain (1,974 metres). Yet the few villagers who strolled past didn’t stop to chat, restricting their greetings to silent nods. Unsupervised tourists are still treated with caution in some rural areas.

Sitting on the gravelly ground, using rucksacks propped against trees as backrests, Rachel and I laid bets on when/if a vehicle would appear and in which direction it might take us. To the west the corniche continued for miles, curving around those radiator cliffs, and once a truck came into view, galvanising us. A false hope, its destination was local. When the
hop-scotchers
gave up at noon Zea and I settled to rummy, the others being in
sudoku
mode. Not long after an elderly man approached – wiry and
fine-featured,
wearing a kind expression and an air of authority. Shaking hands with Rachel and me he addressed us both as compañera and introduced himself as Wilfredo. (First names are the norm in Castro’s Cuba; the President being universally known as ‘Fidel’ is not quirky.) Were we waiting for public transport or expecting a friend to arrive? If no vehicle came we could sleep in the Turquino National Park rangers’ hut: he pointed to it, on a ledge beyond the village. Meanwhile would we like some refreshment? A milky hot chocolate drink? Fresh orange juice? Like puppies at feeding time the Trio yelped with excitement.

Wilfredo lived in a larger-than-average white-washed house high above the road and we watched him taking a short cut, nimbly leaping from boulder to boulder. Forty minutes later he descended on a path, bearing litre jugs of hot chocolate and ice-cold pure orange juice – costing a mere NP20. In
tiendas
tins of imported drinking chocolate are wildly expensive but many Cuban villagers grind their own cocoa berries.

During our four-hour wait two licensed taxis passed, one going each way, their passengers staring in astonishment at the displaced persons by the wayside. Then at 2.40 that local lorry reappeared – bound for El Maja, a village so small we’d hardly noticed it on our ride to La Mula. From there, Wilfredo assured us, a dawn bus departs for Uvero – whence an afternoon truck-bus usually (though not always) departs for Santiago.

Six others climbed on to the lorry’s load of wooden stakes and the driver invited me into the cab. Our situation puzzled him. From where, how and why had we got stranded in Las Cuevas? My explanation that we had walked most of the way from Chivirico because we enjoy walking left him even more puzzled. On arrival in El Maja I offended him by opening my purse. He made a dismissive gesture and said something derogatory about
capitalismo.
After that, when riding in farm lorries, I suppressed my capitalistic impulse to pay for transport.

El Maja, too, was shopless but I faintly hoped for some other source of beer – perhaps a private enterprise household selling Hatuey? Wandering alone up a side road I discovered that there is more to El Maja than meets
the main roader’s eye. Several laneways wind between detached or terraced post-’59 one-storey homes. These dreary little dwellings lack the charm of
bohios
but are supplied with electricity, indoor loos, showers and fridges, evidence of Fidel’s wish to modernise rural Cuba. I stopped everyone I met (two men, three women) to ask my ‘cerveza?’ question. All emphatically said ‘No!’ and conveyed disapproval of my mission. Possibly Ché’s influence persists in these communities. When setting standards for the Rebel Army, after its victory, the ascetic Che wrote:

No mere rhetoric, this. When the Rebels became the rulers of Cuba in January 1959, all observers were astonished by their orderly behaviour. The English historian Hugh Thomas puts it well in his monumental
The Cuban Revolution:

When I rejoined the others, looking grumpy, Clodagh exclaimed, ‘Poor Nyanya! She
needs
beer!’ Rachel hid her own yearning and said primly, ‘It’s good to give our livers a rest now and then.’

Again we went backwards, for a mile or so, to a sheltered beach where mountainous sand dunes would conceal our camp from the road and the swimming was safe and the Trio’s mosquito nets could be hung from low sea-grape branches. In the shade of those trees Rachel and I studied the map at length, debating various possibilities, then hatched a new plan. Having bought enough tinned food for a nine-day trek (the Trio would have to do some of the porterage) we’d take a bus to Baracoa and roam
through its surrounding mountains on secondary roads. In that much more fertile region bananas at least would be plentiful and to date our nocturnal experiences had been reassuring; it seemed easy to get away with illegal camping.

I unrolled my bag near the waves and for an unforgettable hour lay watching a multicoloured display of distant sheet lightening. We associate lightning with thunder; to me there was something ethereal, mysterious, almost mystical about those spasms of silent brilliance flaring among cloud banks on the far horizon.

Before dawn Rachel was busy dismantling mosquito nets with the aid of her forehead torch.

‘It’s dark!’ grumbled Zea. ‘Why are we awake?’

‘Because the bus goes early,’ replied Rose, ‘and if we miss it we must walk to Santiago.’

‘I could easily walk,’ said Clodagh. ‘But Mummy and Nyanya are too empty, they won’t eat our raisins.’

As we struggled through the deep loose sand of those high dunes I thought about Ché’s September 1958 marathon expedition from the Sierra Maestra to Las Villas province. His second-in-command, Camilo Cienfuegos, afterwards recorded:

Che himself recalled that on the banks of the La Plata river, three miles from Las Cuevas:

At the bus stop a crowd of thirty or more – mainly young people – had
already gathered in the half-light. Although it wasn’t a queue-shaped crowd one young woman made it plain, politely but firmly, that as the latest arrivals we just might be left behind. Seemingly buses and
truck-buses
have different boarding conventions. As the sun rose No. 7 appeared, a small Cuban-made model with unglazed windows, broken doors and metal seats. By then we were no longer the latest arrivals and the same young woman saw to it that the newcomers didn’t ‘jump’ us. Queues don’t have to be queue-shaped to work.

At numerous junctions, where mountain tracks joined the road, passengers got on and off; twice the driver had trouble starting a US-born engine that may well have been aged when transplanted to this bus body.

By 8.30 we were back on Playa Virginia where rummy filled the gaps between swims. The bakery opened at 10.00 but it wasn’t a ship’s biscuit day. The
tienda
opened at 11.00 but had been drained of its monthly ration of cerveza. At noon we were first into the restaurant but lean pork was off the menu and despite (or because of?) being so ‘empty’ I found my mound of rice, mixed with chunks of bristly fat, hard to take.

Lest the truck-bus not stop for us on the main road we walked to its terminus shed, a shadeless uphill mile from the restaurant. That journey – as crowded and much hotter than our early ride from Santiago – tested everyone’s stoicism to the limit.

Irma was not even slightly surprised to see us back on her doorstep several days ahead of schedule.

As the Viazul coach (there is no Santiago-Baracoa alternative) hooted through an agreeable rush-hour – fiacres, bicycles, children thronging to school – a row of hundred-foot royal palms stood out blackly against a blood-red sunrise and Clodagh said, ‘I’d like to paint that!’ Two couples, Canadian and Swedish, were looking forward to a taxi trip from
Guantanamo
city to Cuba’s most piquant tourist attraction, Mirador Los Malones. From that high platform the US naval-base-cum-concentration-camp may be observed through a telescope sardonically provided by the Cuban army. Our other fellow-passengers were bound for various towns en route; only
las irlandeses
went all the way to Baracoa.

Beyond the city gentle blue hills overlooked wide pastures and Rose observed that the numerous cattle were much bonier than their coastal cousins. Cuba’s early settlers had rejoiced to find the island so well suited to stock-raising and Europe’s craving for cheap leather soon made the creoles rich. Annually throughout the 1570s, twenty thousand hides were legally exported; illegal trading probably doubled that figure. By the end of the seventeenth century enormous ranches covered areas later given over to cane, coffee and tobacco. Until the 1820s cattle and tobacco remained dominant, though by then Cuba’s three thousand ranches and five thousand tobacco farms were competing with one thousand colossal sugar mills and two thousand
cafetales
.

The Trio exclaimed in wonder as we drove through a fragment of dense forest, some trees liana-draped, some sustaining complexities of epiphytes like fantastical hanging baskets. Along the shaded roadsides tall coffee bushes thrived but too soon this interlude was over.

Although the Revolution has done much to lessen Oriente’s
disadvantages
it remains Cuba’s poorest region, the countryside mainly populated by blacks. Most are descended from the thousands of Jamaicans and Haitians who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sought work on Cuba’s expanding cane plantations. Their isolated thatched
bohios
peep out of thriving banana groves and, despite the petrol shortage, school buses still serve their children – taking some to the nearest town and those from remote homesteads to weekly boarding-schools.

During each short stop the Trio commented on this area’s comparative
abundance of food. Wayside stalls sold homemade buns and pizzas or hefty pork sandwiches prepared while you wait, the juicy joints being dexterously carved with rapier-like knives. Said Rose, ‘We should’ve trekked around here.’

In these smallish towns only an occasional Flamboyant or almond tree, or a piled fruit stall, brightened streets of (mostly) one-storey houses, their unpainted façades of weather-bleached wood, mangy stucco or dismal concrete. Paint had been virtually unobtainable since 1992. Front gardens were rare but on some pillared verandahs flowering shrubs were carefully cultivated in leaking cauldrons, cracked jugs, a damaged drawer, a dead fridge. Such towns can sound and smell truly rural – cocks crowing in the background, pigsty aromas drifting on the breeze – but for obvious reasons Cuba lacks picturesque old villages.

Always slaves were accommodated (imprisoned) on their owners’ land. Then, after emancipation in the 1880s (it was a gradual process), those with access to a little plot – as tenants, sharecroppers or squatters – built individual isolated
bohios.
So did small farmers, mulatto and white, and any casual labourers who could find a site of no interest to the
latifundistas
. Throughout large areas there were no churches, primary schools, shops, cottage hospitals, medical dispensaries or sports fields – those institutions around which European villages coalesced. In the towns, built along main roads with perhaps a few unpaved back streets, lived merchants and wholesalers, lawyers, doctors and teachers (not many) and the local
administrators
and security forces (too many).
Bohio
dwellers walked or rode to the towns to shop, meet friends, and, if literate, collect their mail, normally addressed ‘care of’ a merchant; the government provided neither post offices nor deliveries to scattered homes.

On the narrow road between Navarrete (originally a cattle-ranchers’ town) and Guantanamo city we caught up with a snail-slow Cupet
oil-tanker
, small and rusty, trapped behind a sedate bullock-cart with truck-wheel tyres. Over the next few miles, until we came to a junction, the ambling bullocks Ruled OK, their cigar-smoking driver feeling no need to whip them for the benefit of motor vehicles. To me, a comforting incident: but our driver muttered imprecations. By this stage the Trio were asleep, their devoted Irma having roused them at 5.00 a.m. to allow time for a three-course breakfast.

We skirted Guantanamo, a city chiefly notable for its proximity to the US base. Founded in 1796 to accommodate French colonists fleeing from Haiti, coffee stimulated its rapid development. The refugees rejoiced to
find ideal conditions for their favourite crop on Santiago’s hills and in the valleys between Guantanamo and Baracoa. By 1803 they had planted one hundred thousand bushes and by 1807 four million were flourishing on a hundred and ninety-one
cafetales.
Unfortunately coffee farming is labour intensive and the sugar industry was also booming and not enough blacks had migrated from Haiti. As the slave trade quickened the Sociedad Economica, representing Cuba’s most powerful landowners, urged Madrid to sponsor white immigration. One of its most influential spokesmen, Francisco Arango, designed a scheme to ‘whiten’ rural areas by establishing ready-to-use villages for immigrants. Cuba’s then captain-general (
governor
) liked this plan and in 1817 Madrid agreed to tempt poor Spaniards with land grants and tax concessions; the scheme was to be funded by an import tax of six pesos on each male slave. Between 1818 and 1821 more than fifty-six thousand males were unloaded at Havana and one could do a lot of colonising with three hundred and thirty-six thousand pesos. Yet those carefully scattered villages, visualised by Arango, never materialised. Instead, the towns of Cienfuegos, Mariel and Nuevitas were founded in unpopulated areas.

By 1830 Cuba’s population was reckoned to be more than half black, counting legally freed slaves and
cimmarones
(runaways who hid in the forests and mountains.) The landowners became increasingly twitchy; their ever-expanding plantations urgently needed more and more slaves – who might any day ‘do a Haiti’. In Madrid, Cuba’s rulers, foreseeing just that, proposed ending the slave trade to all Spain’s Caribbean colonies. As Eric Williams has written:

In 1832 Daniel O’Connell, the Irish campaigner for Catholic
Emancipation,
put it more graphically in the British House of Commons:

Around this time the annexationists emerged, grouped around José Antonio Saco, a polemical journalist and, in our terms, activist. These
men, loosely associated with the Sociedad Economica, were the first Cubans to think of their island not as a fragment of Spain that chanced to be in another hemisphere but as a place with its own distinctive character, traditions and needs. Saco excoriated the government’s multiple
ineptitudes;
after the loss of most of its empire Spain was unable adequately to govern itself, never mind its remaining colonies. Yet independence never occurred to this group; they advocated annexation to the US where
slave-owning
was still respectable. Contemplating the imminent emancipation in the British Caribbean, Saco wrote:

Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, a planter who wrote under the pseudonym El Lugareno, heartily agreed and was even more specific. Cuba needed to be settled with ‘superior beings’ – Saxons and Germans. Luckily those beings have begun to arrive only recently, as tourists.

Beyond Guantanamo city the level terrain was dusty and
brownish-green,
the Sierra del Purina a blue-grey blur along the horizon. Here and there brightly clad teams of men and women were slowly swinging machetes in weedy former canefields, clearing corners for vegetable plots. On expanses of over-stocked grassland authentic cowboys, driving cattle to some invisible source of water, brought me back to Christmas Day 1938. In that distant era children didn’t write demanding letters to Santa but waited hopefully, relying on his prescience. And sure enough, on Christmas morning I morphed into a cowboy and spent the day galloping around on a stick shooting dangerous wild animals. Even then it would have been held politically incorrect, in an Irish household, to shoot Red Indians – our fellow-victims.

Down at sea-level, marshland bordered the road on our right where scrubby ridges concealed Guantanamo Bay. Rachel spotted a barely legible sign to Caimanera, a town within walking distance of the infamous base – but one is advised not to walk, this area being densely mined. Anyway visitors (even Cubans) need special permits to pass the road-block. For generations Caimanera’s residents have been employed by the US marines, to-ing and fro-ing morning and evening. Pragmatic inconsistencies abound
in Cuba. Given the island’s long-standing unemployment problem – especially acute in this barren region – it made post-Revolution sense to allow Cubans to continue to work for the occupying forces, earning dollars. Because those workers are witnesses to the ‘American way of life’, Havana supplies all the townspeople with extra rations. The Irish might label Fidel ‘a cute hoor’, which may be taken as compliment or insult.

Owing to a population of giant lizards (Caimans), now extinct, the indigenous Tainos called Guantanamo Bay ‘Caimanero’ – as do many contemporary Cubans. Christopher Columbus landed here in 1494 and with dull accuracy renamed it Puerto Grande. Although the largest harbour on Cuba’s southern coast, its snags deterred permanent settlement.
Prodigious
swarms of yellow-fever-bearing mosquitoes plagued its shores, Europeans found its temperature intolerable at all seasons (those enclosing hills!) and its hinterland was infertile. Yet when Admiral Edward Vernon seized Caimanera for Britain in 1741, promptly renaming it Cumberland Bay, he despatched a favourable report in the first flush of conquest. ‘I think this spot the best chosen for a British settlement of any in this island and am glad to find the Americans begin to look on it as the Land of Promise already.’ Those Americans were six hundred would-be settlers from the Thirteen Colonies.

Soon the admiral was having second thoughts. His ambition had been to march overland to take Santiago – and eventually Havana and the whole island, as Jamaica had been seized a century before. But the Spaniards were waiting nearby with a mixed force of whites, blacks, mulattos and Tainos, all of whom knew the terrain intimately. That knowledge was crucial. The much more numerous invaders, including one thousand Jamaican blacks, didn’t get far along the track to Santiago – the almost exact predecessor of the road we were on. Confined thereafter to the Bay and prevented from foraging for food, with hundreds of yellow feverish men to be medicated or buried every day, Vernon had no choice but to lead his eight warships and forty transports back to Jamaica.

In 1898, as General William Rufus Shafter led a fifteen thousand-strong US invasion force towards Oriente, he studied accounts of the Vernon disaster and decided to put his men ashore much closer to Santiago. An expeditionary force of one thousand had already landed at Caimanera and been punished by the Bay’s Spanish defenders before escaping to join their Cuban allies in the Sierra.

Incidentally, Bush II is not the first US leader to hallucinate about God Almighty’s role in military matters. A
Harpers
journalist accompanying
(‘embedded with’) the Shafter armada quoted one of the Generals on board – ‘This is God Almighty’s war and we are only His agents.’

When Shafter’s force arrived the freedom-fighters had been courageously at war for three years and the Spaniards were weakening. Some Cuban historians argue that the local troops didn’t need help; others regard this as an open question no longer worth debating. In any event, having delivered the coup de grâce, the invaders ignored Cuba’s military and civilian leaders, made their own arrangements with the Spaniards and presented themselves to the world as victors entitled to set up a military dictatorship. During the next four years Washington’s Men in Havana controlled Cuba’s political scene. Their puppet-in-chief was Thomas Estrada Palma, lately resident in the US where he hobnobbed with agents of the administration particularly interested in Cuba’s economic future. Estrada led the constituent assembly, elected in December 1900 to draft a new constitution and undisguisedly a Washington creation, like its twenty-first-century equivalents in Kabul and Baghdad. Six months later the assembly members voted (by fifteen to fourteen) to include the infamous Platt Amendment as an annex to their embryonic constitution – an Amendment already incorporated into US law on 2 March 1901,
before
the Cuban vote.

The Amendment’s first two paragraphs dealt with US control over Cuba’s foreign policy and public finances. The third allowed US forces to intervene in Cuban domestic affairs whenever they judged it necessary ‘to protect US interests’. The fourth outlawed any criticism or analysis of ‘all acts of the US in Cuba during its military occupancy thereof’. The fifth and sixth dealt with disease control and the legal future of the Isle of Pines, now the Isle of Youth off Cuba’s south coast. The seventh entitled the US to set up permanent military bases on the island – hence Guantanamo Bay.