Island that Dared (3 page)

In the late nineteenth century a sugar-rich bourgeoisie strove to replicate the imposing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions of Old
Havana and their residences spread fast beyond the city walls. (These were demolished in 1963 to make way for new housing; only a fragment
survives
, near the railway station.) San Rafael is one of Centro’s almost
carfree
grid of long, straight streets, every downward slope leading to the Malecón; from their intersections the Straits of Florida beckon – usually a blue sparkle, occasionally a grey-green turbulence. Most buildings are three- or four-storey (a few rise to five or six) and their external
dilapidation
is extreme. Post-Revolution, this district was taken over by
working-class
families and what might tentatively be described as the
petite bourgeoisie.
Since then no restoration has been done; Havana was allowed to decay when Fidel took over, his mind set on improving living conditions for the rest of Cuba, hitherto neglected. Much social history is revealed by Centro’s wealth of neo-baroque flourishes around wide-arched entrances or cracked stained-glass balcony windows, and by the strong iron bars protecting both doors and street level unglazed windows; Havana didn’t enjoy its recent low crime rate during the centuries when it hogged most of the national wealth. Vivid expanses of Moorish tiles decorate a few façades and, from corners beneath high eaves, ambiguous carved figures lean out: they might represent Christian saints, classical heroes, Spanish conquistadors, Congolese deities or deceased grandparents. Along certain streets most balconies display strangely dressed dolls atop high stools, or little flags mysteriously patterned, or huge sooty kettles filled with coloured sticks – all components of Santería rituals. And long laundry lines of fluttering garments relieve the background drabness; Cubans are obsessive about personal cleanliness and partial to strong, bold colours.

On every street stereotypes appeared with almost ridiculous frequency. Grandads were relishing the day’s first cigar, settled in cane rocking-chairs behind wrought-iron balconies high above the pavement. Ebullient schoolchildren in immaculate uniforms – each white shirt or blouse meticulously ironed – converged on their schools before 8.00 a.m. Young men rode bicycles held together with strips of tin, many wearing musical instruments over their shoulders. Older men were already playing dominoes, sitting at card-tables – usually improvised – outside their homes. Neighbours sat on doorsteps or window ledges, arguing, laughing, discussing, complaining, gossiping. Fruit-sellers pushed their homemade handcarts from group to group; when the recycled pram wheels had lost their rubber the rims grated loudly on the cobbles.

Superficially I was back in the Third World, aka the Majority World. But only superficially: no one looked hungry, ragged, dirty or obviously
diseased, no one was homeless or neglected in old age. The contemporary Cubans, urban and rural, immediately impress as a self-confident people. Although Castroism has stumbled from one economic disaster to another, for a tangle of reasons, the Revolutionary ideal of equality bred two generations who never felt inferior because they lacked the Minority World’s goodies. They appreciated their own goodies, including first-class medical care for all and a range of educational, cultural and sporting opportunities not available to the majority in such free-market democracies as India, South Africa – or the US. As for the third generation, now coming to maturity – I was to find that question marks surround them.

Since its completion in 1950 (construction was begun in 1901) the
habaneros
have endowed their Malecón with a personality of its own; one can’t imagine the city without these four curving miles of promenade, the shimmering sea so close that boys leap over the low wall, diving straight in. Yet the prospect along the shore does not entirely please. A colony of gawky skyscrapers, Havana’s tallest buildings, crowd the western end in contrast to the dignified battlements of Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro (commonly known as El Morro) on the eastern promontory. In 1589, when King Phillip II realised how important Havana was for the expansion of his empire, he ordered these mighty fortifications to be built – a forty-year task, employing thousands of engineers, craftsmen and peons.

Havana assumed this importance because the treasure fleets, returning from Mexico and Peru, could anchor in this safe, spacious harbour while awaiting naval protection for crossing the Atlantic. By the end of the sixteenth century the fleet usually numbered more than 100 vessels laden with silver, gold and emeralds, cargoes much coveted by pirates. The return voyage normally started in June or July, before the hurricane season, and often the earliest arrivals were moored for months. In 1622 a late start proved disastrous; within a day of sailing from Havana in September,
twenty-seven
ships were mauled by the season’s first hurricane which claimed three treasure galleons and five of their naval escort. Over five hundred men were lost. The fleet’s assembling was again delayed in 1623 and a sensible decision to ‘winter’ in Havana caused panic back home; the Spanish treasury now had to face a second year with a grievously depleted income.

The fleets’ crews, recruited from all over the Habsburg territories, put their genetic imprint on Havana’s rapidly growing population, as is evident to this day. A number were highly skilled craftsmen, employed on shiprepairs, and many settled in Cuba when the island’s vast hardwood forests led to ships being built in Havana for the whole Spanish navy, a major industry until the empire shrank in the early nineteenth century.

The Malecón is a slow ten-minute walk from No.403 and when the younger generations bounced back at noon we set off to swim and picnic. My wailing about the debilitating heat gained no sympathy. ‘It’s
perfecto
!’ said
Rose. ‘It’s why people come to Cuba in November,’ said Rachel. ‘Nyanya’s like an ice-cream!’ Clodagh chuckled sadistically. ‘She won’t last long in the sun!’

The Trio were fascinated by cigar-smoking men with ample bellies sitting on their thresholds wearing only underpants, and by youths practicing baseball catches with a homemade ball and glove, and by an independent trader bargaining with a woman on a fourth-floor balcony who then let down her roped basket to take delivery of four eggs. The fascination was mutual. This fair-haired, blue-eyed trio brought appreciative, affectionate smiles to every face (even the teenagers’) and prompted the wrong guess – ‘alemana?’ As this situation would regularly recur Rachel and I agreed to identify ourselves, en masse, as ‘irlandesa’ – easier than explaining that the Trio are half-Irish, quarter-Welsh, quarter-English.

At the Malecón’s El Morro end, broken concrete steps lead down to
sea-level
, to what is euphemistically known as ‘the people’s beach’, a long strip of rough pitted rock, painful to walk on in bare feet and uncomfortable to sit on. This shoreline has one odd feature; at intervals of thirty or forty yards oblong chunks have been carved out of the rock, providing safe bathing pools for children. These are explained in Richard Henry Dana’s
To Cuba and Back
, a guide-book (I think the first in English) published in Boston in 1859:

Soon the happily splashing Trio had bonded with a group of
contemporaries
. We were the only foreigners around; Havana-based tourists swim off the smooth sands of ‘developed’
playas
many miles away. The Trio couldn’t understand my not joining them in the warm Atlantic; during summer visits to Ireland they are coaxed into the less warm Blackwater River at least once a day. I tried to explain that to me warm water is what you wash in: a swim should be invigorating. Point not taken …

We watched two freighters appearing as smudges on the horizon, coming from opposite directions and traversing the bay until they were so close we could discern their rustiness. Havana’s port is still important though no longer as crowded as in Dana’s day; then vessels had to manoeuvre for space, before unloading hundreds of passengers and valuable cargoes from Europe and the Americas. Now only a few freighters arrive daily, those from Panama carrying (mainly) Asian-made luxury goods for sale in government dollar-stores to Cuba’s nouveau riche. Cheap food for everyone comes from Argentina and Brazil; supplies for tourist hotels, including soap and loo paper, come from the EU.

At sunset the Trio’s quintet of friends accompanied us part of the way home, all eight girls trotting in single file along the Malecón’s wide wall. Children can vault language barriers with enviable ease. Observing this octet, I was reminded of Rachel, aged five, communicating for hours on end with her Coorgi playmates in a South Indian jungle village.

We were led to Parque Antonio Maceo, a dusty expanse presided over by a famous mulatto general, among the most revered heroes of the nineteenth-century wars of independence. Rachel and I made polite admiring noises. Zea bluntly declared, ‘It’s boring here, why don’t they plant grass?’ Rose glared at her little sister and said, ‘But that man looks interesting.’ The octet agreed to meet again next afternoon.

Returning to No. 403 by a different route we passed a few
puestos
(state-run groceries) which the Trio didn’t recognise as shops despite their counters and scales. These dismal places – most shelves bare – come to life only when supplies arrive. Then orderly queues stretch away down the pavement, each citizen equipped with much-used plastic bags and a blue
libreta
(ration book, about the size of an EU passport). The basic rations of rice, beans and eggs may be augmented by pasta, cooking-oil and margarine. But always there is a daily litre of milk for children – now up to the age of seven, pre-Special Period, up to fourteen. Those with spare national pesos may buy meat, fowl, vegetables and fruits at farmers’ markets regulated by municipalities.

To Fidel’s critics, permanent food-rationing proves how hopelessly Castroism has failed. In fact, feeding all Cubans adequately (except during the worst years of the Special Period) has been one of its most remarkable achievements. In 1950 a World Bank medical team estimated that sixty per cent of Cuba’s rural dwellers and forty per cent of urban folk were malnourished. No dependent territory is encouraged to be self-sufficient and Cuba was then importing, mainly from the US, sixty per cent of its
grain needs, thirty-seven per cent of vegetables, eighty-four per cent of fats, eighty per cent of tinned fruit, sixty-nine per cent of tinned meat,
eighty-three
per cent of biscuits and sweets. Hunger greatly strengthened popular support for the Revolution. The US embargo, established in response to the revolution, caused dire food shortages until the rationing system, established on 12 March 1962, ensured that no family would go hungry. In Julio Garcia Luis’s words, ‘Fidel was determined not to allow the law of money and of supply and demand to be imposed, but to ensure justice’.

When my body clock woke me at 2.00 a.m. I read Fidel’s
My Early Years
, then at 6.45 strolled alone to the Malecón.

Below El Morro a freighter was emerging from the port, huge and clumsy-looking, vandalising the dusky blue of the dawn as its funnel trailed thick blackness. Already fishermen were sitting at appropriate intervals along the wall, singly or in pairs, watching their bobbing baits. They used only reels; rods are luxury items. As the sun rose through a shoal of rosy cloudlets the sea swiftly changed from a pellucid green to silver-blue. But why so few birds? I associate Atlantic coasts with ornithological abundance. That afternoon, in a Malecón bar, I was told, ‘We ate them all, in the early’90s – so they know to keep away from us!’ Perhaps a Tale for Tourists? Or perhaps not: that Period was
very
Special …

Back at No. 403 the Trio were breakfasting off multiple fresh fruits, Candida’s fluffy omelettes, crusty golden bread warm from the neighbourhood baker, imported butter, lashings of mango jam made by Pedro and large glasses of hot honeyed milk with a dash of coffee.
Casas particulares
serve much better food, in both quantity and quality, than even the fivestar hotels. But such meals are comparatively expensive so Rachel and I opted for national-pesos breakfasts, eaten in the nearby Fe del Valle Park. Havana’s largest department store, El Encanto, once stood on this site. The park is named in memory of a woman who died here when CIA saboteurs set fire to the store two days before the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.

Clodagh, my room-mate, complained after breakfast – holding her nose – about Nyanya’s smelly trainers. I assured her that I meant to replace them, ASAP, with strong open sandals. But first I must change euros.

Candida escorted me to the nearest
Cambio
, warning me on the way about
jineterismo
, an unsurprising phenomenon of which she plainly felt ashamed.
Jineteras
and
jineteros
cultivate tourists met in the street, the former
offering bodies, the latter offering half-price cigars (some stolen, some counterfeit) or cheap rooms to rent. (Some householders employ touts because by not registering as
casas particulares
they avoid tax).
Jineterismo
evolves wherever tourists congregate in the Majority World but Castroism sees it as a betrayal of the Revolution, and for Cubans – though not for their foreign friends – the penalties tend to be unduly harsh. My enquiries about specific cases met with evasions or contradictory responses.

The
Cambio
lurked in one corner of a dusty, twilit emporium to which national-peso-priced clothing and footwear were irregularly delivered. By the door stood a security guard, uniformed but apparently unarmed, who closely observed every currency exchange. (On later occasions, when I was alone, he insisted that before leaving the premises I must tuck my new wad of convertible pesos somewhere inaccessible.) Candida advised me to convert some convertible pesos to national pesos as foreigners were now allowed to use both, though hard currencies could not directly buy national pesos. Confining tourists to the convertible-peso economy had proved too complicated and not really worth the effort, since few tourists are tempted by what national pesos can buy.

Shopping in Cuba – even in Havana – has to be a hit or miss affair given the erratic supply of all goods. Three meagrely stocked shoe-shops on Centro’s main business streets offered only fragile high-heeled sandals (gold or pink), made in China. ‘You’ll have to go barefoot,’ threatened Clodagh. But it was fourth time lucky: the manager of a small shop was unpacking a consignment of sturdy brown leather sandals made in Brazil, price CP21. ‘Now you can give your trainers to some poor person,’ said Clodagh. But in Cuba there are no people poor enough to make such a malodorous donation acceptable. Moreover, those trainers had both monetary and sentimental value: I had bought them for US$60 in Severobaiskal, my favourite Siberian town. Granted, they were distressingly unsuited to a hot humid climate but I reckoned they might well outlive me and should be left with our winter garments in No. 403 for collection on the way home.

A quest for fruits and peanuts took us to Vedado. (Rachel is a fruit and nut case and has passed that condition on to her children.) Walking the length of commercial Neptuno, we noted that each dollar-store employed two or three unsmiling security men with ‘SECSA’ emblazoned on their brown uniforms – SECSA being a newish organisation set up to guard banks,
Cambios
, dollar-stores and other repositories of wealth. In Russia, super- and hyper-markets employ their equivalents, bearing side-arms and looking even less smiley as they peer into the shopping-bags of all
departing customers. It seems consumerism has become so febrile citizens may no longer be trusted to acquire only what they can pay for.

In a covered market crowds jostled around trestle tables piled with fruit and vegetables – the produce of Cuba’s celebrated
organoponicos
, of which more anon. A recent drought had limited the variety available in November; greens were scarce and the Trio lamented mangoes being out of season. Through piped rumbas one could hear the clattering of weights in antique scales and the good-humoured banter of buyers and sellers, the former scornfully identifying defects, the latter denying or justifying them. Two juicy pineapples cost NP30, a large lush papaya NP15 and very many short fat bananas NP1 apiece. Cleft sticks held squares of cardboard on which all prices were clearly chalked and nobody
attempted
to overcharge us, here or elsewhere. Instead, the girls each received a gift banana.

By chance we found ourselves in one of Vedado’s most attractive quarters, near the university. Here, at the turn of the twentieth century, many prominent families built new homes in a ferment of architectural eclecticism and planted magnificent trees – some eminently climbable, irresistible to the Trio. While watching them ascend to giddy heights Rachel and I sat on the pavement scoffing bananas. (From amidst the foliage an invisible Rose shouted ‘Don’t eat them all!’) Behind us loomed a neo-classical mansion, its stucco flakey, cardboard patching its stainedglass window, squat big-belly palms – less common than the royal palm – lining its garden path. Across the street small children were making merry in their kindergarten, the deep verandah and wide lawn of a recently restored Gaudiesque villa. Studying them, we agreed that Cuba’s variety of skin shades, and countless combinations and permutations of racial features, make official statistics seem absurd. Who came up with the ‘fact’ that in 2000 the population was fifty-one per cent Mulatto, thirty-seven per cent White, eleven per cent Black? And what about the missing one per cent? Are they the unrecorded descendents of Cuba’s indigenous inhabitants? Or those Chinese who have resisted miscegenation ever since their a hundred and twenty-five thousand or so ancestors arrived as indentured labourers between 1852 and 1874? We also agreed that, aesthetically, the dominant Iberian/African mix has been a sensational success.