Island that Dared (56 page)

Some of the domino players were Rebel Army veterans in their eighties and Alejandro introduced me to a nonagenarian in a bath-chair who had twice descended to Manzanillo to fetch Ché’s asthma medicine – easily provided by Celia Sanchez the doctor’s daughter.

By mid-afternoon we were touring again, stopping quite often for Alejandro to talk at some length to friends and acquaintances. He seemed not to notice that standing around in the sun exhausted the Irish
abuela
. I remarked on the numbers of disabled voters we saw driving their buggies into polling stations, the majority black men in their fifties. ‘African vets,’ said Alejandro. ‘For long years Cuba gave big sacrifices for Africa.’ Those veterans are members of an association for the handicapped. Proudly Alejandro told me what I already knew: all Cubans belong to an appropriate group. ‘We have Committees to Defend the Revolution, the Cuban Federation of Women, Federation of University Students, National Association of Small Farmers, Confederation of Cuban Workers, groups of lawyers, economists, athletes, artists, writers, musicians.’ Representatives from all those organisations make up the Electoral Commissions whose Presidents are chosen by the Trade Unions, from the Confederation of Cuban Workers. Anyone other than a Party member can serve on a
Commission
. Pericles would have approved: ‘No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the city, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty.’

All day there was not a soldier or a policeman to be seen; this ‘People’s Election’ needed no state supervision or regimentation and the uniformed forces change into civvies before voting. According to Alejandro, everybody knowing, personally, each individual on the candidates’ list gave the whole process a reassuring reality. Unmistakably these were keen voters,
participating
in something that mattered to them, not merely tolerating a meaningless routine.

Later we watched the count for half an hour, all done with pencil and
paper. Much double and treble checking, by the constituency electoral commission, is mandatory. After supper with Alejandro’s family we were back at the Asamblea Municipal in time to see the list of those elected being posted outside – an astonishingly fast count because of each ‘college’ being so small.

Back at Casa Juana I retired feeling queasy and generally unwell, in an unfamiliar way.

Not long after my return to Ireland the following letter appeared in the
Irish Times:

Hyperpyrexia is so scary that I heeded the amiably authoritarian doctor, not long home from a two-year posting in a high Andean village. He prescribed forty-eight hours rest, then back to ‘cool (!) Havana’. Playa Las Colorades was even hotter than Manzanillo – transport was uncertain – the
Granma
trail was long and exposed, through mangrove forest. He managed politely to imply that anyway
abuelas
should use Viazul coaches and stay in tourist hotels.

On the spacious flat roof, approached by a stairway from the patio, Juana had created a wondrous bower of white-blossomed vines. Here I obediently rested, drinking the prescribed gallons of water and dolefully abstaining from Buccaneros. This was a good vantage point from which to observe the rhythms of local life and I noted the prevalence of parasols and fans, used by both sexes. We associate fans with delicate Victorian ladies reclining on chaise longue, not with males whose biceps bulge and whose hairy chests are sweat-matted. And parasols go with fair maidens mincing through the Capability Brown groves of stately demesnes – not with men trying to give both their small bicycle passengers a safe share of the shade. Motor vehicles were rare, bicitaxis numerous – including some ingenious homemade models, with beach umbrellas wobbling over wooden sidecars and metal footrests welded to the solid bicycle frame.

The recent DIY conversion of Casa Juana to a
casa particular
had demanded much bold experimentation on the plumbing and electrical fronts – the latter a serious health-hazard, given permanently sweat-wet hands. One morning I found my bathroom waterless and so it remained until Manuel returned from work. Sitting in my bower, I admired his gymnastics as he hung by his heels from a parapet doing something daring with the hose piping and electric wiring that supplied my room.

By then I had recovered from the Playa Las Colorades disappointment and was contemplating my good fortune: adequate medical care provided within fifteen minutes at midnight! One can see how neo-liberalism’s corrosion of the welfare state is insidiously weakening Western democracy. Voter turn-outs have remained highest where the welfare state has suffered least damage – e.g., Holland, Germany, Scandinavia. There is no one to protect it in countries like Britain and Ireland, stricken by the cancer of privatisation – q.v. Ireland’s ‘Caredoc’ system. As Gunter Grass wrote in the
Guardian
in 2005:

The failure of central planning in the Soviet Union and its satellites left
those regimes, unsustained by popular support, with no choice but to submit to Capitalism Rampant. When Fidel opposed the Gorbachev reforms, leaving himself open to charges of ‘Stalinism’, he knew that Cuba’s Revolution still had the loyalty of most Cubans and could therefore survive the Special Period. But now …?

In 2004 Aurelio Alonso, one of Cuba’s shrewdest political thinkers, considered Castroism’s future and wrote, ‘It is not possible to speak of an alternative without also talking about power’. He advocated giving much more power to local community action because ‘history has shown that capitalism can reproduce itself without democracy but socialism cannot’. Like other experienced observers, he believes that new socialist regimes will emerge from Latin America, regimes intent on independent
development
, founded on participatory democracy, explicitly challenging the morality of putting profit first. They would of course have to work with capitalist enterprises, as Cuba is now doing. However, by defending state power against the Unholy Trinity they could continue to promote social justice and economic sovereignty, with key industries nationalised and political leaderships supported
and monitored
by mass popular
organisations
. Capitalism Rampant shudders to think of such regimes evolving as the ‘socialism of the twenty-first century’, to which several Cuban leaders have referred in recent years. Transitologists are deaf to the likes of Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National Assembly, who emphasises, ‘We do not want to be seen as a model. We respect the right of others to develop their own system just as strongly as we demand that ours be respected’.

Did Professor Raby coin the word ‘transitology’? He notes that with the preaching of ‘free trade and monetarist fundamentalism as the only
economically
acceptable policy … a vast academic literature has sprung up on “democratic transition” … Virtually all countries outside the North Atlantic core are assumed to be “in transition”. The notion that the democratic will of the people might prefer to place restrictions on the unfettered rule of the market is scarcely even considered. The “transitology” literature is very revealing as to the true significance of neo-liberal orthodoxy on the issue of democracy … Particularly striking is the emphasis on markets and property rights and the absence of any mention of social justice or popular participation’.

Despite hyperpyrexia, I was glad to have had the opportunity to observe ‘popular participation’ in Manzanillo with Alejandro as my guide.

Manzanillo’s railway station is hardly a mile from Casa Juana but I had learned my lesson and at 1.00 p.m. Viktor’s horse-bus picked me up. The Havana train would depart some time between 3.00 and 8.00 but tickets must be bought not later than 1.30. Even by Cuban standards this timing seemed inordinately vague and there was a sad explanation. A few days previously one of Cuba’s worst train crashes had occurred at Yara, between Manzanillo and Bayamo, when a Santiago-Manzanillo train collided with a bus at a level crossing. ‘Thirty people died at once,’ said Manuel, ‘and more may go – seventy injured, fifteen very much smashed up. Now
timetables
are all confused.’

Viktor refused to believe that I was no longer convalescent; he insisted on carrying my rucksack into the waiting-room and telling the ticket clerk I was too old and ill to queue. Having stared me up and down she grunted unsympathetically, then said she wasn’t authorised to deal in convertible pesos and handed me a NP5 ticket to Bayamo. There the tourists’ ticket office would accept my CP25.50. Noting my alarm – the train might leave me behind – kind Viktor hurried away to seek the train’s ‘captain’ who at once volunteered to buy the ticket if given my passport and cash.

When this railway was first constructed Manzanillo lacked road
connections
– hence the enormous waiting-room. For the next five hours three TV sets, hung high on a long wall, showed children’s cartoons interspersed with documentaries about soil erosion and dengue fever. There were no fans. There was no bar. My companions were few and various; as no one had the least idea when the service might depart people wandered in, sat around hopefully for a time, then strolled away.

Soon Marc arrived, a burly young creole wearing a Stars and Stripes
T-shirt
. Spotting the foreigner, he sat opposite me and spoke bluntly. Taxes on the new private enterprises were too high and restrictions too tight. His grandparents used to spend weekends in Miami before the Revolution; he’d been confined all his life to the island. Sellers of snacks and drinks on peso transport (buses and trains) were forbidden to charge more than street prices so their initiatives went unrewarded while those catering for Viazul passengers could charge what they liked. I remarked that it was consistent with the Revolutionary ethos not to penalise peso-dependent
‘captive’ consumers. And consistent with the capitalist ethos to charge tourists as much as they would pay, taking advantage of their captivity. Marc shrugged and looked at my watch and got up to go. A later train would not get him to Bayamo in time for his appointment; there was no bus until next day and he couldn’t afford a
colectivo
. Friends told him transport was improving elsewhere in Cuba but Granma had always been a neglected region.

Later, when Francisco sat beside me, we pooled our linguistic resources and he told me about his eighteen months as a paramedic with the humanitarian brigade despatched to Iran by Fidel during the 1980s war. Saddam Hussein, then a cherished US ally, was using chemical weapons (some of their ingredients supplied by Donald Rumsfeld’s corporation) and Francisco said he doesn’t expect ever to recover from the horror of watching so many gassed youths slowly dying in extreme agony. At the time he asked himself why Cuba was helping a country that exposed many thousands of mid-teenagers to such a fate. Later he came to understand that the object of his mission was not to help the Iranian government but to help relieve the suffering of its innocent victims.

At 6.30 our train could be heard in the distance, jerkily reversing towards us. Pre-Revolution, its coaches must have been first class. The black leatherette seats, with headrests, were wide and soft and adjustable – but now involuntarily so, having come loose from their moorings.
Compared
with my Havana-Bayamo train of indelible memory this was indeed first class but it had its little idiosyncrasies. A cockroach Rapid Reaction Force swarmed just above my arm-rest, its divisional headquarters the crevices around the window, its reactions attuned to the opening of food parcels. Far worse were the mosquitoes; at sunset they zoomed hungrily through all the open windows and soon I felt like one big mosquito bite. Long before I needed the malodorous loo its defects were evident: a loudly banging unlockable door, a floor slithery with pee.

All the way to Bayamo the train’s bucking was sensational, provoking much merriment. ‘Same like as we rode a wild horse!’ chuckled Francisco, sitting beside me. I thought it more like one of those dare-devil fun-fair machines that have you bouncing a foot off your seat but always landing safely. Between bounces Francisco reminisced about his only journey abroad, from Havana to Tehran via Newfoundland, Germany, Greece, Turkey. More than twenty years later he could remember exactly how long each stop had been, on both journeys, and what he had observed at each airport – one benefit of an uncrowded mental storehouse.

At Bayamo I looked anxiously for the captain, clutching my passport and convertible pesos, but he was nowhere to be seen; only then did I scent a scam. During the fifty-minute halt, overlooking a busy road junction, not one motor vehicle appeared. There were criss-crossing flows of cyclists, bicitaxis and various models of horse vehicles – including elegant carriages, Bayamo boasting the finest range in Cuba. (Soon I’d be at home, missing the clip-clop of hoofs …) How unpleasant that wait would have been – smelly, ugly, noisy – at a major junction in a ‘normal’ twenty-first-century city! Here everyone was getting where they wanted to go, quietly, comparatively slowly, without pollution. Car ownership in the Majority World used to worry Fidel years before it occurred to most other people. Yet scant thought is given to its social effects. In Cuba, for instance, how would it change the quality of neighbourhood life? At present Cubans vivaciously converse, play dominoes and chess, make music and dance in their homes or Casas de la Trova, exercise together in the local stadium, work together in the local
organoponico
– always aware of each other, rallying around in times of crisis. Where almost universal car ownership provides mobility, entrepreneurs provide entertainments as commodities. Individuals or ‘nuclear’ families habitually zoom off in different directions to do this or that and communities become fractured. Neighbourhoods matter less as restlessness takes over. People feel an urge to move simply because moving is possible and relatively expensive entertainments work their own black magic, making free pleasures seem inferior. Instead of a walk in the woods, ‘caring’ parents take their children to a theme park. If you have to pay for something, it must be more valuable – right?

At 10.20, when every seat had been filled, the engine whistled wheezily and we went on our jolting way. Then, by one of those improbable
coincidences
with which travellers are familiar, I discovered that the man across the aisle, in the other window seat, was a friend of the ‘independent dissident’ I had failed to contact at Santa Clara University. Moreover, Jesus already knew about my courier role which meant that he was someone to whom I could safely entrust that little packet, now in the depths of my rucksack. Extracting it on the carriage floor broke the monotony for my
compañeros
who exclaimed in awe as book after book emerged.

At Santa Clara Jesus was replaced by Ernesto, a young man with one of those faces that look like a cartoon come alive – elfin ears, a sharp nose, a pointed chin. Before long he had joined the ranks of the many who told me that ‘all Cubans are trained how to fight, how to kill with guns and grenades and use camouflage’.

Around midnight, when the lights were off and most passengers asleep, the captain appeared beside me and whispered a request for my passport and CP25.50. Pocketing the latter, he made much of noting my details, by faint torchlight, in a copybook. No ticket was given me but this didn’t matter; oddly enough, arriving passengers are not checked.

By moonlight central Cuba’s wide flat spaces have a beauty denied them in sunlight. Gazing out at the black and silver tranquillity, I concluded that Fidel’s experiment, despite having been so maimed by US enmity and Soviet friendship, had much to teach the free-marketeers, not least about social cohesion and participatory democracy. Yet I had no easy answer for those (well-disposed towards Castroism) who anxiously asked, ‘How can the Cubans change their government?’ Even now most of us regard this as democracy’s acid test, though for decades its significance has been diminishing as all major political parties fall into line behind their
corporate
controllers.

The foundation stones for a viable Western-style democracy are generally taken to be: a) a stable
state
with a competent (more or less) administration and disciplined law enforcement agencies acceptable to (almost) everyone; b) a united
nation
within settled boundaries, its citizens in agreement on who ‘belongs’; c) safeguards to prevent any religion from dictating legislation or policy; d) an economy sound enough to provide for the population’s essential needs. (On point c, it has to be said, Ireland was flawed until 1971 when we altered our constitution to abolish the ‘special position’ of the Roman Catholic Church. And Britain does have all those Anglican bishops in the House of Lords …) Europe’s senior democracies quarried their foundation stones gradually, over centuries, and had them in place long before full-blown democracy appeared. In contrast,
throughout
much of the Majority World they have only recently been carted from the quarry and remain not very securely laid. Yet the free-marketeers pretend ‘democracy’ can be quickly contrived wherever its façade seems likely to serve their purposes.

Some of my dissident friends argued that by now Cubans are better placed than most Majority Worlders to adopt multi-party democracy, Castroism having laid the foundations while securing their economic and social rights – without which all others are elusive, if not meaningless. (Minority Worlders tend to forget that the rights to free expression and association, or to seek election or found a political party, are not usable by illiterate citizens suffering from malnutrition, overcrowding and untreated illnesses.) It’s unsurprising that such dissidents impatiently ask – ‘Why not
abandon Martí’s misunderstood one-party ideal, which attracts so much criticism, and let us all off the leash?’ But when I put this to Juan in Camaguey he countered that such an electoral venture could only succeed if undertaken by an unthreatened sovereign state. Which took us back to Mr Caleb McCarry and his Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba.

In Ireland, if I protested against Fidel’s being sweepingly dismissed as a dictator, my friends knew how to silence me. Home births are illegal in Cuba, women cannot choose where and how to deliver their babies. Having witnessed the Trio’s arrivals as happy family events, free of the pressures exerted by medical ‘birth-managers’, I find the denial of this fundamental right enraging. Granted, to achieve a home birth on our islands a mother has to be doggedly assertive and lucky with attitudes at her local hospital; and in Ireland, relatively rich. She must ignore accusations of
irresponsibility
and challenge the medical profession, citing evidence that mothers with planned home births gain on all levels (physical, mental, emotional) by not being exposed to a hospital ambience at this rare and wondrous time in their lives. And she must ask, ‘Where in the research is there evidence that a healthy woman who enjoys a normal pregnancy and labour is safer giving birth in hospital?’ No one I met in Cuba seemed to remember that home births were standard practice in all countries until recently, when an expanding medical industry decided that pregnancy and
childbirth
are quasi-diseases requiring long-term high-tech surveillance followed by hospitalisation.

As clouds sailed swiftly from the north-west, coalescing to veil the moon, my mosquito bites grew itchier and the loo fumes became more acrid. Even light dozing was off the agenda and I continued to speculate about Cuba’s future, recalling my three long journeys (1993-95) south of the Limpopo. South Africa was then in transition from white minority rule to what seemed like a model multi-party democracy furnished with a
comprehensive
Bill of Rights, an independent constitutional court, an all-party executive for the first five years, job security for the apartheid regime’s civil servants and immunity from prosecution for crimes committed by members of the armed forces. Since 1990 Nelson Mandela had been tirelessly echoing Martí – ‘Let everyone start from the premise that we are one country, one nation, whether we are white, Coloured, Indian or black’.

On the day after the new President’s inauguration I wrote in my journal:

When
South from the Limpopo
appeared some critics reproved me for being insufficiently enthusiastic about South Africa’s ‘peaceful transition to democracy’. In 1995 I had ended that book with the words: