Slow Train to Guantanamo (11 page)

Convoys of rusty buses and open-topped trucks are flying
by, stuffed with workers from Varadero. The ones in the trucks are jammed together, hanging on for dear life as they jolt unheedingly over ‘sleeping policemen’. I envy them. Despite a sturdy straw hat salvaged from a previous trip to Mexico, I feel in danger of dropping from heatstroke. There is a total lack of shade.

On the landward side stretches a long, gently curve of neo-colonial single-storey buildings, with mock Corinthian columns, most still bearing remnants of once-bright colours while one or two have been repainted: blues, pinks, purples, yellows. Every single one is shuttered up. At one end there is a faded mural of José Martí, Camilo Cienfuegos and Fidel Castro, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of Cuban Communism.

I am back in Bizarro World again. In front of me, in the middle of a long thin field of brown grass between the former shopping arcade – I realize now that is what this gentle colonial curve must once have been – the Cuban flag hangs limply from a flagpole. The symbol of independence from Spain since 1902, unchanged by Castro, began life – like the Capitolio, mimicking a US institution. The US ‘stars and stripes’ flew in Havana for three years during the 1899–1902 US intervention in the Cubans’ revolt against Spain. When the Cubans adopted one that was their own design but remarkably similar: a star and stripes, five stripes and a single star.

Today the US flag flies only at the far end of the island, at Guantánamo. But the influence still hovers in the background. Cuban Spanish is littered with US-Americanisms. Hot dogs are translated literally as
perros calientes
while
los
baños
a literal translation of ‘bathrooms’, is used here – as in Mexico – when they mean toilets (
servicios
in Spain).

Beneath the flag a group of kids in smart red uniforms are practising baseball. It could be a Little League game
somewhere in Florida or the Carolinas. And all of a sudden I can visualize the little neo-colonial parade behind me festooned with inflatable toys, beach balls, flippers, hot dog stands, a picture of the finger-lickin’ chicken-selling colonel, the Seattle coffee shop mermaid in her green circle and – somewhere subtly integrated into the colonial architecture – the yellow arches. And I don’t know if it would make the average Cuban laugh or cry. The Cuban national anthem, much touted by the Castros, includes the lines ‘to live in chains is to live in dishonour’. Will it still be true when the chains are Starbucks, KFC and McDonalds?

We could ask ourselves the same question back in Britain. I find it hard to rejoice that one of the few signs of economic expansion in the current climate of recession is that Krispy Kreme donuts are tripling their number of branches in the UK. On a recent holiday to Thailand, globally famed for its healthy cuisine, I found the natives queuing for coffee and donuts at American chains. Cuba for the moment is safe from this commercial contagion, but only because it is in an isolation ward. Fully exposed to the virus, I suspect it would succumb in a heartbeat.

The same speculation is still running through my head three hours later as I watch what passes for adverts on Cuban television: a video montage of Che Guevara smoking cigars, brandishing pistols, in a doctor’s white coat treating patients, and incongruously bare-chested on a factory floor. These alternate with romantic shots of the bearded Camilo Cienfuegos riding on horseback at the head of a troop of revolutionaries, looking for all the world like the US Seventh Cavalry.

I am sitting with four other people in a line of red plastic chairs in a concrete bunker that purports to be a railway station somewhere very definitely on the wrong side of the tracks, about a mile out of the centre of Matanzas. On the
wall is a photograph of Raúl Castro in his army cap beaming myopically through his glasses with what one cynic has called the ‘smug smile of a self-satisfied Madrid green-grocer’. Slogans stencilled on either side proclaim, ‘Unity means Strength and Victory’, and, ‘We have no right not to do our best’. It is easy to laugh at these faded, endlessly repeated political slogans, but western politicians regularly come out with equally glib nonsense: they just don’t paint it on the walls.

But my major concern for the moment is trying to find out when my train might arrive, to little avail. It seems the reason for my extended stay in Matanzas is that being relatively close to Havana, not many trains stop here. That said, not many seem to pass without stopping either. Except for goods trains. Yet again Cuba seems to have followed a US model: the railways have become dominated by goods trains. Passengers come second best.

In theory, according to a chalk scribble on a blackboard near a doorway that leads onto what I presume is the platform, the train is timetabled at 23.20. With little faith in just how the system might actually work I’m here even earlier than the two hours before departure I was advised in Havana.

On the advice of the lady owner of my
casa
, I have asked for the
jefe de torno
, the duty manager. A thickset man in his forties claimed to fit the bill and told me he’ll call me up to the ticket office at 23.00 to buy a ticket. And not before. Despite the fact that I am here two hours early.

The blackboard is the only timetable. The television, which in a European station might display train information, is there to entertain the waiting passengers, of which there is a growing number. A bloke in jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes is taking surreptitious swigs from a bottle of rum. After a while he pulls out
a packet of cigarettes and goes out for a smoke. For the first time I notice a red sign on the wall proclaiming
No fumar
. Even here in Cuba, home of the big cigar, the health lobby has won at least a token victory in the war against smoking. Even Fidel, once never seen without a cigar in his mouth, gave up in the 1980s.

By 10 p.m., with just an hour or so to go, things are getting livelier. Sort of. A little green lizard just ran across the floor. There are now about 15 of us waiting, most captivated by an Argentinian soap opera on the television, called
Mujeres de Nadie
(
Nobody’s Wives
), which mainly revolves around a series of flirtatious affairs between female doctors, their male colleagues and various patients. The acting is histrionic to say the least, one blonde in a white coat displaying angry grimaces while waving her hands in the air. It may, of course, be true to life; I’ve never been in an Argentinian hospital.

The bloke with the rum bottle inside his jacket comes back in with a decent looking filled roll, which he indicates he bought outside. A woman in her sixties with a big suitcase asks me to look after it for a moment while she goes to get one too. This seems a good idea. I was so concerned with getting to the station that my only thought for provisions was a bottle of sparkling water. I go to the door to find a guy with a rasta hairdo selling ham rolls from a big cardboard box. They aren’t cheap by Cuban standards, or maybe it is just that he has twigged I am a foreigner that he demands one CUC. Or because we are in Matanzas, Varadero’s backyard?

It is just gone 23.05 and I am watching the ticket counter avidly for any sign of the man who has just appeared behind the Perspex window beckoning me, when chaos breaks loose. Suddenly, without any obvious signal, everybody jumps up and crowds around the window waving pieces of paper and the bloke behind it is calling out names. None of them sound like mine. I turn in blind panic to the guy with the rum bottle
who gives me a broad grin and calls to the man behind the counter, ‘What about our foreign friend here?’

The lady whose case I looked after joins in, and the
jefe de torno
, almost in embarrassment, feels obliged to assure everybody that I’ll get a seat: all in good time. I feel mildly reassured but extremely touched and impressed by the wave of popular concern. In fact the only word I can find for it is one that no longer sounds hollow: solidarity.

The lady with the suitcase asks me where I am headed and when I tell her my next stop is Santa Clara, she insists I visit the Che Guevara mausoleum, which is already on my list. ‘Magnificent,’ she enthuses, ‘absolutely magnificent. But only right for the hero of our revolution.’ This with, as far as I can tell, not the slightest trace of irony.

She tells me she is a anaesthetist and a professor at Havana University medical school, and is on her way to the medical school in the city of Sancti Spiritus, the eventual destination of the train we are, hopefully, about to board. She asks me about the
E. coli
outbreak in Europe; she’s worried about our hygiene standards.

She tells me she used to work ‘in Leningrad’ (the change of name back to St Petersburg has not caught on in Cuba). When I tell her I lived in the Soviet Union, she sighs with genuine nostalgia. ‘Ah, those were the good old days. Everybody was so friendly. All comrades together.’ I ask if she speaks much Russian, but she looks surprised even at the thought, and says, with a broad smile, ‘
Nyet
.’

Then she nudges me: the
jefe
is beckoning me over. When I get to the window he shakes his head and indicates I should use the door into his office, which he closes firmly behind me. Then he takes out a key and opens a safe in the wall from which he takes a cashbox. He asks for my passport, inspects it, then writes me out a ticket, a few lines in ball point pen on a little white form the size of a post-it note,
and says, almost apologetically that’ll be seven pesos, ‘
convertibles
’. I hand over a 10 CUC note and he unlocks the cash box. Now I understand: this is the hard currency till. Hence the security, the locked door, the whole in the wall. He picks out three one CUC notes in change and hands them to me before carefully replacing the cashbox in the safe and locking it. He shakes hands solemnly. I feel oddly honoured. Just for having bought a train ticket.

In the distance I hear what at first sounds like a blast on a jazz horn, a musician warming up. It is followed swiftly by two or three others of various pitches, but much louder, and then I catch on and realize it is a train pulling into the station. Not ours, though, a cargo train heading in the opposite direction.

The minute it passes we are herded onto the platform, scribbled tickets inspected at the door. But it is not as easy as that. The platform, it seems, is only for trains heading towards Havana. To get to trains going in the other direction we have to go to the end of the platform, scramble down some barely usable steps onto the rails and cross the tracks.

Isabel, as I have learned to call the lady with the big suitcase, draws my attention to the veiled full moon and says it looks like it’s under water. It does, and any minute now I’m about to feel like being drowned.

A distant roar heralds a blinding light advancing towards us out of the darkness. Slowly like some ancient beast advancing, a great dirty red diesel locomotive bears down upon us. It seems impossibly huge, but I soon realize that this is because there is no platform and we have to clamber up iron ladders into the coaches. The locomotive, I notice, is also Chinese. Cuba may have a hostile superpower on its doorstep, but while the United States has done its best to ignore it, a newly emergent superpower has crept in the back door.

On the train, the feeling of total immersion is instant. I
am thrust into a sea of roiling humanity, except that it feels awe-inspiringly alien. It is not the race or colour of the denizens of this densely packed train, it is as if they belong to another dimension. In the old-fashioned sense: nearly all of them there are twice the size I am.

Admittedly at 5’6” (1m70) I am on the diminutive side of male humanity. But these guys – and they are nearly all guys – are immense! Not fat. Big. Very big. In the sense that American footballers are big, and even bigger when they put on all that protective armour. These guys wouldn’t even find armour big enough. Nearly all of them are dressed in singlets or bare chested, and their chests are twice the size of oil drums while their biceps are bigger than my thighs. Than most rugby players’ thighs. And glisten in the moonlight. With sweat. Everybody is sweating. The relatively cool night air has deserted us and the stationary train is like a sauna. A very old, dirty sauna.

So here I am, a middle-aged short white bloke with a shaggy mop of greying blond hair in the middle of a sea of huge young muscular, sweaty black blokes who look like they could pull locomotives with their teeth. I have gay friends who would consider it heaven, but it doesn’t feel like it to me. Not least because everybody is staring at me.

Not that I blame them. To their eyes I probably look like a furry albino dwarf, from a planet that isn’t Planet Cuba. Not that there’s the slightest hint of aggression, just mild amused curiosity. And then a middle-aged black woman with bright orange hair whose profession is immediately recognizable by the dark blue miniskirt and black fishnet tights, – she is the ticket collector – takes pity on me and finds me a seat in one of the few compartments occupied by women. Obviously she thinks I’ll feel more at home there. I use the expression ‘compartment’ in the loosest possible sense. It has no doors or windows.

A few minutes later I’m joined by a familiar face, another male: the bloke from the waiting-room with a bottle of rum in his coat. He takes a long swig, winks at me as if to say, ‘see, it all worked out in the end’, pulls his baseball cap down over his eyes and is immediately fast asleep. Now I can see the point of the rum.

Managing some sleep on this train is no mean achievement. The compartments have no lighting, which would be a good thing except that the corridor is lit by bright flickering fluorescent tubes and as there are no doors. In any case the corridor seems to be the place to chill for most of the giants who are shouting and calling loudly to one another as we move off and our motion creates a welcome breeze. I wedge my bag under my legs and try to close my eyes, sprawled like everyone else across seats that might once have pulled out to make half-decent sleeping accommodation but are now only loosely connected to the carriagework and slope onto the compartment floor. The air is rich with the sounds and smells of humanity thrown together in much closer proximity than anything I have been used to since I last took part in a scrum on a school rugby pitch. And that wasn’t yesterday.