Slow Train to Guantanamo (12 page)

For a few hours of noisy, rocking, bumping, constantly interrupted semi-dozing, I try to dream of anywhere but where I am right now, my mind continuously going back to the neatly groomed Cuban couple in the bar of the Hotel Velasco, who thought it hilarious I was travelling
en tren
. I’m just trying hard to see the funny side.

I’m not sure whether it’s a dream or a nightmare when I’m tapped on the shoulder and surface groggily from semi-slumber to be told in a heavily rum-flavoured voice that we’re pulling into Santa Clara, the Cradle of the Revolution. I feel exhausted just thinking about it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Che, Comandante!

In the Royal Navy during the Second World War they used to sleep for just four hours at a time. It’s amazing what it can do for you.

By 9 a.m., after yet another glass of thick mango juice, slice of banana bread and a fried egg on a plate, all served up by the genial old gent who opened the door to me in the middle of the night, I’m out on the sunny streets of Santa Clara, strolling down towards the self-same railway tracks I rattled on which into town a few hours earlier.

There are big clouds rolling ominously overhead but the sun is shining and there is a sudden explosion of salsa music from within the whitewashed walls of the house across the road. I’m slowly getting to grips with the Cuban front door system: everyone leaves them wide open for relief from the heat – only the very richest Cubans contribute to global warming by artificially turning the inside of their houses into refrigerators – but in front of every door is a wrought-iron grille which can be separately locked for security. Not that anyone much has anything worth stealing.

A horse-drawn cart with a canopy, of the sort I saw at the station waiting to pick up passengers, trundles by. According to my host they work as a sort of bus service, running services up and down the grid, one lot going north–south, another going east–west. Except that that is only the
theory. The drivers aren’t employed by any sort of public transport system; they just take passengers and take money so you can never be sure how many are going in which direction or at what time. You just take pot luck. Most of Cuba seems to work on what, if it weren’t an apparent contradiction in terms, you’d have to call profit-driven freelance communism.

At the bottom of the hill where the railway tracks cross the road, there’s a little shop selling Che souvenirs, opposite a nearly kept children’s park with brightly painted swings and roundabouts, artistically ripped up railway sleepers, a bright yellow bulldozer on a pedestal, some concrete sculptural representations of explosive blasts and a train with a 20mm canon on it.

The monument to the
tren blindado
, the armoured train which Fulgencio Batista had sent from Havana to crush the rebellion, is possibly the most singular war memorial I have ever seen. There is not just the fact that it feels like a children’s playground, and is all but connected to one on the other side of the tracks, it is at once small-scale and highly dramatic. It feels like a specially constructed downsized theme park exhibit, and yet these aren’t mock-ups: these bright red coaches, poised in the moment of derailment, the bazookas inside, the gun on the flat-top carriage, are not reconstructions, but the real items, albeit lovingly restored and preserved.

This was it: the Battle of Santa Clara, the crucial engagement of the Cuban Revolution, involved just a few hundred men and the crucial weapon was a bright yellow Caterpillar bulldozer. It’s sitting just over there, looking for all the world like it’s waiting for Bob the Builder to take it away. It doesn’t look threatening or imposing or anything but comfortingly familiar: if it weren’t for the concrete blast spikes and the museum exhibit photograph captions it could be a
stylized snapshot of Sunday afternoon ‘engineering work’ on a British branch line, the picture made perfect by the fact there is nobody working.

So much of the Castro iconography, for us children of the second half of the twentieth century, is imbued with the qualities of both myth and the disconcertingly familiar. I am sure I had a toy bulldozer just like this one when I was a toddler, which, come to think of it, was probably just around the time of the Battle of Santa Clara. Compare it with the other icons of the time: by December 1958, when Che and his fellow revolutionaries got round to attacking their first train, Elvis had already produced his first volume of golden records and people were playing his Christmas album, Buddy Holly was just two months away from his final fatal flight and James Dean had already been dead for two years.

There are enough books on Che Guevara to fill a library, but given that the city of Santa Clara has become a shrine to the most recognized revolutionary on the planet, it is worth taking a minute out to revisit how he got here.

Both men would both have hated the comparison but Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was and is to many Latin Americans what JFK was and is to their fellow continentals up north: the great romantic tragic hero who summed up their ideals and was gunned down in his prime. Guevara didn’t even live to see his fortieth birthday.

The young Argentinian was born into a family with Spanish, Basque and Irish roots, impeccably middle-class liberals with vaguely leftist leanings. If they had been English, they would have been
Guardian
readers.

Despite severe asthma, which plagued him all his short life, young ‘Ernestitio’ became a keen athlete, a football and rugby player and keen cyclist. He played chess and read poetry, particularly Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca, but could also quote Kipling’s
If
and browsed
endlessly among his parents’ collection of more than 3,000 books.

His early reading material included Jules Verne and H. G. Wells as well as Karl Marx, Lenin and Friedrich Engels; he studied Bertrand Russell, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Freud, so it was more than mildly patronizing when a CIA report later referred to him as ‘fairly intellectual for a Latino’.

It was an instinctive sympathy towards the poor and downtrodden of Latin America that led him to study medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1950, aged twenty-two, he took off on a 4,500-kilometre (2,800-mile) journey around rural northern Argentina on a bicycle which he had fitted with a small motor.

A year later he took time off from his studies to embark on a Latin American odyssey with his friend Alberto Granada, riding a spluttering 1939 500cc Norton motorbike. They travelled through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama and ended up in Miami before returning home to finish his studies.

On the trip they encountered appalling working conditions at a US-owned copper mine in northern Chile, volunteered for work at a leper colony in the Peruvian rainforest (during which time he swam across the Amazon, a distance of 4 kilometres [2.5 miles]), before ending up working as a barman in Miami to earn the money to fly home.

The trip convinced him that Latin America should be seen as a single entity rather than a collection of disparate countries, but also that the only way to liberate its people from oppressive militaristic regimes was through armed revolution.

The diary he kept was intended to be private, but after his death his family edited the manuscript and it was bought by a Cuban publishing house. Brought out in 1993, the subsequent translation into English publicized as ‘Easy Rider
meets Das Kapital’, it has on several occasions made the
New
York
Times
bestseller list and became a hit film in 2004.

It was Guevara’s second continent-spanning expedition, in 1954, which brought him to Guatemala where he met some Cuban would-be revolutionaries. He ran into them again the following year in Mexico City, including a group who were on the run after carrying out an abortive raid on a military barracks in Cuba. One of them was Raúl Castro, who introduced him to his big brother, a bushy-bearded lawyer-turned-revolutionary called Fidel.

He had found brothers-in-arms; for their part, they had found an earnest young doctor with revolutionary ideals, an odd Argentine accent and funny way of speaking. The best way to explain it is to imagine someone who puts ‘man’ into every other phrase: ‘Y’know, man, there’s this thing I want to say, man, and it’s like we are so oppressed, man, it’s unbelievable.’ The word Argentinians used in place of ‘man’, was
che
. A sloppy speech mannerism had given birth to a legend. He had just taken the first step on the road to Santa Clara.

Primarily in the position of medical officer, Che was with Fidel and the 80 others who boarded the leaky old cabin cruiser named after a previous owner’s grandmother and set out for Cuba in November 1956. The US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s men found them not long after they had disembarked from
Granma
, and most were either killed or captured. It was during the gunfight that Che put down his medical kit and picked up a box of ammunition. The transition was complete.

The few survivors holed up in the near impenetrable Sierra Maestre mountains in the island’s far south-east. Over the hard years of struggling to survive, helped by impoverished subsistence farmers, Che became a formidable guerrilla leader. The former doctor also acquired a reputation for ruthlessness, on one occasion summarily executing with a
bullet in the head a peasant who had sold information on their whereabouts to government forces.

Despite being given the grand title of
Comandante
by Castro, Che probably was in charge of no more than a couple of hundred men. Encouraged by a botched government campaign to suppress them, they decided to strike back. Santa Clara had a garrison of 2,500 troops but the people were behind the rebels. On the morning of December 28 – while people in the United States were still humming along to Elvis’s
Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)
– Che and his men took on the troops in a guerrilla attack.

With the help of local townspeople they managed to seize the Caterpillar bulldozer and some tractors from the university’s agriculture school and ripped up the railway tracks, right where I am standing now, if the legend is to be believed.

There are, of course, many – particularly among the Cuban exiles in the US – who do not believe the legend, and suggest that there never was a real battle and the train was sold out by officers on board. The official version is that it was derailed, then heroically stormed by the ill-equipped revolutionaries, and townsfolk armed with Molotov cocktails.

Che himself encouraged the most romantic ‘triumphant underdogs’ version, not least because it was to be a keystone in building his legend. History is always written by the victors. There probably was a battle of some sort, but most of the ordinary troops on board the train and in the barracks had appallingly low morale, harboured sympathy for the rebels and as soon as their officers lost heart, happily gave up the fight, encouraging the wave of defections and surrenders which subsequently swept the country.

Che, ever the propaganda expert, announced the victory over his own pirate radio
Rebelde
, detailing huge amounts
of arms and ammunition that had allegedly fallen into his hands. Whether or not the figures were true, the propaganda had the right effect. Within hours of his ‘victory’ announcement on December 31, Batista fled the country. Castro declared his victory on January 2 in Santiago, scene of his débâcle raid six years earlier, and within the week rode into Havana after a triumphal march the length of the country.

That’s the legend. Or the history lesson. I had done the victory monument; now it was time for the shrine.

I had intended to catch an ‘uptown’ horse and cart bus, but – just like in London – there’s never a bus when you want one, no matter what it runs on. So I grab a
bicitaxi
instead, feeling only slightly guilty when I realize it really is an uptown journey; from the
tren blindado
to the Che memorial is a long, slow uphill nearly all the way. I can almost feel the strain in my taxi man’s calf muscles as we crawl up to the main square and the blissful relief as we plateau out and freewheel much of the rest of the way to the great grey and rose granite-slabbed parade ground that looks, with its banks of floodlights and towering stone obelisk, like a cross between an American football field and the Nuremberg rally site.

Just to make the kitsch complete there is piped music, playing ethereally from loudspeakers in the floodlights, a mix of revolutionary and Cuban patriotic songs, and of course, inevitably,
that
song, the one that along with
Guantanamera
leaves an indelible impression on anyone who has visited this island:
Hasta siempre, Comandante!

Written in 1965 by Carlos Puebla to a haunting melody that I have heard done as a romantic song of loss, a martial anthem, and an almost hip-hop version – as with church music in the middle ages, in Cuba if the words are right you can get away with almost any melody – it is ostensibly a reply to his farewell letter when he left Havana for the final time
to foment revolution elsewhere. By then his mix of moviestar good looks and revolutionary fervour had made him a global celebrity, feted from Moscow and Beijing to Dar es Salaam, Algiers and Limerick.

After he was captured and brutally executed by Bolivian government troops aided by the CIA in 1967, the song which played on Che’s own slogan
Hasta la victoria siempre
, ‘Ever onwards to victory’, became an anthem, seen as a poignant farewell, a tribute to the legend made all the more powerful by his martyrdom. Here echoes round the palm-fringed square just as, almost on cue, a couple on a motorbike ride across it. The ‘easy rider’ thing is no joke: that combination of youthful idealism and footloose romanticism became the distilled essence of the 1960s, and despite the often bitter taste of harsh realism that has come to flavour the modern world, it is a mythology that is still remarkably easy to evoke.