Slow Train to Guantanamo (18 page)

Whereas every other colonial city founded by the Spanish in the New World was laid out formally – Madrid even passed legislation, the Laws of the Indies 1573, requiring colonial towns to be built to a grid around a central plaza – Camagüey is a maze of oblique angles, retreating curves, U-bends and dead ends. Without even the organic growth pattern that marks many mediaeval European cities, Camagüey is a city planner’s schizophrenic homage to irregular geometry.

A few joysuckers claim its chaotic development was haphazard but most natives and historians believe this inhabited
maze which could swallow a small army was designed deliberately to do just that. Because its rich cattle market made it even more of a target for pirates than little Remedios, the inhabitants of what was then called Santa Maria del Puerto Principe
⁶
∗ (it was renamed Camagüey for an old Taino Indian chief after independence) moved further inland and redid the street plan.

It didn’t necessarily help a great deal. One of the more famed visitors was Henry Morgan, who built a reputation as one of the more ferocious pirates of the Caribbean, despite the fact that he held the title of Vice Admiral in the Royal Navy at the time. He dropped by in 1668 with some 500 freelance villains, looted the cathedral and tortured what few citizens he could find. It would be nice to think his ghost is still trapped in some Camagüey blind alley, but he went on to infamously burn Panama City to the ground before falling out of favour with King Charles II and drinking himself to death in Jamaica.

I’m feeling in need of a stiff tot of rum myself by the time I finally get back to Calle Principe, thanks only to kindly meant imprecise directions and eventually running across the landmark birthplace of good old Ignacio Agramonte again.

Dinner is on the table. Or rather covering it. I know that what I’m paying in CUCs is the equivalent in national pesos of a month’s salary for most people, but I wasn’t expecting a month’s supply of food. Especially as the standard of cooking is what you might expect from somebody who’s asked their mother-in-law to come round and lend a hand. It’s not
awful; it’s just not very good. Or rather, what she’s done with most expensive ingredient isn’t very good. It’s fish. What sort of fish I have no idea. And I expect she didn’t either. I’m wondering if even the fish did. However it started out, it has ended up as a great grey overcooked pile of vaguely fishy protein with a texture like a load of tissues left out in the rain.

It comes served with a few basic ingredients for a salad: some grated carrot, a bit of shredded lettuce, one small tomato and some dried-up cucumber. Not assembled, you see, but just set out, separately on a plate, with a lot of cooking oil and vinegar slopped over them. It’s well meant, but not exactly thought through.

The one thing that really does work, however, is the one she probably makes every day and has just knocked up here as an extra filler, as if one were needed with half a steamed shark or whatever it is on offer: black beans and rice. These
frijoles
, the Cuban staple, have been boiled up until tender in a deliciously tasty onion broth and come with the rice served on the side to add at will. It would have been a good, if unadventurous, nourishing and tasty meal on its own. My biggest problem, however, is feeling obliged to choke down a quantity of the expensive fish.

With the television on in the background and two young children running round and arguing, that feeling of ‘living alongside a local family’ is definitely overdone. Especially as my meal is laid out as something special, separate; the family have either already eaten or will eat later. I am beginning to understand that meals in Cuba are seen as necessity rather than occasion. People eat food because they have to and do it when they can. The concept of
cuisine
in everyday life is about as absent as it was in ration-book Britain in the 1950s.

I am secretly desperate to face down their obvious disappointment that I haven’t cleaned my plate and escape this
haven of chintzy domesticity that has a little too much about it of a 1960s American soap opera. The family are rich as Croesus by Cuban standards, which means they can afford to live in the materialist comfort of US suburbia a generation ago, and with all the lack of roots and tradition that go with it. For them, the revolution might never have happened.

Wandering back into town feels like a different world. I am careful to note landmarks along the way not just to avoid getting lost again but to feel back in a less candied Cuban reality. Passing each open window is like watching a series of cameo tableaux behind wrought iron grilles: a
bicitaxi
in the middle of a living-room, an old couple on an ancient
chaiselongue
watching a sitcom on television, a Baptist church on the corner with girls in red skirts and white shirts standing up to ‘give testimony’ at the Saturday night service. A sign on the wall says: ‘Home is home, prayer is all’. Next door is the district headquarters of the Communist party. Their signs says, ‘We face a war of ideology. Let us fight a battle of ideas to win it.’ Beneath it two old blokes with baseball caps pulled won over their eyes are dozing peacefully.

The real party is going on in Agramonte Square, outside the Café Ciudad. A lively, busty young woman in tight jeans and a skimpy white halter top with stiletto heels and a Panama hat tipped racily over one eye is shaking her maracas and singing her soul out in front of a four-man band on guitar, saxophone, congas and trumpet.

After a time chilling in warm moonlight and salsa sounds, that tot of rum definitively beckons. The place to have it is El Cambio, a surprisingly hip-looking bar on the corner of the square, with paint-streaked walls covered with deliberate graffiti and adorned with a few carved heads like totem poles. I order a
Siete Años
shot and a can of Naranja to wash it down.

El Cambio is the epitome of Camagüey cool. Hemingway
might not have drunk here but you could imagine Hunter S. Thompson would have. There is a whole mid-70s vibe to the place: some cool jazz playing on the stereo and a tall black girl in ripped blue jean shorts with a handbag slung over her shoulder trying to make a call from the payphone on the wall in one corner. A glance at the cooler cabinet soon makes it obvious though that this is a joint aimed almost exclusively at the foreign tourist trade: there’s not just Bucanero in there, but Becks too. And Red Bull. And, most remarkably at all – given that this is Cuba and there’s supposed to be a 100 per cent trade embargo with the United States – the ultimate symbol of American global hegemony: Coca-Cola. Can Coke have engaged in illegal sanctions-busting?

The barman sees me stare, smiles and says, ‘Imported from Canada.’

Meanwhile, across the room a guy at a table on his own is fiddling with some wooden figure or other. I try to guess how long it’s likely to be before he tries to sell it to me. And underestimate by approximately 30 seconds. I’ve been waiting for this. Camagüey has a reputation for being particularly plagued by
jineteros
, the ubiquitous touts who live off tourists, though so far apart from the street cleaner trying to sell his ‘Che’ coin, I’ve had no bother. Eventually though – after maybe about five whole minutes – he sidles up to the bar, pulls up a stool, takes a sip of his drink, which looks like neat dark rum, and introduces himself:

‘
Hola
, my name is Steve.’ He gives me a beaming smile displaying a mouthful of ivory white teeth, save for one that looks filled with either silver or tin, and holds out a hand. I know what’s coming but I smile back and take his hand: Cuba is a friendly country. Even the rip-off merchants have a laid-back charm.

We sit there for a moment or two like a couple on a blind
date stuck for conversation, Steve – and it has to be highly improbable that is his real name – beaming at me as if tongue-tied but probably just trying to muster his English. For a bizarre moment I realize what it must be like to be a girl at a bar being picked up without wanting to be. But I know that’s not what this is about.

And, sure enough, after a few more minutes of mildly uncomfortable silence marked only by a half-effort of a laugh and a matey punch on the arm and the clinking of glasses to consummate our wonderful new friendship, he gets down to business as he pulls the wooden figure out of his bag and set to polishing it.

This is the bit where I’m supposed to respond by showing the merest modicum of polite interest that will allow him to launch his sales pitch. I stare straight in front of me, over the bar, and concentrate on sipping my rum. I can almost feel the frustration next to me, growing as he pays ever more exaggerated attention to his polishing. It’s not fair, I’m not playing by the rules. But then it’s his game, not mine. For the moment. Eventually, and without any more effort at seductive small talk, he cracks and says, in not too badly broken English, ‘What do you think of this? Do you like it?’

It’s my turn to relent. I take a look at the thing which is some sort of crude totem pole thingie with what appear to be flowers and animals carved on it. It reminds me vaguely of something my well-travelled American uncle used to bring back from Africa, things that looked a bit like ancient ritual tribal carvings but were really mass-manufactured in sweatshops in Mombasa. The main difference is the wood is dark brown, not black.

‘Very nice,’ I tell him, doing my very best to convey that I am merely being polite and not a potential customer, and turn pointedly back to my drink. He does at bit more
rubbing at it and then says, ‘You know how long it’s taken me to make this?’

I shake my head in a desultory sort of way, still trying to indicate that I’m really more interested in my rum than small talk, and a lot more than shopping for second-rate statuettes.

‘Fifty hours, man. Can you imagine?’

Frankly, looking at the thing, no, I can’t. He gives a deep, theatrical sigh, then says, ‘But times are hard, y’know. I’m thinking of selling it.’ He makes a good fist of looking sheepish, shy, awkward and desperate at the same time and says, ‘Would you like to buy?’

I give him a broad smile, which is cruel because I’m getting his hopes up. ‘Funny you should say that,’ I tell him as I reach into my own little shoulder bag, ‘Because I’m in the same business, sort of.’

That gets an odd look, which gets odder still when I add, ‘My speciality though is metal toys’.

I’ve been waiting for this moment, just a little wickedly, almost from the moment I landed in Havana. From the depths of my bag I bring out a little red model of a London double-decker bus. Obviously made in China. My wife had bought me a handful of these from one of the tourist trap junk sellers on Oxford Street, with the idea – gleaned from years living in the Soviet Union, and a visit to Egypt where a policeman once asked me if I had a pen, then said thank you and walked off with it – that in semi-third-world countries a bag of little goodies to give out was one way of making useful friends. I had considered giving one to old Pablo’s granddaughter, but discovered that the wheels came off almost as soon as you touched the thing, and, coming from health-and-safety addicted Britain, was painfully aware that to a small child they could be almost as lethal as the pin-sharp little metal rod that served as an axle. I had considered
simply chucking them in the nearest bin, but at the back of my mind a wicked little alternative scenario had taken route. And now it had materialized.

‘It took me two months to make,’ I say.

‘Steve’ peers at the little red bus, then gives me a look, for just a second, as if to say, ‘You’re having me on, aren’t you?’ And then he glanced back at the statue and the bus and gave me another look that said, ‘Of course, you bloody are!’ and we both burst into simultaneous laughter.

I try to keep a straight face while he looks me in the eye for a long moment, then shakes his head and gives a deep belly laugh, sticks his hand in the air and high-fives me, following up with a bit of genuine global English: ‘Fuck you, man. Fuck you!’ There are some American imports that even the trade embargo can’t ban.

We chink glasses again, only this time I offer to buy him a shot of rum. He accepts avidly. Then, thinking that maybe I’ve softened up, takes out the totem pole again and says, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t …?’

In response I hold up the little bus and say, ‘Just five pesos to you.’ Then adds, ‘Convertibles. CUC’ He creases up, shaking his head. But the smile, when it comes back, is genuine. I’ve made him laugh. All of a sudden he reckons I might just speak his language, one way or another.

All of a sudden it is if we have both crashed through an invisible wall: he is no longer just another hustler, I am no longer just another mark. We shake hands again, not a high-five, just a shake. ‘My real name is Juanito,’ he says. I do my best in Spanish which is about as good as his English and for the next half hour or so we exchange life stories, or a sort – I suspect both of us are making stuff up (I certainly am) – and swop drinks.

There is a reason for this. Juanito, it turns out, isn’t drinking local rum at all. Or rather he is, and I’m not. I’m on 
Havana Club, which most locals can’t afford; he’s on local hooch distilled by a mate of his and turned brown not by ageing but by a bit of burnt molasses. He only tells me that after I’ve tried a swig.

The barman is already laughing. It’s part of the deal, the pact, the great Cuban conspiracy. In any bar in a capitalist society – try it in your local – a punter who brought in his own hooch and sat there drinking it while trying to pester (relatively) wealthy real customers would be tossed out on his ear. But here our barman is not the owner, and not on a share of the profits, or a performance-related wage, nor does he feel beholden to his employer: he’s just a civil servant, like everybody else from the farmer to the factory worker, holding down a job like any other poor schmuck who works for the government. Albeit one where he can expect to get tips in the all-important CUCs.

And that’s the point, of course. He also charges in CUCs and there’s no way in a million years Steve, or Juanito, or whoever, can afford to pay. But because this is a CUCs only bar, he can’t buy anything else in there either. So the barman lets him come in and drink his homemade hooch while trying to con whatever cash he can from the tourists. In our economies you’d automatically assume the barman would be asking in return for a share of any profits, but here I genuinely don’t think he is. He gets hard currency tips – which he definitely doesn’t share – and in return he’s willing to let a fellow comrade try his own hand on the market economy.