Slow Train to Guantanamo (31 page)

It is one of the strangest feelings I have ever experienced in a quarter century covering the Cold War to what we all thought was its end. When I lived in East Berlin I would delight in taking visitors to the viewing stand next to the Reichstag from where they could look over, as over the 28 years of the Wall’s existence thousands of tourists and hundreds of foreign dignitaries had done, to the supposedly frightening communist east beyond the walled-off Brandenburg Gate. Then I would load them into my car and drive through Checkpoint Charlie, turn left along Friedrichstrasse and left again down Unter den Linden to where the Brandenburg Gate stood floodlit from the other side, with the Wall almost invisible a hundred metres away, and try to tell them that there were two sides to every story.

The Wall was wrong of course, inhuman and by its very nature necessarily ephemeral, but the point I was trying to make, and still adhere to, is that history is what historians make it. Or as a greater wit than mine once put it, ‘The only reason God tolerates historians is because they can do what he cannot: alter the past.’ Just as journalists, and travel writers, do our best with perceptions of the present.

After all, here I am standing in an empty restaurant in a communist state with one party rule, which tolerates no opposition and insists despite the obvious economic quagmire into which it has led its people, that its system is fairer and more honourable than that of the country on the other
side of this fence, which unselfconsciously styles itself ‘leader of the free world’. It should be a bad joke, but the tragedy is that it isn’t. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the US presence at Guantánamo Bay – and the obvious parallel is Britain’s long but now relinquished occupation, under a similar treaty, of Hong Kong – it is the US itself which has turned logic on its head. The US regularly, repeatedly, systematically accuses the Havana government of a lack of respect for human rights, yet the continued existence of this greatest symbol of its own willingness to suspend those rights makes all else farcical.

Staring out at the watchtowers and radar domes on the low green tropical hills beyond the barbed wire I know that in camps over there, men in orange jumpsuits are imprisoned in cells without ever having faced trial; they have suffered what nobody disputes is torture by waterboarding. This makes it hard to believe there are – or maybe ever were – clear-cut sides in the Cold War or even now in its bastard child, the War against Terror. In all of this Cuba cuts an anomalous figure, like those apocryphal World War II Japanese soldiers holed up in Pacific islands decades after their war ended.

I know and like the United States. Many of my cousins are US citizens. In the year of Barack Obama’s election I travelled 10,000 miles by train around that massive continental nation which prides itself, mostly rightly, on justice and liberty. Yet here in what most US citizens, including the bulk of Cuban emigrés in Florida, would consider the patch of weeds in Uncle Sam’s well-kept back yard, I can’t help feeling happy to be on this side of the fence.

In a small room next to the restaurant’s unused swimming pool there is a small exhibition dedicated to the base. In fact the entire floor of the room, about the size of a small child’s bedroom, is dedicated to a curious topographical map:
piles of sand in the corners of the room arranged to represent the hills beyond the forbidden frontier. On the wall is a hand-painted history of the bay, ‘baptized by Christopher Columbus in 1494 as the Great Bay … illegally occupied by the United States’. On the walls are aerial photographs, decades old, of the base’s desalination plant (Castro long ago cut off fresh water supplies), the hospital and streets of formulaic US suburban housing. They are all at least 30 years old, and all of US origin. For all that Cuba might want to spy on this cuckoo-like outpost of Yankee imperialism, they have had to get their photographs from
Newsweek
. They might have done better by using Google Maps. But then the problem may be not so much that this is a country where the government limits access to information, but that this is a country run by eighty-year-olds.

Back down in Caimanera town my minders are happy to let me ‘escape’ for an hour or so. The streets are little different to any other small Cuban town I have seen: dusty, hot, peppered with small dark cafés and shops with little produce. I drink a cold Mayabe at a corner bar watched with great curiosity by a group of three grizzled locals. Foreigners are obviously a rarity in Caimanera. The only thing that stops them staring disconcertingly is when I try to ask them about the base. They shrug their shoulders, mutter under their breath and turn back to their coffee.

Down by the shore a group of kids are splashing happily in the bay. The US watchtowers haunt the horizon several hundred metres away, but nobody pays any heed. Rather over-optimistically I ask a passing woman to take my photograph with the watchtowers in the distance but she merely shakes her head vigorously and points to a red sign nailed to a truncated palm leaning over the water. In big white letters it says
ACCESSO CONTROLLADO
. I take the point, though I’m not sure everybody does. Just beyond
it two men are wading out into the water, carrying makeshift fishing rods.

And then beyond them I notice what has to be the main Cuban military guard post. Except that at first glance that’s not what it looks like. Standing on a concrete base at the edge of the gravel beach is an absurd pantomime three-storey structure in turquoise blue with a white balustrade surrounding a second floor balcony. It could be the lifeguard station at some elaborate 1930s art deco swimming pool or the stand from which some Gilbert and Sullivan dictator would review his troops. The top floor is reached by a ladder from the second, but it is in any case empty. The supposed occupants, two of them, are lying in the shade by the foot of it, smoking, rifles by their sides. Whatever the state of permanent alert on the Cactus Curtain, in Caimanera today it is clearly not red.

On a street corner next to the inevitable José Martí street, with a bust of the great man on a plinth, there is a swathe of supposed graffiti – obviously done by state-sponsored artists with official permission, like those on the walls in Santa Clara – showing a spit of red land, clearly intended to indicate the base, with a Cuban flag flying from it and the sloganin big bold letters:
TE QUIERO LIBRE
. I want you to be free. Next to it two teenage girls are sitting on a ledge, chilling. One of them is wearing a red T-shirt with the Stars and Stripes on it.

Che T-shirts may be Cuba’s biggest export after cigars but nobody here wears them. Or almost nobody. On a previous visit to Havana I did bump into a couple of characters at a parade dressed as Guevara and his late rival in Cuba’s pantheon of foreign saints, Hugo Chavez. But basically they were just lookalikes having a bit of a laugh. A carefully politically correct one.

The return trip to Guantánamo is something of an
anticlimax, back past the rusting rails, the distant US watchtowers and the strange little isolated cemetery. The check-points barely register us going in the other direction. This may be the last frontier in the Cold War but it is a stale, abandoned front line where both sides claim the high ground and moral values have become fudged. Down here in Guantánamo, Cuba’s
Oriente
, for the time being, it really is all quiet on the eastern front.

10
. Guantánamo is not the only consequence we still live with. As a result of the quarrel on their doorstep, the US got into a general war with Spain. It finished by making Cuba a puppet state, seizing the nearby Caribbean island of Puerto Rico but also intervening on the other side of the world. The United States attacked Spanish colonies in the Pacific, aiding the people of the Philippines in an anti-colonial rebellion, then suppressing them in turn and turning a Spanish colony into an American one which brought them Japanese occupation and eventual independence in 1946. The United States also seized the formerly Spanish island of Guam from where its troops today nervously watch North Korea’s military posturing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Da Coda: Santiago and the ‘French Train’

The Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second city, capital of
Oriente
and chief rival to Havana, is the Castros’ Dunkirk: the place it all went wrong, where the revolution might have ended before it started. But because in the end the disaster was not total, the failure is remembered as heroism and the place itself a national shrine to what was actually an almighty cock-up.

I had thought I would visit the Moncada on my way to Guantánamo but, like the start of World War I, the train timetables dictated otherwise. So I am here on the first leg of the return journey. I have already cheated, and not taken the train, not least because there is indeed no direct train link between Guantánamo and Santiago and doing the journey by rail would require that change in grimy San Luis, which it seemed the Cuban railway system simply wasn’t prepared to accommodate unless I was willing to risk waiting up to two days at a railway station in the middle of nowhere.

Instead I promised myself a ride in the relative luxury of one of the state tourist industry’s Viazul coaches, the sort which normally ferry hard-currency-paying foreigners from their Havana hotels to their gated beach resorts. I had bought my ticket for CUCs from the reception at the Hotel GTMO and taken a taxi to the bus station. Not taking any chances, although Viazul’s reputation is much more reliable
than that of the trains, not least because few if any Cubans can afford it, I arrive early only to find myself besieged by an army of alternatives: private cars hustling for enough fares to fill their vehicles. My taxi driver says I should take one rather than wait. The going rate he assures me is no more than 40 pesos, that despite the fact he has just charged me 4 CUCs, which is closer to 100 pesos for the short ride from the hotel.

We argue for a bit about the price. There is no way he is taking a gringo for 40 pesos. His starting price is 15 CUC. I laugh. He laughs back and says 10. I laugh again and say 5, pointing out I already have Viazul tickets. He looks disappointed, then laughs back and says ‘
Vale
’. Okay. He ushers me into pride of place in the front passenger seat, then disappears for 10 minutes for a cigarette and to hustle enough other passengers, probably all paying 40 pesos at most, to fill the rear cargo compartment. And then we’re off, with the sound of roaring rapper salsa howling from boombox speakers embedded in the leather upholstery above our heads, and every big round dial in the matching pillar-box red painted dash, from ‘TEMP’ to ‘OIL’ to the speedometer itself, set immutably at zero.

There is also the fact that I already have a ticket for what may even be an air-conditioned coach. But will it be real? The backpacker in me is shouting that it would be a cop-out now to take the comfy seat even if the middle-aged bloke with sore feet is hankering after it. Then all of a sudden the answer is in my face, in the shape of a huge great bright blue behemoth, an absolute monster of a vehicle with a great beaming monster of a man behind the wheel. With big brown arms the size of elephant’s thighs, this genial giant in a singlet and shorts is only too proud to show me what he claims proudly is a 1951 Willys Jeep Truck, lovingly cared for, protected from rust by a thick coat of royal blue gloss
paint and upholstered throughout inside in plush shiny red leather. There is even a magnificent curled ram’s head motif on its nose though he admits that probably came from a Dodge.

Just forty-five minutes later after a thrilling rollercoaster ride over the hills that defeated the railway men he dumps me at what appears to be the unlicensed taxi clearing station in the Santiago suburbs. A cantankerous old bloke in a complete wreck of a 1950s Chevy – compared to the near immaculate Willys – offers to take me to my hotel, or rather his cousin’s casa, which I have no difficulty turning down looking through the holes in the foot well at his clunking gears.

I have booked myself in at the San Basilio, am absolute haven of sanity in a city supposed to be Cuba’s most frenetic. And it fulfils expectations, with a handful of elegantly decorated, blissfully high-ceilinged rooms around a little courtyard on the street of the same name, just a short walk from the city’s main square.

The guidebooks paint Parque Céspedes as Santiago’s thriving and just so slightly wicked heart, teeming with people high on hooch, fuelled by sex appeal and swinging to
son
or
trova
music. They must have been there on another day, because right now it reminds me more of Leamington Spa on a Sunday afternoon, with relaxed people enjoying cool drinks in the colonnade of the elegant Casa Grande hotel. There is a
trova
band playing outside but it’s more background music than in-your-face hustle.

I also have a bit of compulsory sightseeing to do, the scene of Castro’s classic débâcle. But first I need a new SD card for my camera, which I’m slightly worried might be impossible to acquire. But no, there is a shop off the main square which I am told has photographic equipment. Hmmm, I’m thinking Kodacolor rather than Secure Digital. But it turns
out I’m wrong. They are available for sale, depending on who you are. The largest available is 2 gigabytes, the middle-aged lady shop assistant says proudly, which is almost the smallest available in most other countries, but it will have to do. But first I have to show my passport, then she has to fill out a form which I have to sign in duplicate and hand over a hugely expensive 30 CUC (£20/$30), vastly beyond the means of any native. But then so is the most basic digital camera. The whole process takes 20 minutes, including the time for her to write out a complex 6-month guarantee form without which she will not give me the card. Still, it’s one-up on Turkey where I bought a 10-gig card for less than half the price only to discover it was phoney and didn’t retain images.