Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  Two sluggish ceiling fans tried to cool the Casa de la Trova, its slightly raised stage overlooked by a local artist’s hectic depiction of the Steps of Padre Pico. In this house lived one of Cuba’s most beloved composers, Rafael Salcedo (1844–1917) and until 1995 his home retained its eighteenth-century dignity. Then crass, cut-price renovations were (surprisingly) permitted and the many famous performers whose portraits crowd the walls would grieve to see it now.

  Between the stage and the seating (plastic chairs) people danced – anyone in the audience who felt like it, but no more than four at a time. We always sat in front, within touching distance of the performers, and this sense of intimacy is important; one might be at a family party.

  One middle-aged couple (white husband, mulatto wife) achieved extraordinary ballet-like gyrations and were ‘regulars’ – always in the second row, smiling affectionately at one another, then he standing, bowing, formally requesting her partnership while the crowd laughed and clapped. The performances of some young couples were even more overtly sexual but it was the solo dancing of a mulatto youth – small-boned, low in stature, apparently made of rubber – that most enthralled the Trio. Loudest of all was the applause for his performance with a tall big-breasted black girl, her ebony skin gleaming against a scarlet halter and tight green pants. As the band played faster and faster those two achieved an acrobatic-erotic tour de force that brought some of the audience to their feet (and perhaps to something else).

  All this was more than I had hoped for in Santiago’s world-famous Casa de la Trova. Here were ordinary citizens doing what Cubans are supposed to do best, making music, singing, dancing, using their bodies with a joyous, mischievous, provocative eloquence – not for tourists but for fun. Outside the three barred windows, reaching from floor to ceiling, townspeople crowded under the arcade. Beaming old men with sun-worn faces, and eyes brightened by their remembered youth, clutched the bars for hours on end, shouting compliments to their favourite singers. Women carrying shopping-bags paused for some free entertainment on their way home from the market. Youths intently observed the musicians, studying techniques, arguing about styles of play. Uniformed schoolgirls eating lunchtime ham rolls wriggled their hips while commenting on the dancers. One rejoiced to know that this Casa belongs to all of Santiago (entry for Cubans NP1).

  Once we joined an early evening session in the tiled patio, a bigger space with potted palms along two walls, a mini-bar at one end and three very obviously dehydrated lavatories at the other. Soon the tourist vanguard appeared, half a dozen bronzed Italians and beetroot-coloured Dutch, all busy with digital and video cameras at CP1 per shot. A tiny nonagenarian white woman – her spine severely curved, limbs withered, eyes sunken, voice quavering – was still able to enjoy dancing. (Her enjoyment couldn’t have been feigned.) When she invited the male tourists to dance with her two did so, looking thoroughly uncomfortable, while their partners took photographs. I wished then that I had confined myself to the casual, spontaneous, non-commercial afternoon sessions.

  Across the street from No. 197 stands Santiago’s celebrated music college (strictly classical) – a fine colonial town house, painted dark pink and navy blue with a view through its pillared chambers to a gracious patio where students relax in the ample shade of kapok and jaguey trees. From Irma’s front windows one could hear the students’ endeavours and Clodagh, especially, spent many spare moments listening to her contemporaries drawing sounds as of a cat being tortured from their violins – her own instrument of choice. Alternatively, one could stand on the pavement by an entrance – as many passers-by do – listening to orchestral rehearsals or one-to-one tuitions. In our world this might be considered an inhibiting distraction for students but in Cuba lives are shared, privilege is not associated with privacy (an alien concept) and those attentive peripatetic audiences seemed to be appreciated. Throughout our stay the orchestra was struggling with Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and a somewhat confused Clodagh complained, ‘They keep on playing the same tune, will they ever finish it?’ I explained that the composer himself had left his seventh symphony unfinished, perhaps because he died of typhus fever at the age of thirty-one. Rose looked shocked. ‘So he was five years younger than Mum is now!’ That inexorably led us into another field of enquiry. ‘What,’ asked Zea, ‘is typhus? Why does it kill people?’

  Irma’s five-star casa particular had only one defect: no writer-friendly table and chair. Therefore I regularly retreated to a corner café on Calle Aguilera where Mirta, a buxom young black woman with a wide smile and a deep chuckle, provided demitasses of excellent coffee for NP1 and was intrigued by my industrious scribbling. Cubans see no reason to stifle curiosity but discovering my profession scarcely lessened her puzzlement. For all their high literacy rate, most young Cubans are not book-minded.

  The café was unlit, its walls panelled in dark wood, its high ceiling smoke-stained. Habitually I sat by one of the barred, unglazed windows and one morning three young men stopped outside on the pavement, staring at my table. After a brief confabulation they entered and shyly offered me NP1 for a pen – the coin on an extended hand. Four pens were visible: blue, red, black and green, all in use when I’m journal-writing, a fetish which perhaps says something about how hard I find it to order my thoughts. Feeling mean and nasty, I apologised for needing all those pens because of being a writer. Gloomily the young men accepted this excuse, one explaining that in Santiago just then there were no pens and when the next delivery arrived they would cost CP1 apiece. Tactlessly I opened my purse to provide CP3. The young men stepped back, gesturing their horror – they weren’t jineteros, they didn’t want a tourist’s money, what they urgently needed, now, was one pen. I gave them my black and blue pens and accepted NP2.

  Usually I was alone in that café, the first arrival, but once, as I was about to leave, fourteen young women assembled outside, looking cowed and sulky, then were led in by a hard-faced older woman. Having pulled two little tables together she opened thick files of rubber-stamped documents containing more figures than words. I ordered another coffee and lingered. The group ordered nothing and on arrival had ignored Mirta. It seemed the young women were guilty of some shared failure, had got their sums wrong, either through incompetence or in an attempt to pilfer. Individually they were challenged, their boss jabbing a forefinger on a page, glaring at them, demanding explanations, hectoring them, plainly enjoying her job. A few muttered defensively, others looked down and said nothing. Only one became angry, raising her voice, half-standing to lean towards the documents and doing a little finger-jabbing on her own account. In response the boss tore up two sheets of paper and snapped something that silenced the angry one who then looked around the semi-circle, seeking support. Everyone avoided her gaze. Next the others were ordered to sign chits which the boss counter-signed and stamped with a large official seal. To me, a café seemed an odd setting for this disciplinary procedure – here was another example of Cuban life being lived in public.

  That same morning, on my way down Enramada, Santiago’s main commercial street, I heard a dog howling strangely in the near distance and saw a crowd gathering. As I drew closer and the howling became more frenzied, four policemen appeared and herded everyone on to the pavements. A little red garbage van sped past me, a closed van with a smallish door in the back. I could now see the mad (rabid?) dog, a mangy medium-sized lurcher. Mercifully the Trio were not present. Out of the van leaped a very tall man wearing thick dungarees and long leather gauntlets. Seizing the dog by one hind leg he whirled it around and around until it was too dizzy to bite, then tried to open the rear door by flinging the unfortunate creature against it, causing shrieks of pain to replace the howling. When the door remained shut there followed another bout of whirling and flinging, also unsuccessful. I wanted to scream at the nearest policeman – ‘Open the bloody door!’ At the third attempt it did open, the dog vanished and the indisputably brave dustman pushed one shoulder against it while fighting a rusty bolt. Swiftly
he drove away and, glancing around, I noticed many in the crowd looking as queasy as I felt.

  That day’s quest, for the Casa de las Religiones Populares, took us east from Parque Cespedes, up and then down along Sueno’s wide, traffic-free, tree-shaded avenues. This district’s art nouveau villas and roomy 1930s bungalows, with tiled facades and colonnaded verandahs, have long since been converted into flats, schools, clinics, kindergartens, government offices. We also passed rows of unassuming old wooden houses (‘Caribbean vernacular’) recalling the arrival of all those French refugees in 1791. En route I tried to not see the garishly decorated fifteen-storey Hotel Santiago which seems to jeer at a nearby white marble monument to the ascetic Che Guevara and the compañeros who died with him in Bolivia.

  In the Casa de las Religiones Populares, a discreetly crumbling mansion encircled by ceiba trees, the exhibits are not conventionally displayed but carefully arranged, in three rooms, to give a sense of their ceremonial significance. Cuba’s popular religions include Santería, voodoo and a cult somewhat ambiguously known as ‘spiritism’. Of these Santería is by far the most popular, its adherents outnumbering Christians. It has evolved from a merging of West African cults with elements of Spanish Catholicism, the former the dominant ingredient.

  The Trio (being reared as agnostics) were baffled by Santería’s interweaving of Christian statues, images and candles with small animal skeletons, a stuffed eagle hanging from the ceiling, weirdly carved walking sticks, intricately embossed drums, cauldrons containing a variety of dead leaves, feathered dolls with forbidding expressions, ebony masks with glaring red eyes and long shaggy manes, votive offerings of fruits, grains and glasses of rum. As we moved from room to room Rose looked increasingly addled while her juniors seemed almost apprehensive. Rachel and I later agreed that this was not our most productive educational effort.

  Emerging into the noon heat, the Trio suggested turning towards Coppelia, forgetting Loma de San Juan, a significant small hill which once formed part of Santiago’s outer defences. There, on 1 July 1898, fewer than a thousand Spaniards held out for some twelve hours against more than three thousand US troops recruited – according to Theodore Roosevelt, who was present – ‘from the wild riders and riflemen of the Rockies and the Great Plains’. This was the only major land-battle of the invasion and Richard Gott records the Cubans’ subsequent resentment:

  Calixto Garcia, the rebel commander closest to Santiago, was invited by the Americans to supply troops to divert Spanish forces during the US advance on the city. He sent 3,000 of his men, but none were asked to the subsequent victory celebrations. Cuba was liberated from Spanish control by the American invasion in barely three weeks, yet the Cubans had been fighting for more than three years. They watched bleakly from the sidelines as their victory was taken from them.

  Rose chose to celebrate her tenth birthday, on 10 November, by returning to Playa Siboney and the mango-shaded restaurant. Despite a long wait for the bus we were on the beach by 9.00 a.m.

  Two hours later the royal palms suddenly became wildly agitated, reshaped by a gale, all their fronds pointing south as masses of low charcoal clouds poured over the Sierra de la Gran Piedra and whiteness flecked the sea – now jade green. We made for the nearest shelter, an improvised café two hundred yards away where the awning was irrelevant because the gale drove the rain horizontally across the tables. Happily the storm passed as quickly as it had arrived and we strolled to the restaurant through a fine drizzle, the slight drop in temperature compensating for the mild discomfort of sodden clothes.

  That was a jolly birthday party, if not gastronomically memorable (noodles, pork steaks, grated carrot). Inevitably I recalled Rachel’s tenth birthday, celebrated in the little town of Andahuayalas towards the end of our three-month Andean trek. There it took over an hour to find a cake – any kind of cake. That evening we ate steak, onions and chips in a large grotty restaurant lit by an oil-lamp. The bottle of Peruvian wine spotted on the top shelf of a dusty shop was challenging – as was that hard-won sponge cake. But aged ten the symbolism of a birthday cake is what matters.

  The clouds began to break up as we returned to the junction, sniffing a medley of strong scents released by the rain: unfamiliar herbs and blossoms, rotting vegetation, ripe pig manure, over-ripe papaya. Outside the long, low junction shed, where locals collect their rations, several groups stood around awaiting transport though no bus was expected for the foreseeable future. Soon a 1950s jeep stopped to pick up two young men carrying tool bags. Some time later an already overcrowded car, minus both rear doors, found space for two slim elderly women. Their fat friend was left behind but her protestations held no rancour. Meanwhile swarms of day mosquitoes were tormenting us though the Cubans seemed indifferent to them. As our itch bumps multiplied, even Rose complained.

  Shouts of joy greeted the arrival of an open-backed empty farm lorry and we were urged to climb aboard – easier said than done, for the uninitiated. This was a high truck, without steps, but a strong young man locked his hands together for me and kind arms stretched down to help the Trio. We stood at one side, holding a bar, able at last to appreciate the landscape – and to see Granjita Siboney.

  From this little farmhouse Fidel and his hundred and twenty companions, wearing army uniforms bought on the black market, set out by starlight on the morning of 26 July 1953 to assault the Moncada barracks, hoping to equip the Rebel Army by robbing its armoury. Most men were armed only with .22 rifles or shotguns; a few carried heavier weapons. During the previous weeks, as the Movement surreptitiously assembled its volunteers and weaponry on Granjita’s two acres, Ernesto Tizol, a poultry farmer who had rented the premises, told the locals that he was building a new battery-hen unit. Now, viewing this tranquil pastoral scene, it seems little has changed since that convoy of motor cars and buses moved off, led by Fidel in a large hired Buick which had just taken him the five hundred and sixty miles from Havana, a black lorry-driver at the wheel, posing as the young white lawyer’s chauffeur. Soon more than half those volunteers would be dead. When the Moncada raid failed, many were shot after enduring extreme forms of torture – so extreme that some of Batista’s soldiers (not sensitive types) couldn’t bear to watch. Moncada’s commanding officer, Colonel Chaviano, had demanded ten rebel lives for every one of the nineteen soldiers killed. The rebels had lost six. Several military doctors and junior officers, appalled by what they saw and heard, tried to rescue some of the rebels but were warned not to interfere. One doctor, Mario Munoz, protested so vigorously that he was shot dead. Photographs of the tortured bodies were circulated throughout Cuba and these, like Britain’s execution of Ireland’s 1916 leaders, did much to help the Revolution on its way – more than the contents of any armoury could have done.

  Above Granjita Siboney rises the steep blue bulk of the Sierra de la Gran Piedra where Fidel took refuge after Moncada, while spotter planes and ground troops sought the surviving rebels. Of the forty who returned to Granjita during the afternoon of 26 July several were wounded and/or demoralised, wanting only to be safe home in Havana. That evening, when Fidel set out to climb the Gran Piedra (four thousand feet and precipitous) only nineteen followed him and only two, Oscar Alcade and José Suarez, were able to stay the course until 1 August. Then, at dawn, sixteen Rural Guards found the fugitives asleep in a remote hut. When a corporal suggested killing them on the spot half a dozen men eagerly volunteered for the firing squad. Rural Guard conscripts were black and uneducated and favoured Batista, a mulatto former sergeant, rather than these white middle-class rebels. Just in time, Lieutenant Pedro Sarria realised what was about to happen and ordered the Guards not to fire. Aged fifty-three, he had been among the courageous minority who attempted to halt the Moncada torturing. When he died in 1973 his funeral was attended by both Fidel as President of Cuba and his brother Raúl as Commander-in Chief of the armed forces.

  At a junction halfway to Santiago we joined two weary-looking women sitting on empty sacks. All around stretch
ed undulating pastureland, yellowish-brown when it should have been green, and in the distance co-op dairy buildings were visible, our lorry’s destination. In Havana we had heard about the drought, Cuba’s worst since 1901. Some two million citizens, out of eleven point two million, were currently dependent on water-tankers. Forty-two of the island’s two hundred and thirty-five reservoirs were dry, the rest were down to thirty-two per cent capacity, on average.

  The Trio fretted as desperate horned cattle pushed their heads under a wire fence to reach the unappetising roadside growth. Soothingly I remarked on these bullocks’ fine condition; their glossy golden-brown coats suggested ample supplementary feeding.

  The first bus ignored us; it was packed to danger point and swayed erratically as it took a nearby bend. I admired the Trio’s reaction to life as it is lived by the average Cuban: no whining though by this stage all three looked exhausted. The next bus stopped only when the women ran after it, shouting what may have been voodoo curses. A genial mulatta offered Zea a seat on her lap, the rest of us stood. At the terminus I suggested a taxi but in unison the Trio said – ‘No! Walking is better.’ Their age-group readily absorbs parental standards: if walking is feasible one simply doesn’t use motor transport. I hope that in ten years hence they won’t be competing for men with Porsches. Back at base they enjoyed an unexpected reward. Generous Irma had baked a fruit and cream birthday cake, as large as it was luscious; by then she had the measure of their appetites.