Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  The National Park to which Ernesto led us was not yet a tourist attraction. No sign marked its rusty barbed wire fence, interwoven with forest undergrowth, and the high, crudely-made plank gate refused to open. Cautiously we climbed over, glad of Ernesto’s help, then for an hour walked in single file through green coolness. (That was one of those blessed days when the sun never shone and occasionally it rained.) At intervals a balancing act was required when the path became a knife-edge ridge of volcanic rock. Ernesto provided refreshment by kicking off his shoes, swarming up the forty-foot naked bole of a coconut palm, hacking off three nuts with his machete and flinging them down after warning shouts. The Trio were mesmerised – and felt challenged. Our future hikes were slowed by frequent attempts to ‘do an Ernesto’, success only limited by shortness of limb.

  Approaching the caves, I chickened out; my head for heights, never good, has been kiboshed by age. From ground level the entrance – somewhere very far up on a sheer cliff – was invisible behind veils of ferns and vines. A ladder made the first stage possible: after that you were on your own. Typically, Clodagh led the way (no cliff too sheer for her!) and having seen everyone safely up I went on my way, not displeased to be alone in the forest.

  It seemed there were bohios nearby; I had soon passed four high hillocks of coconut shells, a common sight around hamlets. Many trees are multipurpose, palms notably so. The royal palms’ hardwood goes both to build and to furnish bohios (and other houses), its fronds thatch them. From the fibrous bract campesiños make slippers, baskets to be carried on the head, cucurucho cones and containers for tobacco, after the leaves have been cured on palm-wood racks, The bract’s heart, always a valued food, is now revered for its association with the Rebel Army; at times Fidel’s guerrillas were largely dependent on it. When grazing is scarce, cattle and horses make the best of green palm leaves and cattle (though not horses) accept the trunk’s pith. In many areas the pigs’ staple diet consists of royal palm nuts and, because palms flower perennially, they keep honey bees in non-stop production. Palm oil goes into the making of soap (when it’s not being exported to earn hard currency) and a distillation from palm tree roots is the traditional remedy for diabetes. Perhaps in recognition of this versatility, Cubans generally obey the new law protecting palms though most such constraints are ignored. Fifteen varieties are native – three particular to Baracoa’s rain forests – and a few exotics have been introduced. As the national symbol, incorporated in the Republic’s seal, the royal palm has been much praised in verse and prose by esteemed writers, but literary outpourings butter no parsnips and all Cuba’s palms urgently needed protective legislation. The population was drastically diminished, post-Revolution, by new dams and reservoirs and the mechanisation of agriculture.

  Were I allowed only one adjective to describe Baracoa it would have to be green. Countless shades of green, countless green shapes and textures – from the palms to the massive ceibas, from riverside groves of the wide-spreading, long-leaved balsa to the gangling sea-grapes, from sprawling mangroves to blowsy banana plants and their wispy young, from gigantic kapoks with flanged roots to that absurd cactus with a slender six-foot stem topped by a solitary oval fruit – looking, from a distance, like a road-sign that might say ‘STOP’ or ‘ONE WAY’. And then there are the mosses and vines and ferns and rare, mysterious rain forest oddities. Baracoa’s mountains even smell green, to my nostrils, though the Trio mocked me when I said so.

  The descent from the caves was an easy pathlet but when I suggested my entering at that end Rachel firmly said ‘No’ and the Trio supported her. Evidently the walk through had been vertigo-inducing, even for them.

  On the way to the next excitement the forest thinned and tall coffee bushes surrounded a hamlet where half-naked hens scratched in the undergrowth. (On first seeing these birds we pitied their diseased state; in fact they are a distinct breed brought to South America many centuries ago by Chinese voyagers.) Two women waved and smiled at the Trio, Ernesto knew everybody and some banter was exchanged. Not long after, in a more open area of high rocks and bushy thickets, our path abruptly ended at the mouth of a deep dark underground cavern filled by a lake, one corner just visible from above. Huge boulders, damp and slippy, formed a natural stairway and that water, guaranteed ‘frio’ by Ernesto, did look tempting. Yet I again became a separatist to guard our rucksack; the two youths crouching in nearby bushes, not showing the usual Cuban friendly curiosity, made me uneasy.

  Ten minutes later, as I sat on the top boulder listening enviously to the Trio’s joyful squeals and splashings, there came a sudden commotion – angry shouts as the youths ran on to the path pursued by a uniformed Park Ranger wielding a short truncheon. He didn’t chase his quarry but approached me with a reassuring smile, apologising for the annoyance, describing the two as ‘bad boys’. Then he looked at his watch, explained that we must be out of the park by 5.00 p.m. and shouted down to Ernesto. It seemed odd that a park so vaguely fenced and gated should have strict opening hours and a uniformed Ranger. But Cuba’s like that …

  Casas particulares date from 1993 when a desperate government allowed Cubans to possess and spend dollars – and to earn them, by renting spare rooms, running private taxis, making and selling souvenirs, setting up roadside food stalls. Self-employment was in again, accompanied by the unannounced visits to casas particulares of Immigration Police, Public Health inspectors, Tourist Board agents. As the average Cuban home might not satisfy the average foreign visitor, the authorities set standards of modest comfort which usually required a certain initial investment, often made possible by US-based relatives. (In 1995 Cuba absorbed some four hundred and fifty-seven million US dollars, partly family remittances, partly the spending money of holidaying Cuban-Americans.)

  All our hosts complained about the licence fees – US$5 per night for each bedroom whether or not the room is occupied, plus US$85 for a monthly licence to serve meals. A US$1,000-fine punishes unlicensed letting, an inability to pay that fine entitles the State to confiscate the property – something rarely done. These fees and fines fund the provision, by local authorities, of homes for young couples trapped with in-laws in cramped accommodation.

  All families must retain one bedroom for their own use and not allow more than four guests per room, a rule that usually doubled our lodging costs. Each casa particular is supplied with a register in which every conceivable detail must be entered and the docket signed by both host and guest. Even on our first morning in Havana, when Rachel was swaying with exhaustion, this time-consuming routine had to be gone through before she retired, lest some inspector find two rooms occupied by unrecorded foreigners.

  In 1993 families with spare rooms, and with relatives among the diaspora, were already privileged and on gaining their licences they became even more so. In an uneasily defensive speech, during the October 1997 Fifth Party Congress, Fidel implicitly recognised Cuba’s new class division and referred to casas particulares:

  Some people decide to live crowded together, some out in the garage, here or there. What we have to do is regulate that. If a number of citizens receive an income that way, on the basis of making a personal sacrifice or because they’ve got excess house space, that’s not a tragedy for the Revolution. It’s not going to suffer because someone has a certain income.

  We had wondered, when booking in to No. 137, if the Trio equalled two adults, thus legalising five to a room. On our sixth evening we got home to find Isabel and Bernaldo being interviewed by a tall thin young man who, as we entered, was scrutinising the open Guest Register with compressed lips. All three were standing in the living-room, looking unrelaxed, and an awkward silence fell as we appeared. Rachel hustled the Trio through to our room – they puzzled by Isabel’s failure to fuss over them, ask how far we’d walked, pour fruit juices, assure herself that no one had been sunburnt. The interview then continued, sotto voce, and soon the inspector left. There had been a small problem, Bernaldo admitted, but now all was well and we could sta
y another three nights, as planned.

  Had the inspector just chanced to call or had someone informed him that five foreigners were staying in a casa known to have only one guest room? We thought the former more likely: surely a complaint would have led to our being immediately evicted? But the latter remained a nasty possibility – though there’s a certain lack of logic in describing it as ‘nasty’. When it suited us, we were grateful for Cuba’s law-abidingness. And that inspector, or anyone who might have ‘informed’, was entitled to enforce a not unreasonable law.

  Although Baracoa has scarcely been industrialised, for topographical reasons, it does have a cigar factory and a gigantic chocolate factory, opened in 1963 by Che Guevara and Raúl Castro and soon deservedly famous for the quality of its output. Therefore the Trio had been promised lots of chocolate – not a normal part of their diet – on arrival. But (a cruel disappointment!) none was available, apart from bars in disguised wrapping being furtively sold by elderly men and those we were advised to avoid. Then Rachel heard that a factory shop sold to tourists (only) and on her day off (something every mother needs) the Trio and I endured a two-mile main road walk through Baracoa’s one dullish district – deforested land, afflicted by the beginnings of ribbon-building. Our timing was peculiarly misfortunate; all the gates were locked and groups of dejected workers sat around on the forecourt playing dominoes or morosely reading Granma. That very morning the factory had been closed for lack of spare parts and no one knew when/if it would open again.

  Trudging back, we invented a guessing game inspired by the sight of a horse-bus driver stopping to remove a tyre-rubber shoe. Some Baracoa equines go unshod, some are shod with rubber or iron and those options sound quite different. Our competition involved identifying an approaching equine’s footwear and the Trio generously made allowances for Nyanya’s being aurally challenged; one of my correct guesses equalled two of theirs.

  At the Trio’s request we turned aside to visit Baracoa’s Archaeological Museum which cleverly occupies small caves on the second and third terraces of a high embankment near the town centre. Within this shadowy complex of limestone caverns religious ceremonies and burials took place over many pre-colonial centuries. Several skeletons have been left exactly as the archaeologists found them, in the foetal position; each is surrounded by pebbles, their size and colour indicating the deceased’s status and age group. A spiral staircase leads from level to level and in the lower cave dim lighting made the skeleton of Megalonus look quite creepy. Poor Megalonus, a giant tree sloth, has long been extinct; the Tainos liked their meat course and Megalonus was not speedy. Most of the many Taino artefacts were baffling since I couldn’t read their labels. But one row of wooden spatulas, hanging below an electric bulb, had a legible label; before communicating with their gods the Taino were obliged to purge themselves and they used spatulas to induce vomiting.

  ‘Disgusting!’ exclaimed Rose. ‘I use my fingers,’ remarked Clodagh, ‘if I feel I must vomit.’ ‘What’s “purge” mean?’ asked Zea.

  On our way down to the Malecón we passed three boys shouting triumphantly under a tree, one with a very long, thick, brown and green snake draped around his neck.

  ‘Is it alive?’ wondered Zea.

  ‘Can’t be,’ said Rose. ‘They’d be scared of it, not wearing it like a scarf!’

  ‘Poor snake!’ mourned Clodagh. ‘Are they so happy because they killed it?’

  ‘Probably,’ I replied. ‘That’s horrible!’ said Zea. So I had to explain a harsh fact of life in subsistence economies. The Cuban boa, the largest snake in the Greater Antilles, is harmless to man but not to poultry. Therefore it may soon go the way of Megalonus.

  This left the Trio unsatisfied. Rose argued, ‘People could make runs for their hens, like Daddy does for our ducks.’ ‘Yes!’ agreed Zea. ‘We don’t kill all the foxes because they eat ducks.’ Clodagh looked sombre, then reminded us – ‘But we have friends who kill foxes for fun.’

  At which point, to my relief, Mummy appeared in the distance and all three raced towards her. She had spent a gruelling two and a half hours in the bus companies’ offices, being repeatedly passed from Viazul to Astro and back again. She hoped, but it wasn’t yet certain, that our seats were secured for the day after the morrow.

  We sat near Columbus’s statue, watching the rush-hour traffic: many crowded horse-buses, bicitaxis carrying people or sacks, mule-carts piled with coconuts or bananas. Soon the Trio were suggesting a bicitaxi ride – ‘Just to see what it feels like,’ said Clodagh. ‘You two needn’t come,’ added Rose. ‘There’s only room for us in one taxi.’ Briefly their elders hesitated; but to have shaken the Trio’s trust would have seemed not only over-protective but downright wrong. We beckoned an amiable young man whose scarlet tricycle had a snow-white awning. Surprisingly, his price for a half-hour ride was NP20; despite Baracoa’s tourist-flow he wasn’t yet thinking in convertible pesos.

  Waving off the happy Trio, we wondered where Baracoa’s tourists flow to … Almost every day we had seen a luxury coach with curtained windows taking its cargo to the out-of-town Porto Santo hotel. And twice we’d seen those cargoes being led around the town centre, looking slightly weary and more than slightly bemused as their guides ‘sold’ them the Revolution in broken English. We never saw them elsewhere; presumably that town centre tour was it – they had done Baracoa. Safely back in their hotel, they could splash in the pool’s familiar chlorine-scented water, recline with daiquiris on the terrace and photograph sunset over the bay before packing up in readiness for an early departure and the next two-night stand. Masstourism’s rate of increase is disturbing on several counts, not least because it reduces people and places to consumer items.

  To go directly from Baracoa to Havana by public transport is not possible. However, I relished our return journey to Santiago with Norma as my seat companion – a congenial Bush-defying Yanqui, a botanist with a special interest in El Yunque’s two carnivorous plants, its Coccothrinax yunquensis (an endemic palm) and its Podocarpus, among the world’s oldest plant species. Despite her bona fide academic purpose she had been refused permission to travel to Cuba and, if detected on the island by US agents, could be fined US$10,000.

  ‘But I guess I’m OK, they wouldn’t dare take me on, I’ve a global name. It could all go to the Supreme Court, Dubya has no right to restrict a US citizen’s freedom of movement – it’s unconstitutional, fascist stuff.’

  As we passed close to Guantanamo Norma quoted George Clemenceau – ‘“The United States is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation”.’ She added, ‘And Clemenceau was dealing with Wilson – what epigram would he have hung on Dubya’s US?’

  Norma provided a morsel of good news from the outside world; nineteen thousand non-violent protesters had just staged a vigil – organised by ‘SOA Watch’ – at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) runs torture courses for thousands of foreign (chiefly Latin American) military and police officers. By 2001 this educational establishment had aroused such public concern that it became WHISC, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Norma laughed angrily. ‘The phrase “security cooperation”, that’s supposed to make torture acceptable – inevitable, for “homeland safety”! The name change was a sop to the House of Representatives who wanted to close SOA and hold a congressional investigation. That was a bi-partisan move, defeated by only ten votes.’

  SOA Watch was founded in 1990 by a Maryknoll priest, Roy Bourgeois. ‘It’s done most, of all the groups, to stir public worry about WHISC. In 1990 Roy and two other vets – former US officers, in your speak! – did sixteen months in federal jails. Punishment for protesting peacefully against hundreds of Salvadoran soldiers then being trained at the Fort. Roy himself won a Purple Heart as a Navy officer in Vietnam. And the others, the Liteky brothers, also got decorations. They’re not softy pacifists, they’re just ag
ainst soldiers being trained as torturers.’

  I said, ‘So quite a few of you – millions, in fact – have stopped off on the way from barbarism to degeneration.’

  In Santiago we learned that all Cuba was preparing for a week-long ‘strategic exercise’ led by the army and involving, in one way or another, most able-bodied civilians. The first such exercise had taken place a year previously in reaction to the launch of Bush II’s ‘Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba’. The commission’s chairman was Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, and its chief advisors included Condoleeza Rice, then head of the National Security Council, and senior CIA operatives, Pentagon officials and representatives of most government departments. When its 450-page ‘Report to the President’ was publicised on 6 May 2004, Cubans took particular note of a recommendation to expand ‘the Cuba budget’ to $41 million, the extra funding to benefit anyone likely to expedite ‘regime change’. The Report’s third chapter explains:

  Lessons learned in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the former Soviet Union, and other countries would inform whatever US assistance to the Cuban constitutional reform process is requested.

  At once Ricardo Alarcón, President of the Cuban National Assembly, noted that the commission openly advocated ‘dominating Cuba and putting under US control the economy, the services and all social activities – in effect, completing the annexation of the country, which would barely be left with some imaginary local authorities, totally subjected to a foreign power.’

  The Trio were touchingly put out because our overnight journey to Havana precluded an adequate seventy-fourth birthday party for Nyanya. When a severe chest infection felled Rachel, our last two days in Cuba were sadly Mummyless. Yet we managed to enjoy ourselves; it seemed I missed the invalid more than her offspring did. A return to Coppelia was inevitable, then more swimming below the Malecón and the discovery of Callejon de Hamel, an alleyway not far from No. 403 where the Trio revelled in expansive Afro-Cuban murals, at once amusing, mysterious and wildly colourful. My delayed birthday party was a gargantuan lunch in one of the Barrio Chino’s good-value Chinese restaurants. Even Rose couldn’t clear her plate so I had to improvise a doggy-bag, the ‘dogs’ being my companions at supper-time.