Without its recently acquired historical significance, Playa Giron would never have made it on to the tourist trail. All around stretch mangrove (and other) swamps and the post-Invasion village, a mile or so inland, is a dusty straggle of detached one-storey houses replacing a wretched charcoal-burners’ settlement. (The motor road came after the Invasion.) Along the shore an ugly defensive wall, constructed to deter future invasions, completely blocks the cabañas’ view of the sea. Nearby, tattered little notices nailed to fences warn – in a whisper, as it were – ‘Military Zone’. The locals, ignoring these, take short cuts across the forbidden territory.
In the other direction, I enjoyed a three-hour shore-walk, setting out as a crimson sun rose behind a fretwork of palm fronds, confirming the validity of all those Caribbean postcards. At intervals a low wooded headland or a mound of hurricane litter forced me on to a narrow cul-de-sac road – ending where the track to Luz begins. Off this people-free coast nude swimming was feasible, the water deep, clear and only slightly too warm. On my way back fellow-guests were splashing in a chemically polluted pool and I asked myself yet again, ‘Why have people become so estranged from – or afraid of – the natural world?’
Developers were then making strenuous efforts ‘to enhance Playa Giron’s image’ but the hotel kitchen was not playing its part; casa particular would never serve such a meagre and disgusting breakfast.
I now learned that different provinces have different currency regulations. In a tienda opposite the hotel (one of a row of brand-new ‘facilities’) a saleswoman refused my CP100 note and a domineering security man requested ‘evidence of identity’. Returning from my cabaña with the documents, I watched another woman, called from a back room, inscribing all my passport and visa details in a massive ledger which I then had to sign, twice, before spending CP3 on two bottles of Buccanero. This can’t be the best way to enhance a resort’s image.
The Invasion Museum is reason enough to visit Playa Giron. Its intelligent lay-out and choice of exhibits are inspired (praise not earned by every Cuban museum) and its lucid introduction to the background fills an obvious need. By now ‘the Bay of Pigs’ means nothing to most people – and indeed, seen against the twentieth-century’s bloody backdrop, it was a minor affray. More people have been killed during football riots and political rallies, as one Australian tourist peevishly pointed out. Her guide tried to explain that the death toll wasn’t the issue but by then she and her group were impatiently edging their way towards the exit. In fact this attack so strengthened the Revolution that its CIA organisers did good for Cuba.
My guardian angel was on duty that day. In the hotel bar I chanced to meet a British Embassy official who chanced to mention, during a general discussion on visas, the importance of one’s return ticket – in relation to consular problems with British sailors who have entered Cuba illegally via Key West. That was a close shave; I had been planning to renew my visa in Bayamo but had left my return ticket in No. 403. Without those chance remarks, I would have arrived in Bayamo by slow train and needed at once to return to Havana by fast tourist bus to avoid the US$50-fine for each over-stay day.
It’s unlike me not to eat a meal I’ve paid for, but Playa Giron’s hotel breakfast would not have compensated for wasted cool hours. Before dawn I was on the road to Havana, planning to hitch-hike when overheated.
During a four-hour walk, close by the deep, calm, pellucid waters of the Bay of Pigs, I counted one hundred and sixty-one roadside obelisks honouring those killed in defence of the Bay. These crude concrete monuments, not tended by anyone, seemed forlorn against their background of mangroves. Several breaks in this mangrove barrier gave access to the sandless limestone shore, where broken diving-boards and collapsed picnic huts – provided for snorkellers – recalled Hurricane Michelle. In 2001 an eighteen-foot wave devastated this coast, sweeping away hundreds of thatched huts, never rebuilt. The whole region had been evacuated the day before and these cenagueros (swamp people) now endure over-crowded conditions in Playa Giron and continue to burn mangrove charcoal. Before Michelle, this strip of coast was striving for a slice of the tourism cake. Outside its one small restaurant, closed at 8.00 a.m., I watched three turkey vultures, ungainly when grounded, squabbling over the scattered contents of garbage bins. A white-haired mulatta, hanging laundry on the restaurant balcony, invited me to rest and wait for a lift; but I wasn’t yet overheated.
No vehicle disturbed the peace until 10.45, when I was about to swim. I hesitated, then decided it would be rash to decline a lift all the way to Havana.
Eugenio was an outspoken young army officer-cum-agronomist driving a strange-sounding Lada, its back seat packed with tall potted plants, blocking the rear view. He stopped to pick up another passenger – luckily a slim youth – at Playa Larga, a bigger town than Playa Giron but not more exciting. Here the road turns inland to cross the vast Zapata swamp and National Park – still teeming, said Eugenio, with iguana, mongoose, wild boar and a treasure trove of rare birds including the Cuban pygmy owl. He often spent days there, alone, but unfortunately foreigners had to hire a guide. We joined the autopista near Australia, Fidel’s headquarters during the invasion.
Beyond a citrus plantation, covering many square miles, the land again looked underused. Eugenio was uninhibited in his criticism of incompetent direction from above, leading to abrupt changes of plan, incompatible adjacent projects, and bad advice (or none) for farmers when they receive seeds to grow unfamiliar crops.
Even on this autopista the traffic merely trickled and Eugenio picked up six village-to-village hitchers, one so bulky I had to sit with an arm around his shoulders. These hundred miles traverse what must surely be Cuba’s most boring landscape: flat and colourless (at least in February), its few towns misleadingly named Buena Vista, La Esperanza, Nueva Paz.
Being unexpectedly back in Havana felt odd, the streets so bustling and noisy compared to where I had been – and nowhere else even approached Centro’s extreme dilapidation. But it was good to be hugged again by Candida and Pedro. Just as I arrived a downpour started though no rain is expected in February. And last April, Candida complained, when it should have rained every day, not a drop fell.
Chapter 12
In Havana University’s Museo Montaine Antropologico I learned that ‘Huracan’ is a Taino word, the name of a deity who had to be regularly placated by music, song and dance. In Spanish the word soon became ‘huracane’ and by the late seventeenth century ‘hurricane’ was the accepted English form. Uncannily, meteorologists’ TV images of hurricanes closely resemble the Tainos’ rock engravings of Huracan.
During his 1494 voyage, Columbus recorded the first known European confrontation with a hurricane and found himself unnerved by the New World’s tropical excesses; even the toughest conquistadors suspected malevolent spirits at work or were cowed by an implicit divine threat. Fr Bartolomé de las Casas didn’t try to soothe them but characteristically identified the sixteenth century’s unusually frequent hurricanes as God’s punishment for cruelty to Indians – who themselves blamed the newcomers for an exceptionally violent 1511 hurricane.
Geography makes Cuba peculiarly vulnerable to tropical storms. Its seven hundred and fifty-mile east/west axis, stretching along the New World’s middle latitude, blocks the path followed by most hurricanes on their way from the Caribbean to the Gulf of Mexico. Powerful gales combine with low barometric pressure to lift mountains of water from the ocean basin and these gain height and momentum while moving towards land across shallow coastal waters. A liquid mountain can be fifty miles wide and, over flat terrain, its crests may penetrate up to forty-five miles inland. Hurricanes making landfall near estuaries commonly drive rivers backwards, causing catastrophic flooding. Heavy continuous rain invariably follows the quieting of the gale, provoking massive mud slides and more flash floods in the sierras and leaving the plains water-logged for weeks.
After the 1509 hurricane a pioneer colonist, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, could scarc
ely believe his eyes:
Innumerable huge and thick trees were fully uprooted, their exposed roots as high as the loftiest branches of some of them; others broken into pieces from top to bottom … It is something to marvel to see some of them so distant from the site where they matured and with their upturned roots, some upon the others, in such a way locked together and piled and interweaved, that it appears to be by design, a work in which the devil has taken part.
Exactly a century later Virginia-bound William Strachey, who had known many turbulent seas, lost his coherency:
A dreadful storm and hideous, swelling and roaring as it were by fits, at length did beat all light from Heaven; which like a hell of darkness, turned black upon us, so much the more fuller of horror as in such cases horror and fear use to overrun the troubled and overmastered senses of all. What shall I say? Winds and seas were as mad as fury and rage could make them.
Strachey’s vessel had been driven on to the Bermudas and his survivor’s tale is believed to have inspired The Tempest. (See Scene 1, Act I – ‘The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch, / But that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek, / Dashes the fire out.’)
The Havana archives list sixty-nine major ‘hits’ between 1494 and 1850 (severe storms not included). A hurricane’s effects precluded exaggeration; the most articulate found their vocabularies inadequate. Everyone emphasised noise. In 1772 Alexander Hamilton wrote to his father:
It seemed as if a total dissolution of Nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind, the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling houses and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels.
Eight years later the Reverend George Wildon Bridges marvelled:
The sea seemed mingled with the clouds and to the distance of half a mile, waves carried and fixed vessels of no ordinary size, leaving them the providential means of sheltering the houseless inhabitants … The midnight horrors of the scene were to be viewed as the last convulsions of an expiring world … The scattered remains of houses whose tenants were dead or dying – the maddening search for wives and children who were lost, the terrific howling of the frightened Negroes as it mingled with the whistling wind …
In 1888 an anonymous journalist reported:
The horrible whistling of the wind sounded like the prolonged moaning of all of humanity … The frightful crash of buildings collapsing, the clash of doors and windows and of zinc sliding, and tiles and a thousand other objects that whirled through the air crashing against one another … And in the midst of all this despair, the screams and ayes that seconded the horrific noises made it sound that the way was being opened to reach the throne of Eternity.
In 1910 a five-day hurricane, one of the longest ever recorded, hit Pinar del Rio. In 1926, at 10.45 a.m., winds above a hundred and fifty miles per hour reached Havana, killing more than six hundred and leaving tens of thousands badly injured. ‘Fishing boats floated down streets like deserted gondolas, dead cows dropped on rooftops and houses flew overhead like birds.’ In 1932 twenty-five-foot waves washed away the entire fishing village of Santa Cruz del Sur, drowning all but five hundred of its three thousand or so inhabitants. In 1944 winds approaching two hundred miles per hour were recorded in Havana.
Until Louis A. Perez produced his riveting Winds of Change, historians paid strangely little attention to hurricanes, despite their influence on Cuba’s economic, social and political development. Several times during the Wars of Independence (1868–98) ‘hits’ intervened. On 30 September 1873 de Cespedes’s diary laments ‘this horrific hurricane’s’ disruption of his transport and communications. Later, at a crucial stage in the final campaign, a hurricane helped the Cuban Liberation Army by entirely ruining the tobacco crop (including seeds) west of Havana. Ricardo Delgardo then informed the army planner, ‘These poor tobacco farmers find themselves today in the most desperate situation. They have nothing to do, nothing to eat, and would give themselves with a song in their heart if they could come over and join our ranks.’ General Maceo acted on this information and two months later triumphantly led his augmented troops into Pinar del Rio.
In Oriente the 1890s hurricanes had no such compensatory outcome. Around Baracoa the 1894 ‘hit’ totally destroyed every banana plantation and when all those small farmers went into production again, on borrowed money, an 1899 hit reduced them to bankruptcy. The United Fruit Company (of ill repute throughout Latin America) then bought all their lands – an enormous area – and planted it to cane, thus worsening Cuba’s sugar-dependency.
Every district, and each generation, has its own memories of terror and heroism, of tragedy, turmoil and triumph. Louis Perez comments on the extent to which ‘hits’ helped to forge a Cuban identity. All classes shared in the fear and grief and, to varying extents, in the subsequent hardship. To survive, and then to pick up the pieces (often literally), everyone had to cooperate: black, white and mulatto, young and old, rural and urban, rich and poor, the illiterate and the scholarly. Thus hurricanes had bonding-power, making Cubans feel justifiably proud of their communal resilience. (There was one exceptional group; after each hit bands of slaves fled to the mountains, though not as many as one might have expected. Most were too debilitated for such adventures.)
By now meteorologists and modern communications have raised strong protective barriers between Huracan and the general public. Yet in 2005 more than three thousand died, the majority in the US, the world’s most technologically advanced country. During that record-breaking season fourteen hurricanes (plus twelve severe tropical storms) raged across the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Unusually, only two hit Cuba hard: Dennis and Wilma. In July the former twice made landfall in Central Cuba, wrecking more than a hundred and twenty thousand homes, killing sixteen people and felling Trinidad’s radio mast. In preparation for Dennis the local authorities evacuated 1.5 million human beings and four hundred and seventy five thousand animals. (The unfortunate citizens of New Orleans, it will be remembered, were told to make their own evacuation plans in preparation for August’s Katrina, though twenty-five per cent of the threatened population lived below the poverty line and twenty per cent of families were carless.) When Wilma hit Cuba in late October more than six hundred thousand people had been evacuated. Ten days of non-stop torrential rain flooded eleven of the fourteen provinces but no lives were lost. Nor were any lost in 2001, in Cuba’s most destructive hurricane since 1944. Or in 2004, when another 1.5 million (more than one-tenth of the population) were moved before Ivan demolished twenty thousand homes.
After Flora hit Oriente, in 1963, a week-long deluge swept away eleven thousand homes and killed more than a thousand campesiños though one hundred and seventy-five thousand had been evacuated. Fidel then said, ‘The hurricane has done its thing, now it is time for us to do ours.’ At present, Cuba is being held up to the world as a model. ‘The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their populations as well as Cuba does’ – so says the UN International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction. ‘The Cuban government’s zero-risk attitude and awareness raising programmes are leading the way in the Caribbean’ – so says the International Federation of the Red Cross.
Awareness raising begins in primary school where children are taught how to prepare calmly for a hit and how to play their part when it comes. All residents of endangered areas know where to find the nearest group shelters, holding stocks of water, food and medical supplies. Health workers keep lists of those most at risk: the handicapped, the elderly, pregnant women. Each municipal authority is obliged to identify buildings or homes with structural defects and organise evacuations accordingly. Public warnings are issued five days before a probable hit; two days later evacuations begin and well-trained rescue teams go on stand-by. Annually, at the end of May, the whole country participates for a few days in Mete
-Oro, a hurricane simulation exercise. And all this ‘disaster reduction’ is achieved despite a petrol drought.
When Cuba is loudly praised by international organisations some people protest in righteous tones that only a dictator could organise such speedy mass-evacuations. Democracies can’t save lives by pushing individuals around, every citizen must be left free to choose how to react. These mean-minded inanities (and they are numerous) perhaps helped to inspire an Oxfam America report:
Cuba has a strong, well-organised civil defence, an early warning system, well-equipped rescue teams, emergency stockpiles and other resources. Such tangible assets are impressive, but if they were the only determining factor, then other wealthier countries such as the US would have lower disaster death tolls. Cuba’s significant intangible assets include community mobilization, solidarity, clear political commitment to safeguard human life and a population educated in the necessary action to be taken … The single most important thing about disaster response in Cuba is that the people cooperate en masse.
All night the downpour that had welcomed me back to Havana continued, water cascading off No. 403’s roof to swirl and gurgle in the patio. Next day the habaneros were depressed and I was energised by a low dark grey sky, a strong cool wind, ten-foot waves crashing over the Malecón and long showers that sent disillusioned tourists scuttling for shelter. On the Prado I overheard one Englishwoman exclaiming, ‘It’s like being at home!’ A plaintive cry; not for this had she spent good money leaving England in February.
Island that Dared Page 28