Resting on a mossy fallen tree-trunk, I remembered that potentially far more dangerous moment when terror immobilised me on a cliff-face high above the Indus river in the Karakoram while a six-year-old Rachel, unaware of my panic, trotted confidently ahead. An odd phenomenon, panic. Its paralysing illogic cancels out one’s instinct of self-preservation, supposedly our strongest instinct though I’ve never believed that. The sane and normal reaction to a shifting cliff-face is to get off it, fast – not to stand around poking it with an umbrella.
Soon after 4.00 I prudently accepted an invitation to stay in one of three bohios on a flat ridgetop scattered with boulders almost as big as the dwellings. From here – my highest point – I was overlooking a mass of lower ridges and beyond them glittered the sea. So these were the very mountains I had gazed at, longingly, during our coastal trek. As happens in close-packed ranges, Turquino was now too near to be visible. The sea was scarcely ten miles away, as the turkey vulture flies, but a four-day trek, said my host, with no reliable source of food on the way. Andres was an elderly muleteer whose four sturdy pack-mules carried coffee to the motor road for onward transport. By sheer chance (that guardian angel again!) I had come to the start of a track – rather than a path – leading directly to the village of Santo Domingo.
As Andres and I walked back to the bohio from the mules’ paddock two little boys pointed to me, burst into giggles and for this discourtesy were sternly reprimanded by their grandfather. It was easy to forgive them; tobogganing down long slopes without a toboggan had left my bottom on public display. That evening I sadly discarded a shredded garment of much sentimental value, bought in Sarajevo in 2000.
Andres made unusual efforts to help me over the language barrier; in Angola he had had years of multilingual experience. His four-roomed bohio accommodated himself and his wife Dora, their only son and his wife and the grandsons who continued to find me vastly amusing though they stifled their giggles when abuelo was around. A table and four chairs, all homemade, furnished the kitchen-living-room. On one plank wall hung several unidentifiable antique tools, three machetes, various bits of mule harness and a picture of the Sacred Heart – that same picture seen in many Irish homes until very recently. Above the nineteenth-century iron woodstove hung dented and chipped enamel mugs and jugs, and dented but shiny clean pots and pans, and a green plastic sieve looking incongruously ‘modern’.
Dora was a vigorous septuagenarian able to carry loads of firewood I could hardly lift off the ground. She and Andres argued about my sleeping space, he being inclined to humour me, she definite that I must have the boys’ single iron bed in the smallest room. At bedtime Andres pointed to the ceiling – palm fronds visible between the rafters – and said not to worry about nocturnal noises; the cat had kittened up there.
No number of mewing kittens could have disturbed me after that night on the path. In fact I overslept: the sun was up before me. Then, setting off, I observed Dora retrieving those smelly trousers I had furtively thrust under a boulder. No doubt her beloved Chico (who looked like a cross between a poodle and a mastiff) had sniffed them out.
The downward track had some slow difficult stages, large loose stones on steep slopes which reminded me of the extraordinary agility of mules. (As if I could ever forget!) Otherwise this was a comparatively easy seven-hour descent. Now I was impatiently looking forward to Islazul’s tourist restaurant. I had eaten sparingly with the campesiños; no one I saw in the Sierra Maestra looked underfed but neither of those bohios had a surplus and rice served to a guest would mean someone going short.
The temperature rose horribly during the final hour. Villa Santo Domingo consists of twenty simple cabañas tucked away amidst tall trees, a restaurant/bar roofed but not walled and a tacky little souvenir shop with a despondent air – all of necessity on the right bank of the Rio Yara, this valley being almost a ravine. At 3.30 the receptionist explained that no food could be served before 6.00 p.m. And the tienda (a tiny hut) didn’t sell food. At 6.00 the menu was limited to pasta smothered in ersatz chemical-flavoured tomato sauce containing something minced. But just then my only concern was quantity and to the waiter’s astonishment I ate two cenas.
According to the leaflet beside my bed: ‘Adventures are interesting, exciting and important facts that come our way and mark our lives forever. Santo Domingo Villa, from Islazul Granma, is where you can find your best adventure.’
One adventure takes tourists around Turquino to Las Cuevas on the coast. When the Villa’s English-speaking manager assured me that I could follow this trail solo, because I had no ambition to climb Turquino, I did a private deal with a friendly waiter. He had access to surplus cooked pasta and, thus provisioned, I set off before sunrise.
The Turquino National Park’s official border was no mere pole across the road but a two-storey wooden structure from which emerged a smiling, charming, stunningly handsome Park Guardian in a pea-green uniform. The manager had misinformed me. No walker was allowed beyond this barrier without a guide. (Had I been forty years younger, and had that Guardian been the guide, I might have said ‘Yes please!’) Motorists could drive on guideless to the end of the road, from where one path ascends Turquino and another descends to Las Cuevas. But throughout the park unguided walkers are verboten.
Señor Handsome, who spoke English on a par with my Spanish, seemed to understand, as few do, my wish to be alone with the mountains. (The manager had probably mistaken that wish for parsimony; guides are expensive.) On my map Señor Handsome pointed to the low ranges west of Havana – many footpaths, no guides required. Thanking him, I turned back towards Bartolomé Maso, toying with the notion of returning to that mule track and spending another few days (pasta-fuelled) going around in different circles. Then Señor Handsome (telepathy?) called me back. Gesturing towards the relevant area, beyond the Yara, he conveyed, with a kindly twinkle, his awareness that already I had been illegally going solo – an offence not to be repeated. The Sierra Maestra campesiños may be deprived of mobile phones but news gets around.
As promised by Fidel in 1957, the spread-out village of Santo Domingo has its school and its polyclinic and I paused to watch scores of cheerful pupils gathered around Martí’s bust chanting a vow to emulate Che. Their seniors go to a weekly boarding school in Bartolomé Maso.
The fifteen-mile San Domingo-Bartolomé Maso concrete road (one of Fidel’s pet projects) was completed in 1981 and may well qualify for the Guinness Book of Records. Many gradients’ surfaces have to be deeply grooved, lest vehicles might fall off what can feel more like a cliff-face than a road. Despite being in reasonably good condition, I had to pause every thirty yards or so on the first ascent from Santo Domingo’s ugly bridge. (This replaces a graceful wooden footbridge, its photograph now decorating the Villa bar.) On several descents my brake-muscles ached and I envied those locals who sat on plank trays, with four tiny wheels, and scooted past me at life-threatening speeds. In this exceptional terrain their lightweight trays, easily carried up the next ascent, are more energy-saving than bicycles.
The large, shapeless village of Providencia marks the halfway stage and has grown since finding itself on a motor-road – though not enough to support a tienda. Below the village, on the valley floor, I sat under a mango tree near a weedy stream too polluted for drinking and lessened my load of pasta (much more palatable on its own). These fifteen miles are almost entirely shadeless, following the contours of foothills long since deforested, and one sweats accordingly. When my water ran out I remembered the Campismo Popular bar, not far off the road, but fortunately resisted that temptation. I therefore arrived in Bartolomé Maso at 2.20, as a truck-bus was beginning to fill up for Bayamo. It also carried livestock: small kids – beautifully marked and distraught – stoically silent adolescent pigs, multi-coloured cockerels tucked under arms, a duck and drake gagged and bound in a bucket.
Rapid movement by public transport is uncommon in contemporary Cuba but that was my lucky day. By 4.30 I was in the Astro bus te
rminus booking the last seat on the overnight service to Havana. As it lacked air-conditioning or perceptible ventilation I streamed sweat for fourteen almost sleepless hours – then immediately transferred to the 9.00 a.m. Havana-Pinar del Rio service. Apparently Astro and Viazul were no longer rivals; the former had passed me over to the latter and all my fellow-passengers were Viñales-bound: German, English, Scandinavian, Canadian, Italian. Pinar del Rio, I was to discover, is not on the tourist industry’s agenda for promotion.
Chapter 14
Beyond Havana’s ailing industrial estates, which have leached out into Pinar del Rio province, the landscape is flat, deforested and intensively farmed. To the north rise the Cordillera Guaniguanico, my new playground, a long line of low blue hills running parallel to the autopista.
One has to struggle to imagine how this region must have looked in the nineteenth century when it was eulogised as ‘the Garden of Cuba’. Those eulogists were numerous; European and North American travellers found Cuba – so conveniently placed on the main Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico sea lanes – an attractive détour and quite a few stayed much longer than planned. A list of their books, in English alone, needs several pages – fat volumes explicitly entitled Letters from the Havana During the Year 1820 Containing an Account of the Present State of the Island of Cuba (London 1821), Letters Written in the Interior of Cuba (Boston 1828), The Island of Cuba: Its Resources, Progress and Prospects (London 1853) – and so on. During the first half of the century, when coffee was as important as (in this region more important than) sugar, the cafetales stimulated much purple prose. In 1844 John Wurdemann wrote:
Imagine more than three hundred acres of land planted in regular squares with evenly pruned shrubs … intersected by broad alleys of palms, oranges, mangoes and other beautiful trees; the interstices between which are planted with lemons, pomegranates, cape-jessamines, tube-rose, lilies and various other gaudy and fragrant flowers … And when some of the flowers have given place to the ripened fruit; and the golden orange, the yellow mangoe, the lime, the lemon, the luscious caimito, the sugared zapote; the mellow alligator pear, the custard-apple and the rose-apple, giving to the palate the flavour of otto of roses; – when all these hang on the trees in oppressive abundance, and the ground is also covered with the over-ripe, the owner of a coffee estate might safely challenge the world for a fairer garden … The cultivator also plants his grounds in maize and plantains, which he sells to sugar estates; and yams, yucca, sweet potatoes and rice, which yields well on the uplands, for his own consumption.
Between 1792 and 1796 the world price of coffee had doubled and the number of cafetales increased from two in 1774 to two thousand and sixty-seven in 1827. For years the three hundred thousand coffee trees on the Carlota estate yielded an annual harvest worth more than one hundred thousand US dollars. A cafetale cost much less to establish and run than an ingenio; less land was needed, and fewer slaves and livestock, and simpler buildings and machinery. Thus coffee enabled a minority of creoles, some starting with few resources, to enjoy a patrician lifestyle on tastefully landscaped garden-farms providing an agreeable setting for ‘cool and shady mansions … floored with marble, furnished with rich deep-hued Indian woods’ each surrounded by ‘its village of thatched huts laid out in a perfect square’. Levi Marrero noted that cafetales were designed as ‘centres of civilisation and gracious living for their owners and invited guests’.
In mid-century three factors contributed to sugar’s conquest of coffee: shifts in the international market, new technologies making cane the more profitable crop and the damage done by two major hurricanes, 4/5 October 1844 and 10/11 October 1846. (By then the custom of naming hurricanes after the saint’s day on which they began was well established; these were San Francisco de Asis and San Francisco de Borja.) All the tall trees essential to protect young coffee bushes were snapped in two or torn up by the roots and replacements would take decades to mature. The more resilient ingenios, though equally devastated, usually recovered within a season or so. Estimates of slave hurricane casualties are imprecise, the injury or death of such creatures being commonly included with loss of cattle and other ‘damage to property’.
Sugar’s victory spelt disaster for the cafetale slaves. Most resident owners were comparatively humane, usually providing adequate food and some basic medical care, as one looks after valuable sick animals. Cafetale slaves lived in soundly constructed huts, en famille, and were allowed to grow vegetables for their own sustenance, and to rear poultry and pigs, and sell any surplus. They worked no more than ten hours a day and quite a few were able to save enough money, from the sale of livestock, to pay for a replacement and thus become ‘a free person of colour’.
In contrast, on the fast-expanding ingenios slaves were crammed into fortified wooden barracks, some built ‘to contain one thousand negroes’. Many owners lived in Havana or New York, ignoring the methods used by administradores to produce maximum profits. During the same period, many Irish peasants were also being exploited by absentee landlords. As the numbers of imported slaves increased, their working conditions and accommodation deteriorated and tensions heightened. Not surprisingly, the sale or lease to ingenios of ‘pampered’ cafetale slaves provoked more frequent and desperate rebellions. The same Dr John Wurdemann quoted above, a visitor from the US, reported on how ‘people of colour’ were punished after the 1843 rebellion when the authorities suspected an island-wide conspiracy. Accused men
… were subjected to the lash to extort confessions … A thousand lashes were in many cases inflicted on a single Negro; a great number died under this continued torture, and still more from spasms, and gangrene of wounds.
In the 1850s a British merchant, Jacob Omnium, echoed many other shocked observers of the ingenios:
On every estate (I scarcely hope to be believed when I state the fact) every slave was worked under the whip eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and, in the boiling houses, from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m., and from 11 a.m. to midnight … The sound of the hellish lash was incessant; indeed, was necessary to keep the overtasked wretches awake.
Another Englishman, Robert Baird, commented that between 1845 and 1850:
… the price of slaves rose greatly; and such was the demand occasioned by the increase of sugar cultivation, that slaves formerly considered so old, infirm and superannuated as to be exempted from working were again put to work; and some were drafted from the lighter work of the coffee plantations … and these consequences arose solely from the fact that the slavers were unable to supply the demand with sufficient rapidity, being prevented by the vigilance of the British and French cruising squadrons.
British ships had been regularly patrolling Cuba’s coasts since the early nineteenth century when, for diverse reasons, Britain was leading the anti-slavery campaign. These patrols sought to enforce the new law against slave-trading, as distinct from slave-owning, and were so successful that smuggled Africans became ever more expensive. The Creoles sullenly resented what they regarded as Madrid’s subservience to London and this boosted ‘annexationism’. As Domingo del Monte, a prominent planter, pointed out in 1838, ‘The USA has since its founding enjoyed the greatest political liberty, and they still have slaves’.
The autopista’s twelve-foot-high roadside hoardings announced the local presence of various agricultural organisations and agencies: UBPC, CCS, ANAP, CPA, INRA. INRA is the Daddy of them all, the National Institute for Agrarian Reform which in 1959 and 1963 redistributed twelve thousand estates. (In 1958 seventy per cent of agricultural land was still owned by eight per cent of the population – if one may include in Cuba’s population those US citizens and corporations who were among the largest landowners.) The government converted forty-four per cent of all ranching and arable land to state farms on which former seasonal workers were permanently employed at a fixed wage. Small farmers retained possession of their land and the number of such farms increased from forty-five thousand to one hundred and sixty thousand. Campesiños may sell l
and only to the government (a safety device against the emergence of new large estates) but they may present or bequeath it to relatives.
In September 1993, when the Special Period was biting hard, the Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPCs) were formed to increase food production by replacing inefficient state farms with energetic co-ops. Hitherto the state had controlled seventy-five per cent of the agricultural economy. Now, under Decree-Law 142, the UBPCs gained the permanent right to use land (of course rent free) and to enjoy outright ownership of their produce. Each UBPC elected its own leader, managed its own bank account and was free to link wages and productivity. However, the state continues to demand quotas and fix prices. ANAP, the National Association of Small Producers, negotiates with the government about policies and prices. I never did find out what CCS and CPA do.
Pinar del Rio province, despite its fertility and nearness to Havana, lay undeveloped until the early eighteenth century when an influx of Canary Islanders first planted tobacco. (Cuba’s widespread development began even later; in 1774 the population was 172,000 (or so) and only in the 1840s did it reach one million.) To this day tobacco remains Pinar’s main crop; from here come the world’s most illustrious cigars. However, the factories moved to Havana in the late nineteenth century and ever since the provincial capital, founded in 1669, has been a backwater.
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