Island that Dared (20 page)

In the 1901 Cuban Presidential election Tomas Estrada Palma, a US citizen born in Cuba, was elected unopposed. Bartolome Maso, the
anti-Platt
candidate whose popularity far exceeded Estrada’s, withdrew when General Wood stacked the electoral commission by appointing five Estrada supporters.

The February 1904 elections for the National Congress exposed Cuba’s inability to run a ‘free and fair’ election campaign. The Republicans,
Estrada’s party, were the more adroit fraudsters but their victory was not acknowledged by the Liberals, who boycotted Congress.

Estrada ran again in December 1905, massively supported by
Washington’s
man in Havana and opposed by the Liberal’s José Miguel Gomez, Governor of Santa Clara. Once more the opposition candidate withdrew, deterred by the tension in the air and the fast-accumulating evidence that Estrada’s re-election was a certainty, no matter how many voted for Gomez. Thousands of thwarted Liberal supporters then resolved to oust the
government;
twenty-four thousand men, the majority black, set out from Pinar del Rio and one Havana journalist referred to ‘the butchers of Africa’ seeking revenge. When the insurrection became countrywide Estrada begged for US military intervention. Instead, President Roosevelt despatched two negotiators to Havana, to reconcile the Liberals and Estrada, but the latter wasn’t interested in reconciliation. By 1906 he needed the Marines to protect his position.

Soon Estrada resigned, leaving Cuba ungoverned because his cabinet had to follow suit. Hastily Roosevelt sent in the Marines ‘to establish peace and order’. Then Charles Magoon arrived, a lawyer who had just
completed
his term as Controller of the Panama Canal Zone and was to spend the next three years as Cuba’s de facto colonial governor. His main tasks were to oversee the training of a new army and the construction of new legal and electoral systems. This last challenge was taken up by Colonel Enoch Crowder, a military ‘hero’ renowned for killing Indians (New Mexico’s Apache in 1886, four years later the Sioux led by Sitting Bull). ‘Crowder’s Rules’ applied to the 1908 elections won by the Conservatives, a party put together by Crowder, using all the bits of the old Estrada coalition.

In 1916 Mario Menocal y Deop, a Cornell-educated sugar
multi-millionaire
, shamelessly bent Crowder’s Rules to ensure his re-election as Conservative President. The votes cast far outnumbered the registered voters, the Liberals again rose up in their wrath and the Marines returned for six years.

Before the next election, President Menocal urged Colonel Crowder to manipulate the electoral law, so that he could bend it so deftly no Liberal would notice. Crowder spent eighteen months on ‘amendments’ – to no effect. When the Conservative Alfredo Zayas claimed victory in November 1920, the Liberals demanded a replay, supervised by what are now known as election monitors – appointed by President Wilson. This demand was granted but extreme violence disrupted the new campaign, causing the
Liberals to abstain. Zayas was once again declared President, in May 1921, a month before the total collapse of Cuba’s banking system. In April the National Bank’s controlling shareholder had hanged himself from his flat’s balcony. Many other bankers then scarpered and the few remaining banks (mostly US) threatened to follow unless Crowder were appointed US ambassador to Havana.

Zayas held office until 1924 when at last a Liberal was elected: Gerardo Machado y Morales, whose campaign had been funded by his US boss, head of the unscrupulous and immensely powerful Compañia Cubana de Electricidad. Machado soon turned Cuba into a military dictatorship and in 1928 didn’t bother to call an election but announced that he had given himself another six years in office. Ambassador Crowder
overlooked
this constitutional hiccup and advised the State Department to do likewise, praising Machado for affording the US ‘the closest possible
co-operation’.

When a 1933 revolution had got rid of Machado there were several more failed experiments with parliamentary democracy. Improbable coalitions, juntas and alliances came and went, as did interim Presidents, US advisors, coup plotters and Mafia bosses. A new word was minted to describe Cuban politics:
Gangsterismo.

This was the Batista era. For quarter of a century Fulgencio Batista, in 1921 a nineteen-year-old private in the army, controlled Cuba – playing various roles. The first mulatto to rule the island, he presented himself as a
genuine
Cuban, being of – allegedly – Indian, Spanish, African and Chinese descent. In the late 1930s the hitherto illegal Cuban Communist Party (only distantly related to Fidel’s Party) was admitted to the political arena. At this stage Batista needed their support.

The 1939 Constituent Assembly elections gave the Autentico Party and its allies forty-one seats, Batista’s party and the Communists thirty-five. This Assembly produced a new and vastly improved constitution with a promising social-democratic flavour. Henceforth all adults over twenty could vote – even blacks and women. Trades Unions were given a civilised degree of power and racial segregation was outlawed (easier written than done). Race-based political parties of course remained illegal; the fear of ‘a black republic’ never faded. One US resident of Havana, Ruby Hart Phillips, commented in her diary on Batista’s influence: ‘Sergeant Batista really is good but he’d better be careful those negroes don’t get the idea that the island is completely theirs and go out to help themselves to anything in sight.’

The sergeant became President in 1940 and for four years maintained his popularity by respecting (more or less) the spirit of the new constitution. Yet in 1944 his rival, Grau San Martin of the Autenticos, won by a huge majority; US corporate interests, and others allergic to social-democracy, had funded his campaign. At first it seemed he might betray his sponsors but soon he took a sharp right turn and split his own party by opposing a new Communist-led labour organisation, the Confederation of Cuban Workers. To prove beyond doubt his value to his backers, he ordered an army captain to shoot Jesus Menendez, the black leader of the powerful sugar union.

Following the Autenticos’ split, Eduardo Chibas (an eccentric on the scene, because honest) founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano
Ortodoxo
and stood for the Presidency but lost to the Autenticos’ Carlos Prio Socarras. The Prio government, according to Julia Sweig, was Cuba’s ‘most polarised, corrupt, violent and undemocratic’. In August 1951, at the end of one of his weekly anti-Prio broadcasts, Chibas declaimed – ‘Sweep away the thieves in the government! People of Cuba, arise and walk! People of Cuba, awake!
This is my last knock on your door!
’ He then shot himself while still on air and died soon after. An accident, some said: but broadcasters don’t normally fiddle with loaded revolvers in an
absent-minded
way. One of the shocked listeners was a twenty-five-year-old law student named Fidel Castro Ruz.

In the run-up to the 1952 Presidential election Batista was limping along in third place; it was time to give up pretending to play the democracy game. His coup in the small hours of Sunday 10 March was efficiently managed. At once the universally detested Prio became an asylum-seeker in the Mexican embassy and no guns were needed, except for show. Most Cubans felt relieved to have Batista again in control – never mind his not, this time, being elected. He soon ‘suspended’ most of the new constitution, yet diplomatic recognition came quickly from the governments of Latin America and Europe – and, not much later, from the US.

By this date Cuba had become the world’s largest sugar producer and the US took sixty-five per cent of its exports and provided some seventy-five per cent of imports. Two mightily wealthy men controlled the sugar market: Francisco Blanco and Julio Lobo. Blanco was among Batista’s most valued ‘financial advisors’. Lobo’s fourteen mills, fed by one hundred thousand acres, brought in an annual fifty million dollars which financed Havana’s Riviera and Capri hotels, among other projects. Tourism flourished, much of it underpinned by Batista’s Mafia friends who ran the major casinos.
Shipping, banking and radio also contributed to the Lobo coffers.
Meanwhile,
in Peter Marshall’s words, ‘the majority of the population eked out a subservient and miserable existence’.

When Fidel and his
compañeros
considered Cuba’s future they ‘had doubts about the value of the electoral process in the Cuban context’, as Richard Gott dryly puts it. Comparing the state of the island between 1900 and 1958, and 1959 and 2006, it is indeed very difficult to sustain an argument for the ‘electoral process in the Cuban context’. John Gray puts it all in a politically incorrect nutshell:

In November Rachel and I had noted the scarcity of uniformed police and soldiers in Fidel’s ‘dictatorship’. However, on the eve of my departure for Santa Clara (20 January) police were swarming throughout Havana, in twos and threes and fours, foot-patrolling the main streets, standing on every other corner, frequently checking ID cards. The explanation: a
mega-demo,
planned for 24 January to protest against Radio Marti, broadcast from Miami and relayed from the US Interests Section on the Malecón. Fidel would, at intervals, mingle with the million or so marchers. The logic of this explanation escaped me. How could those checks prevent an assassination attempt? Was it likely that the assassin would be strolling around Havana exposing himself to suspicion and arrest? But then, I know nothing of security measures. Better-informed people assured me that the authorities knew what they were doing.

I dawdled, observing police-public relations, and sensed no hostility on either side. By international standards this force seemed amiable enough and acceptable to the
habaneros.
One does however hear talk of another
force, not in uniform and less acceptable and amiable. Such talk is always in whispers.

On that same day I witnessed, for the first and last time, violence on a Cuban street. Mild violence, yet startling (and a bad omen?). Suddenly an open space not far from the Capitol was filled with rioting high school pupils. Scores of angry boys and girls were using boots and fists to attack one another, then threatening the few teachers seeking to quell the riot. This racing mini-mob knocked over one frail old lady and when a young man rushed to her assistance, shouting indignantly, he was kicked on the buttocks. I looked around: where were the police, moments before so obvious? They had vanished, chosen not to become involved. That evening I was told the school in question had become polarised, some pupils regarding their exam results as unfair (bribery!), others furiously denying this. Then, in a move that shocked everyone, both factions felt free to take their disagreement on to the streets.

In Santa Clara I discussed this incident with an aged member of the bourgeoisie who had ‘stayed on’. She saw those angry students, and the failure of the police to intervene, as a good omen. ‘Now there is much bribery, a new thing within our educational system. I like to see students resisting it. It’s not good that they kick and punch, other forms of protest would be better. But if nobody listens to their words, I prefer action to passively accepting corruption. After acceptance comes participation … Yes? Is it so in your country?’

I had to admit that it is so – very much so – in my country.

In 1837 Cuba acquired Latin America’s first railway, originally laid to serve certain cane plantations, then gradually expanded to its present 3,030 miles. Yet Havana’s imposing station is almost tourist-free for reasons which soon become apparent. At ‘Information’ a chatty, elderly woman told me that the only service to Santa Clara was the thrice-weekly
especiale
to Santiago; it would depart next day at 2.15 p.m., arriving in Santa Clara four hours later, leaving me time to find my friends’ house before sunset – new English-speaking friends, met on the Malecón and impulsively hospitable.

Whether you’re running a democracy, a dictatorship or an international institution, bureaucracy constipates efficiency. For years Fidel has been condemning the Cuban variety, to no effect; even during the Special Period, with its particular urgent needs, the Faceless Ones resisted most reforming efforts. Cubans are of course the main victims, often on a daily basis. Tourists usually escape this net, woven of illogicality, but free-range travellers are soon enmeshed. For instance, Havana’s railway ticket office is a brisk ten minutes walk away from the station itself – why? Moreover, there are
two
offices in separate buildings, one for Cubans, one for foreigners – why? Arriving at 12.50, I was told to return at 1.15; one’s ticket must be bought within the hour of departure – why? Then, having queued twice in that vast office, one has to queue again, within the station, for the ticket to be ‘Confirmed’.

In the spacious concourse, high and wide, the seating seemed like a planning error: long rows of black metal chairs were welded to the floor and packed close together à la cut-price airlines, leaving open expanses between blocks. A six-foot barrier and locked gates allowed no access to the four deserted platforms. A tall, slim young woman wearing a smart sky-blue uniform labelled ‘Security Service (Private)’, guesstimated that the Santiago
especiale
might leave at 5.00-ish. She and her three colleagues appeared to be in lieu of a police presence. Watching them, I again noted the cold, almost disdainful persona assumed by many Cuban petty officials (including staff in government
tiendas
) when dealing with the public. Is this attitude, so unlike the average Cuban’s relaxed friendliness, a result of Soviet training? Or is it a symptom of the tension that has come to exist
between frustrated citizens and agencies now often despised as corrupt?

Obviously nobody expected this
especiale
to depart at 2.15. My many fellow-passengers looked settled and resigned; most families were lunching, sharing saucepans or bowls of rice and black beans and pork fat. Some men played chess or dominoes while their wives dozed, others read
Granma
with close attention – surprising to me because Cuba’s only daily
newspaper
is the Party’s voice. Small extrovert children romped around the open spaces, making new friends as they went. A happy mixed family occupied the seats opposite mine, in the next block – white wife, black husband, toddler son was happy if left free to wander. Only his maternal grandfather, an army officer, was allowed to restrain him: pick him up and carry him round while grandad’s cap was repeatedly removed, tried on, then flung to the ground with a chortle. As the overhead clock registered 2.30, 3.30, 4.30, no one seemed disgruntled. Beside two of the platforms long trains stretched away into the distance looking as though they had been stationary for months if not years. And maybe they had.

At 4.10 the
especiale
arrived from Santiago and hundreds disembarked; many carried a musical instrument, some wheeled bicycles. When our departure was announced queues formed at four gates, each line confined between metal bars as in a cattle-crush. Then came a delay, caused by several pairs of porters pushing long handcarts piled with cargo for Santiago. Shouting and laughing, they raced each other along the broad hundred-yard expanse between barrier and buffers, their loads wobbling precariously. Unsmiling young women eventually unlocked the gates and closely scrutinised each ticket and ID document. They wore the railway uniform of purple shorts and tunics with black tights and absurdly
high-heeled
shoes. Although foreigners must travel first-class I had trouble finding my allotted place; all the coaches had gone unpainted for decades. Excitedly chattering groups were being guided to their seats by other uniformed women one of whom led me to a carriage with torn upholstery and mud-coated windows. My only companion was Raimundo, tall, lean, distinguished-looking and very black. A history professor, specialising in colonial Africa, he spoke fluent English.

At 5.15 our engine hooted hoarsely and as we moved, almost imperceptibly, I remarked that we should reach Santa Clara by 9.30. Raimundo looked sceptical and said, ‘Maybe’. Then we stopped, still under the station roof. Raimundo, sorting through papers in his briefcase, glanced at me and chuckled.

For twenty minutes nothing happened. After we had backed to our
starting position nothing continued to happen. Again all the platforms were deserted, apart from one jovial railway official engaged in private enterprise, selling delicious sausage rolls, more sausage than bread. I offered CP1 for a roll and received NP12.10 change – perhaps a measure of how little the railway is used by tourists.

At 5.50 we moved again, very slowly. At 6.10 we stopped again. Raimundo closed his briefcase, took off his spectacles and made enquiries. Our engine had broken down, decisively, and must be replaced. As this news spread other passengers laughed uproariously, tuned up their guitars and began a sing-song. Standing in the corridor, watching our engine being detached, I was joined by an effervescent mulatta teenager who offered me a swig from her half-bottle of rum. ‘Have a drink! Cuba transport bad for tourists, Cuba rum good!’ Accepting her offer, I was conscious of Raimundo’s disapproving stare. As the defunct engine passed us, on the next track, passengers crowded to the windows leaning out to cheer and clap ironically. Raimundo smiled at me and said, ‘That’s how we survived the Special Period.’

Our replacement engine got going at 6.55, groaning reluctantly as we left the station. Beyond the suburbs shanty homes huddled close to the track – as shanty as any I’ve seen in the Majority World yet the residents look better nourished than their equivalents elsewhere. For years past many Cubans have had to struggle to supplement their rations but for most it’s possible to do so, by being persistently ingenious and/or devious.

Beyond flat scrubland the sun was sinking and when Raimundo
calculated
that we were unlikely to reach Santa Clara (170 miles from Havana) before midnight I decided to sleep in the waiting-room until dawn.

Soon the only glimmers of light came from the stars and our engine’s weak beam; even in the first-class coaches no one had a torch. ‘This train years ago lost its illuminations,’ Raimundo resignedly remarked. I closed our door, to reduce the salsa decibels, and we stretched out, giving thanks for an uncrowded compartment, and discussed Ché’s Congolese débacle – an almost forgotten fragment of history which Raimundo had closely studied. Then he told me about Santa Clara’s origins. For all Cuba’s sparse population and distance from the motherland, Spain’s Inquisition didn’t spare the colony. In 1682, in the prosperous little town of Remedios, when a priest detected demons by the dozen he summoned Inquisitors from Havana to organise the ‘trial’ and incineration of ‘the possessed’ and the torching of their homes and property. This operation prompted many terrorised residents to flee thirty miles inland and found Santa Clara.

At 12.20 my escort handed me on to a long platform, lit by one feeble bulb, and we were about to seek the waiting-room when Tania came hurrying towards us, arms outstretched apologising for the unreliability of Cuban trains. Raimundo looked immensely relieved; he hadn’t approved of my plan – not for security reasons, but because he refused to believe an
abuela
could sleep soundly on a floor. The little plaza outside the station, a busy horse-bus terminal during the day, was deserted and the few others who had disembarked were crossing the tracks, heading towards those famous suburbs where Ché’s troops won the Revolution’s final battle. For a mile or so Tania and I walked through silent, empty, starlit streets of eighteenth-century dwellings – a pleasing introduction to a provincial capital (population some 210,000). We kept to the middle of the road, my companion reminding me that ‘broken pavements need daylight’.

No. 374 was a small, two-storied terraced house not far from the central Parque Vidal. A boisterous puppy greeted us and Tania warned me to leave nothing within Mesa’s reach; he was teething in a manic way and never out of trouble, chewing cushions, towels, rugs, shoes and – his major crime – the lower leaves of Tania’s beloved house-plants. His playmate, Tigre, a four-months-old-kitten, was often gently dragged across the tiled floor by the tail or a leg, to her evident delight. If ignored for too long she sought Mesa out, then lay on her back extending two forepaws towards his nose. Tigre’s mother, a sedate smoky blue Persian, spent most of her time atop a tall bookshelf, looking inscrutable. In my room (leading directly off the living-room, which led directly off the street) another kitten was curled up on the bed, paws over eyes. Tania’s embarrassed exclamations trailed away when she heard that normally I sleep with one cat on my pillow and another between the sheets.

Santa Clara is both dignified and jolly, handsome in the centre, dishevelled in an insouciant sort of way around the edges. It is compact enough to be walkable, culturally enthusiastic enough to support regular theatre, ballet, orchestral, jazz and film festivals. Horse-drawn vehicles are numerous, motor vehicles few – and restricted in the centre, where boys play baseball on the streets. This is a city with a strong personality, a place content to be itself – which irritates would-be developers eager to ‘realise its tourist potential’. As yet most tourists arrive by coach, have lunch, ‘do’ Ché’s Memorial, then go on their way to Havana or Trinidad.

On my first morning I aroused much friendly curiosity by joining a slow-moving thirty-person queue outside a co-op bakery. (The state-run
sort require a
libreta.
) Fifteen minutes later I reached the doorway, just in time to see the last loaves leaving the shelves and a huge dough-laden trolley being pushed into an room-sized oven. The pleasant mulatta behind the counter advised us to come back in thirty-five minutes.

As I rambled around, a few householders were drawing water from a standpipe that needed vigorous pumping. One skinny, stooped
abeula
was hardly up to the challenge and, noticing this, a passing youth braked his bicycle and went to her assistance.

No noisome skips pollute Santa Clara; instead, thin plastic bags appear beside doorsteps each morning to the delight of wandering dogs. Then street sweepers come on the scene equipped with hand-barrows, wide grass brooms and enormous dust-pans – both men and women smoking the sort of cigars we associate with London clubs. These do not, as I had at first assumed, fall off lorries. Outside Santa Clara’s cigar factory one can stand on the pavement, by the unglazed, barred windows, watching work in progress – every cigar handmade and Perfectionism Rules OK. ‘Defectives’ (their defects minuscule) may be legally bought by the locals at CP3 for twenty-five. And one local was kind enough to sell on to me, making an illegal CP2-profit.

Despite all the street sweeping (it happens thrice daily) rats are quite numerous, especially at dawn and dusk, scuttling in and out of the sewage pipes that emerge from under houses in the older districts. When I returned to the bakery, and admired its three cats, I was told they were famous as Santa Clara’s best ratters.

At the end of December 1958 the city centre was, not for the first time, a battlefield – Ché’s guerrillas versus Batista’s National Army. Yet Parque Vidal seems scarcely changed since its creation in 1925: even the brass street lamps have survived, and the bust of Colonel Leoncio Vidal, marking the spot where this Independence War hero fell in 1896. Within the park guasima trees, poinciana and royal palms surround gay flower-beds and shapely miniature shrubs while sparrows drink from a gently splashing fountain. On every side neo-classical buildings recall Santa Clara’s nineteenth-century sugar-based prosperity. Only the 1950s Libre Hotel –
lime-green,
eleven storeys, on the south-west corner – offends the eye. One magnificent mansion (1810) now holds the Museum of Decorative Arts; the Provincial Governor’s palace has become a library; the Teatro de la Caridad (The Theatre of Charity, 1884, simple but stately) remains a theatre. It was presented to the city by an heiress celebrated for her munificence, Martha Abreu de Estavez, who also provided a hospital, a fire station, an
astronomical

observatory, an electricity station and four public bathhouses. The theatre is so named because it incorporated a casino, ballroom, restaurant and barber shop – all run to raise funds for the local poor. Most of those were black and, until 1894, not permitted to share the whites’ promenade around the square’s periphery where stout railings enforced the colour bar.

Nowadays the park has good vibes. Adults saunter or sit, enjoying it; children romp with dogs and balls and are treated to goat-cart rides; teenagers gather after dark to make music, dance, sing
guajiras
(topical lyrics, often with a sharp edge). Their elders applaud them and sometimes display their own dancing skills. Only the goat-carts bothered me – drawn by three grievously over-worked billies, twelve or fourteen children being crammed into each cart as though in training for truck-bus rides. When given a rare break, the billies lie on the tarmac looking done in. But then, their owners have children to feed …

Sitting on an elaborately wrought iron bench (very 1920s) I took out my tattered paperback copy of Ché’s
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War
and re-read the last few pages: