Motorworld (3 page)

Fifteen minutes passed, followed by a further fifteen minutes. Then, we waited a quarter of an hour while fifteen minutes slid by and then, all of a sudden, we noticed another fifteen minutes had gone by. Fifteen minutes afterwards, one of the white uniformed waiters wheeled some food to our table on his trolley.

There was my spaghetti bolognese and there too, surprisingly, were my vegetables, which looked as though they’d been put in the pan back when I’d applied for my visa. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I want these vegetables with my chicken.’ ‘Certainly sir,’ said the waiter. Actually, he spoke no English so it could have been, ‘You miserable capitalist pig. I hope your wallet catches fire, fatty,’ but never mind.

I knew the spaghetti was wrong just by looking at it.
There was a crust on the sauce which indicated, correctly, that it was stone cold. Again the smiling waiter arrived who, when he understood what I was on about, plunged his finger into the bolognese and nodded. Yes indeed, sir. It is cold.

Back it went and another fifteen minutes went by as they heated it up. There are no microwaves in Cuba. When it returned, the grated cheese had melted and merged with the pasta, which had been under a grill for a quarter of an hour. But none of this mattered because there, in the sauce, was the dimple mark where the waiter’s finger had been for a wiggle.

I simply shoved it away and sat back to enjoy the sounds of Mrs Mills on the piano. She was terrible and her instrument was worse but I forgot about it when the French windows imploded. The disco outside had begun to pump ‘Thriller’ out at 400,000 decibels but Mrs Mills was unmoved; she soldiered on with her rendition of some fifties’ favourite, proving what I’d begun to suspect. She was as deaf as one of the legs on her piano.

Then I noticed the smiling waiter bearing down once again with his trolley and my plate of vegetables which, after another half hour in the pan, had begun to resemble soup, and my chicken. Or was it?

To try to ensure they got a Michelin star, these people had obviously used one of the tyre company’s products in their cuisine and now I was charged with the task of eating it. It was impossible so, again, I gave up and reached for my drink.

Which had gone. So keen were the staff to act like
top-quality hosts and hostesses, they tended to clear your glass the instant you put it down, whether it was empty or not. According to the bill, I’d had eighteen daiquiris, whereas my head the following morning suggested I’d had none.

The bill was £25 each, which explained why we were the only customers that night. Twenty-five pounds is what the average Cuban earns in five months. Cuba is, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked.

Since Russia went all lovey-dovey in 1991, aid to their former friend in the Caribbean has virtually dried up, which means petrol has soared to £2.50 a gallon and there are no takers for Castro’s nickel, or his cigars or even his sugar. Iberia is the only major airline that flies from Europe to Havana, so you need to be a determined and persistent tourist to actually get there.

Then you have to find somewhere to stay. Cubans are banned from even the lobbies of the big hotels so the government feels free to charge what it likes for the rooms. And what it likes tends not to be what you and I like. They cost a bleeding fortune and all the services, being Russian, broke down four years ago and can’t be fixed because there are no spare parts.

Against this sort of background, you would expect to find car-free streets but that simply isn’t the case. They are chock-full of, mostly, American cars from the forties and fifties.

Even though America has had a trade embargo with Cuba for 30 years, ingenuity has kept these dinosaurs going… after a fashion.

I mean, let’s face it: if, all of a sudden, no new cars were imported into Britain, you wouldn’t throw your Cavalier away just because one of the windscreen wipers had come off. And even if there were no Halfords on every street corner you still wouldn’t give up.

You’d jury-rig some kind of device to clear the windscreen when it rains, and that’s what they’ve done in Cuba.

And they’ve gone further too. You couldn’t possibly afford a can of brake fluid out there, even if you could find any, so they’ve worked out that a mixture of alcohol, sugar and shampoo does the job nearly as well.

But what about the engine? Surely, if that goes bang and you can’t get parts, you really have had it? Nope. You simply remove the power unit from a Lada – and they were everywhere when the Russians were in town – and fit that instead.

Most of the old cars out there have Lada engines these days, which is a little sad. We met one chap with an Aston Martin DB4, and he really believed that one day, when Castro is gone, it will fetch $100,000. Well, apart from the complete lack of paint, the total absence of any interior trim and the Lada engine coupled with a Moscovitch gearbox, he might be right.

You see gullwing Mercedes-Benz, Chevvy Impalas, Cadillac Coupe de Villes and countless other rare breeds spluttering around on Lada power. And on every street corner, someone is hooking up a bucket of water to the mains power supply to recharge their 40-year-old battery.

God knows how this works but the sparks and the steam suggest some kind of reaction happens in the bucket. Some
kind of reaction happens at the power station, too, which, in rural Cuba, only supplies power for four hours a day.

Obviously, any form of motorsport is right out of the question here, and not only because Che Guevara thought it was decadent. However, at weekends a few intrepid souls take their Lada-powered yank tanks to the old motorway out of Havana and race from bridge to bridge.

This is not high-speed stuff. Indeed, most of them – particularly one car, which started on petrol but switched over to cheaper kerosene when the engine was hot – couldn’t even keep up with our Daihatsu tracking car.

They also have sumo events where two cars go head to head and try to push each other over a line painted in chalk on the road. Exciting it’s not.

Finding Che Guevara’s car, on the other hand, was. For twelve years it had been sitting in a garage, untouched and unloved, so that when we rolled into town no one even knew what sort of Chevrolet it was. And I know more about antique clocks than sixties’ Americana so I can’t enlighten you either, other than to say that it was knackered.

Nothing worked. Because it was a ‘symbol of the revolution’ no one had been allowed to swap the V8 for a Lada unit or replace the fifties’ brake fluid with Wash ’n’ Go.

We employed nine people at 50p a day each and set them to work on getting it going again while we went off to have some fun.

I have become a keen diver in recent years and had cunningly written a piece in the script which required me to appear under the water with a tank strapped to my back, preferably by a reef near a deserted white beach.

A small island off the south coast of Cuba was located, scouted and deemed to be perfect. They even had scuba gear there.

And it came with the personal recommendation of two Dutch guys who were out there buying up seafront properties. ‘Oh yeah,’ they said. ‘It’s a great little island but you’ve got to get there first…’ And with that, they were gone, laughing strangely.

The next morning we found out why. The aeroplane was a small twin-engined thing which, from a distance, looked like a farmyard animal. Closer inspection revealed that the brownness was a result of much rust.

The tyres were flat and the engines were of a type that simply defied belief. If Karl Benz had come up with this version of internal combustion in the 1880s, he’d have given up and become a greengrocer.

Inside, things became worse. Much worse. There were no windows and the seats were only half-fastened to the floor. Seat belts? Forget it.

Miraculously, the engines fired and somehow the plane became airborne, I assume. Without windows it was hard to be sure but after five minutes I figured we would have hit something had we still been on the ground so I knew all was well.

Then it wasn’t well at all because the entire cabin filled with smoke. No kidding, I had to endure a half-hour flight, not even being able to see that there were no windows. All I could see was those two Dutch guys laughing.

But then we were down in what looked like paradise.
Unusual birds sang strange songs in vivid trees. The water was aquamarine and the beaches really were as white as driven cocaine.

A gaily coloured bus which looked like it might have been used by Stalin himself took us to the hotel, which sat right on the beach. Perfect. Er… no.

Fashioned from concrete, it had water spurting from every air-conditioning unit but, surprisingly, the pool was empty. Good job too because in the scum which clung to the sides and floor I found life-forms that are in no books. David Attenborough could have made an entire series in it.

Most of the guests were on the beach, where we found the bar, a straw edifice which oozed charm and tranquillity. But the reason why it was so peaceful was simple. It had no drink. No beer. No rum. No Coke. Nothing.

And it was pretty much the same story in the dining room, though at least here there were some forlorn European honeymooners to laugh at as they picked their way through some rock-hard boiled eggs.

You just know what had gone on in the poor bloke’s mind, before deciding to reject the Maldives and Mauritius and Antigua. I’ll take her somewhere exotic, somewhere none of her friends have been. She’ll be impressed. We’ll go to Cuba.

Poor sods.

They couldn’t even dive because we’d commandeered the only boat and the only two sets of scuba kit. And then the real fun and games began.

Keith, the cameraman, has the buoyancy of balsawood
and even when he wore a weight-belt that would have sunk a killer whale he was still having trouble getting below the surface, especially as he was burdened with an underwater camera which floated.

I had problems of my own though. My buoyancy vest leaked like a sieve so that it was a jet-propulsion pack. The torrent of escaping air rushed me around the reef like Marine Boy and frightened away all the fish too.

It was a pathetic spectacle. The world’s most revered broadcasting organisation and we had a cameraman who wouldn’t sink, a presenter who was doing Mach 2 and a director who couldn’t dive and was forced to hang around on the surface with a snorkel.

Then our chartered captain had a heart attack. Probably from laughing at us.

It took two days to film our opening sequence for the programme, then it was time for THAT flight back. We were nervous without any real need because we had a different plane, which had windows.

And not much else. It had been built in Russia shortly after the war and last serviced in 1953. You would not believe how much smoke poured out of the engines as we trundled down the runway, dodging dogs, and lumbered into the air.

But as we settled down, I appreciated the view, which really was exquisite. It was a perfect summer’s day, which meant one thing… thunderstorms.

I have been prone to exaggeration in the past but ask anyone on that plane what it was like and they’ll start to quiver. It was truly the most terrifying half hour of my life
as the plane bucked, writhed, turned upside down and plummeted.

I was forever being lifted from my seat, a worrying thing because I knew that just inches above my hair was a paddle fan. Would I be decapitated before we hit the deck? It seemed important.

I really did think we were going to die, but somehow I managed a smile because I thought of my daughter, who was one at the time, growing up knowing her daddy had died in a Russian plane, over Cuba, in a thunderstorm. It’s a pretty cool way to go, let’s face it.

We came out of the clouds at tree-top height and cruised at that level all the way to Havana with the lightning turning the wings blue every few seconds. And then we were back.

And in need of a drink, which meant heading for the Cohiba nightclub. It is assumed that researchers on a television programme only have to find the stories, but that’s just part of it. They also have to find the best hotels and the best bars, and in Cuba Andy had excelled himself.

Not only did he have an endless supply of stories that went beyond the realms of ‘amazing’ but also he knew where to take us after a near-death experience at 30 feet.

Outside the Cohiba every night of the week hundreds and hundreds of girls hang around.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Here are some more people waiting for the lift marshals to stop government-registered cars, so that they may get a lift home.’

‘Er no,’ replied Andy. ‘It’s not really like that here.’

Puzzled, I stepped out from our Daihatsu Sportrak and
was, within ten seconds, surrounded by a dozen or more pubescent girls who, for the most part, were wearing dental floss.

My word, I thought, these Sportraks have some serious pulling power, but I was a trifle wide of the mark. It seems that they were only interested in my wallet which would enable them to get into the hottest night-spot in town.

In return for the $10 entrance fee, I would have them as my escorts, at my beck and call, all week. Jesus.

Even more amazingly, one chap turned up in a Lamborghini Diablo, which seemed like overkill. You can get your leg over if you have ten bucks, leave alone a £150,000 automobile.

I was even on the receiving end of some smouldering come-ons when I tooled by on a bicycle which was powered by the motor from a fumigation pump. It wasn’t the bike. It wasn’t my good looks or flowing locks. It was my Visa card they wanted; that and a passport out of the place.

Technically, the girls aren’t prostitutes in the accepted sense. In fact, they’ll go further for less, which proves really how screwed-up the Caribbean’s largest land-mass has become.

I found myself wondering, as I strolled round the museum dedicated to the revolution, if Castro and Guevara could possibly have foreseen that one day their people would be asked, by their government, to eat grass.

In fact, the museum is a hopeless waste of money in a country that doesn’t have any. Inside a large glass tomb, there’s the boat that brought the rebels over to Cuba, and
outside, there are other mechanised pieces which have been preserved for all time.