Slow Train to Guantanamo (15 page)

‘And this,’ the priest (though I am beginning to think I should refer to him as a
babalawo
) says reverently pointing to a dark figure on one altar, ‘is Babalu-aye’. It is the first time he has not used the Catholic name first. And his other name? ‘Saint Lazarus.’ My knowledge of Catholic saints is scant, but I assume this is the same Lazarus as Christ raised from the dead. It seems more than probable as he explains to me Babalu-aye is seen as the ‘lord of the body’, associated with epidemics, including smallpox and AIDS. Scary.

One statuette particularly interests me. Having written a thriller based on the disputed origins of the cult of the Virgin Mary
⁵
I am fascinated by the little black figure in a gold robe with her own glass-fronted altar and the flag of Cuba behind her. This, the priest tells me, is a representation of the Virgin Mary worshipped as the patron saint of Cuba. But also, he adds as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a practising Roman Catholic to say, as ‘Yemaya, goddess of the sea. Her symbol is the star.’

To my own surprise, I give a nod of understanding. Maybe there is something in these parallels after all. A Catholic church near where I once lived in south-east London was dedicated to ‘Maria, Stella Maris’: the star of the sea. Scholars also believe Yemaya was regarded as the divine incarnation of the river in Nigeria, and may ultimately be linked back to the Egyptian goddess Isis. I could take it even further, but that is literally another book.

The priest is now pointing out yet another Virgin Mary, on a separate altar. Despite the stereotypical snow-white complexion of so many European representations of the ‘Mother of God’, this one is easy to imagine as Yemaya. For a start,
instead of sitting solemnly nursing her special baby, this Virgin is dancing. It is easy to see why: she is clearly pregnant. ‘The Immaculate Conception,’ the priest says. Quite.

The interesting thing about Santería, and the one that most Roman Catholics from other parts of the world have the greatest problem with, is that it makes no reference to one of the more relatively important figures in Christianity: Jesus Christ. I ask the priest about this, and he just shrugs and smiles. Back in the cab, Santiago tells me it’s because in African culture they see it as a bit a weakness having a god who gets killed. Just to confuse me further he says the religion has two other names – Lucumi, which sounds exactly like the Turkish word for Turkish delight – and the Regla de Ocha. Just what the differences are I have no idea. He shrugs and says, ‘names’. I tip him a CUC and walk back into the light.

And light there is indeed. The great golden orb has suddenly emerged from behind the swathes of dark clouds. All of a sudden one of the oldest religions of all and appears particularly attractive: sun worship. I may have been sweating and seeking shade on the streets of Havana but I feel like I have spent the last twenty-four hours living under Niagara Falls. And as it turns out there is within close striking distance one of those things most foreign visitors to Cuba come for: a beach.

In fact we are close to some of the finest beaches in the whole of Cuba, the Cayas Santa Maria, a chain of little islands not unlike the Florida Keys (which were originally called
cayas
), linked by a 48-kilometre long causeway stretching out into the Caribbean and already well on the way to being a second Varadero, if not worse. They are almost totally off-limits to native Cubans. There is a checkpoint at the beginning of the causeway which requires a passport and an entrance free, payable of course only in CUCs.

But Santiago knows what he claims is a nice little beach just outside Caibarién. Within minutes I am stripped to my shorts clutching a cold beer and dabbling my feet in water that actually is the pale pastel blue colour of the tourist brochures. The beach is only 100 metres or so long, with a small hotel for Cubans at one end, with a rickety little shack serving food. Santiago proposes fetching something – we are both hungry by now – and I agree but with little expectation that it will be edible. My mistake. I am about to have the best meal I will have in Cuba.

The best, because it’s the simplest. Over on some rocks at the end of the beach a couple of lads are fishing. Whenever they catch something they bring it over to the shack and a couple of grinning, broad-shouldered lads gut it, whack it the barbecue, sprinkle it liberally with sea salt and black pepper, and serve it up, fresh as could be, straight from the sea, even if you do have to eat it with a tiny reusable wooden fork off a piece of cardboard ripped from a case of beer. Who needs posh cutlery when you’ve got fish this good.

I have no idea what it sort of fish it is – it vaguely resembles a sea bass, but I suspect it is some local variety I wouldn’t know if I was told it. The Cubans don’t seem to know either. ‘
Pescado
,’ the cook says with a shrug: fish. That’s good enough for me. It’s one of the best fish dishes I’ve eaten anywhere. Ever. And definitely the cheapest. The lads weighed it first and Santiago offers to pay. I let him, knowing he’ll charge me for it later, but it hardly breaks even a Cuban’s piggy bank: 9.60
pesos nacionales
, about £0.40 ($0.60). Santiago orders two. I think he’s going to take one back to his wife. But he eats both. There and then. Since the ‘Special Period’ Cubans have a
carpe diem
attitude towards food: if it’s there, eat it.

By the time we roll back into Santa Clara in late afternoon, however, the black clouds have rolled back too. I settle my
account with Santiago who has one last pitch to throw at me: do I want some cigars?

This is a hustle that is omnipresent on the streets of Cuba, particularly in Havana, where street vendors will sidle by going, ‘Psst Meester, you want seegar,’ much in the same way blokes in Brixton with dreadlocks will try to sell you hashish. There is almost inevitably a catch: Cubans cannot afford Cuban cigars. The majority of the population smokes – got a light is one of the most popular pick-up lines, which makes
no fumo
, I don’t smoke, almost as good a deterrent as answering in Russian – but they do smoke cigarettes. Not bad cigarettes, mind you, in fact probably far better than most of the ‘fine Virginia’ sold in the United States and Europe, but far less acceptable to the dwindling number of ‘first world’ smokers, because they are a lot stronger and unfiltered. In other words they taste like the real thing.

I don’t smoke as a rule, and never have done, except for the odd joint at university – my enjoyment of which was much diminished by the presence of tobacco – and when I was sent by the
Sunday Times
to report on the drug trade in Amsterdam and had the immense perverse pleasure of submitting an expense claim for a quarter ounce of cannabis and three ready-rolled joints to Rupert Murdoch (paid without demur). But I have been known to enjoy a fine cigar. And they don’t come any finer than Cuban.

Sadly the myth that they are rolled on the thighs of dusky maidens is untrue. I visited the Partagas cigar factory in Havana on my previous visit, and the business is done mostly by middle-aged men – the girls put on the little paper-rings or do the packaging – a sign, even in supposedly egalitarian but really traditionally macho Cuba, that this is serious: ‘man’s work’.

There is a skill in taking the various grades of tobacco – the main grade used for flavour, the thinner shreds which
help keep it burning, and the top quality whole leaf outer wrappers – and blending them into a quality cigar. Most westerners can’t easily afford the top quality ones either. A top notch Cohiba, Fidel’s favourite back in the days when he was seldom seen without one, named after a Taino Indian chief, costs around £17 (US$25). Each.

So I have a few doubts when Santiago says he can get me a box of 25 Cohibas for 35 CUC. There is obviously a risk that they are not quite the real McCoy – the cigars sold by street vendors in Havana tend to be knocked up from sweepings from a cigar floor factory, with one half-decent leaf wrapped around them to look good. But it is also an open secret that anybody who is anybody in Cuba has a friend in a cigar factory who can ‘acquire’ the real thing, or near equivalent, as a knockdown price. And Santiago seems to me to be that sort of bloke. In any case, I am not going to smoke more than a few myself, and friends back in England will be delighted, so I agree. He promises to deliver them to my
casa
later that evening.

Right now I have another matter on my mind: keeping dry. The thunderclouds have opened and torrents of water are pouring off badly-tiled roofs, or down the furrows of the corrugated iron, the cobbled streets of the old town centre are awash. Santiago has left me at the corner of a street known simply as Boulevard. This is Santa Clara’s equivalent of Bond Street, the pavements made of polished granite with a smart-looking bar called the Europa on one corner and a well-kept national peso shop on the other.

More in an attempt to get out of the rain than anything else I dash inside the peso shop and am immediately plunged into a moment of
déjà vu
. This could be Warsaw or Gdansk circa 1982: the shop is clean and the shelves are well-stocked, as long as you want tricycles or plastic potties. There are dozens of the former and hundreds of the latter, available in
different colours. There is precious little of anything else at all. It is the classic problem of the centrally-planned economy: there is a shortage of potties, let’s make millions.

When supply and demand is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals the law of market economy nature loses touch with reality. If there is someone deciding what he or she thinks the market needs, rather than someone trying to think on their feet and work out what will sell, what you end up with is a glut of plastic potties.

They are selling though. I see one man leave with two. This is another fact of the centralized economy: if you know someone who could use one, buy two, you never know when they might be available again.

I opt instead for the Europa bar next door and a cold Cristal beer. Despite the torrential rain, it is still over 30ºC out there. The bar is heaving, almost exclusively with Cubans, further proof of the emergence of a new, tiny but growing CUC-rich class. The sign on the wall spells it out clearly:
moneda nacional
is not accepted. It is hard not to see this as a slap in the face for the ordinary Cuban to know that the currency in which his wages are paid is all but worthless in bars in his home town.

But, bizarrely, Cubans don’t see it like that. They remember the period before the US dollar was made legal tender, and subsequently converted into the CUC. Nobody had anything, and nobody wants to go back there. In this curious state of communism on the potential verge of transition, it has become widely accepted that it is better for some people to have nice things than for nobody to have anything. At least this way there is a chance of trickle down, rather than stagnation and starvation. By accident Cuba has evolved a truly aspirational culture.

It is an attitude that I am about to have explained to me by an earnest young man who unsurprisingly tells me his name
is Ernesto. Unsurprisingly not because he is earnest but because this is Santa Clara, shrine to Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. I imagine half the male population is called Ernesto, or at least claims to be; it is not unsurprising for Cubans to invent fictitious names when talking to foreigners.

He is trying to sell me a copy of the party newspaper
Granma
’s edition for young people
Juventud Rebelde
(
Rebel Youth
), which considering that about 70 per cent of its content is identical to
Granma
, is about as unrebellious as you can get. When I decline he tries to tap me for a CUC but I offer to buy him a beer instead.

Which he accepts gratefully and before long we are deep in discussion (or as deep as my relatively shallow command of Spanish will allow) of the Cuban economy. Ernesto is no outspoken critic of his government or the ruling party, but he does have some clear-cut views on what is happening to his country’s society.

‘They say we are a one-class society. It is not true. Not now. Now we have six classes: the top are people who work in the tourist industry and have easy access to CUCs, the second are people whose business lets them work in both currencies (he means taxi drivers like Santiago), the third are those whose families always had a house big enough to rent rooms (the
casa
owners), fourth are people married to foreigners, fifth are people with relatives abroad who send them money, and last, largest and lowest, are people like me, most people, who work in the state-run economy and get paid in pesos.’

According to Ernesto he is a baker who earns 200 pesos a month, or about eight CUCs, around £6 ($10). We talk prices and he is horrified when I say a beer in London costs the equivalent of five CUCs, and green with envy that the British national minimum hourly wage is the equivalent of his monthly salary. But I burst the bubble when I tell him
that the average rent for a one bedroom flat in London is the equivalent of 1,200 CUCs (£800). He pays nothing. The flat comes with the job.