An Innocent in Cuba Read online

  We say goodbye, Orestes takes off for home, and I’m dashing off to Santa Clara. But halfway there a brilliant idea causes me to slam on the brakes, turn around, zoom back to the Captain’s compound, and ask him if he wants to come with me to the big city (pop. 175,000). Maybe we could catch a baseball game. He jumps at the chance, he thinks it’s a fantastic idea. Within about three seconds he’s in the car, without even asking his wife’s permission. He left her home to worry about her son-in-law’s surgery all on her own.

  “Che was one of those people who is liked immediately, for his simplicity, his character, his naturalness, his comradely attitude, his personality, his originality, even when one had not yet learned of his other characteristic and unique virtues.”

  – Fidel Castro, October 18, 1967

  The bright and beautiful city of Santa Clara serves as a perfect little microcosm of all of Cuba, if for no other reason than that’s the way it feels on this lovely day, with many birds singing sweetly in every leafy tree. Maybe it has to do with Che’s remains being interred here, in 1988, twenty years after his death, along with the ashes of all the other famous fighters who died with him in Bolivia. Also, ten years later, in 1998, the late Pope John Paul II visited and no doubt enjoyed Santa Clara’s pleasant atmosphere. He would have known that the city was named after the first Abbess of San Damiano, Saint Clare, who was the great spiritually intimate friend of no less than Francis of Assisi, penniless patron saint of animals and the environment, and founder of the Franciscan order.

  First stop was Che’s mausoleum. Interred here besides Che are twenty Bolivianos, fifteen Cubanos, and three Péruamos. There were no slogans, everything was very solemn, and there was the sacred eternal flame. No way could I hold back the tears. Orestes looked at me shyly. I blubbered something about how over and over again the best are killed by the worst, and how is the world ever going to get anywhere this way, with my brain extremely embarrassed and trying to get my heart to shut up. The mausoleum was beautifully designed, and Che’s marker was the same style and size as those of the other thirty-eight. Even the bricklayers and carpenters seemed to have been caught up with the solemnity of what they were doing. But I felt suffocated, as if an asthma attack was coming on, and couldn’t wait to get out.

  We’re all of course admirers of Che Guevara, a seriously handicapped asthmatic of supernatural courage. And you’d have to be pretty thick not to be stirred by a man who could say, “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.” But I’ve never cared for the Bolivian escapade, and not just because it was a lost cause. The low ceiling was contributing to the gloom, and Orestes didn’t care to linger long either. I also didn’t like the big statue of Che outside the mausoleum. It was all wrong, and it made him look like the Michelin man with a rifle. The Che museum adjoining the mausoleum was closed for repairs.

  We had some time before the baseball game so we went to Parque Vidal, the city square, where in December 1958 Che and his men took positions and fired up at the ultra-romantic art deco Hotel Santa Clara, where numerous disheartened and demoralized Batista soldiers were occupying rooms all the way to the tenth floor. The handsome facade is still bespattered with bullet holes, but they give the hotel a certain cachet. A cinema takes up most of the first floor, leaving only room for a cramped front lobby. The hotel is now just as it was then, except there are no Batista supporters staying here, as far as we know.

  Orestes showed me the exact spots where Che and his men had been positioned, down on one knee and firing away. I looked up at the hotel, tall, slender, beautifully proportioned, painted in two shades of green, alternating vertically. About thirty baseball players in their Holguín uniforms were spilling out of the lobby onto the street. They were handsome, youthful, happy to be in Santa Clara, so bright they looked as if they might be movie stars dressed up as ball players. If the Santa Clara team is as sharp as these guys, it would be a good game.

  Then the two of us went to the railroad tracks, where several hundred Batista soldiers forty-five years ago had steamed in on a freight train from Havana to reinforce the handful in the hotel. They were shaking in their boots because they knew a madman named Che was on the scene.

  El Capitano explained how Che’s men were firing at the train and tossing Molotov cocktails at it, causing the engineer to lose his cool and open the throttle to full speed. This was a fatal mistake, for he did not realize that the clever Che was busy knocking out the tracks with the sharp black blade of a heavy-duty yellow bulldozer. The train hit the damaged tracks while still accelerating, and was promptly derailed in the most spectacular fashion. Four of the boxcars, riddled with bullet holes, still lie there today in a quaintly haphazard manner, the way they landed so long ago.

  Batista’s soldiers came running out with their arms up, throwing their rifles away, calling out, “Don’t shoot!” This moment marked the fall of Batista. He was out of the country in twenty-four hours, never to return as far as is known.

  The spot is now a memorial park, with the boxcars lying where they fell. The bulldozer looks very impressive on its stone platform. It still looks new. It’s a U.S.-made Caterpillar – without this overgrown snowplough Batista might still be running Cuba. But how did Che and the others know that the Caterpillar would have enough power to rip up the railroad tracks? They didn’t know for sure, but Che took a chance and it worked.

  Fidel Castro delivered a magnificent outdoors speech attended by close to a million Cubans in Havana’s Plaza de la Revoluçion in 1967 a few days after it was confirmed that Che Guevara was dead. He said that Che had made an “audacious” attack on Santa Clara with three hundred guerrillas, and Santa Clara was defended by tanks, artillery, and several thousand infantry soldiers. These and other battles stamped Che as an “extraordinarily capable leader, as a master, as an artist of Revolutionary war. Many times it was necessary to take steps to keep him from losing his life in actions of minor significance.”

  He also said, “If Che had an Achilles heel, it was his excessive aggressiveness, his absolute contempt for danger.” And he suggests in the same speech that Che had “meagre self-regard.” Had Che realized how valuable he was alive he wouldn’t have been so eager to be forever courting death.

  —

  Orestes and I had box seats on the third-base line at Estadio Sandino. There were maybe four thousand people in the stands. Even without knowing that Holguín was way down in the standings and Santa Clara way up, we could tell during the warmup that the Holguín players had somehow lost the confidence they radiated as they came out of the hotel. Now they seemed unprepared, out of their league perhaps, and Santa Clara looked ready for the World Series. The Santa Clara team was all smiles and high-fives. Holguín looked despondent.

  Amusing moment: There was a Santa Clara player on first. A ball was hit hard into extreme right field and the fielder had to run like mad to get it. But he got it and he threw it very well, but I’m not sure who he was throwing it to. The centre fielder missed it, and the second baseman missed it, and the shortstop missed it, and the third baseman missed it – so the guy who hit it ran all the way home to score two runs. Can you imagine? You don’t see plays like that at SkyDome. The centre fielder was so miffed he threw himself on the ground and kicked his feet in the air.

  That was in the first inning, and the player who racked up those two lucky runs batted in when he hit that ball, I can’t remember his name, but he was from Holguín even though he was playing for Santa Clara, and there was a full-page profile of him in Granma last week. As he was warming up before the game Orestes called him over, and he shook hands with both of us. We figured our luck had rubbed off on him – or maybe the other way around.

  The manager of the Santa Clara team, I forget his name also, but apparently he’s a great Cuban hero for turning down a huge contract to play in the United States. When the pitcher began to lose control in the fifth, the manager came out and openly lambasted him. I think he was angry because the pitcher
had drunk too much last night.

  You express your feelings in Cuban baseball. Elsewhere when the pitcher delivers four straight walks the manager goes out and politely asks him if anything’s bothering him, and did he remember to have his bowel movement this morning. In Cuba, the manager goes out and starts screaming before he gets there. And everybody can see him waving his arms around and throwing things. He doesn’t even care if the player’s mom and dad are in the stands.

  The score was lopsided, but it was an exciting game. Everybody in the stands was on to every pitch right to the end. Even the beautiful women wearing wild orchids and other tropical flowers in their hair were very concentrated on the game, as they sent out exotic messages like multicoloured parrots in undiscovered forests. Even the police were very intent on the game. Even the kids who had arrived with cardboard boxes, painted to look like TV cameras, and who were running around pretending to be cameramen, even they were intent on the game. The only ones not to be were the sixteen-year-old girls sexily dressed and armed with their photograph albums in case any of the younger players wished to see what they looked like in evening gowns, at coming-of-age parties, with palm trees painted on the moonlit backdrop.

  The Pope performed mass at this stadium in 1998. He only spent four days in Cuba, but his face looks lobster red in the Santa Clara photos. The crowd is said to have been much quieter here than in Havana, but they let out a thunderous roar when the Pope called for a “free and independent” Cuba.

  DAY TEN

  I AM YOURS FOREVER

  Monday, February 23, 2004. I’m lying flat out in the biggest bedroom at Orestes’s place, with my mind “just saying no” to the drug of sleep. It’s one-thirty. Last night about this time, before pulling into the sugar plantation, I stopped off at a little town but I forgot the name of it and had a coffee at a little coffee place whose name I also forgot, and it was served by a fellow whose name I’ve forgotten, and I forget what we talked about. Just kidding. His name was Juan, he was tall, skinny, with a closely shaved head, and he was very alarmed when I told him about the accident I came across earlier. He excused himself and made some phone calls. All his closest friends seemed accounted for.

  At yesterday’s game there were two black guys sharing a bottle of cheap, powerful aguadiente in a labelless bottle, with no lemon, and they were standing up rather than sitting down. A police officer, also black, came by and told them to sit down, don’t stand up. And they said no no, you sit down, we stand up. They refused the cop’s orders, so the cop backed off.

  There were two kinds of police officers in attendance: the ones from the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) in green and from the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (MINFAR) in grey. But there weren’t very many of them, and they didn’t seem to be armed at all, except for the shiny black batons in their belts, and they were more interested in the ball game than anything else. They weren’t about to blow a gasket because someone wouldn’t sit down.

  When we got home from the game, it was time to eat – the missus had been cooking her head off. All the little thoughtful touches were just so amazing. They not only didn’t want me to drink tap-water, they didn’t want me to drink the bottled spring water for fear it would give me tourist tummy. I’ve been drinking bottled water all along, and it hasn’t bothered me. But instead they presented me with a huge pitcher of fresh orange juice from their backyard trees. And there was spaghetti with tomato sauce and chunks of sweet pork, and she even cooked a separate plate of meat for me, cooked in soya, and plates of meat for the others all cooked in something she didn’t think I’d care for, or which she had heard might not appeal to tourists.

  And there was cup after cup of thick black coffee. One of the sons came in with his girlfriend and their little girl, four years old. And when I asked for news about the son-in-law’s state of health, the Captain’s wife leapt to her feet, went running into the kitchen, and brought out some pills for me. She thought I wasn’t feeling well. I had a look of sympathy for the son-in-law, which made me look ill, and I was pointing to my stomach – so she misinterpreted me. She thought I meant my stomach needs some sympathy. The son understood exactly what had happened, and he succeeded in calming his mother down. He’s okay, he’s not sick, he told her, following her into the kitchen and back again. He understood the situation before I had. Orestes just kept wolfing down great amounts of food.

  —

  So here I am at two in the morning with lots of time to kill. Very strange, I went to the washroom, and just as I was returning, Orestes came out and asked if I wanted some coffee – at two in the morning! No, I said, very kind of you, but I must go back to sleep.

  I have all the windows open, and a big Russian fan going full blast, the fan labelled INPUD. But it turns out I was wrong. I would find out later that it wasn’t Russian, it was an excellent Cuban fan, and INPUD stood for Industria Productora de Utensilios Domésticos, an all-Cuban firm inaugurated by Che Guevara in Santa Clara in 1964 and still going strong. Its big forte is refrigerators. On its Web site is one of those comical poll questions. The question is very strange and hard to translate, but people are asked if they would be in favour of petitioning President Bush to allow three thousand poverty-stricken people from the United States to be invited to Cuba for a lengthy stay, and put them in a Cuban educational program that would make them self-sufficient, and lead to productive work, perhaps in the INPUD plant. The number three thousand would be an attempt to make a positive response to the three thousand who lost their lives in the tragedy of 9/11. Voting results were very much in favour: 369 to 58.

  The generosity of the Cubans is unsurpassed. It seems that everywhere you go in the world the poorer the people the more generous they are. Even in Toronto, the panhandlers will tell you that they almost never get spare change from well-heeled people, they only get help from people who can’t afford it. Orestes and family are treating me as if I were the Pope, as if I were José Martí come back to life. What do I have to offer them? Nothing. What have they asked of me? Nothing. I’m even in the biggest bed in the biggest bedroom. Maybe they want me to tell everyone Cubans are the best people in the world. I just might do that.

  —

  In the morning I woke up to find my car shining. The Captain had completely washed it, with help from his handsome sons. Breakfast was a tall glass of icy-cold mango juice and two excellent fried eggs. The minute I got up, it was ready for me. Sounds like another day in paradise, but Orestes’s sons had discovered that my two front doors can be opened by any key or a nail file, or even a toothpick. And all along I’ve had no protection at all when I’ve carefully locked the car with my notebooks and tapes inside.

  Orestes’s phone wasn’t working this morning, so I couldn’t inquire about getting a new car. He took me to another place much like his, a spacious house, plenty of fruit trees and coffee trees. This place was full of dark-skinned women in their late forties or early fifties who were all very sad because their children had grown up and moved to Toronto where they are working as Spanish teachers. All their men seemed to have gone away too, except for their youngest son, who was about twenty, and who told me that his sister was working in Toronto for the Cuban Tourist Board.

  These people very kindly let me make numerous phone calls, but things got so complicated I chilled out and decided to stick with the car I had. And to be extra vigilant about my belongings. Let’s look at the odds: who would try to get into my car using a nail file? I should have checked that myself because you could tell by the look of both locks that they had been forced sometime in the past.

  El Capitano definitely did not request any compensation for his hospitality, for paying for the baseball tickets and incidentals such as pizza and coffee, and for the tour of the town and the country. Also for the excellent book of Cuban maps (1:300,000 or 1cm=3km) he insisted I take with me, for all the wonderful food, the friendship, the patience with my lousy Spanish, the best bed, and so on. He even wanted me to take the flip-flops he’d loa
ned me.

  But when I flashed forty dollars in front of his eyes, he didn’t say no. What a deal! He accepted the money with a wonderful look of surprise and a huge hug, as if it was the last thing he expected, needed, or was hoping for, but he appreciated it anyway. He hadn’t wanted the Santa Clara people to have even a sniff of my U.S. money, but he didn’t mind taking it himself when offered. Isn’t that odd? Not really.

  —

  An old campesino with a straw sombrero is walking along the side of the autopista on the far side of Santa Clara with a pair of yoked oxen lugging a twisted hunk of scrap metal. He has stumbled on this find, and has been lugging it along the highway under his own steam. But now – good luck! – he has spotted the oxen going his way, I suspect, and at about the same speed, and so he has tied the rope to them. So they can lug it along. They won’t know the difference, but it’s like night and day for him. Thing is, he doesn’t know where these oxen are going or where they’re coming from. Or if there is someone along the road waiting for them. All he knows is who they belong to. They belong to El Beardo! They belong to everyone!

  This area southeast of Santa Clara is very cowboyish, with lots of horses and horsedrawn wagons. The homes are elegantly designed, no two alike, but very cheap – concrete blocks, wood fronts, sagging eaves, and brightly painted. Everywhere you look you see a scene from something you might remember from an old picturebook from childhood, showing a benign sort of Third World, with a family-of-man spirit of solidarity. Here’s the local bus driver driving a tractor pulling a trailer with about eighty children in it, and a couple of kids on bicycles hanging on to the rear end of it so they don’t have to pedal, though they could pedal a lot faster than the tractor was going, since it’s not a highly powerful tractor, and you have to be careful with those precious children.