On the revolutionary road
The ten whirring ceiling fans made little impact on the humid air, which felt as sludgy as the bottom of an espresso cup. It was the live music that sliced through the torpor. The Casa de la Trova in Santiago de Cuba is steeped in the troubadour traditions that gave the world son - the infectious mix of European and African rhythms popularised by the Buena Vista Social Club.
Right now a seven-piece called Los Jubilados - old guys, cool hats, big trumpet - were shaking the rafters. Drifting out to the balcony for air I watched dudes in two-tone shoes dancing for free in the street below. Then a woman in a tight yellow top gained my immediate and undivided attention by jabbing me with one of her breasts.
'Are you solo?' she wanted to know. I pointed into the hall, at the back of my partner's head, to indicate I was spoken for. 'Is that a problem?' she replied.
The jiniteras - female hustlers - of Cuba have front, shall we say. Like their male counterparts they are on the make because they have so little. Desperate for dinero, the jiniteros and jiniteras will try to sell tourists anything from their bodies to their cousin's home-cooked food. But they are not bad or dangerous people, just symptoms of an ailing system that, like the old American cars you see, is now spluttering along from day to day.
Outsiders have long been predicting Cuba's demise as a revolutionary socialist state. And there is undoubtedly a voyeuristic element in many tourists' motives for going there: see it before the wheels drop off. The difference now perhaps is that Cubans themselves sense some sort of end game and will it on.
This year is a milestone. Fifty years ago this spring, Fidel Castro stood on a street corner in Havana and proclaimed the 'socialist character of the revolution'. Reminders of the victoria del socialismo, when the barracks of Batista's hated army were turned into schools and every child learned to read and write, are still everywhere in the form of billboards, slogans and rousing TV shorts. My plan was to use the significant sites of the revolution to frame a countrywide tour, starting in the east, the cradle of the guerilla uprising, where, as Graham Greene noted, everyone is a rebel at heart.
As if to prove the point, back in Santiago's tropical Cavern Club another jinitera tried a different tack. Pulling her chair to our table Celia pointed at the band and the ecstatically whirling dancers and shouted over the music, 'Cuba always has this happy face - but in our hearts we are sad.'
Articulate and impassioned, Celia was not trying to sell sex, cigars or a cheap bed. The commodity on offer was her political opinions, which can be dangerous things to bandy about in Cuba. I bought them for a drink and a tip, and a promise to give her a made-up name. 'There is no freedom here,' she said, among many other things. 'My father was a great revolutionary but he died believing it was all mierda.'
The next morning, when I related this encounter to the director of one of Santiago's museums, he laughed and said, 'You know, we have the best-educated hustlers and prostitutes in the world. That's why I'm optimistic about the future.'
In the heat of noon we strolled with the museum director - let's call him Miguel - from the main square, the Parque Cespedes, to another of Santiago's live music venues, the Casa de las Tradiciones, which attracts fewer tourists - and fewer hustlers - than the Casa de la Trova. This walk, undertaken to show us the way to go for that evening's revels, was Cuba's second city in a nutshell.
It took us past the cinema, looking as moribund as the description of it in Our Man in Havana, past the school where Fidel Castro studied and the little house in which he lived, past roofs of semi-tubular Spanish tiles and flat French ones, reflecting successive waves of colonisation and immigration, past the Museo de la Lucha Clandestina, chronicling the local underground struggle against Batista's military dictatorship, to a welcoming open door in a shabby side street.
That night the dancers in the Casa de las Tradiciones moved with the jagged fluidity of flickerbook figures to an all-female band called Las Perlas del Son. The next morning - reflecting on Miguel's truism that everything both good and bad that has happened in Cuba in the past half-century is down to Fidel - we hit the potholed road to experience for ourselves Castro's curate's egg of a country.
Over ten days, and taking into account all the to-ing and fro-ing, we drove about 700 miles west to Havana, from the youthful idealism of the revolution's birth to the gerontocracy into which it has ossified. The narratives that unfold along the way keep you hungry for more, for Fidel, Che Guevara and their khaki-clad compadres authored a yarn so rattling and improbable that Rider Haggard would have been proud of it.
Stick a pin in a map of Oriente, the eastern third of the island of Cuba, and you're almost bound to hit somewhere with revolutionary associations. We started our trail at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago, a former stronghold of Batista's army that on July 26, 1953 was the subject of a guerilla attack led by Fidel. Bulletholes pepper the building still.
The museum housed in part of the old barracks (the rest is now a school) tells the story of the attack, which was a military failure but a political success as Batista's brutal reaction generated overwhelming sympathy for the revolutionary cause. After serving less than three years in jail Fidel Castro fled to Mexico where he recruited an expeditionary force - including an Argentinian doctor, Ernesto Guevara, known as Che - that would return to kickstart the revolution.
Their arrival in Cuba was another cock-up but time, and eventual victory, have leant the episode a romantic patina. The force of 82 men were squashed into a small cabin cruiser called the Granma (as in grandmother - it was bought for Fidel from an American company) which on December 2, 1956 ran aground at Playa las Coloradas, a remote and swampy stretch of the Caribbean coast near the Sierra Maestra mountains.
Disorientated and exhausted, the men had to machete their way inland through the mangroves and razor-sharp grasses. The route they took is now a mile-long raised concrete walkway over which tiny crabs scuttle. The platform marking the point of disembarkation lies in ruins, blown away by Hurricane Paloma in 2008.
Regrouping after suffering heavy casualties, the expeditionaries set up a camp known as La Plata on a mountainside in the Sierra Maestra - the cluster of cedarwood cabins they occupied is a four-mile trek from the nearest roadhead and back, on a sand-and-rock path shaded by mahogany trees.
Fidel's cabin has an old American fridge, and an escape hatch in the floor. The guide was learning English and had carefully prepared appropriate phrases. Outside the kitchen cabin he said, 'They cooked at night so the smoke could not be seen from an airplane'.
The defining engagement of the revolution was the battle of Santa Clara in 1958 in which Che Guevara masterminded victory over Batista's troops - an action that prompted Fidel's description of Che as 'an artist of guerilla struggle'. On the north-east side of town the carriages of the armoured train he derailed lie where they were blown up and now serve as a museum. To the south, Che's remains rest beneath a vast Soviet-style monument embossed with his famous letter to Fidel that ends, 'Hasta la victoria siempre, patria o muerte...'
Che's image is everywhere in Cuba - his premature death in 1967, by an assassin's gun, clinched a quasi-religious status for him. In Havana I was lucky enough to be introduced to a man who knew him as a man, not a god. Juan Alberto Castellanos had been his chauffeur and bodyguard as well as friend (Che was married in his house) and believed, were he still alive, that he would still be seeking solutions to injustice. 'But no individual can change the world,' he said. 'It will change when we learn to think differently.'
Alberto painted a flesh-and-blood picture of Che - his high standards and impatience. On this tour of revolutionary sites we were also interested in flesh-and-blood, here-and-now Cuba. And by taking us through the landscapes and communities that fomented the uprising, our trail gave us a glimpse in to the heart of a uniquely wonderful country.
Key to this experience was having a hire car. There are so few cars in Cuba that traffic density is probably similar to Britain in the 1920s (bullock carts trundle the wrong way down the fast lane of the autopista). This is why drivers are morally obliged - and in the case of government-owned vehicles, legally so - to pick up hitchhikers. The red licence plates on our hire car exempted us from this duty but during ten days on the road we stopped anyway, picking up at least 30 talking testimonies to life in modern Cuba.
A young woman who looked too young to be married was in fact already divorced and looking for un buen hombre to be husband number two. A man called Raul - born in the early 1960s, named after Raul Castro - was disappointed that 'America's first Afro-American president' had not lifted the trade embargo that sits like a boot on the windpipe of Cuba's economy. At one point a car mechanic in oily black rags shared the back seat with a doctor dressed all in white, right down to her tights and shoes (she squashed herself right in the corner).
The places they hitched between were similarly distinct and charming. Built in the foothills of a sugar mill with a vigorously belching chimney, the little town of Niquero had an air of desiccated sleepiness with lopsided clapboard houses and signs handpainted in elegant script from pen-and-ink days.
Its little museum, housed in a colonial villa of high ceilings and stained glass fanlights, included the 'tooth of a megalodon', a 'peasant-beating instrument' ('Batista was a monster,' said the guide, Beatriz, cheerfully) and a photo of the town's most distinguished personage, Raquel Morales, who is 'the only female organist in Cuba'.
The tiniest place had a chess academy, whilst each had its signature feature. Bayamo's main square has elegant wrought iron and marble benches, Manzanillo's has four sphinxes, while in Trinidad the cannons from colonial wars have been sunk snout-first through the cobbles to act as markers on street corners. It was in Trinidad that I saw a defining image of Cuba - in the mirador of one of the belle époque mansions, surrounded by antique glassware, a humble man in a singlet watched baseball on a flickering TV whilst son blasted out of a portable radio.
Celia, the outspoken jinitera in Santiago, had told us, 'When Fidel dies I won't care. He is just a photograph to us now. What we need is change.' Change is surely not long in coming, but what sort of change is the question. Go now, before the wheels drop off and, to mix metaphors, some marvellous babies are thrown out with Fidel's old bathwater.
Published in The Daily Telegraph on July 23, 2011