Our MI5 writer in Cuba
Thirty years ago Stella Rimington was tracking spies from Cuba. What
sort of welcome will Havana give the former MI5 boss?
"Don't talk about Castro," said our driver to our guide on the way from
the airport. He needn't have worried. No Cuban will discuss Castro with
foreigners. His health, even his whereabouts, are state secrets. With
only state TV channels and the official newspaper, Cubans know less than
we do. Whether you go on a package tour or hire a car and stay in the
private houses licensed to host tourists, you'll have to use your eyes
and work it out for yourself and no two people will agree. Sitting in
the sun, drinking cocktails and arguing about it is one of the joys of a
Cuban holiday.
Thirty years ago, as a middle-ranking MI5 officer, one of my
responsibilities was to keep an eye on Cuban intelligence officers in
London. In those Cold War days we thought them a threat and I couldn't
have travelled to Cuba. Now it's difficult to imagine a threat, even
though the revolution still loudly asserts itself. Motorway hoardings
and state-sponsored graffiti in the villages announce "Revolution is
Eternal Victory", or, more sinisterly, "No-one Will Quit".
It isn't easy for Cubans to quit. The revolution seems to be propped up
by every kind of restriction, yet at the same time, it still proclaims
its youthful ardour. At Che Guevara's memorial at Santa Clara, a place
that feels like a shrine, photographs of the young revolutionaries line
the walls. Che and Fidel slouch in chairs, looking in their fatigues
eerily like Battle of Britain pilots with beards and cigars. You cannot
but reflect that revolution is the fun part; what counts is what you do
afterwards when difficult decisions have to be made.
Cuba is increasingly a magnet for foreign tourists seeking sunshine or a
holiday with a difference. They are welcomed because they bring the hard
currency essential since the Soviet prop disappeared. Last year, 2
million came, mainly from Canada and Europe; none, of course, from the
US. The old mutual resentments live on. On every bookstall you'll find
English books with titles such as CIA Targets Fidel and a George Bush
with vampire's teeth stares out from posters. Whether all this will
continue when Castro dies, who can say?
Related Links
* At home in Cuba
* You haven't been to Cuba yet?
* Cuba up in smokes
But tourists are also a threat, and to prevent them getting under its
skin, Cuba mounts a theatrical performance. Here is a sunny idyll where
everyone smiles and greets you with a cheery " Hola". Whenever you sit
down a band appears to sing and dance. There is rural beauty and
neo-colonial charm. Cubans are decently dressed, the children well cared
for, and nobody looks hungry. Education and healthcare are excellent,
public order seems good.
But when you look behind the scenes, all visible infrastructure seems to
be falling to bits. Outside the towns there is little public transport
and even bicycles are rare. On the motorways, people congregate under
every bridge and tree, organised by men in yellow, who ensure that
government vehicles stop to give lifts. In rural areas travel is by
Soviet-era lorry, bus, rickshaw or on horseback. Tourists attract street
vendors and beggars wanting anything Western – chewing gum, pens, and,
of course, the convertible peso, the tourist money. Beneath the smiles
and the genuine kindness of Cubans, there is a palpable sadness and a
sense of an extreme hardness of life.
Visitors throng the Jagua Hotel in Cienfuegos, enjoying the swimming
pool and the buffet. In the beautiful Viñales Valley, to the west of
Havana, you can sit on your balcony at the pink Los Jazmines hotel and
watch, far below, a peasant working the tobacco fields with a wooden
plough, his voice encouraging his oxen. A glorious sight, until you
reflect that under the curious double-currency system in which the
convertible peso is worth 24 times the local peso, it will take him
months to earn the single convertible peso you'll give your chambermaid.
Even for the tourist, arrangements mysteriously break down. You wanted
to stay at Los Jazmines? Beware of being relocated, as I was one night,
to La Ermita, farther up the valley, where water cascaded through the
ceiling, and I dossed down in jeans and two jerseys to survive the
draughts from the broken windows.
In Havana, many of the old colonial buildings are falling down, their
pillars and balconies propped up with wood. But if you look through the
windows, the insides are often lovingly cared for, clean and polished,
rugs on the tiled floors and lace antimac-cassars on the chairbacks. A
tourist can drink at the Floridita bar, largely unaltered since
Hemingway's day, where the barman and the daiquiris are perfect, or
lounge in the sun on a huge basket chair at the Hotel Nacional, a 1930s
masterpiece.
You'll meet the ghost of Graham Greene everywhere: in the Sevilla Hotel,
where Hawthorne of MI6 recruited Mr Wormold the vacuum-cleaner salesman
as Our Man in Havana, the bar is no longer dark and sinister, but decked
out with pretty Moorish tiles. There's no sign of a vacuum-cleaner shop
in Lamparilla Street, and the Wonder Bar, with its shades of the
murdered Dr Hasselbacher, is, alas, no more. But across the road, on the
corner of Virtudes, the colonnade where the beggar limped by still
stands, just as Greene described it in 1958.
You can visit a cigar factory where the tobacco is rolled by hand, hire
an old Cadillac or, in the car museum, admire a 1926 Willys Whippet that
could have belonged to Bertie Wooster. But if you are a local you must
travel in the camelos – long buses, overcrowded and filthy.
Cuba presents different faces to different people. Some will see a
socialist state working as it should, providing equality, healthcare and
education for all. To others it is a police state going nowhere, with
crumbling buildings, medieval agriculture and inefficient services. To
many it's just an inexpensive and sunny place to swim, drink rum and
enjoy music. If you want a different kind of holiday, go there and see
what you think.
http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/destinations/caribbean/article2595093.ece
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