Cuba

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THE PIG ARRIVED AT MIDNIGHT as the salsa dancing party reached fever pitch in the tenth-floor apartment overlooking Havana Bay.

Killed and spit-roasted at another address – ‘Why? Don’t ask,’ said our local fixer. It had been bundled across the city in the boot of a car.

A City of London financier in his sixties was being chased along the balcony by an attractive barrister in her thirties who specialises in crime; she walloped his retreating bottom with a pair of maraccas while the rest of their party from London’s Boisdale Jazz & Cigar Club applauded loudly.

‘John’s been very naughty,’ it was explained.

Under the disapproving nose of Uncle Sam, Europeans are taking over Cuba these days.

A lively affair

Dining out in Havana can be a lively affair.

As part of the softening of his more than 40-year-old communist revolution, Fidel Castro allows some Cubans to open up their dinner tables to foreigners, and charge for it.

The hosts make some much-needed extra dollars, the state takes its share in taxes and foreigners feel they’ve really engaged with the local people.

Can this really be Cuba, the harsh Caribbean dictatorship which, in 1962, had panicking New Yorkers who feared nuclear apocalypse taking cover underground when it invited its ally, the Soviet Union, to install ballistic missiles on its soil, 90 miles off the Florida coast?

Yes, but not Cuba as we know it. This vibrant little nation has embarked on an unusual political experiment. In essence, it is inviting capitalism to prop up its communist revolution. By doing so, it is spitting in the eye of its mortal enemy, the United States. America has ached for more than 30 years to return Cuba to capitalism. Now Cuba seeks to improve communism with a dash of capitalism – without reference to America, which refined this economic idea and spread it worldwide.

Discovered by Columbus in 1492, Cuba was Spanish until America ended Madrid control after the Spanish-American War of 1898.

This phoney affair – a battle of words which began when a U.S. battleship, The Maine, sank after a mysterious explosion in Havana harbour – is remembered chiefly now for press tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s reply to a correspondent. He had cabled home saying that he could find no fighting. ‘You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war,’ replied Hearst.

So he did. Hearst, memorably depicted by Orson Welles in the film Citizen Kane, whipped up anti-Madrid hysteria with banner headlines such as ‘Spanish Galleons off the New Jersey coast’. Americans believed them and there was panic.

Cuba became an independent republic in 1901, but America continued to exercise control.

From 1933, it was ruled – for a time democratically, then despotically – by corrupt Fulgencio Batista, who made it a playground for American Mafia gangstars until he was forced to flee into U.S. exile in 1959, carrying much of Cuba’s treasury, by Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries. His plane could barely take off because of the weight of gold bars aboard.

From that moment this 780-mile-long country of 11 million people, has been virtually at war with the world’s most powerful democracy. An attempted U.S. invasion using local counter revolutionaries, led by the CIA, at The Bay of Pigs in 1961, was a humiliating failure.

Cuba has come to represent communist revolution, air piracy – ‘Take me to Cuba’ demanded the first skyjackers – and anti-Americanism.

The U.S. imposes trade and travel embargoes. But Cuba courts Europeans. Jumbo jets disgorge holidaymakers at Jose Marti International airport.

The visitors from Europe range from students who cycle through rural Cuba staying as the paying guests of local families, to tycoons in private jets who seek to fix special cigar export deals or hotel schemes.

Everywhere I heard the chatter of European voices. The only non-Europeans touring the State-owned Havana cigar-rolling factory were South Americans and Canadians.

As we inspected cigars which in Europe would cost up to £20 each, the giggling Cuban girls who made them offered us samples at special prices. Packets of five, which cost about £100 in London, changed hands for $10, about £6.

In the middle of this happy trading, a male supervisor ran in shouting angrily. We were horrified to think we might have got the girls into trouble but, moments later, he left smiling clutching a $10 note.

Our British guide, Toby Brockelhurst, who has been taking parties to Cuba for more than ten years, said: ‘Things are changing so fast. Not long ago, they would not have dared to sell cigars so openly.’

One day, deep in rural Cuba, our party found a special picnic spot in a ravine on the banks of a river. Local fishermen brought delicious red snapper and fish.

They also spit-roasted a pig – pork is popular in Cuba – while a salsa band set up an uproarious din. Before long, travellers on the road above, mainly European students on rented bikes, had joined us.

The night before we had gone to see a huge cavern which had been turned into a nightclub. That too, had a mixture of Cuban and European customers, as did the disco in the local village.

There appears to be little crime, although we were warned about pickpockets. You see police everywhere, but their manner is low key.

A friend on the trip met a cab driver from Blackpool. Although he’d lived with a local girl for eight years, he still had a broad North-West accent.

How did he deal with the police, who are fussy about speeding and other motoring infringements? ‘I tell them I can’t understand what they’re saying,’ he replied. ‘I don’t speak a word of Spanish.’.

Havana jazz

There was standing room only in the Havana jazz joints I visited. Admission and drinks charges were about a quarter of European prices.

Literacy and infant mortality figures bear comparison with those in Europe and are far ahead of other Caribbean and Latin American neighbours.

‘They’re a bit like us, with a wicked sense of humour,’ says a British businessman I met in the Hotel Nacional. Cubans in our party literally shouted with laughter at the antics of Rowan Atkinson in a Mr Bean video playing in the coach we rented.

The EU is in a delicate position over Cuba. Collectively, they’ve agreed to ignore American legislation which aims to isolate and ruin the Castro regime. The co-ordinated EU diplomatic line of our ambassadors to Havana is ‘constructive dialogue’ with Castro.

It isn’t hard to detect an undercurrent of admiration for the old tyrant among diplomats. One envoy told me, ‘At well into his seventies he is still very fit and his mind is clear. We have to assume that he’ll last another 10 years, maybe more. He’s very well informed and has a good sense of humour.

‘Yes, the big question is what happens when he goes, but I don’t lean towards the chaos theory. I think it perfectly possible that, to some degree, his revolution will carry on.’

Diplomats here say America would prefer to have better relations with Castro’s regime and suspend the trade embargoes altogether, but it is the captive of vociferously anti-Castro Cuban groups in Florida who have political clout, and right wing opinion generally which abhors communism.

A European diplomat in Havana told me, ‘It may just be a question of time. The anti-Castro Cubans in Florida are like Fidel himself: they’re getting on in years. Their sons and grandsons are assimilated into American culture and don’t feel so strongly. Castro is less of an issue for them.

Meanwhile, Europeans come in greater numbers to participate in Cuba’s political spring. Havana has become our Bay of Pigs – spit-roasted, served with beans, and eaten at the homes of locals when you’re all samba’d out.