Slow Train to Guantanamo by Peter Millar

Author:Peter Millar [Peter Millar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909807082
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Cu’a e’ Cu’a

Juanito’s unsolicited saloon bar language tuition has been little short of a miracle. All of sudden I’ve started to understanda bit more, And be a bit more understood. The explanation of the missing ‘s’ is a revelation. When I ask the girl behind the Plexiglas the time of today’s train eastwards, she looks blank for a moment and then says something that sounds like, ‘Ahhh latoona’, I can now nod enthusiastically. Yep, a Las Tunas, that’s where I want to go. The bad news is that it was at 4 a.m. this morning. The worse news is that it was indeed the only one and the next is tomorrow at ‘ochimaya’ – las ocho y media – 8.30, which means of course that I need to be there at 6.30.

This is not good news, but Cu’a e’ Cu’a, as they say. There is nothing to do beyond chilling my heels for another eighteen hours and, more immediately pressing, chilling my parched throat and resting my sore feet. This turns out to be surprisingly easy and pleasant, because against all common sense, logic and anticipation, at the other end of the station, abutting the near derelict puce semi-ruins, there is an open-air bar, with high stools, electric fans and cold beer.

I perch myself there with a cold can and, for lack of anything better, a view of the television which is playing that most riveting of programmes, the Cuban review of international news. The big item, probably not playing high on many other news editors’ agendas right now – except possibly, just possibly, and even then I wouldn’t bet on it, in Caracas – is a meeting of the Cuban–Venezuelan Intergovernmental Commission, which has ‘concluded with the signing of important contracts’.

Just what those ‘contracts’ might be is obviously not mentioned. This is government business. All the average Cuban citizen needs to know, in the eyes of the national news media, is that his government is doing good stuff for him. Precisely what that ‘good stuff’ might be, or who is paying for it, is no business of the common man. That does not mean it is all bullshit. The Cuban–Venezuelan ‘oil for doctors’ deal also happens to fit pretty precisely with the old mantra of communist economics: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’.

There is also the fact, unknown to me at the time sitting by the bar in Camagüey, that Chavez was just about willing to sign anything in return for treatment by Cuban doctors for a cancer which he at one stage alleged might have been deliberately caused by United States secret services.

That may sound ridiculous – and I am fairly certain it is, but only fairly, because I have to remember that when I lived in Moscow as a British reporter, the US embassy solemnly informed us its intelligence assets had proof the KGB had treated the steering wheels of certain westerners’ vehicles with chemicals that would allow them to trace our movements, and which incidentally happened to be carcinogenic.

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