Lovely old lady, lovely old car, lovely new town

February 18, 2008

CIENFUEGOS - I knew the moment we rode inland from the port that this was going to be a striking city. We turned left by chance from the bumpy road that led from where the ferry disgorged its overgenerous load and we rode straight into the main square. It was named, like so much else in Cuba, after José Marti.

The centre of Cienfuegos is everything that two decades of restoration will one day make of Havana. The square is big and airy and leafy. There are statues and seats and grass and trees and a bandstand with chairs awaiting the musicians. At one end of the square is a triumphal arch and, on the outer edge of the road around the square, a college, theatre and a cathedral. Everything is painted, fresh and clean, in pastel colours.

Running inland are broad boulevards, now closed to all but pedestrians, of shops and restaurants.

Cienfuegos - pronounced "Sinn-fwayo" by most people - is a new town, built only in 1831 after the original was flattened. The sizeable or at any rate influential French community ensured the broad boulevards and put its stamp on the architecture. The result is a beautiful city that is neither French nor Spanish but nevertheless Caribbean. The only disappointment is that the interior of the cathedral is no match for the exterior.

This was a day off and our first day with rain. We explored the town between showers, looked into doorways and windows and stopped unexpectedly and at random on crowded pavements as tourists are supposed to do. Taking it into our heads to go to one place, we ended up somewhere else instead and then decided to walk to a cemetery. I'm still not sure why, except that there is something of human nature in a cemetery and the way that all nations do these things differently. On the scale that runs from the austere stone blocks of the USA, with little on them but the family name, to the absurd weeping angels of a French cemetery, Cuba comes out markedly on the French side.

But that wasn't the high point of the walk out through one of the poorer quarters. That came in two places, first when we passed a lovely woman with a lined face who stood framed in a wooden window with her grandchild, and the second when we glanced into a house only to find an old white car in it.

The grandmother made it clear that she was happy to have her picture taken but seemed to miss the point. Every angle I took to get both her and the baby into the picture was thwarted by her holding the baby in front of her face like a human shield. Only when I gently moved both her arm and the baby to one side did she get the point that it was the two of them - and in reality mainly her - that interested me. She smiled all the more sweetly, her face crinkling into a million little wrinkles.

The man with the car was a lovely, cigar-smoking chap in his eighties, round-faced, smiling, sitting on a stool in what was half a room, half a garage, steadily fashioning something from a length of metal. If you want to keep an old car going in Cuba, that's how you do it. You make it yourself.

"Can I come in?", I asked.

Santiago: "Both of us get out but the car costs more to run"

His cigar waggled in his mouth as he spoke, in the way it should with an old-time boxing promoter. I expected him to slap the car and say: "Da's ma boy!" Instead, to my surprise, he said: "Henry Ford. Mr Henry."

And sure enough it was a Ford, but white rather than black. I'm going to fail you now if you want to know what sort of Ford because I didn't ask and, even if I had, I'm not sure I'd have understood. Built in 1930, anyway, because that's what he wrote down for me.

His name was Santiago and he was born in the year the car was built.

"And you both still work OK?"

He laughed.

"Yes, we both work, but it's the car that doesn't go out much these days. It's too expensive to run."

Right across Cuba in the first couple of weeks, we noticed political slogans wherever we went. Not just the occasional billboards but small, handmade and roughly painted signs that called for the victory of socialism or pledged support for Fidel or, as often, showed allegiance with "the Five". The five, always identified by their first name and whose faces look down almost as frequently as Che's, are a complicated group. The Cuban version is that they innocently and indeed praiseworthily went to Florida to detect who it was among "Mafia Cubans" who were dedicated to terrorism. Therefore they were good guys devoted to peace and global stability. From what I can make out, America didn't see things the same way and locked them up for being foreign agents operating on US territory. Quite possibly terrorists themselves, therefore.

What has annoyed Cuba even more is that the five were brought to court in Miami. For all their lawyers insisted on somewhere else, the Americans dug in their heels and stuck to Miami. And yet there, the Cubans said, was the largest community of right-wing, passionately anti-Fidel Cubans in the world. And even if they didn't sit on the jury themselves, there was no chance their views hadn't coloured the opinions of those who would.

The Cuban Five still look out fresh-faced wherever you go in Cuba and people arrange stones and rocks in their garden to form stars in their support. But the other political slogans have gone. In the west of the island, barely a house lacked one; here, in the southern centre, there are hardly any at all.

Another difference is that we are now in a real tourist area, so we get touted in the street. The approaches start by asking where we're from. The problem for us is that Cubans are such friendly people that that is genuinely what they want to know. If we say "Inglaterra", they wish us a good time in Cuba in English. If we say "Francia", we get a "Ah bonjour, les français!" even if they can't add any more. Five-second contact like that is what makes Cuba a delight. The trouble is that the same opening is used by one-dollar friends, as we've come to call them, those looking for a tip from us or a commission from the restaurant they hope to take us to.

Tonight, we stumbled on a charming young lad who switched from English to fluent and near-perfect French. I'd hoped that talking French would put him off. Instead, it enthused him even more. We chatted as we walked.

"And how do you speak such good French?"

"I taught myself," he said. "I've never been to France but I know it through television and books and I'm interested in people and the world."

He was genuine, too, and I felt for him as I had felt for Pilo, that intelligent man whose knowledge of the tourist world was limited to the picture postcards that acquaintances send him. Cubans are rarely allowed to travel abroad.

"You know Paris?" I said I did. I told him it was as far from where I lived as one tip of Cuba is from the other.

"I know the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysées and the palace of Versailles," he enthused. "And the other big cities. Where are you from?"

"Near Toulouse. In France it's called the Pink City. You know why? It's because the sun sinks on the main square and lights the brick of the buildings to turn them pink."

He listened attentively, taking it all in, expanding his knowledge of a country, a world, he may never get to see. But a sales pitch was still a sales pitch and he remembered it just in time.

"Where are you eating tonight? I know all the best restaurants. I can take you to one." We said we were eating where we were staying.

"And you'll go out afterwards? I know all the best discotheques!"

"At my age?"

He looked at me as I smiled. "Well, maybe not," he conceded.

Having missed his commission, he made his final bid. "I collect euro coins," he said. "Would you help add to my collection?" I couldn't help laughing. If I'd had a euro, I'd have given it to him. But I didn't, so I couldn't.

"Well," he said, "it was good to meet you. Have an enjoyable time in Cuba. Goodnight!" And he walked off with a smile and a wave.

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