Once upon a horrible time...

February 18, 2008

VINALES - Once upon a time there was a wicked landowner who forced all the people for far around to work only for him. He paid them very little and he made them work very hard, because he owned their houses and the people could go nowhere else. There was nowhere else to go. In time, some of the people died, because they were old and weak. But the wicked man refused to have them buried on his land. Instead he insisted that the bodies be carried on a six-hour walk into the nearest town.

That was always hard, because nobody likes to stagger beneath a dead body and still less one of someone he loved. But at some times of the year it was harder because then the rivers were high and couldn't be crossed. And then the bodies had to be heaped in the hot sun and there they rotted as the people waited for the waters to subside so they could carry the rotten corpses into town.

If the story is true, it could only have been about a robber baron from the medieval centuries. Yet it is true and, still more astonishing, it happened until 1959. It may be an extreme of the way landowners treated the peasants until then but nevertheless they would have continued at least until the man's death had the Revolution not intervened.

The man owned all the land around the giant stone ridge of the Caverna de Santo Tomas. Legend says that conditions there were so harsh that it was one of the first places that Castro visited and that he promised immediately that the people would be rehoused in clean and sanitary accommodation. Word also says that he went into the Santo Tomas cave to meditate on his people's misfortune but even the locals say that's stretching things a bit far.

It's true, though, that abuse like that made Castro focus his changes not on the towns, where most people to this day live in Cuba, but on the countryside where conditions were worst. Had he decided otherwise, misery could have continued on the farms, the sugar fields and in the tobacco plantations while the very things that now make Havana appealing - the decrepit buildings - would have been pulled down and the capital could have become another ordinary town among hundreds.

The Santo Tomas cave is about 20km outside Vinales on a rolling road that runs almost in a straight line past many of those A-shaped barns on which the thatched roofs reach to the ground. It is the longest cave system in Cuba - although it may lose that title to another nearby network still being explored - and the third longest in the Caribbean. Curiously, for my concept of a cave, it is all above ground. It goes on for ever, on numerous levels, with occasional deep channels open to the sky where the roof has fallen in. It takes a guide to show you around and the trick is to get in a group of reasonably athletic people. If you get stuck with a bunch of fatties, you miss out the trickier parts and your tour lasts only 30 minutes compared to the hour and a half or more for everyone else. And of course the guide can hardly say "Well, I see you're all very fat this morning so we'll only get to see the easy parts." So you'd never know.

"Hey, now I know there are no Americans in the group..."

Our group contained four Germans, two French-speaking Belgians, and us. When we murmured appreciatively as we reached the first cavern, our guide - whose own accent made John Wayne sound like the Duke of Edinburgh - said: "Now I know we have no Americans in the party. You Europeans, you look at this and you say 'Umm!' And 'Oh!' And 'Ah!' Americans are all 'Omah gaaard, wahooo, willya gedda look at dat for chrissakes!'"

I have no reason to think that he doesn't tell the tale in reverse with an American party...

Well, it made a day out, just there and back, and apart from the cave the only remarkable feature of the day was the Terrible Fighting Chickens of Cuba. They had been bred for the attack, I think, for instead of just roaming loose and acting properly chicken-like, they had mutated into food-grabbing monsters that showed no fear. A man couldn't sit on a doorstep and just eat his sandwiches in peace. If he tried, the chickens would be on him, pecking, snatching, generally acting scary.

I don't like to record here that I was scared away by chickens but I'm afraid that's what happened.

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