Suffering makes a man of you

February 18, 2008

SAN DIEGO DE LOS BANOS - Every so often, life throws a day at you that can only be designed to make a man of you. To stiffen the upper lip. To build character. This was that day.

It couldn't have had a more pleasant start. We had a leisurely, perhaps too leisurely breakfast, overlooking a stream that ran through rocks, admiring the circling vultures and watching the antics of a strange black bird that could lift its tail vertically and then turn it through 90 degrees like the back of an aeroplane.

The curly-haired American told us more of his hope to establish the link between music and Cuban life, a couple from Yukon Territory told us why the frozen half of Canada was something they would never abandon ("You won't believe how beautiful it is") and a stick-thin Dutch girl with frizzy hair spoke of her quest to return to the birthplace of Che Guevara.

"I love Argentina", she said, her Dutch accent the only colouring of perfect English. "I love the people, the climate, the life. I work in volunteer social jobs in Holland and that's what I hope to do to live there, although it isn't easy to arrange.

"But above all I want to be there because Che was born there and his life inspires me."

"Inspires?", I asked, because many people are fascinated by the romantic image of a good-looking, almost too good-looking man in his one-starred beret.

"I think that's the right word," she said, her tone suggesting not a weakening grasp of the English dictionary but such a tight command that she could choose exactly the right word. "The more I read about his life, the more I realise that this was a man who believed in what he did and who did what he believed. He was motivated by good, by his purpose, not by personal greed or honour. That's why he died. And it's why he's so different from Castro."

She didn't quite spit the name but that was her intonation.

Such were the suspicions that Castro had engineered Guevara's disappearance from Cuban government and possibly even his role in the Bolivian jungle, where he was killed by the CIA and Bolivian forces, led to Castro publishing Guevara's letter in which he is said to have welcomed his return to guerilla warfare and the end of fighting from the back of a desk.

I've never sensed here that Castro is disliked. If anything, if the connection isn't too absurd, he is like Queen Elizabeth to the British: a character both loved and ridiculous but who, beyond simple personality, symbolises the continuity of the country. In fact, there are more images of Che than of Castro. Fidel is there and often quoted - "Revolution is sensing the moment in history" is the most popular - but it's Che, the foreigner made an honorary Cuban, who gets top billing.

Che (it means "pal" or "buddy"): his face rather than Castro's is everywhere

Anyway, having learned of Canadian geography, American music studies and Bolivian communists, we set back off through the hills to tackle the many sharp ridges to the flat main highway towards San Diego de los Baños. We switched the gears back and forth as we descended and then climbed again through rich vegetation of cactus, of long, spear-like leaves that fell in mops of green, and tall palm trees that stretched to the sun like pom-poms.

The palm tree is the emblem of Cuba, holding its head high above the competing jungle

On the steepest hills, we walked. We had no choice. But there was more than that because, simply pushing my bike, I could feel my heart pumping furiously. It carried on when I stopped. My breath rushed in and out. Something was up.

I'm beginning to think these last days have been sent to try me. All countries are different and you have to learn them in the first few days. In some ways Cuba is easy but in what you think should be the simplest things - the simple exchange of money for goods - it has been hard. And so has the cooking. It's reached the point that, where we have managed to buy a meal, I've not been able to finish it. For a man who cares little for food and has always wished that those predictions would come true, that in the Space Age (and who talks of that any more, when soon there'll be nobody left on Earth who has set foot on the Moon?) we would all be happy with a meal of two blue pills each day, to dislike food is quite something.

And why have I disliked it? Because Cuban cooking is plain, which I can accept, without a hint of spices or even flavour, but also because it is carried out with vast quantities of fat. And some sort of fat which, unlike that which surrounds a hamburger and gives it that guilty good taste, my mouth finds intolerable. The outcome is that I barely ate my lunch yesterday and I couldn't eat more than a few mouthfuls from Steph's dinner last night. My soaring heart rate doesn't need medical science: I am suffering hunger-knock and I am getting dehydrated.

The national park ended at the top of the last hard ridge and we passed through a border control into the world beyond. The rainforest-like vegetation ended and we moved into a rolling, more scrub-like countryside and a drop to the small town of Soroa.

Had we wanted to stay in Soroa, nowhere would have been easier. So many are the houses licensed to accept foreigners, and such the capitalistic competition between them, that house-owners call "Cheap room... very good" at you as you pass. But to eat is trickier.

We stopped at a breezeblock café, a cement box with a counter.

"Tienes a comer?" I asked in what I call Spanish.

"No," the woman said, even though you'd think something to eat was all you'd expect of a café. "Go back up the road and try there."

I angled my forearm and made pointing motions to indicate that "back up the road" had been a fast drop that we were being urged to tackle the other way.

"No, no," she persisted, careful to ensure that no more than 80 per cent of her Spanish flew over my head. "It's..." And out came the sort of directions you hate getting when you don't really understand the language.

But this is Cuba and there's always someone with nothing more interesting to do than guide foreigners about the place and a surly boy on a bike proved that appearances aren't everything by willingly taking us no more than 50 metres back through the village - how could 50 metres in a straight line require such a torrent of Spanish? - and pointed at a private house that advertised not just a bed but a knife and fork.

I knocked at the glass door.

"Puero comer aqui?"

"Ahora?"

"Si."

She looked nervous, about to say no, wanting to say yes. With glances up and down the road, she said: "Come on... It's illegal but, quick, come inside." She gestured for us to lean our bikes behind a hedge where they wouldn't be seen. She was allowed to sell meals to foreigners staying the night but not to those passing by day, in which case she would be in competition with state-owned restaurants. The fact that there are no restaurants is a gap in the logic that the state seems not to have spotted, just as the government's initial reluctance to allow householders to open their homes to foreigners was also motivated by a wish not to have competition for non-existent hotels.

We sat in a small room beside her kitchen. She brought cold drinks, made welcoming sounds, then returned to show us a wide plate with fish laid on flour.

"Bueno?"

"Perfecto!"

The meal was a treat after the fatty cooking we'd endured so far. From now on, we eat at private houses. And almost always fish. Lesson learned.

I thought the meal would have ended my weakness. Sadly not. We rode on through the village, bought bottled water at a small garage - locals say it's chancy to drink tap water but, equally, there's too little opportunity to buy bottled water for their doubts to be justified, unless the whole nation has become resistant to stomach problems - and then turned right for a long, almost flat stretch along the main highway.

Rice grows in fields beside the main highway. In Cuba, rice comes with everything.

In Cuba, people talk of these highways in the way they narrow their eyes when talking of the water supply. In fact there is barely any traffic and plenty of room for what little there is. The inside lane is reserved for slow traffic, anyway, which is why most drivers travel on the outside lanes all the time.

This was some consolation but it did little to improve what happened next. Because time after time I ground to a halt for want of energy. Sometimes I lay in the grass, sometimes I stared at my handlebars. More than once I thought I wasn't going to get to San Diego. Or, if I did, it would be after darkness, for as Steph observed, night falls suddenly this far south.

I have felt bad on a bike in the past, but in those days I knew even less what I was doing than I do now. But a long time had passed since I felt this bad. Starting again, stopping again, I made eye-bulging, road-staring progress. For the last 15km, Steph took my bags and piled them above hers. I looked so bad that even the accommodation and restaurant touts talked to Steph rather than the robotic moron riding with her.

Pilo wasn't a tout. Pilo was the last man to ride with us, on his sporty mountain bike that was his evident pride. Pilo will return to this story, but not today. Because today - yesterday night as I write this - I collapsed on my bed at 6pm and, other than a couple of moments around midnight to take off my sweaty, salt-crusted clothes, slept until eight next morning.

"I felt very worried about you," Pilo said next day. But not as worried as I'd felt about myself.

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