The importance of being Ernesto

February 18, 2008

VINALES - We're in Cuba but for much of today we could have been in China. It was more than something about the little villages and the scattered wooden houses with a cow, a horse or a goat outside that brought back memories of cycling in Middle Earth.

It was more than the blossom of the trees, white with a touch of pink that, had I been home in France, I would have called acacia. It was the strange turrets of rock, sugar loaf mountains that stood independently in ragged groups. If you have ridden the lunar fields towards the Li valley in China, you'll know just what I mean.

We started with that visit to the ever-smiling Henry and left town on a gentle country road with horse-pulled buggies and the occasional cowboy sitting high in the saddle and wearing a broad-rimmed hat, shirt with buttoned pockets and the obligatory thin moustache. Houses and barns were thatched with leaves from palm trees, the barns often A-shaped with a high ridge and the roof extending to the ground. Little white egrets, like miniature storks, flew up from the roads or hitched a lift on the back of cows munching by the roadside.

After five kilometres the road swung left and then round back on itself to the right to pass under the turreted archway marking the start of the Güira national park. This was the start of Henry's fabled mountain, the killer of foolish cyclists who dreamed too high. And, yes, it was steep but not unrelenting, and yes the road had often crumbled into a patchwork of different heights and surfaces, but we were on road bikes with narrow tyres and we got through fine. Cuban roads are generally good but, even when they're bumpy they are nothing compared to those in the old communist states of eastern Europe. We had just reached the summit when we were caught by the puffing front-runners of the Czech group we'd seen the day before. They were the fit guys, in their 30s and unencumbered by luggage, treating the climb as a tussle, a thigh-bulging challenge of masculinity.

They were waiting at the top of the next climb, looking back the way they'd come for the rest of the fast riders to catch them before turning off right on an unmarked and largely unsurfaced road between high walls of palms and sharp, tumbling leaves.

"Is this the Los Cabañas turn?" I asked.

The Czechs had route sheets. Los Cabañas had been signposted some way back but, when it came to the turning itself, any sign that had been there had long since gone. Forty years ago the last thing anybody would have wanted would have been a sign. Because it was up this little track that Celia Sanchez, one of the leaders of the Revolution, had found a hideaway for Castro and the others had America invaded during the Missile Crisis.

In those days there were huts and cabins and aerial walkways. These days there's hardly anything left beyond what might have been. The mountain-bike guys got up fine, those who bothered to try, but we saw no point in struggling on heavy bikes and we abandoned them by the roadside and went the rest of the way on foot. As we went up, the first of the Czechs came down the other way in an exciting rattle of wheels on ruts.

Los Cabanos: Fidel would have hidden out here

"No good?"

"Scheiss!"

That's how is sounded, anyway.

And what was so "scheiss"? Well, the remains of the buildings were, if you'd been expecting anything better, which I think all of us had been. Only the floor remained by the track, the aerial walkways had long vanished and all that remained of any substance were a couple of half-fallen buildings hidden by foliage.

"Scheiss?" I said to the next disappointed Czech to reach the top.

"Big scheiss", he said in an entertaining melange of languages.

I called the warning to the last of the group, who was riding up as we were walking down.

"Yes, I know," he said, "but it's history."

There's not much left of the hideaway, but history could have been so different

And he had a very good point because had things been different then, if the world had survived at all, this assortment of abandoned buildings and worries would have had a reputation across the planet.

Castro never did come here. But Ernesto Che Guevara did take to the hills and he spent a month in a cave further down the hill. It's a national monument now, the cave, at the far end of a campismo, although my impression is that few people bother visiting it. Nevertheless, it's hard not to imagine the tension, the worry, the fright, that filled the place as America and the USSR confronted each other and then, without bothering to consult the Cubans, reached a deal between themselves and let the world off the hook.

"You'd be old enough to remember all that, I suppose?", Juan-Carlo asked me. I agreed that I was. I can remember the certainty that we elsewhere, uninvolved, could evaporate into smoke in an instant through the political follies of those over whom we had no influence.

Juan-Carlo is a former history professor. We met him at the end of the pathway, somewhat manicured, that led through an archway into the towering rock and on to Che's lair.

"Che said 'Either the people have great faith in us or they are very stupid'", he recalled. "He'd seen that they were very calm despite what was happening, you see, but that was because in 1962 not many people had radio or television and they didn't know what was happening. We knew that America was going to attack us and then of course people were scared. They didn't know why America was going to attack, but they did know that they had attacked before, in the Bay of Pigs, which seems a long way from here, and that they had been defeated, and they assumed it would be something of the same again.

"We knew nothing about the Russian missiles until ten years afterwards. Then there was a conference and Robert McNamara, the American politician, spoke about it on television and our jaws dropped. It was the first time we knew everything."

With the Russian freighters still heading for Cuba and the Americans blockading the island and speaking of nuclear war, Guevara did what he knew best. He hid and prepared for guerilla resistance.

"Che Guevara spent a month in this cave. The place used to belong to a Cuban politician who turned it into somewhere to bring his girlfriend. A Cuban politician!", Juan-Carlo said disbelievingly. A certain lack of exposure to the morals of other nations' politicians was clearly in evidence.

"Che came and made this cave his base for a month of the crisis. He had 200 soldiers with him and lots more up in the hills. He slept in a small headquarters built in the cave and he came out during the day. The Americans must have known where he was, though, because their planes used to circle just too high for the Cuban missiles to reach them. And then they began flying down lower and lower." He made circles with his hands, his palms downward, to mimic them.

We walked through the entrance in the stone wall of cliff and then along a smooth path beside a stream that has cut its way in a crevice. The path had a vertical stone wall to one side, spiky bushes on the other and, beyond them, the stream. There were no signs of the "This way to Che's HQ" sort. In fact no signs at all, not even for the first cave to the right, which led to it. The only hint was a narrow concrete walkway with a railing to one side. We walked through the underground darkness, turned left where paths ran in each direction 50 metres further on, then emerged into an opening in which stood an oblong hut made of undecorated grey breezeblock. This was it: this was where Che Guevara lived the most worrying hours the world had known.

In it were three rooms, with a fourth set off to one side not in the main structure but lower and beneath an overhang of rock. The first room, little larger than a cupboard, could only have been for a guard. The second was empty but for a sturdy metal bed, still with blankets and sheets, of the sort you'd find in a hospital. Beyond that, and without doors to separate it - there were no doors anywhere - another square room with a table, chairs and a plastic 1960s telephone, its cord which had once run to some sort of command now cut off and trailing towards the floor. To one side of that room, the fourth, the one under the rock roof, again with a made bed in it.

To look at, it's not much. Outside, by the road, you'd dismiss it as a hovel. But as a glimpse of an era that scared the world, it is much more. It says something, either about the respect of Cubans or the scarcity of visitors, that nothing has been vandalised, nothing covered with graffiti, nothing disturbed. Somehow you expect more, while knowing that there can't be. It was a stone hut, built in a hurry to serve for as long as it needed to serve. It was a guerilla headquarters, not a hotel room.

We left and passed the time again with Juan-Carlo.

"I've seen some of the missiles that the Russians brought," he said. "They've got one in a military museum near here. I was amazed at how big they were. They reach from..." He looked round for something with which to make the comparison. "They'd reach from here to the far end of that cliff." I'm not sure how far that was but it was a big space for a rocket.

He wanted to know about the trees and birds of Europe. Whether the continent was green, whether it was cold. Cold was the hardest notion for him to grasp.

"As low as freezing?"

"Yes, quite often."

"Even in February?"

"Especially in February."

He looked aghast.

And then: "Tell me," he said, "Fidel says the world is in trouble. Is that right? He says the American economy is suffering, that the ice caps are melting, that there is a world movement for - how would you say? - greenness." I filled him in with my own undoubtedly wise and considered opinion of the world situation and said there wasn't much about Fidel's summary, as presented, that I could contest.

We left Juan-Carlo, gave a peso to the man who had elected himself guardian of our bikes, then rode on through that Chinese countryside down in the valley.

Little mountains point their way from their eroded surroundings

The stumpy mountains, which had kept their height when the softer earth around them eroded, pointed sexually at the blue sky. Blossom hung from the trees. And our tyres sang on the smooth road as a gentle wind played at our backs. As a symphony for cycling, it couldn't be bettered.

When we got to the sawmill, we turned left as we had promised Henry that we would. We rode at the foot of a wooded cliff, past farms and small wooden houses. The surface of the road deteriorated but, compared to what we'd been warned we could have expected on the other road, it was a delight.

Let it be known that in this instance at least, Henry's advice was spot on.

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