Cally Phillips' Another World is Possible
Episode Twelve – DESTINATION
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: 1999 Cuba – ROISIN
Swearwords: None.
Description: 1999 Cuba – ROISIN
It’s April and the plane lands in Havana more or less on time. Roisin is overwhelmed and overtired and not ready for the full force of the heat as it hits her in the face. It’s like she’s walked into another world. The sun almost paralysing her senses.
Getting through customs with no Spanish is challenging enough but facing the rank of taxi drivers is just about too much. She manages to negotiate a fare to the Habana Libre hotel and just for a moment she thinks of Mary’s story about Hanratty’s. Is this the point where their lives meet? Because Roisin is now looking for Che, although she knows she’s over thirty years too late.
The English speaking taxi driver means well, but Roisin isn’t up to facing well intentioned questioning at this point in her journey and fails to make the most of the opportunity. She checks into the Habana Libre Hotel and tries to sleep amidst the unfamiliar clunking of the air conditioner. There will be time enough for Cuba tomorrow. Tonight, or three in the morning as it is according to her body time-clock, she just needs to sleep.
It’s nearly midday by the time Roisin comes round and she’s missed breakfast. She goes down to the vast lobby and skirts round the long desk. She can only hear Spanish being spoken and she’s not ready for that yet. She looks for a telephone. All the time she’s thinking, ‘He was here. He walked here. He might have stood here.’ And it doesn’t help her to focus on the task.
She looks for telephones. She sees one but as she approaches it, it’s clear it requires pesos or some card she doesn’t have. That will have to wait. She needs to eat. She spots a restaurant (looking closed) and a café, much more down-market and looking empty. She negotiates her way to the café. It’s like someone has tried to sell Havana the idea of an American diner but missed the point and she sits there, looking at the menu, totally unclear as to what will happen next. The menu is limited and it’s a long time before anyone comes her way. She orders a burger. Surely you can’t go wrong with that? But as if testimony to the fact that Cuba holds no truck with the ways of the USA, when it finally arrives, it’s coolish, tasteless and overpriced. Roisin eats it, manages to negotiate payment (in dollars) and heads off to try her luck with the phones.
Finally she gets a card and a dialling tone that sounds like the phone is engaged. But this is not the case and almost immediately the phone is answered (in Spanish). It’s not Roberto who answers but his wife Cecilia (who speaks no English). Roisin thinks that she manages to convey who she is and that she is at the Habana Libre Hotel but isn’t sure what Cecilia is trying to say to her. She doesn’t know whether to wait here hoping Roberto will come and find her, or whether to try and find his house on Vedado.
Roisin actually feels like crying. She can’t believe she is so un-brave in this situation. She never thought about the reality of being alone, with no language skills, in a place so different. She thought that because Che had lived there, somehow she would feel at home. She doesn’t. She feels as alien as you can feel. She pulls herself together. She must make an adventure of it. She’ll find Roberto and Cecilia and things will be all right.
And two hours later, it is. She’s sitting drinking a cool Habana Libre; (the drink now, not the hotel) rum and coke to the uninitiated, in Roberto’s apartment while Robertito who is seven, is trying to teach her the basics of Spanish. The oboe reeds she brought have been gifted and graciously accepted and Roberto is preparing a meal which will restore her confidence in Cuban cooking.
Later in the evening, Roberto talks to Roisin about her plans. It is decided that once she leaves the Habana Libre, she’ll come and stay with them for a couple of days before trying to get transport to Santa Clara. Roisin hadn’t bargained on it being a flight, but Roberto tells her there’s no other reliable form of transport at this point in time. Trains – forget them. Car – impossible. So plane it is. Before that, he will take her to the Cabana and the Museum of the Revolution since he knows she’s interested in Che.
Roberto and Cecilia are somewhat younger. Both appear to be of Hispanic origin, certainly both have the sort of healthy tanned skin most Brits would pay a lot of money for. Like most Cubans, Roberto is both proud of Che Guevara and somewhat puzzled by why foreigners should actually want to come and find out about him. For Cubans, after thirty years Che is part of the furniture, the mythology, the lifeblood of the place, but he’s no longer real. They have so many more pressing immediate concerns and Che is no mystery to them, he’s part of their history. The history of Cuba is so large and so complex that Che just has to fit into the allotted space amongst all the others. After all, he was not even Cuban by origin.
The next day, accompanied by Roberto, Roisin goes to la Cabana (the fortress on the harbour) and once again gets the experience she had been looking for; the feeling that she’s standing where Che stood, seeing things he saw. But it doesn’t resolve anything for her. It makes her feel, if anything, more lonely and isolated and further away from him than ever. All around her are small artefacts, everyday items that Che owned and/or used, and as she peers at them through the glass, she just wishes she could pick one up and touch it to make a complete connection. She imagines him sitting at his desk and wonders what Mary would make of this room. Strangely, the experience seems to be bringing her closer to an understanding of her mother than her father.
Roberto tries to be helpful but his comments and explanations spoil any personal meaning the experience might have for her. And he’s so obviously bemused by why she should be on a Che pilgrimage anyway. All in all, the reality that Che did actually exist and was actually here, almost makes him less real for Roisin. It seems less likely that he could ever have touched her life personally. She realises as she stands in the gardens outside la Cabana that somewhere deep inside she had hoped she would be able to come to Cuba and say ‘Che was my father’ and be embraced by the Cuban people as one of them, and maybe finally feel at home in the world. But faced with it, she feels like a ghost, walking through a world she has no connection to at all. It is disconcerting and depressing. She tries to put it down to culture shock, but she knows it’s something much more profound than that.
Roberto and Cecilia are lovely and try to make her comfortable and to apologise for the state of the buildings, the state of the roads, the state of the transport system, the state of their lives. They never blame Americans or Westerners for their plight, indeed they try not to talk about the ‘whys’ of their situation; they are too busy living it. Roisin can’t find the right questions to ask, or the right way to do it, so she spends her days being a polite guest, a tourist, which is the last thing she wanted to be.
By her third day there Roisin determines she must strike out on her own, so she turns down Roberto’s offer of coming with her to the Museo de la Revolución and armed with a map heads off into the city alone. Inevitably she gets lost amidst the myriad of backstreets but emerges unscathed at the Malecón. From there she somehow negotiates her way towards Capitolio and thinks she’s on the right track. But eventually she has to ask a local for help. Her Spanish seems to have improved, at least he seems to understand and points and gives her directions in Spanish. She thinks he says right then left but she’s not sure which is which. However, she’s pleased that she actually had the nerve to ask for directions. She knows that if all else fails she can point the guidebook at them, because Cuba has a massively high literacy rate and so everyone will be able to read the Spanish and at least they will understand what she’s looking for. Pointing and smiling will have to work for the fine detail.
She thinks of Roberto’s favourite saying, ‘¿Donde hay ganas hay mana?’ which roughly translated means, where there’s a will there’s a way. This it seems is his response to all problems or crises.
She finally finds the Museo. Buying a ticket proves challenging. The woman behind the desk purports no English and demonstrates no understanding of non-Spanish speakers. Instead she just keeps repeating her instructions. Roisin tries all her half learned phrases in turn but she just can’t make sense of what the woman is saying. She might be saying that part of the building is closed, she might be saying you have to start at the stairs, she could be saying anything and in the end Roisin just cuts and runs, assuming that if she does something totally wrong one of the many custodians who seem to be standing around in uniform will put her right.
The Museo de la Revolución is an experience and a half. It doesn’t bring Roisin closer to Che but it does help her realise why Cubans don’t obsess about the revolution in their daily life. The torture weapons, the visually gory depictions, photos and artefacts (everything is labelled in Spanish only) assault her sensibilities and bring home to her the reality of civil war with an immediacy and brutality she never expected. It seems trivial to be asking questions about some mythic hero when the Cuban people’s experience was so real and so brutal.
After a good few hours, including a walk-past of the Granma (the cruise ship which took the revolutionaries to Cuba at the start of it all), which looks ill designed even for a short pleasure trip, Roisin goes past the ‘corner of the cretins’ (she makes the translation herself), which seems to be a mural of various US presidents and Cuban dictators. And then she hits the unexpected. A row of coffins. The one in the centre has Che Guevara’s picture above it. Roisin is transfixed. It takes her minutes to regain any composure and she tries her most ambitious Spanish sentence to date: she asks the attendant if the body of Che is in the coffin. She hopes that’s what she’s said at any rate.
The coffins are about half size, which is disconcerting. Roisin remembers that the bodies were dismembered. She knows that Che’s body was found and brought back to Cuba in 1997 but she thought he was buried in Santa Clara. However, perhaps that is just a memorial, and here he is.
The attendant, in his politest and slowest Spanish, repeats two or three times, till Roisin is sure she understands: ‘No, the body of Che is at Santa Clara. But all the other bodies here are in the coffins.’ At least that’s what she thinks he says. Her poco Spanish means that no communication can be certain.
The attendant seems to think Roisin is interested in dead bodies. Or maybe he, like everyone else here, believes that Che is just one part of the story and not perhaps the most important part. It seems that the Cubans understand Che’s purported last words, ‘Shoot coward, you are just killing a man’, in a literal way the rest of the world has ignored.
So Roisin leaves the Museo and tries to find some water to drink (Havana is horribly humid) before getting a taxi back to Roberto’s. They pass the evening talking about this and that, but nothing of consequence. Roisin feels she cannot unburden her emotions on them and so everything stays light and polite. The next day she’s off to Santa Clara. Roberto has arranged the flight and a place to stay in a newly opened tourist compound, close to the city. Roisin is grateful as she’s sure her Spanish isn’t good enough to negotiate flight and accommodation with any degree of success. Things are hard enough in Cuba and without Spanish she finds they are nigh impossible. She reprimands herself that she didn’t she learn some Spanish before she went. It was such an obvious thing to do but she just didn’t think.
Arriving at Santa Clara, Roisin is far beyond having expectations, although she had imagined that the rest of Cuba would be rural and her recollections of the campaign in the mountains made her think that Santa Clara would be more of a village than an urban sprawl. Okay, it’s an urban sprawl Cuban-style but it’s not what she expected. Although she’s used to getting not what she expects by now!
She is whisked by taxi to the ‘compound’ which is a set of chalet-style apartments with balconies set in acreage round a pool and a restaurant. It’s fairly obviously a kind of tourist resort and while it’s not what she came to Cuba for, Roisin starts to feel a bit more back within her comfort zone. She could be holidaying anywhere when she’s within these walls. There aren’t many other tourists in evidence, though. It seems this is the kind of place people come for the day on coach parties, stay overnight and move off to the up and coming beach resorts. The Cubans acknowledge that Santa Clara will be a pilgrimage site or a spot on the tourist map but it’s clear they really don’t understand the concept of tourists at all.
Roisin spends a quiet night at the resort, trying to catch up on her thoughts. She feels like tomorrow will be a big day, definitive in some way, and she wants to be ready for it. She finds that, even with the vagaries of the flushing cistern, which means that water drips constantly from the en suite (but she’s getting used to the inconsistency of the water and power systems in Cuba), she is more relaxed and feels more herself than she has since she arrived. She feels like she could almost just stay in that room for the rest of her trip and never come out. Hardly the intrepid explorer.
But come out she does the next morning and gets a taxi back into Santa Clara. She can’t see the memorial anywhere and is beginning to wonder if it will be anything like it’s cracked up to be, and then, turning the corner, turning her head the right way – it’s there. The figure of Che stands high on a column above the city. It’s huge. The proportions are of Tiananmen Square and she expected nothing like that. The sky is bright blue and the sense of space incredible. Looking like he’s overseeing the whole of Cuba, Che dominates without exuding power. The pose is active and the detail correct, right down to a plaster cast on his arm. There are several huge white plinths, with various depictions and slogans on them, (in Spanish of course and therefore indechipherable to Roisin) and all of these dwarf the human ants swarming over the steps leading up to them.
Round the back is the entrance to the mausoleum and museum. Roisin is told strictly, in a language even she understands, that no cameras are allowed and while she is desperate to hold this most important of memories, she can understand why. This place is not about the commercialisation of Che. It is possibly the one place in the world where he is not being exploited for commercial or ideological gain. This is a place of respect. In the place the revolutionaries are laid to rest, it is right it should be so.
She enters the museum first and this time is more moved than at La Cabana by the pictures, the artefacts and the personal writings and belongings. In this context, somehow, she feels much closer to Che than she has since she arrived. It feels, in some strange way, like he is really here – and that’s a feeling she’d given up expecting. The museum tells the story of Che’s life and the collection of artefacts is domestic and poignant.
After more than an hour, Roisin reluctantly leaves the museum, turning right to face the heavy door into the mausoleum. She pushes it with an effort and entering, is overcome with emotion. It is half-lit, quiet, like a church and it takes her all her cognitive and emotional senses to try and take in what she sees.
On one wall there is a bank of what look like pigeon holes, each with a plaque beside a box containing a flower, an orchid or lily perhaps. To Roisin a flower is a flower. Each plaque has the name and details of the revolutionary whose remains are within, with the exception of several whose bodies have never been found. Their boxes are empty but they are honoured just the same. Roisin can’t help but look for Che’s plaque in the middle; in a place of honour, bigger or better in some way but there he is, as if it were random, on the right hand side but not picked out in any special way. Just one of the boys. Roisin wonders whether the boxes are listed in the order in which the men died, or perhaps the order in which they were found. On reflection she realises that this is so right for Che. Here, in death, he needed no more honour than any of the others. Any life given up for the cause is as valuable as any other life. Che is special outside, but here he is just a man like all the rest.
Confronted with the final resting place of Che, Roisin is both full and empty of emotion at the same time. There is nothing to say, nothing to feel. She is no part of this long-past event and yet this is a defining moment in her own existence. And all this goes on in her mind while her body just stands, stock still, amongst the few other people who are in the room at this moment. A moment perhaps of no significance to them but then most people travelling all this way will doubtless find something significant in this quiet, darkened room, paying tribute to life and death and honour.
Finally Roisin turns to her right and sees, at the end of the room, a sort of oasis effect. It seems to be flowers and water but she can’t determine in the low light whether these are real or constructed. It is a calm and tranquil outdoor scene, held here within this most sacred of places. Roisin hasn’t thought of the word sacred since she was at her first primary school (before Mary abandoned Catholicism) and she has never felt the effect of the word. But no other word will do in this context.
Eventually, because she cannot stay there any longer without looking like she’s taken up residence, Roisin leaves. She wants to go back, but realises it’s one of these moments which you can’t have twice. You have to have it fully when you are there and then keep it as a memory. The transition between the moment and the memory is excruciatingly painful for her and she goes to sit some distance away in the landscaped square, so that she can get a vista of the scene and hopefully regain some sense of objectivity, having been totally a subject within the scene for what seems like all her life.
She’s been sitting there maybe half an hour, when she hears a male voice, ‘Hi. Are you all right?’
She turns round and sees a man, English, and it is a relief. ‘Uh.. yes, just resting. It’s hot.’
‘I’m Tom. Would you like a coffee?’
And that is how Roisin meets Tom Black.
Roisin shares a taxi with Tom back to the compound and spends the evening out on the veranda with him, drinking coffee then rum, watching the crickets and the sunset. And when the mosquitoes come out in force they go back into his room and they make love.
On reflection, Roisin isn’t sure how or why any of this happened and she’s not sure it’s worth the reflection. It happened. She’s out of space, out of time, out of control of her life and her destiny, giving herself up to the moment. She’s confronted something profound in her life and she doesn’t know what the conclusion is; certainly nothing has been finalised or rectified or clarified. Meeting him in the shadow of the statue of Che seems to be enough of a reason to justify things. Tom is a man, he’s real and he’s here. And she needs someone real right now.
It’s obvious to Tom why Roisin is in Santa Clara, she’s a Che pilgrim. He doesn’t need to ask more and she doesn’t need to explain. And Tom tells her he’s in Santa Clara on business. He’s trying to develop exporting opportunities for Cuban coffee, despite the embargo. He doesn’t want to talk shop, though, and it’s clear that he’s less interested in questions and more interested in taking advantage of ‘the moment’ they find themselves in.
In all, it is a glorious, sensuous, magical night and the experience matches up to it. But it’s one night and the next day Tom is due back off on his business, while Roisin has another day to spend in Santa Clara. She was planning to go back to the mausoleum but she knows it won’t be the same. Nothing is ever the same after the first time. It’s an unwritten law of life. So when Roisin and Tom part in the morning, exchanging an embrace but not contact details, Roisin assumes they both accept that this was one of those unique, unreal moments that goes into memory. A brief encounter. The end. Until the airport a week later.
The mind plays tricks on you when you’re tired, and somewhat wearily Roisin looks up in response to the presence of yet another man. She’s surprised this time for two reasons, firstly because she recognises him as Tom and secondly because he’s English, well, actually he’s a Scot. As tall, dark and handsome as she remembers from Santa Clara, with a soft accent and an unconscious charisma which had already become part of a pleasant memory for Roisin.
‘You flying out tonight?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Mind if I join you?’
‘Not at all. Be good to have someone to talk to, to pass the time.’
At that moment the lights dim. Even in Jose Marti International Airport the power supply is inconsistent and Tom and Roisin sit in the airport lounge in the half light and begin to talk as if they were back in Santa Clara – alone with the crickets and the mosquitoes.
They have hours to kill and Roisin wants to avoid the conversation getting too personal. Tom is lovely, but she doesn’t need more complications in her life. He’s a memory in the making, after all. Not a reality. So, in order for him not to ask her awkward questions, Roisin asks him why he is there? How did he get into the coffee business? And why Cuba?
And amazingly, Tom tells her a story she has heard before, but from a different perspective.
Getting through customs with no Spanish is challenging enough but facing the rank of taxi drivers is just about too much. She manages to negotiate a fare to the Habana Libre hotel and just for a moment she thinks of Mary’s story about Hanratty’s. Is this the point where their lives meet? Because Roisin is now looking for Che, although she knows she’s over thirty years too late.
The English speaking taxi driver means well, but Roisin isn’t up to facing well intentioned questioning at this point in her journey and fails to make the most of the opportunity. She checks into the Habana Libre Hotel and tries to sleep amidst the unfamiliar clunking of the air conditioner. There will be time enough for Cuba tomorrow. Tonight, or three in the morning as it is according to her body time-clock, she just needs to sleep.
It’s nearly midday by the time Roisin comes round and she’s missed breakfast. She goes down to the vast lobby and skirts round the long desk. She can only hear Spanish being spoken and she’s not ready for that yet. She looks for a telephone. All the time she’s thinking, ‘He was here. He walked here. He might have stood here.’ And it doesn’t help her to focus on the task.
She looks for telephones. She sees one but as she approaches it, it’s clear it requires pesos or some card she doesn’t have. That will have to wait. She needs to eat. She spots a restaurant (looking closed) and a café, much more down-market and looking empty. She negotiates her way to the café. It’s like someone has tried to sell Havana the idea of an American diner but missed the point and she sits there, looking at the menu, totally unclear as to what will happen next. The menu is limited and it’s a long time before anyone comes her way. She orders a burger. Surely you can’t go wrong with that? But as if testimony to the fact that Cuba holds no truck with the ways of the USA, when it finally arrives, it’s coolish, tasteless and overpriced. Roisin eats it, manages to negotiate payment (in dollars) and heads off to try her luck with the phones.
Finally she gets a card and a dialling tone that sounds like the phone is engaged. But this is not the case and almost immediately the phone is answered (in Spanish). It’s not Roberto who answers but his wife Cecilia (who speaks no English). Roisin thinks that she manages to convey who she is and that she is at the Habana Libre Hotel but isn’t sure what Cecilia is trying to say to her. She doesn’t know whether to wait here hoping Roberto will come and find her, or whether to try and find his house on Vedado.
Roisin actually feels like crying. She can’t believe she is so un-brave in this situation. She never thought about the reality of being alone, with no language skills, in a place so different. She thought that because Che had lived there, somehow she would feel at home. She doesn’t. She feels as alien as you can feel. She pulls herself together. She must make an adventure of it. She’ll find Roberto and Cecilia and things will be all right.
And two hours later, it is. She’s sitting drinking a cool Habana Libre; (the drink now, not the hotel) rum and coke to the uninitiated, in Roberto’s apartment while Robertito who is seven, is trying to teach her the basics of Spanish. The oboe reeds she brought have been gifted and graciously accepted and Roberto is preparing a meal which will restore her confidence in Cuban cooking.
Later in the evening, Roberto talks to Roisin about her plans. It is decided that once she leaves the Habana Libre, she’ll come and stay with them for a couple of days before trying to get transport to Santa Clara. Roisin hadn’t bargained on it being a flight, but Roberto tells her there’s no other reliable form of transport at this point in time. Trains – forget them. Car – impossible. So plane it is. Before that, he will take her to the Cabana and the Museum of the Revolution since he knows she’s interested in Che.
Roberto and Cecilia are somewhat younger. Both appear to be of Hispanic origin, certainly both have the sort of healthy tanned skin most Brits would pay a lot of money for. Like most Cubans, Roberto is both proud of Che Guevara and somewhat puzzled by why foreigners should actually want to come and find out about him. For Cubans, after thirty years Che is part of the furniture, the mythology, the lifeblood of the place, but he’s no longer real. They have so many more pressing immediate concerns and Che is no mystery to them, he’s part of their history. The history of Cuba is so large and so complex that Che just has to fit into the allotted space amongst all the others. After all, he was not even Cuban by origin.
The next day, accompanied by Roberto, Roisin goes to la Cabana (the fortress on the harbour) and once again gets the experience she had been looking for; the feeling that she’s standing where Che stood, seeing things he saw. But it doesn’t resolve anything for her. It makes her feel, if anything, more lonely and isolated and further away from him than ever. All around her are small artefacts, everyday items that Che owned and/or used, and as she peers at them through the glass, she just wishes she could pick one up and touch it to make a complete connection. She imagines him sitting at his desk and wonders what Mary would make of this room. Strangely, the experience seems to be bringing her closer to an understanding of her mother than her father.
Roberto tries to be helpful but his comments and explanations spoil any personal meaning the experience might have for her. And he’s so obviously bemused by why she should be on a Che pilgrimage anyway. All in all, the reality that Che did actually exist and was actually here, almost makes him less real for Roisin. It seems less likely that he could ever have touched her life personally. She realises as she stands in the gardens outside la Cabana that somewhere deep inside she had hoped she would be able to come to Cuba and say ‘Che was my father’ and be embraced by the Cuban people as one of them, and maybe finally feel at home in the world. But faced with it, she feels like a ghost, walking through a world she has no connection to at all. It is disconcerting and depressing. She tries to put it down to culture shock, but she knows it’s something much more profound than that.
Roberto and Cecilia are lovely and try to make her comfortable and to apologise for the state of the buildings, the state of the roads, the state of the transport system, the state of their lives. They never blame Americans or Westerners for their plight, indeed they try not to talk about the ‘whys’ of their situation; they are too busy living it. Roisin can’t find the right questions to ask, or the right way to do it, so she spends her days being a polite guest, a tourist, which is the last thing she wanted to be.
By her third day there Roisin determines she must strike out on her own, so she turns down Roberto’s offer of coming with her to the Museo de la Revolución and armed with a map heads off into the city alone. Inevitably she gets lost amidst the myriad of backstreets but emerges unscathed at the Malecón. From there she somehow negotiates her way towards Capitolio and thinks she’s on the right track. But eventually she has to ask a local for help. Her Spanish seems to have improved, at least he seems to understand and points and gives her directions in Spanish. She thinks he says right then left but she’s not sure which is which. However, she’s pleased that she actually had the nerve to ask for directions. She knows that if all else fails she can point the guidebook at them, because Cuba has a massively high literacy rate and so everyone will be able to read the Spanish and at least they will understand what she’s looking for. Pointing and smiling will have to work for the fine detail.
She thinks of Roberto’s favourite saying, ‘¿Donde hay ganas hay mana?’ which roughly translated means, where there’s a will there’s a way. This it seems is his response to all problems or crises.
She finally finds the Museo. Buying a ticket proves challenging. The woman behind the desk purports no English and demonstrates no understanding of non-Spanish speakers. Instead she just keeps repeating her instructions. Roisin tries all her half learned phrases in turn but she just can’t make sense of what the woman is saying. She might be saying that part of the building is closed, she might be saying you have to start at the stairs, she could be saying anything and in the end Roisin just cuts and runs, assuming that if she does something totally wrong one of the many custodians who seem to be standing around in uniform will put her right.
The Museo de la Revolución is an experience and a half. It doesn’t bring Roisin closer to Che but it does help her realise why Cubans don’t obsess about the revolution in their daily life. The torture weapons, the visually gory depictions, photos and artefacts (everything is labelled in Spanish only) assault her sensibilities and bring home to her the reality of civil war with an immediacy and brutality she never expected. It seems trivial to be asking questions about some mythic hero when the Cuban people’s experience was so real and so brutal.
After a good few hours, including a walk-past of the Granma (the cruise ship which took the revolutionaries to Cuba at the start of it all), which looks ill designed even for a short pleasure trip, Roisin goes past the ‘corner of the cretins’ (she makes the translation herself), which seems to be a mural of various US presidents and Cuban dictators. And then she hits the unexpected. A row of coffins. The one in the centre has Che Guevara’s picture above it. Roisin is transfixed. It takes her minutes to regain any composure and she tries her most ambitious Spanish sentence to date: she asks the attendant if the body of Che is in the coffin. She hopes that’s what she’s said at any rate.
The coffins are about half size, which is disconcerting. Roisin remembers that the bodies were dismembered. She knows that Che’s body was found and brought back to Cuba in 1997 but she thought he was buried in Santa Clara. However, perhaps that is just a memorial, and here he is.
The attendant, in his politest and slowest Spanish, repeats two or three times, till Roisin is sure she understands: ‘No, the body of Che is at Santa Clara. But all the other bodies here are in the coffins.’ At least that’s what she thinks he says. Her poco Spanish means that no communication can be certain.
The attendant seems to think Roisin is interested in dead bodies. Or maybe he, like everyone else here, believes that Che is just one part of the story and not perhaps the most important part. It seems that the Cubans understand Che’s purported last words, ‘Shoot coward, you are just killing a man’, in a literal way the rest of the world has ignored.
So Roisin leaves the Museo and tries to find some water to drink (Havana is horribly humid) before getting a taxi back to Roberto’s. They pass the evening talking about this and that, but nothing of consequence. Roisin feels she cannot unburden her emotions on them and so everything stays light and polite. The next day she’s off to Santa Clara. Roberto has arranged the flight and a place to stay in a newly opened tourist compound, close to the city. Roisin is grateful as she’s sure her Spanish isn’t good enough to negotiate flight and accommodation with any degree of success. Things are hard enough in Cuba and without Spanish she finds they are nigh impossible. She reprimands herself that she didn’t she learn some Spanish before she went. It was such an obvious thing to do but she just didn’t think.
Arriving at Santa Clara, Roisin is far beyond having expectations, although she had imagined that the rest of Cuba would be rural and her recollections of the campaign in the mountains made her think that Santa Clara would be more of a village than an urban sprawl. Okay, it’s an urban sprawl Cuban-style but it’s not what she expected. Although she’s used to getting not what she expects by now!
She is whisked by taxi to the ‘compound’ which is a set of chalet-style apartments with balconies set in acreage round a pool and a restaurant. It’s fairly obviously a kind of tourist resort and while it’s not what she came to Cuba for, Roisin starts to feel a bit more back within her comfort zone. She could be holidaying anywhere when she’s within these walls. There aren’t many other tourists in evidence, though. It seems this is the kind of place people come for the day on coach parties, stay overnight and move off to the up and coming beach resorts. The Cubans acknowledge that Santa Clara will be a pilgrimage site or a spot on the tourist map but it’s clear they really don’t understand the concept of tourists at all.
Roisin spends a quiet night at the resort, trying to catch up on her thoughts. She feels like tomorrow will be a big day, definitive in some way, and she wants to be ready for it. She finds that, even with the vagaries of the flushing cistern, which means that water drips constantly from the en suite (but she’s getting used to the inconsistency of the water and power systems in Cuba), she is more relaxed and feels more herself than she has since she arrived. She feels like she could almost just stay in that room for the rest of her trip and never come out. Hardly the intrepid explorer.
But come out she does the next morning and gets a taxi back into Santa Clara. She can’t see the memorial anywhere and is beginning to wonder if it will be anything like it’s cracked up to be, and then, turning the corner, turning her head the right way – it’s there. The figure of Che stands high on a column above the city. It’s huge. The proportions are of Tiananmen Square and she expected nothing like that. The sky is bright blue and the sense of space incredible. Looking like he’s overseeing the whole of Cuba, Che dominates without exuding power. The pose is active and the detail correct, right down to a plaster cast on his arm. There are several huge white plinths, with various depictions and slogans on them, (in Spanish of course and therefore indechipherable to Roisin) and all of these dwarf the human ants swarming over the steps leading up to them.
Round the back is the entrance to the mausoleum and museum. Roisin is told strictly, in a language even she understands, that no cameras are allowed and while she is desperate to hold this most important of memories, she can understand why. This place is not about the commercialisation of Che. It is possibly the one place in the world where he is not being exploited for commercial or ideological gain. This is a place of respect. In the place the revolutionaries are laid to rest, it is right it should be so.
She enters the museum first and this time is more moved than at La Cabana by the pictures, the artefacts and the personal writings and belongings. In this context, somehow, she feels much closer to Che than she has since she arrived. It feels, in some strange way, like he is really here – and that’s a feeling she’d given up expecting. The museum tells the story of Che’s life and the collection of artefacts is domestic and poignant.
After more than an hour, Roisin reluctantly leaves the museum, turning right to face the heavy door into the mausoleum. She pushes it with an effort and entering, is overcome with emotion. It is half-lit, quiet, like a church and it takes her all her cognitive and emotional senses to try and take in what she sees.
On one wall there is a bank of what look like pigeon holes, each with a plaque beside a box containing a flower, an orchid or lily perhaps. To Roisin a flower is a flower. Each plaque has the name and details of the revolutionary whose remains are within, with the exception of several whose bodies have never been found. Their boxes are empty but they are honoured just the same. Roisin can’t help but look for Che’s plaque in the middle; in a place of honour, bigger or better in some way but there he is, as if it were random, on the right hand side but not picked out in any special way. Just one of the boys. Roisin wonders whether the boxes are listed in the order in which the men died, or perhaps the order in which they were found. On reflection she realises that this is so right for Che. Here, in death, he needed no more honour than any of the others. Any life given up for the cause is as valuable as any other life. Che is special outside, but here he is just a man like all the rest.
Confronted with the final resting place of Che, Roisin is both full and empty of emotion at the same time. There is nothing to say, nothing to feel. She is no part of this long-past event and yet this is a defining moment in her own existence. And all this goes on in her mind while her body just stands, stock still, amongst the few other people who are in the room at this moment. A moment perhaps of no significance to them but then most people travelling all this way will doubtless find something significant in this quiet, darkened room, paying tribute to life and death and honour.
Finally Roisin turns to her right and sees, at the end of the room, a sort of oasis effect. It seems to be flowers and water but she can’t determine in the low light whether these are real or constructed. It is a calm and tranquil outdoor scene, held here within this most sacred of places. Roisin hasn’t thought of the word sacred since she was at her first primary school (before Mary abandoned Catholicism) and she has never felt the effect of the word. But no other word will do in this context.
Eventually, because she cannot stay there any longer without looking like she’s taken up residence, Roisin leaves. She wants to go back, but realises it’s one of these moments which you can’t have twice. You have to have it fully when you are there and then keep it as a memory. The transition between the moment and the memory is excruciatingly painful for her and she goes to sit some distance away in the landscaped square, so that she can get a vista of the scene and hopefully regain some sense of objectivity, having been totally a subject within the scene for what seems like all her life.
She’s been sitting there maybe half an hour, when she hears a male voice, ‘Hi. Are you all right?’
She turns round and sees a man, English, and it is a relief. ‘Uh.. yes, just resting. It’s hot.’
‘I’m Tom. Would you like a coffee?’
And that is how Roisin meets Tom Black.
Roisin shares a taxi with Tom back to the compound and spends the evening out on the veranda with him, drinking coffee then rum, watching the crickets and the sunset. And when the mosquitoes come out in force they go back into his room and they make love.
On reflection, Roisin isn’t sure how or why any of this happened and she’s not sure it’s worth the reflection. It happened. She’s out of space, out of time, out of control of her life and her destiny, giving herself up to the moment. She’s confronted something profound in her life and she doesn’t know what the conclusion is; certainly nothing has been finalised or rectified or clarified. Meeting him in the shadow of the statue of Che seems to be enough of a reason to justify things. Tom is a man, he’s real and he’s here. And she needs someone real right now.
It’s obvious to Tom why Roisin is in Santa Clara, she’s a Che pilgrim. He doesn’t need to ask more and she doesn’t need to explain. And Tom tells her he’s in Santa Clara on business. He’s trying to develop exporting opportunities for Cuban coffee, despite the embargo. He doesn’t want to talk shop, though, and it’s clear that he’s less interested in questions and more interested in taking advantage of ‘the moment’ they find themselves in.
In all, it is a glorious, sensuous, magical night and the experience matches up to it. But it’s one night and the next day Tom is due back off on his business, while Roisin has another day to spend in Santa Clara. She was planning to go back to the mausoleum but she knows it won’t be the same. Nothing is ever the same after the first time. It’s an unwritten law of life. So when Roisin and Tom part in the morning, exchanging an embrace but not contact details, Roisin assumes they both accept that this was one of those unique, unreal moments that goes into memory. A brief encounter. The end. Until the airport a week later.
The mind plays tricks on you when you’re tired, and somewhat wearily Roisin looks up in response to the presence of yet another man. She’s surprised this time for two reasons, firstly because she recognises him as Tom and secondly because he’s English, well, actually he’s a Scot. As tall, dark and handsome as she remembers from Santa Clara, with a soft accent and an unconscious charisma which had already become part of a pleasant memory for Roisin.
‘You flying out tonight?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Mind if I join you?’
‘Not at all. Be good to have someone to talk to, to pass the time.’
At that moment the lights dim. Even in Jose Marti International Airport the power supply is inconsistent and Tom and Roisin sit in the airport lounge in the half light and begin to talk as if they were back in Santa Clara – alone with the crickets and the mosquitoes.
They have hours to kill and Roisin wants to avoid the conversation getting too personal. Tom is lovely, but she doesn’t need more complications in her life. He’s a memory in the making, after all. Not a reality. So, in order for him not to ask her awkward questions, Roisin asks him why he is there? How did he get into the coffee business? And why Cuba?
And amazingly, Tom tells her a story she has heard before, but from a different perspective.
About the Author
Cally Phillips has written fiction and drama in English and Scots, much of which is published through HoAmPresst. She also currently works as editor for Ayton Publishing Limited and runs a number of online projects, including The Galloway Raiders, which is the online hub for Scots writer S. R. Crockett. Her latest project to hit the virtual shelves is the #tobelikeche serial, which started in October 2016.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.