Sarah Rainsford - Our Woman in Havana: Reporting Castros Cuba

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Contents

Endings

There is a frentecito frio , a little cold front as Cubans call it, but its still warm for an Englishwoman so I decide to walk all along the Malecon to Old Havana. As the waves crash against the sea wall and curl over, cascading onto the path, I cross the road. A tourist trying to take a photo gets a soaking. Its December 2017 and just over a year since Fidel Castros death but some things havent changed. Men pssst! as I pass and try to match my step. Where are you from? is the usual opening line as they draw alongside, but they soon drop away unoffended.

I reach the beige block of whats now the US embassy, one side still obscured by a forest of giant flagpoles erected in 2006 when the building housed the US Interests Section. The Americans had begun running an electronic ticker tape across the front pronouncing the ills of communism so the Cubans flew black flags to conceal it. Its more than two years since presidents Raul Castro and Barack Obama restored formal relations, broken after the revolution. The rusting poles now stand empty, but on the Anti-Imperialist Platform down below the letters of a defiant slogan remain bright and clear: Patria o Muerte, Venceremos! Fatherland or Death, We will Triumph!

The Interests Section became an embassy in the summer of 2015 and the following spring Obama became the first serving American president to visit Havana since the 1959 revolution. Cubans crowded the streets to welcome him and the message he brought: that it was time to bury the differences and disputes of the Cold War. The make-up with America sparked a rush of tourists as travel articles began hyping Havana. There was a surge of Europeans first, eager to experience Cuba before the Americans came and made Havana just like anywhere else. Americans followed swiftly after, many for the same reason, as the US government relaxed its travel restrictions and direct commercial flights resumed. Returning to Havana myself, I began to see cruise liners docked near my former office and packed open-top tourist buses looping their way around the city. Before a groundbreaking USACuba football match, I heard a man in a Stars-and-Stripes T-shirt pronounce that he was glad to visit before Havana got a Hooters.

On the Malecon a small fleet of beautifully restored 1950s American cars passes me by, passengers dangling over the sides snapping photographs. December is high season but I notice fewer tourists this time and friends in the Cuban travel business have confirmed a fall. The brief optimistic surge that followed Obamas visit has faded since he left the White House, though I still spot the odd American on the seafront, conspicuous by the huge water bottles they clutch as if theyre heading into the desert.

I come to Havana as a tourist too these days but the city was once my home. I was Havana Correspondent from late 2011, reporting for the BBC from inside one of the worlds last communist-run states. I hadnt been sure about taking the post when it was offered, wondering whether heading for a country of limited breaking news and restrictions on reporting was career suicide. Friends were baffled by my hesitance, picturing only Caribbean sunshine and cocktails. In the end my deep curiosity about life in Castros Cuba won out.

There was also the chance of being there for that one big story. Though Raul Castro had been president since 2008, and in charge for two years before that, his elder brother Fidel remained a powerful presence. The iconic revolutionary was in his mid-eighties and seriously ailing when I arrived in Havana, and just a week into my posting a rumour spread on Twitter that Fidel had died. An editor called asking me to check it out, sparking what I described later in my diary as slight panic. I fretted that I wasnt ready to cover such a big moment. How could I interpret Cubans responses when the only locals I knew by then were my new colleagues? Luckily, the rumour had been started by wishful-thinking or mischief-making exiles in Miami and soon faded.

It was the first of many false alarms and each time Id have to scramble to prove Fidel was still alive, just in case. That wasnt easy on a secretive island. After decades as the energetic, obsessive leader involved in everything, by my time in Cuba Fidel was barely seen. At one point he disappeared for ten months until the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported hed attended a six-hour launch of his latest book. Cuban state TV eventually released images and I saw an animated Fidel addressing an invited audience, jabbing his long forefinger in the air and talking quickly as if to defy the rumours of his demise.

When he first fell ill in 2006, and nearly died, foreign editors all but banned their Cuba correspondents from leaving the island. The assumption was that the revolution would expire with its Comandante and reporters based in Havana dreaded missing the moment. But by 2011 Raul was firmly in control and he had one priority: saving the socialist revolution Fidel had launched six decades earlier from collapse.

It was a time of fundamental change. A few months before I landed in Havana, Raul released the Communist Partys guidelines for reform, known as the Lineamientos . Cuba would remain a one-party state where all organised opposition was outlawed but some of the resented economic restrictions were being lifted. Cubans were free to buy houses and cars for the first time and, crucially, the government was making it easier for people to open their own businesses in the hope of removing hundreds of thousands from the vast state payroll. Raul described it all as an updating of Cubas socialist model, but in reality he was attempting to ease the strain before it reached breaking point.

Much of my work would follow the progress of these reforms as the island slowly opened up. I was one of a small group of foreign correspondents permitted to work in Cuba, a status that earned me a large laminated ID card marking me out as an officially accredited journalist. No state employee would agree to be interviewed without seeing it, and that meant a huge number of Cubans. There were practical problems to overcome before I could start, like how to file news to London with an Internet connection barely powerful enough to open an email. But finally I made it on air. Now its over to Sarah Rainsford, Our Woman in Havana, the presenter announced down the line and the label stuck.

Back in Havana now, walking by the waves, its odd to recall just how tough it sometimes was to work here. Reading my diaries, I realise they contain little description of the charm of the city, its warmth and real beauty. The pages are filled instead with frustration as I struggled with the pace and peculiarities of my new posting. Writing to a friend in Madrid, the busy news patch Id come from, I admitted that I hated the lack of information in Cuba and missed being on TV every day. Needing official permission to film almost anything, I wailed in my notebook that I felt hemmed in and wanted to scream or explode.

The Malecon was always my consolation. As this walk draws closer to Old Havana I remember how I used to drive the stunning route to and from my office in the colonial heart of the city. Id wind down the window to smell the sea and soak up the sight of a place whose faded grandeur was so enchanting. Then Id turn on the music. As well as salsa, I developed a taste for reggaeton with its pumping beat and infectious tunes. The words were so distinctly Cuban, and so rude, Id sometimes have to ask my producer to translate. One of the biggest hits then was a celebration of masturbation. The shared-taxi drivers would paint the lyrics on their rear windows, and schoolchildren wearing headphones would sing along with the recording playing on their mobile phones. Kimba Pa Que Suene .

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