Peter Millar - Slow Train to Guantanamo: A Rail Odyssey Through Cuba in the Last Days of the Castros

It is nearly twenty-five years since all of a sudden communism keeled over and died. The annus mirabilis of 1989, when the Cold War caught its death, the Berlin Wall crumbled , the dominoes of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe tumbled and in quick succession the Soviet Union itself disintegrated , seems a lifetime ago. So long, in fact, that it is hard to remember that back then it was widely considered that capitalism had won and was from now on invincible as a global economic and social system.

Five years after the great financial crash of 2008, that no longer seems such a wise conclusion.

Apart from the aberration of Chinas adoption of a strange form of capitalist communism, only two states remained that genuinely considered themselves dedicated to the principles of Marx and Engels: North Korea and Cuba. Both were considered , particularly by the United States, little better than pariahs, with sanctions imposed against them.

The reality, of course, was always dramatically different . While North Korea was, by and large, a cold and barren half-peninsula, Cuba is one of the most beautiful, sun-blessed islands in the Caribbean. While the North Korean people were drummed into regimental parades and marched through the streets of Pyongyang, the Cuban people drummed, played and sang themselves into and out of the bars of Havana and onto the big screen. While North Koreas leaders died and succeeded one another in dynastic fashion, Fidel Castro hung on, seemingly forever, until eventually, in 2008, in admittedly similar dynastic fashion he yielded power to his not much younger brother Ral.

And now Cuba is changing. Ral himself has said he will serve five more years at most. Cuba beyond the Castros is already on the horizon. What will it be like, and more to the point what is it like now, outside the luxury enclaves visited by most beach-loving foreign tourists, in the streets, buses and trains used by the ordinary people?

As someone who lived in East Germany, the Soviet Union and communist Poland and reported on life in those countries before the fall of the Iron Curtain it seemed to me there could be no better way to experience life in Cuba on the ground, literally, than by travelling the length of the island by train.

Cubas railway is or was, as I was about to find out one of the first and most extensive national systems in the world. Cubans had the fifth national railway system in the world, after the United Kingdom, United States, Germany and France, before Spain or most other European countries, and it remains the only truly national system in Latin America. Although just how extensive it was I had no idea.

This is not a guidebook, not a book about politics, nor even, I regret to tell railway buffs, a book about trains. It is a book that deals with all those topics and I hope a lot more. It is a book about people and places and country on the cusp of change. It is a book about travel and why it is the best education the world can offer. It is about life and living it, the Cuban way. And believe me, for all the deprivations the Cubans today still suffer, there are worse ways to live. Far worse. Ask anybody in Iraq or Afghanistan.

. 1989: the Berlin Wall (My part in its Downfall), Arcadia Books 2009.

. All Gone to Look for America, Arcadia Books 2008.

It is 4.10 a.m. on a dark, steamy tropical morning and raindrops that look and feel like drowned bluebottles are falling from the rusting corrugated iron of the station roof. I have just been poured out of a train the Cubans nickname El Spirituario an experience as close to being below decks on a seventeenth-century slave trader as a middle-aged, middle-class European man ever wants to get.

I stumble down the station steps in search of transport to where I am hoping to find a bed for what remains of the night. The options are not great: a donkey-cart with a candle burning in a jam jar as its tail light, or an ancient Soviet Lada with only one door, no windows and a patchwork quilt of badly-stitched upholstery.

This is Santa Clara, capital of the cult of Cubas secular saint and martyr, the chess-playing, motorcycle-mad humanitarian medic and ruthless revolutionary who looked like a movie-star; his iconic image has stared from bedroom walls of generations of liberal students across the globe for more than half a century. It was here that Argentinian Ernesto Che Guevara won the battle in reality little more than a train derailment and subsequent skirmish that would give control of the Caribbeans capitalist playground to the Communist Fidel Castro. The aftermath of the Battle of Santa Clara would make Che a household name in almost every nation on the planet.