Dervla Murphy - The Island That Dared: Journeys in Cuba

In times long past (197387) I travelled with my daughter Rachel (born 1968) in Asia, Latin America and Africa; pack-animals assisted us on those months-long treks. In 1993 Rachel met Andrew in Mozambique where both were working as UN volunteers during that countrys transition from war to peace.

Fast forward to the autumn of 2005 when my grand-daughters were soon to be ten (Rose), eight (Clodagh) and six (Zea) old enough to benefit from some real travelling, instead of merely flying from their home in Italy to visit relatives and friends in Wales, England and Ireland. From Andrew came an exhilarating suggestion, a three-generation November wander through Cuba. The islands quasi-Western way of life would not, he judged, overtax his darlings adaptability and Castroism has brought about a remarkably low crime-rate. But unfortunately this had to be an all-female team; Andrews job precluded winter holidays and the university vacation months would be intolerably hot.

Everything was easily organised. Low-cost Virgin Air fares were on offer and at the Cuban Consulate in London efficient young women took only seven minutes to process our five visas (15 each) thus setting a record, in my experience. Tourism has now replaced sugar as Cubas main official source of hard currency so it is in the national interest to lower bureaucratic hurdles. Another vitally important source this one long-established is the cash-flow, unquantifiable but considerable, from Cuban exiles to their families and friends.

From the Rough Guides list of casas particulares (government-approved B&Bs) Rachel selected Casa de Pedro y Candida in Centro Habana and by e-mail booked two rooms for three nights. Beyond Havana we would muddle through; having closely studied our map and guide books, we knew how to avoid the main tourist zones. And Cubas four thousand five hundred-mile coastline promised that the Trio would not be deprived of sea and sand.

Despite its unique socio-political interest, Cuba was not a country I had ever considered for a solitary trek or cycle tour; always its too hot (Siberia in winter is more to my climatic taste) and topographically it is too tame. I visualised, not entirely accurately, an island mostly flat and monochrome (all those canefields!) with only a few low mountain ranges. The Cuban people, I gathered, were the countrys most precious resource, an impression to be confirmed by experience.

I failed to register the Revolutions triumph in January 1959 when I was in the midst of a prolonged personal crisis that obliterated world events. However, I do vividly remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. By then I was preparing to cycle to India while everyone else was, if you believed the media, preparing for nuclear war. I didnt believe the media and concentrated on sending spare tyres to strategic points (usually British Council offices) between Istanbul and New Delhi. Meanwhile Nikita Khrushchev and J.F. Kennedy were sorting things out without consulting Fidel, which seemed fair enough since he had had no ambition to host nuclear weapons. Inevitably, however, this ignoring of their leader caused considerable offence in Cuba; it too loudly echoed that Spanish and US ignoring of the courageous Cuban army in 1898, when the Wars of Independence ended. Fidels accepting of the missiles was a decision reluctantly taken, as he explained years later. By allowing Cuba to become a Soviet military base the image of the Revolution would be damaged and we were zealous in protecting that image in the rest of Latin America. He was referring to the importance of the Revolutions being recognised as a one hundred per cent homegrown event, brought off by ordinary Cubans without any significant outside assistance financial, ideological or military.

During subsequent decades, Cuba came to my attention only occasionally: in 1967 when Che was executed in Bolivia by CIA-funded militia; in August 1968 when Fidel severely shocked his friends, at home and abroad, by condoning Soviet brutality in Czechoslovakia; in April 1971 when the poet Heberto Padilla, winner of a major international literary prize, was bugged by State Security and subsequently publicly humiliated; in the mid-70s when Cuban troops in Angola contributed more than their share to the defeat of apartheid South Africas US-backed army. During the following decades I was impressed by the publication of internationally acclaimed statistics recording the extraordinary achievement of Castroist health and education campaigns and in the early90s it distressed me to hear that the end of trade relations with the Eastern Bloc was threatening all such achievements. In Washington that crisis engendered two more anti-Cuba laws and here one recalls the much-quoted comment of a US diplomat, Wayne S. Smith Cuba seems to have the same effect on American administrations as the full moon used to have on werewolves.