Free Island that Dared by Dervla Murphy

considered an inhibiting distraction for students but in Cuba lives are shared, privilege is not associated with privacy (an alien concept) and those attentive peripatetic audiences seemed to be appreciated. Throughout our stay the orchestra was struggling with Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and a somewhat confused Clodagh complained, ‘They keep on playing the same tune, will they ever finish it?’ I explained that the composer himself had left his seventh symphony unfinished, perhaps because he died of typhus fever at the age of thirty-one. Rose looked shocked. ‘So he was five years younger than Mum is now!’ That inexorably led us into another field of enquiry. ‘What,’ asked Zea, ‘is typhus? Why does it kill people?’
     
    Irma’s five-star casa particular had only one defect: no writer-friendly table and chair. Therefore I regularly retreated to a corner café on Calle Aguilera where Mirta, a buxom young black woman with a wide smile and a deep chuckle, provided demitasses of excellent coffee for NP1 and was intrigued by my industrious scribbling. Cubans see no reason to stifle curiosity but discovering my profession scarcely lessened her puzzlement. For all their high literacy rate, most young Cubans are not book-minded.
    The café was unlit, its walls panelled in dark wood, its high ceiling smoke-stained. Habitually I sat by one of the barred, unglazed windows and one morning three young men stopped outside on the pavement, staring at my table. After a brief confabulation they entered and shyly offered me NP1 for a pen – the coin on an extended hand. Four pens were visible: blue, red, black and green, all in use when I’m journal-writing, a fetish which perhaps says something about how hard I find it to order my thoughts. Feeling mean and nasty, I apologised for needing all those pens because of being a writer. Gloomily the young men accepted this excuse, one explaining that in Santiago just then there were no pens and when the next delivery arrived they would cost CP1 apiece. Tactlessly I opened my purse to provide CP3. The young men stepped back, gesturing their horror – they weren’t jineteros , they didn’t want a tourist’s money, what they urgently needed, now , was one pen. I gave them my black and blue pens and accepted NP2.
    Usually I was alone in that café, the first arrival, but once, as I was about to leave, fourteen young women assembled outside, looking cowed and sulky, then were led in by a hard-faced older woman. Having pulled two little tables together she opened thick files of rubber-stamped documents containing more figures than words. I ordered another coffee and lingered. The group ordered nothing and on arrival had ignored Mirta. It seemed the young women were guilty of some shared failure, had got their sums wrong, either through incompetence or in an attempt to pilfer. Individually they were challenged, their boss jabbing a forefinger on a page, glaring at them, demanding explanations, hectoring them, plainly enjoying her job. A few muttered defensively, others looked down and said nothing. Only one became angry, raising her voice, half-standing to lean towards the documents and doing a little finger-jabbing on her own account. In response the boss tore up two sheets of paper and snapped something that silenced the angry one who then looked around the semi-circle, seeking support. Everyone avoided her gaze. Next the others were ordered to sign chits which the boss counter-signed and stamped with a large official seal. To me, a café seemed an odd setting for this disciplinary procedure – here was another example of Cuban life being lived in public.
    That same morning, on my way down Enramada, Santiago’s main commercial street, I heard a dog howling strangely in the near distance and saw a crowd gathering. As I drew closer and the howling became more frenzied, four policemen appeared and herded everyone on to the pavements. A little red garbage van sped past me, a closed