Muriel Ramirez has lived her entire life in the shadow of the vast yellow hacienda that sits on the outskirts of the Cuban village of Biran. As a child, she heard how her parents had attended the lavish funeral of Don Angel, the Spanish immigrant who owned the palatial home and its 25,000 acres of pine forests and sugar plantations.
As a schoolgirl, she was indoctrinated in the glories of the man who grew up on that farm. Now, as an adult, she works at the hacienda, which has been turned into a museum celebrating its boyhood inhabitant: Fidel Castro.
“Fidel was a rebel at the time rebellion was necessary,” says Ramirez, standing in the shade of the hacienda’s adjoining wooden amphitheatre, where cockfights were held each Sunday to entertain the labourers. But is that rebellion still relevant to modern Cuba?
She looks at her feet and sighs deeply. Her granddaughter is turning 15 soon — a huge event in Latino life, requiring an expensively furnished fiesta. She worries about how she can fund that, with her minute income. “Now we need someone to sort out our economy,” she says. For the first time since “the triumph of the Revolution”, as Cubans refer parrot-fashion to Castro’s 1959 takeover, that economic transformation may be about to happen. Communist Cuba is at a turning point. On April 10, the fruit of four months of landmark talks with its old adversary, America, will be put on show.
US President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro will meet at the Summit of the Americas in Panama — only the third time an American president has met a Cuban leader.
And the two men could, for the first time, hold a working meeting.
For Americans, it means they can at last visit the forbidden island, and begin to do business with the 11 million people living just 90 miles from the coast of Florida. For Cubans, it means the promise of more money, in a country where the state employs more than half of the population on an average salary of $20 (Dh73.44) a month, and where engineers, lawyers, doctors and teachers drive taxis for tourists to supplement their meagre salaries.
Cuba’s moribund economy suffered enormously with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it was the post-Soviet hardship years that pushed Fidel Castro to open the island to tourism, in a desperate attempt to bring in funds. Even now, Cuba is one of only a handful of countries in the world to have rejected a relationship with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In recent years, the Castro regime has had a lifeline from Venezuela, where the late Hugo Chavez provided cheap oil in return for Cuban doctors. But the GDP per capita in Cuba is still only $5,890 — roughly a tenth of that in the US — with the lumbering dirigiste economy producing strange anomalies.
While Cubans still get rations of a loaf of bread a day, plus monthly allowances of rice, sugar, and a tiny amount of meat, toiletries are expensive and shoes can costs $45 — more than double the monthly wage. A humble Peugeot can sell for $200,000. True, the economic benefits that rapprochement with the US may bring do not necessarily mean an end to Cuba’s one-party rule, which is not yet on the diplomatic agenda. But the hope at least of a brighter financial future is still a source of delight for the majority of Cubans. “I was at home, and there was an announcement that Raul was going to make a statement,” says Juan Miguel, who lives in the Castros’ home town.
“Then when he started talking, well, I couldn’t believe it! It was a split screen, Raul Castro with Obama! They had been talking!”
One of seven children of a soldier
He gestures wildly, his eyes animated, as he sits on a bench in the centre of the small, dusty town, recalling the emotion of the moment. “For 50 years we don’t speak — and then suddenly, this!” In languid, steamy Biran — 500 miles to the east of Havana — there is a sense that things have to change. It was here that Fidel was born 88 years ago, one of seven children of a soldier from Galicia in northern Spain.
In contrast to his son, Castro Senior first arrived here as a soldier to help quell the nascent Cuban independence movement in 1895. He returned to the newly liberated country in 1899 and built up an estate. “By the time I was born in 1926, my father had already accumulated a certain degree of wealth, and he was very well-to-do as a landowner,” Fidel Castro writes in his memoirs. “‘Don Angel Castro’ they called him, a person who was very highly respected, a man of great authority in that almost feudal area and time.”
The yellow wooden mansion — built on stilts, providing cooling breezes for the inhabitants and space for the livestock underneath — spawned a slew of smaller buildings to cater for the 400 residents: a post office, a bar, a school and even a hotel for passing travellers. Forty bee hives provided honey for the family. In the fields grew papaya, plantain, coconut, oranges. It was a bucolic and privileged existence. But, as with many Left-wing revolutionaries, a privileged upbringing was no obstacle to embracing radical politics.
By the time the young Fidel was training as a lawyer in Havana, he was railing against the corrupt and repressive regime of Fulgencio Batista, whose links to the US included close business relationships with the Mob, who controlled gambling and prostitution on the island. Indeed, such was Fidel Castro’s revolutionary fervour that when he finally seized power, he even expropriated his own late father’s property in the name of the workers, provoking a family rift.
Furious at her older brother’s actions, Juanita Castro was soon recruited by the CIA to help overthrow the new regime, and fled the island in 1964. In the port city of Santiago de Cuba, where the revolution began, 81-year-old Laura Dominguez remembers those heady days with remarkable clarity.
Living at the time in Segundo Frente, a town to the north, she was a seamstress, and sewed uniforms for the rebel army. “We did it happily because we supported them,” she says. “We all hated Batista.” Dominguez, who now runs a guest house, remains an ardent Fidelista. But she adds: “This US deal has to be a good thing. We can’t go on like this.”
This week, the historic rapprochement that began before Christmas takes another small step forward, with a meeting in Washington between Cuba and the US to discuss human rights. On the ground, meanwhile, changes are already visible. American tourists can now come to Cuba without seeking permission from their government, and last week, the first direct flight in decades arrived in Havana from New York.
American companies have signed deals to bring internet access to Cuba, where, until recently, it was illegal for most people to go online at home.
“I think everything is being discussed in Havana now — the atmosphere really is changing,” says Dr Emily Morris, of the International Institute for the Study of Cuba. “There is a discussion of electoral systems. There is maybe more space for differing opinions. From Washington, with George W. Bush, there was a hardening of the line. But now Cubans are far more optimistic.”
Others are less sure. The ultimate goal for the Cuban regime is the lifting of the hated US embargo — described in billboards nationwide as “the biggest genocide in history”. But Obama cannot do that without approval from Congress — which its Republican majority will not grant.
Raul’s overtures to America
“As long as the embargo remains, there will be very little shift at all,” says Antoni Kapcia, head of the Centre for Research on Cuba.
“I would say: don’t hold your breath.”
Fidel Castro himself has also expressed reservations about his brother Raul’s overtures to America.
“I shall explain my essential position in a few words,” he wrote on January 27.
“I do not trust the politics of the United States, nor have I exchanged a word with them. But this is not, in any way, a rejection of a peaceful solution to conflicts.”
Back in the town of Biran, the small cafe is shut. The bakery has no bread — they offer sandwiches, but it will take a while for the boy on horseback to fetch the goods. Shortages are rife.
“All the pretty slogans you want,” said an old man in a stetson, laughing as The Sunday Telegraph photographed a giant mural of Che Guevara. “But nothing here to eat.”
On the hill above, schoolchildren sing Guantanamera, the classic song about a beautiful cowgirl from neighbouring Guantanamo province. Of history, culture and song, there is plenty; of jobs and optimism, there is rather less.
“Everyone is asking themselves what will come next,” says Ramirez.
“We hope they improve things economically, but no one knows.”
Miguel, a lawyer, had brought his family to see their revolutionary leader’s birthplace.
“I respect what he’s done,” he says, stopping to inspect the Castro family tomb. “But I’ll celebrate when he’s gone.”
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2015
