Island that Dared Read Online Free PDF

to the Trio. While watching them ascend to giddy heights Rachel and I sat on the pavement scoffing bananas. (From amidst the foliage an invisible Rose shouted ‘Don’t eat them all!’) Behind us loomed a neo-classical mansion, its stucco flakey, cardboard patching its stainedglass window, squat big-belly palms – less common than the royal palm – lining its garden path. Across the street small children were making merry in their kindergarten, the deep verandah and wide lawn of a recently restored Gaudiesque villa. Studying them, we agreed that Cuba’s variety of skin shades, and countless combinations and permutations of racial features, make official statistics seem absurd. Who came up with the ‘fact’ that in 2000 the population was fifty-one per cent Mulatto, thirty-seven per cent White, eleven per cent Black? And what about the missing one per cent? Are they the unrecorded descendents of Cuba’s indigenous inhabitants? Or those Chinese who have resisted miscegenation ever since their a hundred and twenty-five thousand or so ancestors arrived as indentured labourers between 1852 and 1874? We also agreed that, aesthetically, the dominant Iberian/African mix has been a sensational success.
    Clearing my eyes of sweat, I looked at my watch: 10.50, beer-time for those who rise before dawn – and Rachel, succumbing to Havana’s aura, rather fancied a daiquiri. The Trio grumbled slightly on being brought down to earth but were cheered by the mention of Coppelia where theycould gorge on ice-creams after we had attended to our alcohol levels. During the descent to La Rampa I recalled that the name Vedado (‘prohibited’) dates back to the sixteenth century when all construction was forbidden on this slope overlooking the Straits of Florida. Platoons of sentinels were permanently on duty and needed to see the frequently approaching pirates as soon as possible.
    In an al fresco bar a dilatory waiter took our order and when the Trio began to roam restlessly Mummy registered guilt about their delayed gratification while Nyanya spoke up for Adult Rights.
    It seems socialism brings out the worst in architects – witness the Coppelia emporium, designed by Mario Girona and built in 1966 in the middle of a park that must, until then, have been a blessed antidote to Nuevo Vedado’s brash skyscrapers. Constructed mainly of reinforced concrete, it is topped by a single monstrous slab supporting a truncated cone. The six colossal circular ice-cream parlours on the upper floor are subdivided by naked concrete girders – grey and gloomy, seeming to belong beneath a motorway – and by pointlessly placed partitions of tinted glass. The habaneros are very proud of this excrescence, the first (and most bizarre) of a chain of Coppelias; all are open twelve hours a day, six days a week, serving affordable ice-cream of the finest gelato quality to the general public. In Havana a daily average of thirty-thousand addicts queue happily for hours, without shade. Latterly, however, the Coppelia ideal, like many others, has been tarnished; near the main entrance a small queue-free annex caters for convertible-peso users.
    During our fifty-minute wait the naval officer standing behind me (home on a week’s leave) spoke of his favourite ports, Murmansk not among them. That led on to the Cuban/Russian relationship when thousands of Soviet troops were stationed on the island for more than twenty-five years. Dryly Nestor said that there had been no relationship; the Soviets kept to themselves, importing their own food and entertainment (if any) and apparently remaining immune to Cuba’s charms. I wondered if they were obeying orders or simply found Cubans uncongenial? The latter, Nestor thought – because occasionally groups of Central Asians did venture out to their local Casa de la Trovo. Privately I reflected that the average Russian’s deep-seated racism, impervious for seventy years to Marxist egalitarianism, must have inhibited social