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Guevara’s car was different, though. Here was something that, we know, was used by someone famous. And here it was, after nine days of solid slog, emerging from the old town barn and seeing sunlight for the first time in twenty years.
    And there, coming from under the bonnet, were flames. It’s strange how one reacts in a situation like this: I did 100metres in eight seconds as I ran to get the cameraman, so that we could record this momentous event for all time.
    Andy, mindful of the budget and how much it would cost us if the damned car burned out completely, behaved rather differently. He dived into a shop, which, miraculously, had some mineral water in the fridge. To the astonishment of the owner, he paid five bucks for one bottle and then poured the contents all over a car which, to the average Cuban, was worth rather less than that.
    It worked out quite well in fact. We got some pictures and Andy got the fire out before too much damage was done. The only tragedy was that my drive in this important car was limited to one run down the Malecon seafront.
    Communism had wrecked a car. And it has certainly wrecked Cuba, but I guess we were quite lucky really. It never actually got round to wrecking a planet.

Detroit
    Way back when, the good people of Detroit decided it would be a good thing to have a railway station. And this was not to be a platform with some geraniums on it either. No siree, you wouldn’t be able to find Bernard Cribbins having a chinwag with Jenny Agutter in the steam here. They wanted something big. Really big.
    And that’s what they got: the biggest, flashiest, tallest railway station the world had ever seen. The huge marble cavern of a concourse sat at the bottom of a twelve-storey skyscraper and backed on to no fewer than sixteen platforms.
    Unfortunately, Detroit became the car capital of the world and large, free-flowing urban interstates sprang up like mushrooms after a summer shower. They connected the new suburbs with the downtown auto factories and frankly, no one really needed the station any more.
    And so, it closed down.
    It’s still there, dominating the Detroit skyline, but today it’s smashed and broken. Every slab of marble is cracked, the concourse is littered with burned mattresses and the upper floors are said to be in an even worse state of repair.
    But no one is absolutely certain because Detroit’s railway station is at the end of Michigan Avenue and, as such,is at the epicentre of a gang war that measures 9.4 on the Richter scale.
    Rival outfits with silly names like the Ice Warriors fight for control of the high ground. And this is not Reggie and Ronnie Kray either. You can forget all about honour among thieves here. This is vicious like you simply would not believe.
    Every year 600 people are shot to death in Detroit and, in that railway station, I very nearly became one of them.
    The police had said we were mad to even think about going in there. ‘Not even that phoney accent is gonna save your ass. You go in there and you’ll come out in a body bag,’ said one cheery soul in a hexagonal hat.
    But frankly, the British perception of gangland violence is some spotty eleven-year-old with a penknife. We could handle these American pussies, no problem at all.
    It took about five minutes to find that we couldn’t. We’d just set the camera up when, from the minstrel’s gallery, a not-very-minstrel-like voice asked whether we were cops.
    We were then ordered to stand still and advised that, if we moved, we would be shot repeatedly. And then killed.
    I could have passed muster as a statue until, from behind one of the pillars, came this guy who was about fourteen feet tall and nine feet across. Also, he was brandishing what we later discovered was a ‘street sweeper’ – a machine gun that fires 12-bore shotgun cartridges.
    He frisked us, checked out the camera equipment, listened quite politely while we explained we were from the BBC and then said he was going to check