Part 2 - Bayamo by Train

We were pretty keen on taking a train across to the east. Ask any Cuban, and they’ll give you their advice: Do not take the train. It is said that they are frequently cancelled, never run on time, and the only thing reliable about them is that they will certainly break down many times en route. The guidebooks say the same. So, naturally, we decided the train was definitely the way to go.

We went to the train station to check it out and make inquires. The Havana train station is an airy place, mercifully bereft of tourists and abounding with patient prospective passengers with many parcels. We found out from the train station information desk woman, one of the very few unfriendly people in Cuba, that a train going to Manzanillo runs every two days, leaves at 8:25pm, and is supposed to take about 16 hours to get to Bayamo. The next one was the next day. I asked if the train was really, truly leaving when they said it would, and winked knowingly. She unabashedly answered that yes, of course, it always leaves at 8:25pm, every other day.

Having heard so many negative reports, we weren’t absolutely sure we should trust her or the train, so we looked into the buses as well. It seemed we could get a Viazul (the tourist “de luxe” bus line) that would leave at 7:30pm. The day of departure, we packed and prepared for the trip, and at around 5:30 we asked our hosts at the casa to call the train station for us and enquire whether the train was actually leaving. By that time surely they’d know whether the train was going to be leaving or not. It must be well on its way back towards Havana. If it wasn’t we’d still have time to catch the bus.

When we asked Humberto to do this for us, and after he and his friend laughed a little about the fact that we were taking the train, he asked us if we had our tickets yet. He and his friend were astounded that we hadn’t thought to do that in advance. He called anyway, and whoever he spoke to assured him that of course it would leave at 8:25pm, as it does every other day. He got off the phone and told us that whoever he’d spoken to had also said that if we wanted tickets we’d have to go to the station immediately or we wouldn’t be able to buy them at all.

So off we raced to the station, fortunately no more than a half mile from our casa, and straight to the information counter. Relieved that Miss Discourteous wasn’t on shift, we asked her coworker where we needed to line up to purchase a ticket. Well, it was not there in that building, of course! (Why would you sell train tickets in a train station? Silly foreigners.) As gregarious as he was amiable, he tried to explain and then actually left the counter and led us outside of the station and around the corner, pointing far up the street and telling us to look for a house and some trees.

Completely amazed and charmed by this development, we started up the street. It follows the 20-foot high wall that surrounds the huge grounds of the train station. We followed this slowly curving mass of fortifications, looking for an official-looking building, and trees, until we’d gone the entire length of the wall and right around the corner, now faced with a streetful of houses from which it seemed clear that train tickets would not issue.

We caught the attention of a security guard atop the wall, who seemed very flustered trying to explain to us how to achieve our destination: no doubt our deficiencies in Spanish, the physical distance between us and his position on the battlements, and the mysteriousness of our desire to use train travel, all conspired to confuse matters further. He disappeared a few times and eventually motioned for us to go around the wall again, back the way we’d come.

This time we noticed a large and inset iron gate where another guard was waiting for us with a big welcoming grin and something along the lines of “Ah! There you are!” We passed up that gate before without really considering it because there was no indication of it being the ticket office entrance, and because there’d been no one there to make it seem like it would admit applicants.

The first guard joined us, and we all shook hands, and then the two of them escorted us down a paved path and into a fairly large and elongated building. Inside was one long, high-ceilinged room which was almost completely empty save a huge, executive-style wooden desk just to the left of the entrance. There was a man sitting in a chair behind the desk, and two very plush armchairs in front of it. He stood up and motioned for us to be seated. The guards looked on, we sat looking across the expanse of the desk, and he sat back to look us over before asking what he could do for us.

We couldn’t believe the disproportionate grandeur of our situation! It was as if this man was a mighty nobleman and we were asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage. All this to buy a pair of train tickets? A series of questions, noting of passport details, and then the writing out of the tickets by hand. The process must have taken at least fifteen minutes from when we sat down. I still don’t understand how this arrangement could possibly be used for the hundreds of travellers we’d seen thronging in the terminal. Alas, I’ve learned that I was born not to understand.

As for train travel: every one who had warned us about it had been quite right. The train which was supposed to leave at 8:25pm didn’t end up even arriving until long after midnight, and didn’t leave until after 2am. While waiting, we were told by others familiar with that train that because it was late everyone was entitled to a 50% refund on arrival at the destination. I was skeptical, but at least the prospect of a $12.50 savings in the future, along with several bottles of Bucanero in the present, helped to ease the pain of waiting. The waiting wasn’t that bad, since we’d expected the worst, and any train terminal is an interesting place.

Everyone waits in the main area of the terminal, and the platforms are kept empty. The separation is maintained by seven foot high fences and gates. When the train finally did arrive and decided it was ready to ingest humans, the system for admitting these humans to the platforms was strange: a gate was opened, but only partially, so that one person could just squeeze through. Then all the horde became a mob that threw itself at this breach. People with large bags were leaving them behind and then forcing themselves through the mass of less aggressive or more heavily laden folk. Once on the other side of the fence, an accomplice would pass the the bags over the fence then advance through themselves.

We were definitely the only foreigners on the train: it was evident looking around, and also the ticket seller had told us as much. We hadn’t understood everything that he’d told us, but when we’d left the office (highly bemused by the whole experience), we had the impression we might get a cabin to ourselves. No such luck. We got to our cabin good and early, and therefore we were at least able to install our massive backpacks on the racks above the seats, but in the absence of a working knowledge of train travel in Cuba, we had no way of knowing how, strategically or tactically, to keep a cabin to ourselves. In fact we ended up with all six seats being full. This, somehow, with the cabin next to ours remaining empty for at least the first half of the journey.

My dismay over all seats being taken steadily grew into agony as the eighteen hours crawled on. Of course, no regrets, but a more uncomfortable night I cannot recall. My neck, my lower back, my lungs, my thirst, my throat… I caught and incubated a bad throat infection that night. When the day came, it became evident that both of us had been given seats with their backs to the direction of motion, which meant that the Torched Tin Trap Effect of the sun on my baking brain was not in the least alleviated by breeze through the window. I sat there, feverish and out of water, wishing death on the (perfectly pleasant and friendly) woman who had decided to occupy the seat across from me. I can still see the locks of her hair dancing lightly to the whimsy of a gentle cooling air. That air graced only the seats facing the train’s engine.

The journey was remarkable in many ways, but one amazing thing was the way the seating and sleeping ended up functioning. We were all tired from waiting for the train, and realistically speaking there isn’t much to do on a train except sleep and wait for it all to end, so, before long, all six cabin cohabitants began settling down to concerted snoozing.

These cabins can sleep three people in reasonable comfort. The chairs slide down to be completely flat, thus covering up the area where feet go while seats are upright. If any of those three people happens to be over six feet high, woe to them, for comfort does not figure into their journey. More importantly that night, however, was the fact that there were six of us, and not three stretched out. What happened, very naturally and with little or no discussion, was that everyone shimmied their butts over in the seats a little bit in order to make room for the person opposite’s feet. Before long, strangers were dozing with strangers’ feet in their faces. I’ve never seen this on the Go Train. It’s a simple and beautiful thing that demonstrates the cooperative and sociable Cuban nature.

At one point I watched two of the cafeteria workers playing ping pong. They were in the train cafeteria uniform but they’d removed their vests and rolled up their sleeves. They’d fashioned paddles out of rectangles of cardboard. They didn’t have a table either: they just knocked it back and forth across half the length of the cafeteria car. This was fine because no one was eating or drinking there because there was rarely anything to be had: one of the reasons I was going thirsty, aside from having increased my water intake because of my increasingly belligerent throat, was that there was no water to be had on the train. Certainly there had been no running water for decades, and no one aside from tourists has interest in bottled water: the tap water in Cuba is potable everywhere. Throughout the journey I’d periodically seen people returning from the cafeteria with little sealed pouches of what looked like a grape drink. Sometimes I’d seen people carrying quite a few of them. I figured it was yet another over-sugary chemical concoction, and stuck to my water. The time came, eventually, where I realized I was going to have to drink something other than the four litres of water I’d brought with me. So, seeing someone cheerily passing by our cabin with one of these pouches, I sidled down to the cafeteria where there was a communist line-up (to coin a collective phrase) looking something like a miniature NYSE. The guy in front of me bought at least twenty bags of the stuff. After he was gone, suddenly I was the only one there. I tentatively ordered one, wondering if they were going to try and charge me a dollar price, and so pulling out my modest wad of pesos nacionales to perhaps show that I knew how things worked. You’ll guess what happened: there were none left.

Thusly I learned yet another Cuban lesson: if things are available for sale in pesos, there’s a line-up and everyone’s buying as much as they can carry.

One more note on the issue of water: I do remember someone coming on the train during the night heaving a bucket of ice water through the train and announcing the availability of cups of water for half a peso. He was working by flashlight because for whatever reason there was no light whatsoever on the train. I will drink and eat most anything, but this seemed to require a bit more faith than I could muster.

I was told that the coaches were from Germany circa World War II. The engine was a fuming and ancient Russian beast. The fact that I don’t even know if it ever properly broke down exposes the rate of travel we were achieving. And the smoke! When I showered that next night, the water into the drain ran black.

A day had come and gone and we were still on that train. We kept asking our cellmates if we’d yet arrived in Guamo Embarcadero, the town where our railway met the longest river in Cuba, the mighty Cauto. We wanted to catch a glimpse as we passed over it, to get a more palpable image of our first goal. And so at last Guamo, and a bridge, and our noses were pressed up against the window to grasp at the scene as it passed by.

It looked grand. A large river by any standards, very wide, looking calm enough, without an obvious wild current. Navigable, at least in that region: I saw a twenty foot craft moored up along one side.

So, with that little taste, we temporarily thought we hadn’t travelled in vain to that part of the country.

Not long after we arrived in Bayamo. I was immediately struck, even as we rolled in, by the pleasant dearth of automobiles in this town: there were far more horse-drawn carriages than cars.

We were exhausted, and it must have been nine in the evening when we finally found ourselves disembarked. It had been more than 24 hours after the proposed departure of that train, and we’d covered only 744 kilometers.