Read Online Slow Train to Guantanamo by Peter Millar - Free Book Online

approximation of a uniform fussing around. I take my seat again opposite Miguel who has mercifully gone back to sleep. A woman with two children arrives and shouts the question which I have been warned is crucial etiquette in the unavoidable everyday Cuban experience, the queue: ‘ Quién es último? ’ Who’s last?
    This is a remarkably civilized and in my experience uniquely Cuban attitude to queuing. Instead of having to stand in a long line for hours – and in Cuba queues frequently last for hours if not days – you find out who the person immediately ahead of you is. That way everybody is free to mill around or wander off until you see that person being called. It is a sort of chain reaction and happily, while I was feeding my face, the drunk Miguel has already established my place in it at the head of the line.
    Eventually with much clanking and squealing of iron on iron an apparition which I can only construe to be our train lurches in. The drunk looks up from his sleep and says surprisingly lucidly, ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.’ I wonder for a poignant moment if he might actually mean it. Then all of a sudden he repeats the same line, at the top of his voice, in an impromptu karaoke version of Phil Collins. It seems his entire English vocabulary and syntax is a litany of pop song refrains strung together with a few conjunctions. (I suspect it was that which would put the Phil Collins line into my head arriving in the bleak Santa Clara dawn two days later.)
    Glad as I am to see the train arrive, I find it hard to believe it will actually get us to Matanzas. The only time I have ever seen such rusted bodywork was in a scrapheap for ancient cars in the midst of the Montana desert. There are just two carriages and parts of the lower sections of each which look thin enough to push a finger through. The roof has long lost the bulbs supposed to fit in its horn-like headlights. The pantograph which provides the power from the overhead rails looks like if it stopped hanging from them the whole train would fall to bits.
    But clearly everyone else is more optimistic. The ticket office is open. I pay my four ‘CUCs’ and finally get hold of my first Cuban train ticket, a little piece of paper with punched holes for each station you are allowed to stop at. I’m going all the way so it is virtually perforated.
    My fellow passengers are an assorted lot: a massive handsome black guy who could be a double for the young Mohammad Ali, in a tight red T-shirt that shows off his pecs, a skinny, stereotypically Latino gangsta-looking bloke in designer sneakers and bright orange shorts with a spider tattoo climbing up his arm, a well-built mulatto woman in skin-tight day-glo pink pants and a tight low-cut top, and of course the drunk who is now giving English lessons of a sort to one of the children of the middle-aged woman who arrived last. The elderly couple I had spotted from the café apparently aren’t getting on the train all day: it seems they’ve just come to watch.
    A quick look at the train suggests, to say the least, that it lacks even the most rudimentary toilet facilities, so I really need to lose some of that beer before getting on board. The difficulty is that there is no obvious sign indicating the whereabouts of the station conveniences.
    This turns out to be for the very good reason that there aren’t any. Not any more. I eventually identify a blue-paintedconcrete block which proclaims itself the servicios , but both cubicles are missing doors and boarded over. In desperation I take a quick leak behind the block and get back to the platform just in time to see a bloke who appears to be the conductor in a white shirt jumping down from the train and calling at people to climb onboard.
    But before we are allowed to, he fetches a bucket of water from a standpipe and splashes it over a seat, apparently his own, before wiping it dry with a cloth. Only then are we invited to clamber on