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Dilip D'Souza

The Hotel La Rusa, painted a bilious yellow and brown, is the distinctive feature of the Malecon in Baracoa. Wherever your vantage point, if you look towards the sea, the hotel stands out like a jaundiced thumb. So when we got to this faded, sleepy town, we made our way unerringly to La Rusa and asked specifically for the room which Fidel Castro had used.

It was spotless, almost fussily tidy. But the bed so filled the tiny room that we had to wonder: how had Fidel manoeuvred his extra-large frame in and out? Or had he dispensed with manoeuvring? Had he perhaps spent his time at the window looking out at the waves as they crashed onto the seafront boulevard, the Malecon, as mesmerised with them as we were?

The hotel (the yellow building with a sloping roof in the picture at the right) was built by and named for a glamorous but mysterious Russian lady -- "La Rusa": "the Russian woman". She fled the Soviet Union and turned up in this forgotten corner of Cuba. Part of the mystery is that while she seems to have felt revulsion for what was happening in the USSR, she became curiously enamoured of Fidel Castro and his Cuban Revolution. That's why Castro and Che Guevara both stayed here when they came to Baracoa. The lady's memory is revered and preserved in the hotel, as it is in the Matachin Museum a mile to the east on the Malecon.

But nobody tells you her name. She is now and forever La Rusa, just another of the myths that envelop Baracoa. Nothing more, nothing less. Why should I change that, even half a world away?

Only 40 km from the eastern tip of the island, Baracoa was cut off for generations from the rest of Cuba by a range of mountains that crowd behind the town. Access was only possible by sea. Havana is over a thousand kilometres away and must have seemed even further for years. This might explain why the town still retains a certain rusticity, a bedraggled appeal that still charms.

Or it might just be the myths that add up to charm.

We found one more of them just a few blocks from La Rusa. In the Plaza Cacique Hatuey, facing the church, is a remarkable bust of a remarkable man. By the time we got to Baracoa, we knew his name well. Cuba's only beer is named after him: every can carries his picture. As the inscription on the pedestal told us, Hatuey was Cuba's first rebel. This valiant Indian chief led a band of guerrilla fighters in running battles with the Spanish conquistadores of the late 15th century. For years, he hid out in the mountains around Baracoa, harrying the invaders in a brilliant campaign that would have its echo half a millennium later, in Fidel's and Che's Revolution of the 1950s.

But Hatuey's rebellion couldn't last. Spanish firepower finally wore him and his little band down. He was captured and burned at the stake as a heretic. About to be set alight, he was asked if he wanted to be baptised before he died, so that his then Christian soul might ascend straight to heaven. "Are there Spaniards in heaven?" Hatuey wanted to know.

When told that there were, he said he preferred to die a heathen. This courageous man had spent long years fighting the so-called Christians from Spain who were invading his beloved home: why would he want to meet more in a place they called heaven? Thus did Cuba's first rebel die, rebellious and spirited to the last.

In Baracoa's little Plaza today, Hatuey's handsome head leans forward from its pedestal under a towering tree. Every sinew on his neck strains with the effort. His long nose presides over a scornful scowl. As you stand there with him, you can almost feel his contempt for his Spanish captors. After all, they and their descendants and various other rulers were about to spend the next few centuries raping Cuba and running it into the ground. Given the destruction Hatuey had already seen in his lifetime, he must have foreseen what was coming. Undoubtedly he felt contempt.

I couldn't help wondering if some of it was reserved for the 20th century banality of naming beer after this proud man.

Photographs by Dilip D'Souza

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