Viva la shoelace revolution! CAROL THATCHER explores impoverished Cuba by bike
As shortages go, it was hardly likely to bring one of the world's last communist regimes to its knees, but it might make it stumble a little.
Halfway through a cycling tour of Cuba, one of my group abruptly announced a desperate need for shoelaces. It was surely simply a matter of buying a pair. Not so. For hours we combed the streets of Havana but from every counter came the same reply: no shoelaces.
It was, in its small way, an example of how a command economy will always fail. Clearly, the Cuban Central Ministry of Footwear Fastening Production had neglected to fulfil its five-year plan.
Revolutionary road: Carol Thatcher in Havana's Revolution Square with the wrought-iron monument to Che Guevera in the background
Look closely at those candy-coloured American cars seen on Cuban postcards. The Pontiacs and Buicks may look as grandiose as the day they were imported in the Fifties, but they are ingeniously patched-up rust-buckets that would send British mechanics into acute shock.
The engines and most parts have been taken from other models; the bodywork is mainly Polyfilla and glue. Indeed, were B&Q ever to open a superstore in Havana, its adhesives offerings would be cleared out within 30 minutes so keen are Cubans on anything that will stick their crumbling infrastructure back together.
I decided to take a cycling tour around Cuba to enjoy a sort of twisted nostalgia. It is more than 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event precipitated by my mother Margaret Thatcher's famous meeting with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984.
I remember the words of my father, Denis: 'At the time one doesn't say that it was history in the making, but I realised that this was something pretty special.' My mother put it more simply. 'This is a man I can do business with,' she said of Gorbachev.
Since that time, things have changed. Old-fashioned communist despots, once household names, are now rather thin on the ground. If we overlook China's hybrid capitalism, there's really only the semi-retired Fidel Castro and North Korea's batty Kim Jong Il left. They're almost an endangered species.
This is not to suggest that Cuba suffers anything like the otherworldly desperation of North Korea. Far from it. Only the terminally flint-hearted visitor could fail to feel a little note of rapture. Surely this is communism with a sunny face.
The restored Spanish colonial squares in Old Havana were magnificent with their handsome stone facades, columns and arches. Jazz tinkled out of clubs and restaurants.
But venture beyond this and you will see architecture that would be instantly condemned by even the most casual of English building control officers. Only faith in Fidel and yet more glue prevent its collapse.
These two images - cheek-by-jowl perfection and rickety dereliction - are twin monuments to 51 years of failed communism. But they are also a monument to 51 years of failed American foreign policy. Fidel and his brother Raul, who took over as president in 2008, have seen ten American presidents come and go.
Making history: Margaret Thatcher's famous meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984
It's hard to accept that at some point in the past 50 years, an American politician could not have told Fidel or Raul Castro: 'We don't approve of communism, but we are prepared to work with you.'
As I pondered the Castros' resilience, however, I had to stop myself falling under Cuba's spell. I was the daughter of the woman who helped bring down the Soviet Union. Surely I could not allow myself to be seduced by a whiff of cigar smoke and a little revolutionary solidarity.
After all, I was brought up in a household where it was never necessary to ask one's parents what this puzzling thing called 'communism' actually was. I have from the cradle onwards been instilled with a suspicion of all things Marxist. Mum not only objected to communism on ideological grounds, she also felt that an all-enveloping dictatorship sapped the human spirit, eroding endeavour and imagination.
It certainly does seem to mean shortages - and not just of shoelaces. People came up to me asking for toothpaste, as if I was a one-woman version of pedalling Boots.
So while posters of Fidel celebrating the 51st anniversary of the revolution adorn the windows of shiny new boutiques in Old Havana, Cubans haven't a hope of shopping in them.
Fidel's revolution has simply-produced a different set of haves and have-nots - rich party officials and tourists on one side, the rest of Cuba on the other. Everyone here covets a job in an international hotel. It provides a taste of how the rest of the Western world lives - and holds out the prospect of tips.
Towels are folded into intricate origami-like sculptures, with small cards attached saying: 'I do hope you enjoy your stay, with best wishes from your friendly chambermaid, Juanita.'
It worked. I found a reply from Kurt and Helga, the previous occupants of my room, profusely thanking Juanita for her handiwork. I'm not sure whether they left her any precious hard currency, though.
The girl at the hotel pool bar looked at my plastic designer watch with such a longing gaze that I handed it to her, and I gave some of my shoes to the chambermaids.
We were generally treated with deference, particularly in the capital-Sometimes, outside Havana, we were treated with less respect. 'What is your room number?' a woman barked at me one morning, more in the manner of a secret policeman than a hotel employee in charge of the breakfast buffet.
Carnival spirit: One of Havana's glamorous cabaret stars
To speed things up, I mounted my bicycle to cross the square only to be stopped by a policeman. 'You may push your bike in the square,' he explained, clearly relishing the sort of bureaucratic authority vested in minor operatives in dictatorships, 'but you are not allowed to ride it.'
With that sort of attitude, I thought, it is hard to imagine how Guevara and Castro managed to overthrow the Batista government in 1959.
Che is your constant companion on any trip to Cuba. His image is everywhere-more so than Fidel himself. Such was his presence that our tour was dubbed On Yer Bike With Che.
The iconic photograph (tilted beret, faraway gaze) of him taken in 1960 by Alberto Korda was one of the most reproduced images of the past century. In Old Havana, postcards of beaches, palm trees, rum and the sights took second billing to racks of black-and-white photos of Che smoking a cigar, or of Che standing alongside Fidel.
It would be hard to name a film star, entertainer or politician whose image has so endured, which is odd. Che may have masterminded the revolution with Castro, but he was shot dead in Bolivia in 1967. What's more, he wasn't even Cuban: he was born in Argentina.
But Cuba throws up many incongruities. As we waited at traffic lights in Havana before starting our 150-mile tour, a bendy bus drew alongside me. Momentarily, I wondered whether Mayor Boris Johnson was selling off the monsters Londoners love to hate to Castro's capital, but apparently they came from China and some former Soviet republics.
Still, Cuban commuters need all the help they can get - just getting around outside the main cities is a challenge. At one hotel I stayed at in Varadero, a beach resort 90 miles east of Havana, staff have to get up in the early hours to hitch-hike to work. There is no other way.
To the west, around Vinales, one of the most fertile tobacco growing areas, fancy tourist carriages give way to basic horse-drawn carts. They provide a pragmatic and essential mode of transport. Again, glue and a little string are probably used to hold them together.
Almost all private enterprise is forbidden. All farm produce must be sold to the government at appallingly low rates. Nevertheless, we managed to taste freshly squeezed sugarcane juice from a roadside kiosk.
Life in the countryside witnessed from our relaxed biking itinerary was unhurried and, to a Londoner, terribly quiet. Oddly, one of the things I missed most were Western advertising hoardings.
Often the only sounds would be a farmer's voice coaxing his oxen to pull a plough over his field. Roaming goats and chickens, unconstrained by fences or considerations of ownership, added a new meaning to the phrase 'free range'.
One day our group was overtaken by a young lad, lasso at the ready, chasing a bull. The animal doubled back and seemed to stalk us. Finally it was roped in and we relaxed. I like to be a strong fence away from a set of vicious horns, but this was Cuba.
We even cycled along a stretch of Cuba's main motorway, which was so devoid of traffic that onion sellers offered their produce from the fast lane, while horses and carts went the wrong way down the hard shoulder.
Aficionados say Cuban tobacco is the best in the world. The tobacco barons fleeing the revolution took their precious seeds with them, and planted and nurtured them in neighbouring Caribbean islands such as the Dominican Republic, but they failed to replicate the quality.
I knew nothing of cigars when I went to Havana beyond remembering that when Mum was Prime Minister, she bought a box of them every Christmas for her speechwriter, the playwright Ronnie Millar.
To learn more, I joined a tour of the Partagas Cigar Factory in Havana. The workers, two-thirds of whom are women, do a nine-month course to learn how to turn out 120 cigars in eight hours.
It was tobacco and sugar that made generations of Cubans hugely rich in the centuries before the revolution. It is still possible to catch a glimpse of the extravagance of prerevolutionary days, and wonder what might have been had Castro not had his way.
The Hotel Xanadu in Varadero, built in 1928 by the American Dupont dynasty as a sumptuous private mansion, has a magnificent view across the Florida Straits from the third-floor bar and terrace. It's now a place where guests can eat lobster beneath carved mahogany ceilings of considerable grandeur.
Times are considerably tougher for modern Cubans, but I saw no one who was visibly hungry. Health and education are reckoned to be good, and, walking back from a Havana jazz club in the early hours, I felt safer than I would in other Caribbean capitals or, indeed, London. I would not, however, recommend wearing high heels - the potholes are lethal.
Most Cubans we met were not reticent in the way that the fearful people of East Germany and Russia were when I visited Eastern Europe in the early Eighties. Nor were people resentful of the superior food and facilities enjoyed in tourist hotels. The vast majority were friendly and talkative.
Asking Cubans to volunteer their views on politics, however, comes with risks. Palm trees, rum cocktails and sunshine cannot disguise the chilly stranglehold communism retains on its citizens. Neighbours are still obliged to spy on each other. Voluminous Stasi-like files are kept on anyone suspected of subversion. Dissidents are imprisoned, anti-government journalists are intimidated.
People were happy to speak out in praise of their country though, or to denounce its enemies. A taxi driver said Cubans are angry that their country is repeatedly mentioned on the news as the site of a terrorist prison camp. In fact, Guantanamo Bay has been leased to Washington since 1903, but Cuba's government refuses to cash the rental cheques.
Another driver told me he hated Americans. That did not seem to be a view shared by the many good-looking and energetic young dancers at the nightclub where he dropped me. They were almost all wearing designer clothes and shoes from the United States. Admiration of things on the other side of the Florida Straits extends to other pastimes, too. Many Cubans are obsessed with baseball.
Talking to my group about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, I said it was my view that when US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev went eyeball-to-eyeball, it was Khrushchev who blinked, thus averting nuclear war - something the world should be grateful for.
At that point a Cuban interrupted. 'It still pains us that this deal was done between Khrushchev and Kennedy over Fidel's head,' he said with some passion. 'It deprived us of a bargaining card.'
For what, I asked? 'To get the Americans out of Guantanamo Bay.'
Cubans, it seems, see history through a different prism and one must be careful. Dining in a restaurant with British people, I was indiscreet enough to indicate that I wasn't a paid-up member of Fidel's fan club. One of our group felt it necessary to apologise on my behalf to the Cubans at the next table.
Will Cuba ever ditch communism? A year ago, Barack Obama stated his intention to close Guantanamo Bay. He hasn't. One morning, as I was preparing for another day's cycling, a TV bulletin reported a strongly worded statement from Raul Castro in which he alleged that Obama's government was trying to undermine Cuba's regime.
I don't sense any rush for change in Cuba. There is little sign of a younger generation in the regime, or a Gorbachev figure pushing for reform. Obama appears to have an in-tray filled with more pressing issues, and, even if he wanted to negotiate, the powerful Cuban lobby in the United States would oppose any compromise. Obama may be the 11th president to fail to do business with Cuba.
That said, the Berlin Wall came down suddenly. The unexpected can happen; it just takes one catalyst.
Where political argument has failed to bring down communism in Cuba, designer clothes, sport and tourism just might. Or perhaps life without shoelaces will one day break the revolutionary spirit.
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