It was certainly very weird to be sitting in the bedroom where Fangio was held, talking to Arnol and knowing that he’d gone on to be Cuba’s deputy minister for foreign affairs. I found myself wondering how Terry Waite would feel if one of his abductors were to be seen on TV every night meeting world statesmen like Clinton and Chirac and Gerry Adams.
I didn’t exactly worry about it though, because I was beginning to formulate a plan. Whenever I visit a place, I like to bring some permanent reminder home and I was being thwarted at every turn in Havana.
There is almost nothing in the shops, apart from cigars, which I don’t like, and shoddy Che Guevara T-shirts. I bought a photocopy of Che’s resignation letter to Fidel and even procured a bank note from 1960 signed by beardy himself.
But I wanted something bigger… like a car.
The streets really are chock-full of ageing classics which would, with a bit of attention, fetch all sorts of silly prices in the land of MTV.
I’m told that in the current climate, it’s hard as hell to get them out but not impossible, and that was good enough. I mean, I’d just seen an Aston Martin DB4 slide by, and I wanted it.
And that Cadillac over there. And the gullwing Mercedes in that barn. And that Porsche speedster. No kidding, you don’t have to hunt for cars like this. They’re everywhere.
There was even a Maserati which, said its owner, was one of only two ever made. He didn’t know what model it was, and the ravages of time had removed most of the clues, so I wasn’t sure whether he was bluffing or not.
This car was a bare shell. It had no engine, no interior trim, no seats, no lights, nothing. But he wanted $50,000 for it, arguing that it had once been used by Mrs Batista, wife of the former president.
This was the third car I’d see that day which had once been used by Mrs Batista, but it was not to be the last. I was shown four Jaguars that had belonged to Frank Sinatra and countless old wrecks which had been vomited in by the old drunk himself, Ernest Hemingway.
Si Senor, I know it is a worthless piece of junk that is not even fit for the scrapyard but Ginger Rogers once owned it so I am asking for $100,000.
And they’re not going to give up either, because the haggling has only just begun.
Later, when countless Westerners have told them to get lost, they’ll sell for decent money, but not now.
Che 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 100 metres 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 us out.
Now this puzzled me. I was still standing there, wondering if he had a hotline to John Birt, when a girl emerged from the shadows. She last knew what she was doing in 1976. Here was a person whose hair was green, whose nose sported sixteen silver rings and whose eyes had as much life to them as cardboard.
Her first words were odd. ‘You’re that guy off
But then her face broke into a broad grin as she explained she’d once worked as a researcher on
Within seconds, we were joined by an army of gangland down-and-outs, all clamouring for an interview. Christian, the least stoned and most eloquent, explained that things are pretty bad in downtown Detroit these days.
Had he been shot at? ‘What today? Yeah sure. I was down the gas station this morning and these guys came in. It was pretty ugly.’
So we are in danger then? ‘You sure are. If they want your trucks, they’re going to take ’em. If they want your camera, they’re gonna take it. If they want your shoes, you’d better hand ’em over, because if you don’t the
