James Pringle IHT
 
    HAVANA When the guerrilla fighter Che Guevara won the climactic battle of Santa
    Clara leading to the triumph of the Cuban revolution, he made his headquarters at La
    Cabaña, the former Spanish fortress overlooking colonial Old Havana. There he
    oversaw military trials of supporters of the fallen dictator, Fulgencio Batista, leading to
    dozens of televised executions by firing squad.

    With the firing squads out again recently for the first time in three years, I went to La
    Cabaña, which was a closed military area when I previously worked as a
    correspondent in Havana, and asked a friendly militiawoman where the earlier
    shootings had taken place.

    "Ah you mean the revolutionary justice sentences," said the handsome mulatta, taking
    me outside and pointing to a wall. On top of it, ancient cannons pointed across Havana
    Bay, where, a few days before, a small ferry boat had been seized in an aborted
    hijack. The wall showed dozens of bullet impacts.

    In April, the government executed the three men who had tried to hijack the ferry.
    They were put to death just nine days after their arrests, sufficient time for the
    government to hold summary trials and for Cuba's highest executive body to
    rubber-stamp the verdicts.

    The executions coincided with the biggest political crackdown in Cuba for a
    generation, in which nearly 80 political dissidents received harsh prison terms of up to
    28 years.

    Of course, those condemned in the latest hijacking were not put to death at La
    Cabana. The fortress is now popular with foreign tourists who pay valuable foreign
    currency for the view from its battlements to Old Havana.

    Once gray, crumbling and depressing, Old Havana is now under restoration as a UN
    world heritage site. The tourists include Americans defying Washington's efforts to
    discourage visits. They throng Old Havana's Obispo Street, admiring Cuba's beguiling
    women, who manage to dress so stylishly on extremely limited resources.

    This is where Ernest Hemingway strolled each day from La Bodeguita del Medio - the
    bar where he famously enjoyed his mohito, a rum and mint cocktail - to his room at the
    Ambos Mundos hotel, where he began writing "For Whom the Bell Tolls." His old
    typewriter is still there at a window looking toward La Cabaña.

    Hemingway is one of two literary figures who, for me, haunt Old Havana. The other is
    Graham Greene, who wrote "Our Man in Havana," a prescient "entertainment" that
    seemed to foresee the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

    There is something surreal about Havana. It must be the only world capital with a
    Lenin and a Lennon Park, the latter named for the murdered Beatle. President Fidel
    Castro told me a couple of years ago, when I reminded him he had banned Beatles'
    music, that it was only much later he had appreciated John Lennon's "life and ideas."
    (Castro's appreciation of Lenin has never flagged).

    Unveiled by El Commandante, Lennon's lifelike statue, looking melancholy but loving,
    sits on a park bench. The monument is enjoyed by neighborhood children who polish it
    daily, but seemingly not by young adults, nowadays disillusioned by repression and a
    lack of opportunity and jobs.

    Guevara's popularity among Cubans, however, remains undimmed; the Argentine is an
    untouchable icon of the revolution. This is curious, as his diaries indicate Che's Stalinist
    tendencies and ruthlessness toward his own men.

    I drove to Santa Clara, where his remains were brought from Bolivia years after his
    execution in 1967. The memorial was closed for repairs. Water had flooded in and the
    "eternal flame" was extinguished for now. At the site of Batista's ambushed armored
    train, a few carriages remain as a shrine to Che and his men.

    As I stood in a carriage door, a passing pensioner stuck out his hand and demanded
    that I give him some "small change." So many Cubans beg and hustle these days, unlike
    before. Whatever happened to the idealism of the revolution? Perhaps it is a sign of
    desperation.

    The writer is a former Reuters correspondent in Havana.

               Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune