A DEDICATED FOLLOWER OF FASHION

Did you grow your hair out, wear checked shirts and worship the lyrics of Kurt Cobain or did you hide deathly white skin from the sun and dress in funeral black? Were you one of the Mods who clashed on the beach in Brighton or did you dye your hair purple and make it stand on end? If not that, then did you spend your best years talking about flowers and waiting for enlightenment? Or perhaps you’re still young today and wearing trousers so baggy they show your arse or is it jingly jewellery and souped up cars for you?

Fashions fickle spotlight is legendry, but it doesn’t just revolve around looks and image. Gadgets, people, places and even politics, yo-yo in and out of fashion just as quickly. Its been said that fashion is something so ugly that it has to be changed every few minutes, but is it really that bad? Is fashion really something so shallow it has to be altered every fifteen minutes? Personally I think not. I think fashion is what makes the world go round and is something far deeper than we ever give it credit for. Fashion is about something new, something alternative. Fashion is about how we live our very lives. It’s about brushing away all that was before and replacing it with something, if not better, then certainly different. You could even say that each new fashion trend is a revolution, but let’s face it; both fashion and revolution can sometimes get it really badly wrong.

Spilling out of the plaza and clogging every road for hundreds of metres the people gathered, waiting expectantly for the show to begin. Bottles of rum were passed around; flags fluttered and chanting filled the night skies. The atmosphere was that of a huge music festival or the moments before kick off in the World Cup Finals, but this was no England, Germany football match and this crowd were certainly not waiting for the latest pop sensation to strut onto stage. These excited masses of people were gathered here for something as mundane and unfashionable as a political speech.

Some countries were born to have an alluring, almost fashionable, gloss to them. Step through the doors of any high street travel agents and India becomes a land of eastern exotica, France is romance and museums and Cuba is salsa and cigars under the palms. Even though we probably all know that these are just clichés, and that India is actually poverty and dirt before maharajahs and France is unemployment and inefficiency instead of champagne and sunsets on the Seine, this doesn’t mean that we don’t all want to believe in the images. After all I suspect that I wasn’t the only one in our party, which consisted of my brother, Robin, Newquay grom, Liam Watkins and bodyboarders Ben Clift, Jon Bowen and Guilaume Girbon, to arrive in the tourist brochure island of big finned classic cars with dreams of sitting contended under a coconut tree with a hip swirling Latin temptress spiralling her way towards us with cocktails in hand. But what was Cuba really like? What’s the truth to the worlds’ most fashionable holiday spot and the world’s most fashionable icon?

A fashionable icon? What’s that? Well, just as every fashion needs a revolutionary leader to set a new idea in motion - the hippies had Lennon and Morrison, grunge had Cobain and the punks had Sid Vicious. Every revolution needs a fashionable leader to stir the masses. Back in the plaza a peak of excitement had been reached and, under a thunderous wave of cheering Fidel Castro, icon of the modern age and leader of the Cuban revolution, stepped onto the stage to rapturous applause. If the massive mural of his former right hand man, revolutionary genius and now, so many years after his murder, an international fashion guru, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, that overlooked the scene could have smiled, then I suspect he would have burst out laughing at the sight of so many rejoicing in the glory of the revolution he helped create. Or would he?

It wasn’t fashion and revolution that had been on our minds when we boarded a plane for the Caribbean island of Cuba, but rather the thought that Cuba is at the receiving end of two swell systems that together provide the juice throughout the northern hemisphere winter. One is a wild and stormy system of short lived, but powerful swells churned up off the coast of Texas that shatter onto the coast around Havana with surprising frequency. Whilst from the opposite direction come the Atlantic generated ground swells that seep in between the islands of the Bahamas and hit the east coast of Cuba in, we hoped, such clean and orderly lines that the images of billowing blue waves we would return home with would cause a revolution in the surfing world. Alas, as is so often the case, the revolution we were hoping to create didn’t quite materialise and, as for Cuba being the prettiest girl in the fashion parade, well that too didn’t quite match up with expectations.

As we all know fashion was never supposed to be sensible, practical or even enjoyable, and if the old photographs of you wearing a giant clock, Public Enemy style, around your neck aren’t sufficient to prove this then allow me to tell you of a fad that once caught on in Cuba that will certainly make you see how wrong fashion can be. Los Roqueros were one of the Havana street gangs that were all the rage in the ‘80’s, they loved rock music, grew their hair long and were harassed by the authorities as trouble makers. Like sub-cultures or revolutionaries everywhere they dreamt of a refuge and a place to feel safe and this they finally found in the most unlikely and tragic of places. Back then the AIDS/HIV virus was just starting to make its presence felt and, with media talk of much of the world’s population being wiped out before the decade was past, every nation came up with a plan of how to deal with the virus. In Cuba, a country long famous for its health service, the government set about building special AIDS sanatoriums where victims of the virus could live out their remaining days in relative peace and comfort. Seeing this as an answer to their search for a refuge the Roqueros started to deliberately infect themselves with the HIV virus. Each successful infection was greeted with celebration as another Roquero could join the communes forming in the sanatoriums. The theory behind this fashion disaster was that before the virus took too strong a hold of their bodies a cure would have been discovered and they would have benefited from a couple of years of easy living, but of course no cure was forthcoming and the only part of the living that was easy was dying.

The vision that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had of a perfect society is famous the world over and, with universal education, a free and equal health service, housing for all and a guaranteed meal at the end of the day, there is no way that anyone in their right mind could doubt the ideals that have led to the formation of modern Cuba. If it had worked then maybe Cuba really could sit easy with the title of worlds most fashionable holiday destination, but the problem is, like so often happens with revolutions and fashions, things didn’t work out as planned and, for no real fault of its own, Cuba’s collective vision of the perfect human society has turned cloudy and all that was pure has become rotten. So what was it that went wrong? Who took the glory out of the glorious revolution? The answer is a long one with many different players and yes, mismanagement and corruption within Cuba has a massive part to play, but at the end of the day the real suffering on the streets of Havana, Baracoa and Santiago are the fault of the nasty bully to the north. The good old US of A. It’s no secret that Havana and Washington have been the best of enemies since the day Fidel Castro and buddies reclaimed Cuba for the Cubans back in ‘59. Prior to that day Cuba had put up with a string of US backed dictators, who, in return for a few under the table payments, handed out more than half of Cuba’s land, industry and services to foreign, mainly US, companies who essentially raped the country of all its commodities and gave nothing in return. When the young Castro and Guevara, finally walked victorious into Havana and set about the enormous task of stamping out corruption and re-distributing wealth and opportunities equally amongst the people the Americans got in a mood and vowed revenge. Since then there have been failed invasions and exploding cigars as the CIA has done its utmost to unseat Castro, but it’s the continuing sanctions on almost all foreign imports to Cuba that hurt the most. Today the sanctions are tighter than ever and once again it’s the average person in the street who is suffering and all because of a collective vision to create a fair and just society. Despite what the White House would like us to believe Castro is no Saddam, but at the same time nobody could say that he or his government are saints. Hand in hand with the good has come the bad and oppressive policing, media censorship and controls on all aspects of life are a part and parcel of what is, without doubt, a dictatorship.

Our journey started in Havana, the once beautiful girl now long past her prime, and at first everything was as fashionably Cuban as the tourist brochures led us to believe. There were streets and streets full of calmly crumbling art-deco houses, stunning women in short skirts, pink Chevy’s at all the junctions, old men with cigars and music and dancing at every turn. My brother even commented that it was the first place he had been that was actually exactly how it was supposed to be, but then we went into a supermarket and everything changed. Before us stretched empty shelves and deserted freezer units, a true Sahara desert of nothingness interspersed with an occasional oasis in the form of a packet of pasta or a tin of tomato paste and from that encounter onwards all our opinions of Cuba began to unravel. This was a nation not of iconic leaders and fun in the sun, but rather a nation of hunger, suffering and humiliation and that’s where the Roqueros come into it. Though every Cuban gets a daily food allowance from the government hunger is, thanks to the US enforced embargo, a part and parcel of life. The Roqueros, as well as seeking a refugee, were seeking full bellies and they had realised that the daily food allowance given to patients in the sanatoriums was higher and of better quality than that given to everyone else and so, by deliberately infecting themselves with HIV, they were also sticking a finger up at Castro and Guevara’s fashionable revolution and saying that death was preferable to life under the revolution.

Two days after arriving in Havana the Caribbean Sea, which up until that moment had been as smooth as glass, began to stir. A swell, born off the coast of Texas, was approaching and so, clambering into our hire car, we set off out of the city in search of billowing blue waves and the Cuba of tourist brochures. Before we go any further let’s get something straight. Have you ever read a surf travel article that didn’t make you glow with jealously? Have you ever read a surf travel article that didn’t make you want too quit your 9-5 and head off to paradise? Even the surf trips that clearly didn’t score good waves somehow seem to have been perfect. How can this be? Simple, if the writer doesn’t make the reader want to see, feel and experience the destination country and its waves for themselves then they aren’t doing their job properly and therefore the story is unlikely to be gracing the pages of the magazine you now hold in your hands. The surf media isn’t alone in this conspiracy. Travel brochures are famous for such deceit, but that doesn’t matter, because if they can make you believe that a place is cool and fashionable then you’ll go there and, with blinkers over your eyes, see only what perpetuates the myth and it’s this knowledge that has left me with a bit of a dilemma, because yes, I finally have to admit it, I didn’t enjoy palm trees and a Latin temptress. I didn’t enjoy billowing blue waves. I didn’t enjoy the most fashionable of holiday destinations, but worse than all of that, was that I saw that fashion had got it badly wrong on the day it turned the Cuban revolution into nothing but a fashion statement.

Our first day searching for surf didn’t go all that smoothly. The swell arrived right on time but it didn’t seem to matter how far we drove and how many beaches and points we checked we simply couldn’t find anywhere with an even vaguely rideble wave. For kilometre after kilometre the flat, jagged rock reef stretched, sometimes dropping away abruptly from the shore, sometimes forming a fringing reef way out of reach, but whatever form it took the waves were always the same grey, cascading close outs with no shape or style whatsoever. As if this wasn’t insult enough, nothing else seemed to fall into place either, soft sandy beaches were non-existent, palms were bent double in the wind and the towns, well they were everything I would expect of a forgotten industrial city in Siberia. We continued to persevere until night fall when our attention turned from waves to sleep, but every hotel, guesthouse or campsite we came across turned us away with the words, ‘No license for foreigners. Tourists forbidden’. It seemed that Castro, in his enthusiasm to keep his Socialist revolution untainted had done his utmost to ban Cubans from mixing with us nasty capitalist foreigners. Now that’s something the fashion aware tourist brochures forget to tell us.

Our experiences of Cuba didn’t improve much in the coming days and weeks. From one end of the country to the other we traipsed in search of surf, close to the eastern tip of the island we found a potential point break where we rode wobbly two foot rights in a beautiful forest clad bay, but that though was as close as we came to seeing the Cuba of popular imagination. Everywhere else we went all we came across were rocky close outs with plenty of backwash that, though rideable, were hardly the kind of waves to grace the pages of fashionable surf magazines. But it wasn’t so much the poor waves that were such a turn off, but the realisation that we had been lied too for so many years. Cuba was not the fashionable country of swinging salsa and minty mojitos, but was instead a country where so much potential had been squandered. You’ll see what I mean if you too visit Cuba today and take a look beyond the shiny, happy resorts and the Havana façade. Step inside a pharmacy to experience this free and equal health service and what you’ll actually find are groups of people milling about waiting for basic medicines that are impossible to obtain. Pop into a school and you’ll find such a lack of essential tools that the whole purpose of education becomes worthless and, finally, just try going into a local café to buy some of Cuba’s famous coffee. Those experiences will surely leave you wondering how we ever turned Cuba into a fashion statement.

Standing in a plaza, under the gaze of a giant Che Guevara mural, with ten thousand others, listening to the now old and frail Castro comparing George Bush to Adolf Hitler, I could not help but to think of how Cuba had maybe come closer than any other nation in creating the perfect society, but unfortunately, just as they got close, the revolution went wrong. Like Morrison, Lennon, and Cobain, Guevara died young and will live forever as the ultimate fashion icon for those seeking something new, something alternative, something, if not better, then certainly different, but Castro? Well as he continued to rant against everyone but himself he suddenly started to appear a little stale, a little like a fashion that’s been around just a bit too long and I couldn’t help but to think of the mans most famous speech, made long before his victorious march into Havana, back when he was the leader of a fresh and fashionable revolution in the making. Sitting in court, shortly before being sent to prison accused of treason by the US backed Bastia dictatorship, Castro spoke with passion on the inequalities present in Cuban society at the time. His speech ended with the immortal words, ‘Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me’. As he now nears the end of his life and Cuba prepares itself for an uncertain future you have to ask yourself one question. Fidel Castro, icon of the modern age and leader of the Cuban fashion disaster. Will history absolve you?

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