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Beneath the rain, beneath the smell, beneath all that is a reality a people makes and unmakes itself leaving testimonies Virgilio Piñera         It is always raining when I land in Havana This time, as we taxied across the sleek, empty runway towards the tarmac I watched the serrated tops of royal palms materialise through the mist, felt humidity rising from the dank red soil We trundled past a row of hangars: an elephant’s graveyard for a decommissioned Cubana fleet, a Soviet MiG and a passenger plane with a coat of pale moss enveloping its flank I recalled my surprise when, arriving from Bogotá in 2013, we’d pulled in next to a tiny private jet glistening in the rain, an emissary from another world There was a Venezuelan flag on the tailfin which made me think of President Hugo Chávez, then undergoing cancer treatment in Cuba: later I heard it had brought his daughters to the island, come to take him home, where he was to die a couple of weeks later     ¶ In 2010, while living in Havana, I visited my friend Silvio who’d gone to Caracas on a ‘mission’ for six months as part of a bilateral deal between the Cuban and Venezuelan governments Missions were integral to the generous internationalism of the Cuban revolutionary project, but some betokened necessity In exchange for cheap oil, Cuba would provide doctors and military personnel to train their Venezuelan counterparts As a representative of the smaller, cultural, cadre, Silvio’s duty was to play music up in the cerros – the hillside slums surrounding the capital – for which he’d earn 700 dollars a month (the Cuban government retained the rest of his wages) Silvio had little desire to be there – his first trip abroad, he’d left his wife and children in Havana – but as the average monthly wage in Cuba was 25 dollars, this was a chance to earn serious money All the Cubans were put up downtown at the Hotel Alba – once the Caracas Hilton, until Chávez nationalised it Silvio’s roommate was away, in the provinces on a literacy campaign,