The clandestine emigrants

On Friday 25 November 2016 one of the world's best-known heroes or villains, depending on your standpoint, finally succumbed to the enemy that nobody ever defeats. Fidel Castro was cremated the following day and the island of Cuba entered a nine-day period of mourning. Followed by, we can be sure, a much more prolonged feeling of strangeness, a sensation that the world has changed.

So what has this got to do with La Gomera?

Let's address that question with irritating obliqueness by following Doris and Bill as they make their way down the gangway from their cruise ship, one sunny morning in the port of San Sebastián. They are refugees from a grim Lancashire winter, taking a week's sunshine cruise around the Canary Islands, and this is their day in La Gomera.

Ripe for adventure, or at least for something vaguely interesting, Bill and Doris stroll hand in hand past the neat rows of yachts in the marina. As they approach the town they pass a flower bed where a small metal sculpture lurks apologetically beneath a giant cactus.

Doris pauses to look at it. 'It's a yacht,' Bill tells her and tries to walk on but Doris, who was once a teacher and likes to know about things, has caught a whiff of history. 'It's bigger than a yacht, Bill. It's an old sailing ship.'

Bill grunts and bends down to look at the bronze plaque beneath the ship. 'Telly-macko,' he reads. Shrugging, he takes Doris's hand again and pulls her onwards.

Well, they did better than most - at least they noticed it. But they've just dismissed an extraordinary and highly emblematic event in Gomeran history. This humble sculpture commemorates the sailing of the Telémaco (Tell-AY-mako) in August 1950, the last sailing ship to depart from La Gomera carrying clandestine emigrants across the Atlantic to South America.

Why clandestine? Because in 1950 General Franco, the Generalissimo, was still very much in control of everything that happened in Spain and strongly discouraged emigration, even from islands such as the Canaries which he had allowed to descend into deep poverty and hardship.

The Telémaco passengers had a terrible time on their voyage, but some of them eventually managed to settle in Venezuela. Many other such fly-by-night escapees from the Canary Islands fetched up on the island of Cuba, and many of them stayed there. So there's our first clue to the Castro conundrum.

Meanwhile, Doris and Bill have just happened upon another highly significant monument as they stroll along the seafront. This time it's a large lump of rusted metal perched precariously on a marble-clad plinth. Bill is a little more intrigued here, walks around the monument, peers through the central hole as though it were a telescope or Henry Moore sculpture.

He stands back to squint at it for a moment then announces: 'Propeller!' Correct, got it in one. 'It's the shaft of a ship's propeller. Must've been quite a big boat.'

There is a bronze plaque on the plinth but the embossed text is difficult to read and anyway it's in Spanish, so most visitors never find out what this thing is. Sadly, it's all that is left of the proud Cantabria, a transatlantic steamship whose captain took the bold decision, on the fifth of March 1862, to beach his ship in the harbour of San Sebastián after it suffered mechanical problems and a dangerous leak.

The Cantabria was bound for Cuba with a battalion of Spanish troops. At that time Cuba was still a Spanish colony but showing increasing signs of not wanting not to be, and Spain was reacting with a brutal campaign of suppression.

In short - what these two humble monuments illustrate is the closely interwoven histories of the Americas and the Canary Islands. There are large numbers of Latin Americans today with Canary Island blood in their veins, and in recent years many have returned to the Canaries, ironically, in search of work and a better way of life. It's by no means a flood, nothing to merit a Donald Trump We're gonna build a wall! - but here in La Gomera I know of families from Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Cuba.

Especially Cubans. There are quite a few of those. They fit here perfectly, their culture is much the same, hardworking but friendly and cheerful. I asked a few of them in San Sebastián how they felt about the demise of Fidel Castro, their revolutionary Comandante and head of state for the last half century and more.

Most were neutral - 'He was an old man, death comes to all of us, it won't change anything very much' - but Yani, a waitress in one of our favourite cafés, confessed to feeling triste, sad. Maybe she was sad about Fidel, or maybe the news of his passing reminded her of family, friends and her earlier life in Cuba.

Yani is settled here now, with her own family, but like all our Cubans she goes home now and again for a holiday. Mostly they come back complaining about the heat. There's really nowhere better to live than La Gomera, even if you're Cuban.

Notes for the serious student
The Telémaco was heading for Venezuela, a voyage of nearly 6,000 kilometres. A small cargo schooner, it set sail on the ninth of August 1950 with 170 men and one woman crammed like sardines on the deck and below. They left at night, without permits, without papers, and with nothing but hope to greet them when they arrived. Skippered by a local fisherman who had never before ventured out of sight of land, because the professional pilot who was booked to do the job took one look at the ship and fled.

Not long into the voyage they suffered two great storms, followed by continuing heavy seas that washed overboard most of their provisions, including the water barrels. They were saved from almost certain death from starvation and dehydration by a Spanish oil tanker whose captain gave them water and rice. Four terrible weeks after setting off, they arrived at the island of Martinique where the inhabitants took them in for a few days, revived them with food and kindness and gave them provisions for the rest of their journey.

Six days' more sailing took them to the port of La Guaira in Venezuela, where the authorities immediately sifted out the fourteen voyagers they considered responsible for this adventure, imprisoned them in Caracas for 45 days then sent them back to Tenerife.

Some of the other would-be emigrants chanced their luck by slipping away illegally into the hinterland, where they generally had a hard time, while the rest were eventually given immigration papers and found work of one kind or another in Venezuela.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of this story is that ten days into their voyage, while they were fighting the waves, Franco lifted his ban on emigration. If they'd waited a couple more weeks they could have done it all so much more easily.