Fly me to Cuba.

Tonight the memory of the demise of Castro a few years ago and its attendant macabre carnival, stirred a melancholy recall in that part of my heart where my inner child still resides. 

Three young Cuban soldiers came calling at our house at night in a remote corner of Malawi, close to the border with Tanzania. It was 1965. They had strayed across that border where they should not have been and one had Malaria. In battle fatigues and with beards and guns I looked upon them as a bit of an intriguing curiosity. My parents saw them as an opportunity to show kindness and my younger brother noted aloud that they were all very smelly. 

Our parents swore us to secrecy and that indicated an adventure. A bed was made up in the guest room for the sick soldier, food was made and water heated  for washing. The soldier in charge spent the night slung carelessly in a chair inside the front door, gun at the ready,  and the other took the spare bed in my room. What were my parents thinking? 

I didn't sleep much that night but the soldier did and he snored for a long time. He had a strange smell coming off him but it wasn't dirt. I remember half thinking of putting on his rumpled army trousers and trying on his boots but even as a seven year old I knew that that would be weird. I watched the sleeping warrior most of the night as he snored, farted, tossed and turned. I was watching him intently when he woke and he was clearly unnerved to open his eyes and see a little boy staring at him. 

I watched him pulling on his magnificent boots - how I wanted a pair of boots like those - and his camouflage trousers. A packet of cigarettes fell out of his pocket and then I knew that it was tobacco that the nameless soldier smelled of and I decided I wanted to smoke, wear black boots and army fatigues. I wanted to be Cuban, whatever that was. 

For three days the boy soldiers stayed with us, spending most of the day on the veranda at the back of the house where no-one could see them; but there was no-one about to see them. Then they were gone. 

In time the smell of the smoky soldier faded from my room and the memory of him became part of a colourful, never-ending phantasmagoria of dangerous, edgy, often nameless characters who passed through our lives and sometimes slept in my room if my parents trusted them. Their smells have all merged over time into a melancholic nostalgia that leaves me a little bit disappointed. 

They are probably all dead now. I know that one became president of a not insignificant republic: I couldn't possibly say which. He was assassinated.