It was the stuff of dreams, a sleepy lagoon so exotic and embedded in time it could have burst from a century-old canvas by Henri Rousseau. Ever so slowly, the tropical panorama began to stir in in the brilliant morning sun. Thatched huts, hovering dry on water-soaked stilts, encircled the cove like a necklace of tropic charms. Still waters mirrored the ancient dwellings and the slender palms towering like sentinels above them.
A dugout inched silently from shore, its shallow wake undulating above a silvery-school of fish bent on breakfast. Birds of every color darted overhead, while their cousins, enshrouded in broadleafs, scanned for mosquitoes in humid air.
Guama, like the island of Cuba surrounding it, was materializing in the mist of a dazzling spring morning.
The resplendence of the aging tourist center at Guama was but one unexpected delight encountered on a zigzag across Cuba–from Santiago to Havana–while the island staggered in economic despair.
When photographer Eduardo Contreras and I kicked around the option of making the trip that took us to Guama and other scattered sites, several questions raced to mind:
1. Would a rental car and its tires survive at least 700 miles and five days, especially on a road system scrounging for repair money in a bankrupt economy?
2. Would there be an adequate gas supply in a system suffering from unprecedented shortages of fuel and everything else?
3. Was it safe for two Americans–even savvy travelers who were not strangers to lost horizons and distant fields of battle–to drive across a country whose leadership had hurled words like bullets at the United States for more than 30 years?
4. Would we find adequate food in a land that virtually went bankrupt in 1992 after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, whom Cuba depended on for 80 percent of its imports? Everything from gasoline to razor blades was severely rationed and even basic food products were hard to come by without the U.S. dollars to purchase them.
5. Would we be hounded by the secret police, or would roadblocks prevent us from exploring treasures seldom seen by outsiders?
“You’ll find extraordinary friendship wherever you go,” a young engineer had said during a stroll along Old Havana’s gracefully curving Malecon sea front, near the wave-covered grave of the USS Maine, whose mysterious sinking kicked off the Spanish-American War. “Forget Castro’s crap about the Yankees. Next to Spanish, friendship is our second language.”
His talk turned out to be an understatement. But on the so-called Forbidden Island, there was reason for concern.
Journalists and some U.S.-approved research scholars are the only Americans who can travel legally to Cuba these days following last year’s tightening of the Cuban Democracy Act, which links any easing of U.S. economic sanctions with Cuban progress toward political and economic reform.
While the act turned Cuba into the playground of Canadians, Europeans, Mexicans and South Americans, thousands from the United States manage to visit the seductive island clandestinely from a variety of foreign ports.
But Cuba’s police don’t necessarily view Americans who risk travel to Cuba as the good guys–especially if they are journalists. When my plane from Miami landed in Havana’s Jose Marti airport, I’d been quickly singled out by customs for special treatment. Every bag was searched, every letter I’d been carrying from Cuban friends in the United States to relatives in Havana was torn open and read, every item of clothing examined and the titles of all books and magazines copied down.
With nothing to show for their search, a heavy in civvies apologized for the hour’s delay, and soon I was pushing through the crowded airport toward a cab for Havana.
Across a dozen sultry blocks from the Malecon in Old Havana, where majestic Spanish mansions crumble from neglect, an official from the foreign ministry sipped sugared coffee and spoke with envy.
“I wish I was going with you,” he said. “I am from Santiago. It’s our most beautiful city. There is so much I could show you along the way!”
We’d be on our own, he said, traveling without the kind of official government watchdog that journalists in earlier times had been saddled with on backcountry expeditions.
The kickoff point, after a flight across the island from Havana, was Santiago de Cuba, a laid-back city of salsa made for the music of weekends and the night. Children flood its central park Saturdays and Sundays, cramming into pony carts, while their older brothers, sisters and parents turn the night into a fiesta of Carib bands on stages hammered together across side streets.
Spain’s Diego de Velazquez founded the city as Cuba’s capital in 1514 and named it for St. Jago. Sweeping gently from the lush slopes of the Sierra Maestras, the first stronghold of Castro’s revolutionary fighters, the city spills softly into the azure Caribbean waters of Santiago Bay.
“The city has the best Caribbean flavor on the island–you’ll be captivated by the folklore, the temperament and especially the warmth of the people,” said one of the city’s top theater officials.
But the stunning human spirit and soul-soaked streets run in stark counterpoint to the cruel blow time and official neglect have dealt the majestic colonial mansions and once-famed hotels in Santiago and other cities on the road to Havana.
As in much of Cuba, the city’s past links with the United States are visible but not bragged about.
On a hill called San Juan on the edge of town, cows grazed among eroding trenches occupied by U.S. troops after Teddy Roosevelt led his Rough Riders to its summit in 1898. Roosevelt’s charge hastened Spain’s defeat and helped guarantee a U.S. presence on the island.
“When Spain surrendered to U.S. troops, the stars and stripes replaced the Spanish flag, and mambis were barred from Santiago,” author Tom Miller wrote in “Trading With the Enemy.” “Cuba, in its War of Independence, simply went from the Spanish column to the U.S. column as if the country were a prize in a game show.”
But the slight wasn’t totally unavenged. Roosevelt’s name is nowhere to be seen on San Juan Hill, and a plaque commemorating the U.S. role in capturing the rise has been removed from a pedestal bearing a bronze statue of a U.S. Marine, looking wistfully across a valley with shouldered rifle and hat in hand.
On the opposite side of the city, high on a peninsula separating Santiago Bay from the Atlantic, sits the Morro Castle, one of Colonial Spain’s most spectacular monuments of war.
A maze of stairways, armories, chambers and dungeons, the fortress balances on a gun-studded cliff hammered below by powerful waves from the Atlantic, where marauding pirates flew the Jolly Roger and Spanish ships went to the bottom under American guns.
Scratched on a cannon forged in 1748 France was the name of a military tourist who visited the site some 150 years later–“R. McLean, USS Yale.”
Inside are two museums–one housing displays related to famed pirates of the Caribbean and the other dedicated to what the curators call the “new pirates,” Cuban exiles allegedly captured or killed on raids or landings aimed at Castro’s overthrow. Showcase descriptions indicate that most of the weapons, small boats and other military paraphernalia on display was captured from CIA-sponsored expeditions from Florida.
Heading west from Santiago, a sturdy two-lane highway climbs gently into the Sierra Maestra through country laced with Spanish copper mines and revered as one of Cuba’s most sacred spots–El Cobre and a mystical statue of the Caridad del Cobre, the Virgin Mary, considered the island’s patron saint.
Two Indian brothers and a young slave collecting salt in the Bay of Nipe discovered the foot-long image floating on a 3-foot board bearing the inscription: “I am the Virgin of Charity.”
Today the statue is displayed in an ambient church topping a knoll in a green-clad ancient crater, less than a mile from the tapping sound of a hammer swung by a Canadian miner exploring green veins for mineral wealth in an old Spanish mine.
White church walls against a backdrop of sweeping green bear mute witness to the impossible battle faced by Communist bosses in their effort to crush religion. The Cuban church survived three decades of Marxist propaganda and persecution, and even gained strength in times of crisis.
Pilgrims flock to Cobre, leaving behind showcases filled with an array of gifts, ranging from military chevrons (brought in secretly until 1991, when anti-religious fervor eased) and Communist Party cards to baseballs and valuables in gold and silver. Crutches and medical objects stand as trophies to miraculous cures.
“It is a miracle how people feel the presence of God every day through the virgin,” said Father Rafael Couso Falcon. “It is the virgin who saved the faith of the people. Every day her presence grows across the island.”
Estimates of pilgrims range to 60,000 monthly, with visits some months climbing to 90,000.
“I don’t know how they manage (to travel so far),” he said, referring to the compounding problems cash-strapped Cubans faced in making ends meet. “If you know how serious the (economic) situation is, you have to admire these people. With such food problems, it takes a lot of courage.”
North of Cobre, on the road toward Holguin, the Sierra Maestra in late spring can test the mettle of the best country driver. Storm clouds blown in from the sea swell into voluminous thunderheads that spill upon lush jungles. Angry torrents wash scattered hamlets clean, tear through gorges and culverts, cut channels across roadways and make underwater passages of hardy mountain bridges.
But the road drops quickly on the northern side of Cuba’s spine, giving way to a countryside famed for its fruit, beans, sugar and cattle. Draped in a breathtaking array of virtually every shade of green, the gently rolling countryside is a panorama spreading backward in time.
Houses of thatched roofs and bamboo walls huddle amid sheltering Royal Palms and mango trees rocked gently by balmy winds off the Florida Straits. Schoolgirls in bright red jumpers and boys in red shorts stroll toward home. Small horses pull carts choked with riders. Windmills wave giant arms at oxen weighed down by loads of cornstalks.
Smokestacks towering above giant sugar refineries– struck silent by a string of disastrous sugar harvests–stand dead in the thickening air, their lack of smoke mocked by the swirling black clouds that cast bolts of lightning at a backdrop of sawtooth ridges.
This is a part of Cuba’s soul that future travelers may never see: a pristine countryside untouched by progress and dealt with gently by time and the absence of tourists.
Cuba’s transportation disaster–caused by a dearth of gasoline and spare parts–is evident in the throngs jamming every rural bus stop waiting for carriers that often never come. Stopping next to such a gathering brings a flurry of requests for rides, an experience that brings foreign travelers face-to-face with perhaps Cuba’s finest product–its people.
“They never cease to amaze me–how nice they are with all the problems they’ve got,” Marc Frank, a U.S. writer living in Cuba, had said earlier when a shirtless man showed us directions through Holguin by leading us down twisting lanes on his bike.
On the road to Guardalavaca, seconds after we had come to a stop near a burgeoning crowd at a bus stop, Pedro Jorge Torres and two of his children piled in.
“You’ve fallen out of the sky for me,” said Torres from the back seat, offering warm bread from a cloth bag. “I’ve got to get my kids to a dental appointment far away and I was standing there praying to God that we’d get a ride. Maybe a truck or tractor, I thought. We’ve been waiting since 6.” It was 9:30 a.m.
To the northeast was Guardalavaca, a resort region of stunning white sand and modern hotels filled with British, German and French tourists. Women lying topless seem oblivious to leering construction workers on breaks from jobs building new hotels financed by Spanish investors.
Officials estimate that 850,000 foreign tourists will visit Cuba this year, leaving behind about $1 billion. The figure compared to 617,000 who visited Cuba in 1994 to the tune of $850 million. Though the government has invested heavily in the tourist trade, it is estimated to keep roughly a third of the take.
Many arrive from Europe, Canada and other Latin American countries on inexpensive tours that keep them virtually stranded at magnificent but remote meccas like Guardelavaca, Varadero and offshore island resorts, creating what is called tourist apartheid, a condition that keeps foreigners and ordinary Cubans out of each other’s reach.
West along the coast was Gibara, on a seashore so spectacular in its beauty that upon seeing it Columbus wrote in his log: “I have never seen a more beautiful place: has such marvelous beauty that it surpasses all others in charms and graces as the day doth the night in luster.”
A fisherman named Carlos looked across a windswept bay at a saddle-shaped mountain and nodded in agreement. “We get for free what tourists travel great distances for big money to enjoy.” Holding up a plump yellowtail, Carlos grinned broadly and said: “But back to work; if we don’t catch, we don’t eat.”
Doubling back to the south coast and the sparkling city of Trinidad takes a traveler through the Escambrays, past mountain resorts and lakeside hotels. Sturdy Spanish churches and bell towers, and block after block of colonial housing, crowd the center of Trinidad, perhaps the Caribbean’s best preserved colonial city.
Carlos Joaquin sat in his spacious 18th Century living room and spoke of his city, which was founded by Velazquez in 1514. Joaquin helped restore the town’s historic center in a UNESCO-backed program that began in 1965.
“This is one of the few cities in the world so well preserved,” said Joaquin. “There was a terrible economic crisis from 1856 until the middle of this century, so nobody had much of a chance to rebuild anything. That actually made restoration easier. Now you can go to one part of the city and see one epoch and to another to see a different era.”
A climb to the bell tower of the Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria de la Popa church provides a memorable panorama of cobblestoned streets and red-tiled roofs spread across houses from another world with walls covered in fragrant bougainvillea.
Further to the west, beyond Guama and the Laguna del Tesoro, where legendary Indians cast gold into the waters to prevent its capture by Spanish Conquistadors, lies the Bahia de Cochinos, which translates into a more modern legend, the Bay of Pigs.
Today a soft surf rolls peacefully onto the long shoreline, where a resort hotel, scattered cabins and a disco accommodate both Cuban and foreign tourists. Some in Giron, site of the worst fighting in the April 1961 invasion attempt, still remember the sounds of war.
“I remember the morning I first saw the first lights from the boats carrying the invaders here,” said Josefa Franeo, immediately after she raised the Cuban flag to the top of its staff in front of the Historical Museum containing downed aircraft and captured landing craft and other weapons supplied by the CIA.
“We immediately notified the coast guard. I can remember the noise from the guns. My family took off for the mountains and found refuge in a cave. A plane came over and dropped a bomb that actually left a crater bigger than the cave we were hiding in.”
Later, she said, her group encountered a batch of “mercenaries, who gave us cigars and wine. They told us to hide. They were awaiting reinforcements.”
But reinforcements never came, and hundreds of the Cuban exiles who composed the invasion force were captured and paraded dramatically before Cuban television cameras.
Near a spot where fishermen prepared their rowboats for a morning catch, Raul Hernandez Rodriguez was asked whether he thought invaders under the control of the United States ever would return.
“I don’t think so,” he said looking across gray water lapping below the fog of a coastal dawn. “I don’t think they will.”
Was the concern felt at the beginning of our long journey justified? Not at all.
Both the car and its tires held up beautifully over hundreds of miles of roads relatively free of potholes and other damage. Lead-free gas was available in most stations along the way.
At no time–even after midnight in a rundown section of old Santiago–did we feel any sense of personal danger. Acceptable food was available in hotel dining rooms along the way. Ham and cheese sandwiches were ubiquitous.
Roadblocks were totally unseen and at no point was there evidence of surveillance by local authorities or Cuba’s Soviet-trained secret police.
But the comfort of crossing an alluring island in a new rental sedan stood in contrast to the method used by at least one British couple “roughing it” across the island on cheap public transportation.
In Trinidad’s main square, the words foamed with frustration.
“I’m just livid over how things are done here,” said a woman in her late 30s. “Look, I was a firm believer in Fidel and Che (Ernesto “Che” Guevara) in the ’70s. Now I am appalled. You can be as idealistic as you like, but after standing around for 10 or 11 hours on the hot asphalt waiting for a ride, you are prepared to compromise the most cherished of your principles.”
Her compromise? Waiving a $5 bill at passing motorists in hopes of hitching a ride while hundreds of other Cubans without U.S. cash continued their long wait for a public bus.
CAR TRIP GUIDELINES
Traveling by car across Cuba requires adherence to special guidelines, rules and precautions. Among them:
1. Though gasoline stations can be found in cities and towns, it is best to fill up your tank at every opportunity, especially when crossing vast distances between cities. Make sure the gas you are buying comes from special green unleaded pumps. Rental cars use unleaded gas and they are not fitted with gas receptacles that prohibit the use of leaded nozzles.
2. When possible, avoid night driving, not in fear of violence but due to the nature of Cuba’s narrow roadways and more primitive modes of travel: Many Cubans travel on horse- or ox-drawn carts; pedestrians, bicycles and other vehicles use the roads after dark without lights or reflectors. Livestock often wanders onto highways.
3. Scan the roads for potholes in a nation strapped for funds allowing repair.
4. Always ask directions if uncertain about your whereabouts or immediate destination. Cubans are quick to assist visitors and enthusiastically give directions that can be relied upon. Allow extra time for finding you way through some cities and towns. Maps are scarce.
5. Bring a good Spanish phrase book, and try in advance to learn basic phrases involving questions on directions and ordering meals. None of the Cubans encountered on our cross-country voyage spoke English.
6. Pick up all the Cubans you can at bus stops and along highways. Using common sense, there is little danger in this and it provides one of the best ways possible of meeting the islanders.
7. When renting cars, insist on a newer vehicle with relatively few miles on its odometer. Call every minor scratch, dimple and dent to the renter’s attention and make certain he indicates the damage on the condition-disposition sheet you get with your rental agreement. Take all supplementary liability and damage insurance available. Rental agencies accept only cash, not U.S.-issued credit cards.
8. Carry with you basic medicines, such as aspirin and iodine. Such products are not available in Cuban shops, although they usually can be bought in the special stores in major cities that accept only U.S. dollars.
9. Bring a supply of insect repellent and sting easers to offset seasonal swarms of mosquitoes in the island’s swamps and tropical forests.
10. Cubans love to receive gifts and souvenirs, such as soap, cigarettes or inexpensive lighters. It is better to disperse such gifts among average Cubans you will encounter, not the obvious hustlers common to the streets of major cities.
DETAILS ON THE ISLAND
Getting there: While it is legal for U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba, it is against U.S. law to spend money while on the island. Since it is necessary to pay for food and lodging in Cuba, it virtually would be impossible to avoid breaking the law.
Nonetheless, Americans by the thousands travel to Cuba via third countries, primarily nations in the Caribbean and Mexico.
Willful violation of the legislation, called the Trading With the Enemy Act, allows a U.S. court to impose a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Prosecution, however, has been rare.
U.S. travelers reach Cuba from a variety of foreign countries, including the Bahamas, Jamaica, Cayman Islands, Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Canada. Two agencies with high-volume Cuba-bound business are Hip Hop Travel in Nassau, the Bahamas (809-356-4663), and the Otto Viajes agency in Mexico City (direct dial: 011-52-5-661-0952 or 011-52-5-661-0825).
Package tours: At the beginning of June, Hip Hop Travel was offering a round-trip air ticket–and a Cuban tourist visa–for $187. Ground tours offered by Hip Hop were ranging from $296 for three nights in Havana to more than $750 for a weeklong stay in Havana and the Veradero resort area, with ground transportation and continental breakfast included. Prices (all per person, double occupancy) depend on seasonal rates and can change quickly.
Travelers should have a full understanding of precisely what meals are included in their tour package. Resort and city hotels often charge high rates for meals not included in a travel package.
The prices do not include the cost of air travel from American cities to the foreign jump-off locations.
Getting around: Once in Cuba, accessibility to most of the island is possible using private or public transportation, although a shortage of gasoline and spare parts has rendered public transportation unreliable.
Auto rental agencies have offices in most of Havana’s tourist hotels, with cars available on daily rates currently going for $55 a day for a standard four-door Japanese sedan, with unlimited mileage. A deposit of $250 is required. Insurance is $5 to $10 extra per day, depending on the coverage taken. Unleaded gasoline can be purchased at state-operated Cupet service stations in all cities and, occasionally, in smaller towns at 90 cents (U.S.) a liter (roughly $3 a gallon).
Photographer Eduardo Contreras and I commenced our auto trip across Cuba by flying some 450 air miles from Havana to Santiago de Cuba on a twin-prop flown by Cubana Airlines at a rate of $68 each.
We rented a late-model Japanese car from an agency adjacent to our Santiago hotel, and encountered no difficulty with the vehicle during our five-day, 700-mile journey over adequate roads with very little traffic along the way.
Hotels: We stayed at the 5-star, newly built Santiago Hotel for $125 per room on a Saturday and Sunday night. Had we been part of a package tour, the rate would have been considerably lower. Our comfortable rooms were equipped with Sony TV sets carrying a range of networks, including CNN. Modern dining rooms with international menus were available in the hotel, one offering a breakfast buffet with eggs, bacon and a variety of tropical fruit.
Hotel rooms were readily available without reservations at prices ranging from roughly $40 for a decent room in smaller town to $170 and more in 5-star luxury class hotels springing up in tourist resorts. Occupancy rates for the island’s international tourist rooms is listed at roughly 55 percent.
(Mexico City’s Otto Viajes travel agency said they offer hotel prices–per person, double occupancy–ranging from a week in a cheaper Havana hotel for $383 to some $560 for seven nights in Havana’s luxurious 5-star Cohiba Hotel, the city’s newest tourist haven.)
Food: A growing number of fast-food-style restaurants made food easy to find, with the popular jamon y queso (ham and cheese) sandwiches and dishes of Cuban rice and beans available virtually everywhere for under $5.
Cigars: Cuba’s famed cigars were available in hotel gift shops, special dollar-only tourist stores and at Havana’s H. Upmann Tobacco Factory, where a tour might be arranged through Olga Torriente, a congenial plant engineer. However, Cuban-made cigars brought into the United States can be confiscated by U.S. Customs.
Currency: Bring a sufficient quantity of American dollars to cover your expenses in Cuba. Credit cards and traveler’s checks issued by U.S. banks are not accepted on the island due to the U.S. embargo. Cuban pesos and U.S. dollars are the only currencies accepted in Cuba. The dollar is the preferred currency and is accepted everywhere. The exchange rate is 1 peso per dollar.
Accessibility: Cuba appears to have no special standards or policies to accommodate disabled visitors. Havana’s new Cohiba Hotel said it has two more-expensive suites equipped for the use of wheelchairs. Special ramps were unseen, but one hotel staffer said his co-workers would “help you in and out.”
Information: A 24-hour tourist hot line, called Asistour, has been newly established in Cuba, but its phone number could change without notice. Ask your tourist agency or hotel for the current number.
