By Sandra Blakeslee.
The New York Times. February
18, 2001
KNEW we were in for some serious fun when our Cuban guide mispronounced "cycle
tourists" as "psycho tourists." You don't have to be crazy to
spend two weeks bicycling through Cuba's eastern provinces the Oriente
that hatched three major revolutions, sheltered Fidel Castro in cloud-covered
mountains, and gave birth to the hip-shaking rhythms of Afro-Cuban music
but it helps to have an attitude of cheerfully accepting whatever is thrown your
way.
Years ago I learned that the best way to see a country is by bicycle. As you
round each corner, you often encounter serendipitous delights, which in eastern
Cuba included sparkling aquamarine water, cowboys galloping across fields of
tobacco, undulating grassland and mile-high mountains that rise like petrified
waves.
For this adventure, my partner, Carl, and I met up with nine strangers from
the San Francisco Bay Area all experienced cyclists. We had all signed up
for a tour organized by the Club de Cicloturismo Atenas de Cuba, which works
with the Seattle-based International Bicycle Fund. Our guides were the club
president, Pedro Curbelo Alonso, and his assistants, Julito, Alejandro and
Alfredo. Alfredo drove our gear in an open truck while Pedro, Julito and
Alejandro rode with us to help decipher modern Cuba and its revolutionary past.
Using our own bikes brought from home, we cycled on the near-empty roads of
three provinces: Granma, Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo. Apart from
layovers in a few larger cities and one day with a longer ride, we rode 50 to 70
miles a day. Accommodations varied from a few high-end hotels built for tourists
to home stays with Cuban families. We usually split into small groups to explore
Cuba at our own pace. With the exception of two riders who were in their
mid-30's, all of us were in our 50's, and everyone was in good physical shape.
While our guides were wonderful, caring people, it turned out that Pedro's
helpers couldn't change flat tires, so we pretty much took care of ourselves on
the road. On the other hand, their help was indispensable every time we got off
our bikes.
After three days of pedaling around Havana gawking at decrepit
classic cars and decrepit colonial buildings and 12 hours on a chartered
air-conditioned bus, we began our two-week cycling adventure in Bayamo, the
capital of Granma Province, where the country's largest mountain range, the
Sierra Maestra, dips into the Caribbean. Bayamo may be the cleanest town in
Cuba. We stayed at the immaculate Royalton Hotel on Céspedes Plaza, where
our tour leaders gave us our first indoctrination in Cuban hero worship.
Carlos Manuel Céspedes is the Abe Lincoln of Cuba and father of the
first Cuban revolution. In 1868, he freed the slaves on his sugar plantation and
invited them to help overthrow Spanish colonial rule. When Spain fought back, Céspedes
burned Bayamo to the ground rather than surrender it. He then fled into the
Sierra Maestra. Although Céspedes was soon killed, his followers fought
on for 10 years. Spain won.
The second Cuban revolution began in 1895, when José Martí, a
relentless advocate of Cuban independence, launched a war of liberation in the
eastern provinces. A poet who had no knack for fighting, Martí was killed
while riding his white horse not far from where he landed after returning from
exile. Three years later, his generals were on the verge of defeating Spain when
the United States barged in. Shortly after Theodore Roosevelt, then an assistant
Navy secretary, led the famous Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Santiago de
Cuba, Spain surrendered Cuba to the United States.
The third revolution began on July 26, 1953, when Fidel Castro
unsuccessfully stormed a military compound in Santiago de Cuba, and then was
jailed and exiled. In 1956, he returned in a boat called the Granma and
established his base of operations in the Sierra Maestra. Three years later he
defeated the military dictator Fulgencio Batista and has run the country ever
since. Numerous attempts to overthrow Castro, including the 1961 C.I.A.-backed
Bay of Pigs invasion, have ended in fiasco.
We spent the rest of our trip visiting memorials of all three revolutions in
towns all over the Oriente. Busts of Céspedes, Martí and others
are as common as McDonald's back home. Curiously, we didn't see a single bust of
Castro. But there are billboards everywhere advertising the revolution:
Socialism or Death! The first duty of a revolutionary is work!
In Bayamo, we toured the colonial-period house where Céspedes was
born and visited the church where the national anthem was first sung. We cycled
to the nearby village of Guisa, where Castro's army captured a tank and other
weapons from Batista.
On most days, our guides helped us find places to eat lunch although there
were days when we survived on nutrition bars brought from home. Large cities
have restaurants, but small towns and villages do not. Roadside stands sold
tasteless doughy pizza or tiny bits of ham on white bread. Food for ordinary
Cubans is bland. The staples are rice, beans and bananas. Pork, chicken and fish
are generally fried into hard, greasy lumps. We rarely encountered fresh fruits
and vegetables. We were told that it is safe to drink tap water, but we chose to
buy bottled water. Early in the trip, we bought enough to last the whole time,
and it was readily available from the back of the truck.
On our second evening in Bayamo, we rented horse-drawn carriages for $5 to
take us the couple of miles to the Martyrs of Barbados baseball park. The warm
night air smelled deliciously of charcoal, loam and tropical flowers. I have
never experienced such comfortable outdoor temperatures; we never felt hot or
cold, even when riding in the rain. That night, a team from Granma played one
from Las Tunas before a polite crowd of about 2,000 people.
The all-day ride from Bayamo to Manzanillo passes through fields of rice,
tobacco and sugar cane. We took a dirt road through the back country where we
saw hundreds of egrets and scores of soaring hawks. When we rode past yoked oxen
dragging rusted harrows, I felt as if we were in the 16th century. Horse-drawn
carriages are the main transportation in most smaller towns and cities. No one
is ever in a hurry.
We stopped in Yara to see the 12-foot-high statue of Hatuey, an Indian who,
shortly after the Spanish arrived in 1512, tried to warn other indigenous people
that the newcomers were evil. Hatuey was burned at the stake near the Yara town
plaza.
There is also a small museum just off the plaza that contains memorabilia
from several Cuban wars. Like dozens of other archives of Cuba's revolutions,
this one contained a vast array of well-displayed personal items belonging to
former freedom fighters spectacles, shoes, bloodied shirts, wallets,
scissors and the like.
We spent the night at the three-story Hotel Guacanayabo in Manzanillo, which
gave us excellent service, including a tasty fish dinner. In the morning we took
a quick ride through the central square, which had wonderful Moorish-style
architecture. Then we took off for a 70-mile daylong ride to Marea del Portillo
on the southern coast of the Oriente.
After a stop at the plantation, Farmis Demajagua, where Céspedes
emancipated his slaves, we went a bit farther along the road and toured the home
of Celia Sánchez, who sent supplies to Castro's army. In the little town
of Chura we met our only road hazard light rain mixed with diesel oil and
horse manure. Three of our riders went down, providing us with a reason to visit
a nearby medical clinic. The care was professional, courteous and free.
This part of Cuba, near where Castro launched his revolution, has almost no
cars. Apart from noxious diesel fumes from occasional trucks or buses, we had
the road to ourselves. Rush hour involved goats, chickens and cows headed home
for the evening.
Our lodging that night was a luxury resort called the Hotel Marea del
Portillo. Our Cuban guides were not allowed to cross the threshold. We were told
that most Cubans do not resent this tourism apartheid because everyone knows
that foreign visitors bring in hard currency. At the same time, many Cubans are
getting relatively rich because they have access to tourist dollars.
We spent the next two days on one of the most beautiful roads I have ever
seen. Opened three years ago, this 100-mile stretch of highway goes from Marea
del Portillo to Santiago de Cuba and has scenery to rival Big Sur. To our right,
the Caribbean surf crashed onto white- and black-sand beaches. Unseen just
offshore lay the 23,179-foot-deep Cayman Trench. We pedaled past Cuba's highest
mountain, Pico Turquino, 6,749 feet high.
Along the way we passed thatch huts called bohíos and saw coffee
growing on mountain slopes. The farmers' compounds were spotless. Dogs, pigs and
chickens ate every smidgen of organic matter. We also rode past huge tunnels
carved into limestone cliffs, which we were told had been made to hide tanks and
heavy artillery should Cuba ever be attacked by air.
At Uvero we saw a memorial to the first major battle won by Castro on May
28, 1957: his soldiers overtook a position guarded by 53 Batista soldiers. Our
stop that night was the Sierra Mar Resort at Playa Sevilla, about 40 miles west
of Santiago. It is a big pyramid-shaped tourist hotel built into a terraced
hillside. Such hotels offer package deals that include meals, snorkeling,
swimming pools, tennis courts and the like. We woke in the morning to a steady
downpour and flooded hallways. By noon, there was no break in the weather and so
most of us piled into a rented bus for an hour's drive to Santiago de Cuba. Four
of our party, however, chose to ride in the heavy rain.
Santiago de Cuba is the nation's second- largest city, with many cultural
sights. We visited the Bacardí museum with an art collection and more war
memorabilia, including ominous Spanish instruments of torture. In the Santa
Ifigenia cemetery were mausoleums to the heroes we had been following. San Juan
Hill, where Theodore Roosevelt led the Rough Riders to victory over Spain, is
bedecked with statues, plaques and a tower that explains what happened in 1898
from both Cuban and American points of view. We also rode out to El Cobre, to
see the Basilica de Nuestra Señora del Cobre, the beautiful colonial
church that is Cuba's holiest shrine where Ernest Hemingway placed his
1954 Nobel Prize for good luck.
Private accommodations in Cuba are not meant for persnickety Americans who
might require luxuries like hot water, comfortable mattresses or toilet paper.
On the outside, our 17-story apartment building in Santiago looked like Fort
Apache in the South Bronx grimy, dark, depressing. But the apartments
inside were clean and neat, with basic amenities. We came to call these little
surprises "the Cuban experience" no service at restaurants,
elevators that skip every two floors, single 40-watt bulbs for a whole room
all delivered by extraordinarily warm, friendly people. We never encountered ill
feelings toward Americans.
Cuban culture, we discovered, is distinctive and flourishing. That night we
visited a folk music center where young and old musicians perform. Cuban singers
use outstretched arms and direct eye contact to scoop you into their ballads.
Dancers gyrate in perfect tempo, as if bound by a magnetic force.
Our next stop, after two days in Santiago, was Guantánamo, a city
that held few charms. Even if we had had time, we could not ride out to see the
American naval base because of security checkpoints.
We spent the night at the Hotel Guantánamo talking about the
challenge that lay ahead the next day. Pedro told us that there were no
accommodations between Guantánamo and our final destination, Baracoa,
almost 100 miles away. There was also a mountain range in between, which he
thought would be very difficult to ride. That was like waving a red flag before
the members of our group. We took off early with a plan to meet the truck in the
town of Imías, which is on the south coast, or to ride the whole way.
Soon after Imías, the road begins a serpentine 50-mile climb over the
Purial mountains. Called La Farola, this road is an engineering marvel with
cantilevered pavement for much of its length. The views along the route are
splendid. Dense tropical forests climb staircases of misty hills. Near the
summit, farmers wait for passing vehicles to sell bananas, pineapple and coffee
beans.
In the end, only four of our group rode the whole way while the rest jumped
into the truck at Imías. To my lasting regret, I rode in the truck
because I believed Pedro when he said the climb would be exceptionally
difficult. But it was the kind of climb that cyclists dream about.
Baracoa, the first Spanish town in Cuba, may have been where Christopher
Columbus first set eyes on the island in 1492. The small, nicely designed museum
on the waterfront traces this interesting history. Because Baracoa is bordered
by spectacular beaches, it is being developed for tourism; for this reason we
were, for the first time on our trip, badgered by jineteros hustlers and
prostitutes.
After a bus ride back to Santiago and a flight to Havana, we packed our
bikes and headed home. We had ridden up to 500 miles, and cumulatively had
climbed 14,000 vertical feet. And we thought Cuba was going to be flat.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company |