My wife Camila doesn’t drive, but she does direct. Studying the map, she’ll say, “This road!”, and before I know it, we’re off down some track, startling locals who haven’t seen a “yuma” – technically an American but really any foreigner – for years.
Cuba is a country that lends itself to country road adventure. Besides drinking daiquiris, it’s perhaps my favorite thing to do. And it’s what I miss most now that it’s impossible: the US oil blockade that began in January means there is no gasoline.
‘Is this ceviche the red snapper or the snook?’ I asked. The waiter shrugged, ‘Once it’s ceviche it’s hard to tell’
Few others seem to do it. Even self-driving the island’s main highways is considered outré by tourists, given the potholes and potential for wandering animals. And expats like to go straight to where they know there is a decent beach.
But there are few better ways of seeing this country and its people. Take the time Camila said: “There’s a road coming up that should lead through the swamps to Playa Girón.” (It’s better known as the Bay of Pigs.)
For a while, it seemed relatively normal, like a Bad Bunny halftime show. Squat houses with rocking chairs on the verandas. A stall selling sugar cane juice. A nice school with kids in their Young Pioneers outfits. But as we drove on, it grew odder. A man came past on a horse and trap with a shotgun on his knee. The pony trap is a common sight once you leave the city, but the shotgun not so much. The whole feel was very Kentucky circa 1870.
We picked up a hitchhiking lady who asked where we were headed. “Oh,” she said. “There is a big river in the way.” She suggested I ask a farmer coming the other way who was driving two oxen. He sucked his teeth and nodded to his beasts. “I wouldn’t even take Comandante and General through there,” he replied.
Sometimes we’ve come across magic. To this day, our best culinary experience was on the north coast. Camila saw a restaurant on the map, at the end of a long and broken road out on to a peninsula. We eventually came to Isabela de Sagua, a town left in ruins after 1985’s Hurricane Kate and 2017’s Irma. It felt post-apocalyptic, but at the end, on stilts was (and is) Restaurant Vista al Mar. The other guests were a construction team who looked up and smiled, and a family being treated by a gold-toothed relative, probably visiting from Miami.
We ate lobster salad, ostiones (oysters in a tomato sauce) and crab. “Is this ceviche the red snapper or the snook?” I asked. The waiter shrugged, and said, “Once it’s ceviche it’s hard to tell.”
We’ve revisited often and it remains my favorite place to eat in Cuba. The thing is, though, it turns out Isabela de Sagua used to be hugely prosperous, a port from which sugar and molasses were dispatched all over the world. Now the fishermen use sails rather than motors. I might enjoy seeing a sail on the horizon, just as that farmer with his oxen was so evocative, but I know they would prefer motors and tractors.
The law here demands I stop at railway lines. There are many, almost invariably leading into thick bush – tracks to a disappeared past.
The people I have met on these travels are now cut off. But as soon as I have finished writing this, I am flying to Cuba’s second city of Santiago. I want to see if I can make the 550 miles back to Havana by hitchhiking or public transport, and I know it will be hell. But I no longer know what’s going on in the countryside, and I want to find out.
I suspect I will find people waiting – for what, they no longer know. Like the time when we turned down a road to a sulfur spring, only to come across a hotel. The lobby was clean and the shop open, selling beach towels and hats. The staff were welcoming, in their pressed uniforms, but the pool was empty. I asked when the last guests came through. The receptionist told me it had been four years earlier.
Comments