Cruising the
Sierra Maestre
by Dan Armstong
8 days
Day 0
Getting There : Snow, Sleet and a Tropical Breeze
A 400-mile drive from New York City to
Montreal. Not the most relaxed way to start, but Uncle Sam makes it
necessary by banning most travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens. It's one of the
coldest days of the year. The only thing moving on the Interstate is the
snowflakes flying at my windshield. When I stop for gas, the two other
vehicles at the pumps are snowmobiles. A half-hour north of Plattsburgh I
mumble to the Canadian immigration lady about skiing and she distractedly
waves me through. At Mirabel, Montreal’s special airport for cheap
Caribbean charters, I sit with elderly Quebecois couples listening to
Roger Miller songs in French. The departure – on Air Transat, one of a
handful of unrecognizable charters that calls Mirabel home - is scheduled
for 10:30 p.m. and we roll onto the runway just after midnight.
My goal is to spend a week
bicycling around the eastern tip of Cuba, as far as possible from the
hustlers of Havana. It's poor, rugged and rural. It's populated by
descendants of African slaves, French planters and (like Castro's parents)
Galician landowners. It's where all three of Cuba's civil wars began. (You
can still see masts of scuttled Spanish and American battleships poking
out of the sea at low tide.) The people of Oriente have always resented
their distant masters in Havana, almost a thousand miles to the west.
That's one reason the peasants flocked to Castro's guerrilla band when he
hid high in the Sierra Maestre.
There’s nothing like the sweet warm breeze of the tropics at 3 a.m. when
we step off the plane onto the tarmac of Frank
Pais Airport in Holguin, the country’s fifth largest city. Three
hundred French Canadians disappear into charter buses while I linger to
flirt with the lovely customs inspector. Outside I’m hustled into a
Cubataxi – the taxi monopoly designed to ensure that the government, not
private citizens, collects all tourist dollars - for a ride into town.
It's now 4:30 a.m., and nobody seems to be awake at the casa
particular where I made reservations three weeks before. (A friend in
Toronto made the call, since Fidel cut off incoming U.S. phone calls a few
months earlier.) The cabby drives around waking up friends to see if
they'll put me up. At the second house, an attractive woman of 30 or so
shows me and my bicycle into a spare bedroom and I collapse, 19 hours
after leaving the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
CubaMy route was suggested by Stephen Psallidas. He said that if I got into reasonable shape the trip would be doable. But I didn't, and it wasn't.
That's not me, though there's a close resemblance - especially the deathlike pose.