Cuba day 3, part 1 - Heading for the Caribbean, a million miles on the clock and thumbs up for the environmentalists.

The Autopista Nacional, or A1, is the main highway that cuts diagonally across the country from Havana in the north east down to Cienfuegos province and beyond.   Our destination today is ultimately the Hotel Villa Guajimico but before then we will stop for a swim in the warm waters of the Caribbean at Playa Larga and take a stop at French-influenced Cienfuegos.        

 The city is at full pace at this time of day, the roads are busy with in all directions and the old cars which are so iconic of Cuba pant and rumble waiting for the lights to change.   There are about 60,000 of these pre-1959 American cars left in Cuba, down from the 150,000 or so that existed pre the revolution but when the relationship between the US and Cuba began to deteriorate the megaliths of American car manufacturers had to halt the sale and trade of any further vehicles, parts of service.  Some of these cars have exceeded their design life by five, six or seven times and it’s not unusual for them to have clocked a million miles or more.  But the most impressive thing is the way they keep these cars on the road in the most ingenious manner whether that’s making brake fluid from tree sap or adapting a 24V Russian tank battery for a ’58 Chevy.  I salute the sheer resourcefulness and determination to not have their spirit quelled.    

Outside of Havana the countryside is vibrant and lush, down to the good rainy season they have had this year.  We pass one banana plantation after another and whilst the quality of the roads begin to deteriorate after about 20 miles from the capital the traffic is light and so we make good progress.  In the fields and on the edges of the roads large flocks of Turkey Vultures settle and take off and settle again.  They are ugly and ungainly birds and we see many hundreds of them over the course of the week. 

Cuba is a large island, the largest in the Caribbean at 1250km from east to west. At its narrowest point there is just 31km between the choppy Atlantic Ocean to the north and the more tranquil turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea to the south.  It is in fact a sprawling archipelago containing thousands of mainly uninhabited islands and keys.  It is shaped like an alligator and sits just below the Tropic of Cancer.  By the end of the week’s itinerary we will have just about managed to cover the central block of the country and will have travelled a lot of miles.  Like I said, it’s a big place and I am beginning to understand why Exodus Travel calls this week a ‘Taste’ of Cuba.

Our guide is pointing out various points of interest as we pass them and informs us about Cuba’s economic and trading history, about the buoyant and lucrative slave trade of the 18^th and 19^th centuries and then more about the countries fraught relationship with the USA.    This may be one of the major roads in the country but it doesn’t stop cattle from wandering nonchalantly across it and though the driver slows down and toots his horn it’s unfazed and just continues its steady progress across the lanes.   Water towers dot the landscape at regular intervals and gradually the flatness gives way to strange flat-topped hills which I learn are called mogotes.  I check my compass and note that we are heading SE.  As I sit looking out of the window at the landscape going by I think it reminds me a lot of Argentina.       

Someone observes that there are different coloured vehicle registration plates on the cars.  Sometimes they are black, sometimes blue, and sometimes white.  Infect, in Cuba the registration plate identifies the driver, not the vehicle and the range of colours and code might identify anything from your status in the ‘party’ to your nationality to what you do for a living.  Government vehicles have dark grey number plates with white lettering and determine where and when the vehicle can be driven and whether it can be used for personal as well as official duties.  The bosses of government owned companies get blue plates and they can only use their cars for getting to work and back.  Allegedly government inspectors wait along the highway out of town and in other high-traffic areas and flag down cars with blue plates to make sure the occupants aren’t using them for a trip to the beach. Army vehicles have red number plate and the pale-green plates are for vehicles used by the Economic Ministry. Black plates are for diplomats who don’t have to adhere to traffic laws and white plates are for Cuban government ministers of heads of state who apparently often drive like they have diplomatic immunity but technically don’t.  Most of the half-century old American roadsters that create the moving museum that is Cuba have yellow licence plates meaning they are owned and used by ordinary Cubans.  It’s an interesting system adopted from the USSR for which I see some minor merit, but to me, it just screams CONTROL and I am not sure where it fits in with the  Cuban socialist framework but to your Cuban in the street, it all just normal.

Small clusters of low-rise houses make up small villages from time to time and most the houses have small vegetable patches and are keeping chickens or goats or pigs.  There is the odd neighbourhood restaurant or pizzeria.  But I see very little wildlife though I scan the fields and skies and just once I spot a vulture sitting quietly in a dead tree.  The sugarcane industry is a significant part of the economy in Cuba along with citrus and mango plantations.  At the time of Columbus’ arrival in 1492 95% of Cuba was covered in forest by 1959 due to unregulated land-clearing that area had been reduced to 16%.  Large-scale tree-planting and protected parks have seen this figure creep back up to about 24% which perhaps doesn’t seem a wholesale reversal but actually puts them at the forefront of Latin Americans for this kind environmental planning.  The government is keen to confront the mistakes of the past and there have been massive clean-up projects in harbours and rivers around the coast.  Cuba might not strike you as being at the forefront of environmental innovation with its emission-belching cars and decaying infrastructure but in 2006 the World Wildlife Foundation named Castro’s struggling island nation as the only country in the world with sustainable development.  Perhaps the Americans should put that in their pipe and smoke it.