You can fly from Havana, although it's far more fun to take the hydrofoil, which roars across the Golfo de Batabanó like a sleek space machine from a Flash Gordon movie.
Soon enough, Isla de la Juventud comes into view. It's not the most beautiful isle. It was once smothered with native pine – hence its early name: the Isle of Pines. It was renamed (in 1978) for a remarkable socialist experiment (alas now defunct) initiated in 1971, when the first of over 60 schools was established for foreign students – primarily from Africa, Nicaragua, Yemen, and North Korea– who came to learn agricultural and veterinary sciences. The Cuban government paid the bill, and, in exchange, the foreign students joined Cuban students in the citrus plantations. At the height of Cuba's internationalist phase, more than 150,000 foreign students were studying on the island. Alas, the Special Period dealt the international schools a deathblow. They're now closed.
The island's history of socially transforming experiments began in the 19th century when the Spanish used the remote isle as a prison for Cuban nationalists, including José Martí, shipped here for the crime of sedition at the age of 18. He billeted at Finca El Abra, a farm on the outskirts of Nueva Gerona, the capital city. Today El Abra doubles as a museum that exhibits personal belongings, documents, and other artefacts of Martí's life.
Calle Martí, Nueva Gerona's colonnaded main street, is lined with congenial colonial buildings. The town has a well–heeled, albeit parochial air, thanks in part to the marble hewn from humpbacked mountains that rise west of town. It's everywhere, gleaming underfoot and along the countertops of cafeterias and bars. Even the streets sparkle with marble gravel that glistens like diamond dust.
The isle's foremost site is Presidio Modelo (Model Prison), built 1926–31 during President Machado's repressive regime and model after the penitentiary at Joliet, Illinois, on a 'panopticon' plan, with four five story circular buildings, each pinned by a central watchtower. The prison did duty until 1967, when its doors were slammed shut by its most illustrious erstwhile occupant, Fidel Castro (Fidel and 24 fellow revolutionaries were incarcerated here after their failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in July 1953).
A perimeter road that loops around the panopticon will deposit you outside the old hospital block, which had been converted to isolate Castro and Co. from other prisoners. Safe, I suppose, to have infectious minds in a hospital. Today, restored, it's a museum complete with metal frame beds, each with a pillow and a single neatly pressed sheet, as if patients are still expected. Above each, its former occupant mugs for the camera. There's a youthful Fidel– prisoner RN3859 – staring at you from above the next to last bed to the left, facing the door. Later, Fidel was placed in solitary confinement: his pastel–blue room was immodestly large, with a lofty ceiling trimmed by stucco and a bathroom of pinero marble boasting a capacious shower lined with white tiles. Perusing the bookcase, you'll note that Fidel spend his time brushing up on the complete works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
The southern half of the isle is girt by beaches of purest white and haloed by barrier reefs guarding bathtub warm waters. Inland the entire southern section is a tangle of brush and marsh. Crocodiles slosh about in the soupy marshes, which also harbor wild boar and deer, as well as egrets, majestic white and black herons, and other stilt legged waders. The entire wilderness is protected within the Area Protegida Sur de la Isla de la Juventud. Guided excursions to the 4,000 hectare Refugio Ecológico Los Indios thrill birders keen to spot Cuba's endemic crane and endangered cotorras (parrots), while a visit to the crocodile farm is de rigueur.
"No closer!" Oneldi Flores, director of the Criadero Cocodrilo, warned me as I inched toward a croc with my camera in hand. "The lagarto criollo isn't like your timid American crocodile."
In fact, Crocodilus rhombifer, the endemic Cuban crocodile, is aggressive from the moment it emerges from its egg. The breeding centre, at the end of a dusty road in the Lanier Swamp, has about 2,000 crocs of various ages.
"We're beginning to see six–meter animals again," Oneldi said, guiding me towards a wooden stockade. Peering over the chin–high stakes, I found myself eye to eye with a pugnacious croc the size of a Peterbilt truck. Chunks of hacked–up cattle had been tossed into the enclosure, and the monstrous evil–eyed male was lumbering out of the water for lunch. Oneldi reached for a pole with which to prod the bad–tempered monster. The animal exploded in fury, teeth bared in rage.
With a guide you can continue to the glorious white–sand beach of Playa Punta del Este, where the Cueva del Punta del Este is adorned with pre–Columbian paintings. One day, surely, hotels will grace this magnificent beach, resembling confectioner's sugar dissolving into electric–blue seas. Marine turtles are always in the water, particularly during the nesting seasons, when big males hang off the edge of the reef, waiting for the females to return from laying their eggs in coral sand above the high water mark.
The shallows hereabouts are also strewn with cannons and coral encrusted Spanish doubloons. Off Punta Francés, at the south–westerly tip of the island, the waters rival anywhere in the Caribbean for diving, to be enjoyed from the Hotel Colony's Centro Internacional del Buceo, at Sigueanea. The waters are littered with wrecks of Spanish galleons and pirate ships, and the treasures they spilled when they foundered. Latter–day vessels scuttled several decades ago to provide bombing and naval gunnery targets for the Cuban armed forces also lie in ocean graves in transparent jade waters a few fathoms down. Further out, huge coral parapets loom over a wall that begins at 20 meters and plummets into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico's cobalt abyss. |
Most vacationers here fly in from Europe or Canada for a week or so of relaxing on the beach, snorkelling, boozing, and not doing much of anything else. You're a captive audience, given the distance from the mainland and the relative paucity of things to see and do. Other visitors fly in for one– or two–night excursions from Havana or Varadero.
The main drawback here: No Cubans are allowed and other than the hotel workers, billeted far away from the hotels, you'll leave with virtually no sense of the country itself. And most of the few services here (a bank, medical clinic, and disco) are five kilometers away in the workers and administrative village: El Pueblo. Choose your hotel carefully. There are only six to pick from. They vary markedly, from the unexciting Hotel Club Cayo Largo to the attractive four–star Sol Cayo Largo, plus there's a fishing lodge (Villa Marinera) nestled up to mangrove–lined shallows. All the hotels are run on an all–inclusive basis and concentrate along Playa Paraíso, where high surf occasionally makes enjoying the watersports all but impossible.
An excursion shuttle ferries visitors to and from Playas Sirena and Paraíso, twin stunning swathes of white sand that have a beach grill and watersports. And sailboat excursions take you to nearby uninhabited cays sprinkled like diamonds across the sapphire sea, including Cayo Iguana, named for the large population of endemic giant lizards appearing as baked and lifeless as the ground they walk on. |
