Cuba: A Learning Experience A Visit To The Guama Resort On The Forbidden Island Offers Its Share Of Hassles And Highlights

“That island is the most beautiful that eyes have ever seen.” - Christopher Columus’ diary

It was the stuff of dreams, a sleepy lagoon so exotic and embedded in time it could have burst from a century-old canvas by Henri Rousseau.

Ever so slowly, the tropical panorama began to stir in the brilliant morning sun. Thatched huts, hovering dry on water-soaked stilts, encircled the cove like a necklace of tropic charms. Still waters mirrored the ancient dwellings and the slender palms towering like sentinels above them.

A dugout canoe inched silently from shore, its shallow wake undulating above a silvery-school of fish bent on breakfast. Birds of every color darted overhead, while their cousins, enshrouded in broadleafs, scanned for mosquitoes in humid air.

Guama, like the island of Cuba surrounding it, was materializing in the mist of a dazzling spring morning.

The resplendence of the aging tourist center at Guama was but one unexpected delight encountered on a zigzag across Cuba - from Santiago to Havana - while the island staggered in economic despair.

When photographer Eduardo Contreras and I kicked around the option of making the trip that took us to Guama and other scattered sites, several questions raced to mind:

1. Would a rental car and its tires survive at least 700 miles and five days, especially on a road system scrounging for repair money in a bankrupt economy?

2. Would there be an adequate gas supply in a system suffering from unprecedented shortages of fuel and everything else?

3. Was it safe for two Americans - even savvy travelers who were not strangers to lost horizons and distant fields of battle - to drive across a country whose leadership had hurled words like bullets at the United States for more than 30 years?

4. Would we find adequate food in a land that virtually went bankrupt in 1992 after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, on whom Cuba depended for 80 percent of its imports? Everything from gasoline to razor blades was rationed severely and even basic food products were hard to come by without the U.S. dollars to purchase them.

5. Would we be hounded by the secret police, or would roadblocks prevent us from exploring treasures seldom seen by outsiders?

“You’ll find extraordinary friendship wherever you go,” a young engineer had said during a stroll along Old Havana’s gracefully curving Malecon sea front, near the wave-covered grave of the USS Maine, whose mysterious sinking kicked off the Spanish-American War. “Forget Castro’s crap about the Yankees. Next to Spanish, friendship is our second language.”

Journalists and some U.S.approved research scholars are the only Americans who can travel directly to Cuba these days (legally, anyway) following last year’s tightening of the Cuban Democracy Act, which links any easing of U.S. economic sanctions with Cuban progress toward political and economic reform. But thousands from the United States still manage to visit the seductive island from a variety of foreign ports.

The kickoff point for our trip, after a flight across the island from Havana, was Santiago de Cuba, a laid-back city of salsa made for the music of weekends and the night. Children flood its central park Saturdays and Sundays, cramming into pony carts, while their older brothers, sisters and parents turn the night into a fiesta of Carib bands on stages hammered together across side streets.

Spain’s Diego de Velazquez founded the city as Cuba’s capital in 1514 and named it for St. Jago. Sweeping gently from the lush slopes of the Sierra Maestras, the first stronghold of Castro’s revolutionary fighters, the city spills softly into the azure Caribbean waters of Santiago Bay.

“The city has the best Caribbean flavor on the island - you’ll be captivated by the folklore, the temperament and especially the warmth of the people,” said one of the city’s top theater officials.

But the stunning human spirit and soul-soaked streets run in stark counterpoint to the cruel blow that time and official neglect have dealt the majestic colonial mansions and once-famed hotels in Santiago and other cities on the road to Havana.

On the opposite side of the city, high on a peninsula separating Santiago Bay from the Atlantic, sits Morro Castle, one of Colonial Spain’s most spectacular monuments of war.

A maze of stairways, armories, chambers and dungeons, the fortress balances on a gun-studded cliff hammered below by powerful waves from the Atlantic, where marauding pirates flew the Jolly Roger and Spanish ships went to the bottom under American guns.

Heading west from Santiago, a sturdy two-lane highway climbs gently into the Sierra Maestra through country laced with Spanish copper mines and revered as one of Cuba’s most sacred spots - El Cobre and a mystical statue of the Caridad del Cobre, the Virgin Mary, considered the island’s patron saint.

White church walls against a backdrop of sweeping green bear mute witness to the impossible battle faced by Communist bosses in their effort to crush religion. The Cuban church survived three decades of Marxist propaganda and persecution, and even gained strength in times of crisis.

Pilgrims flock to Cobre, leaving behind showcases filled with an array of gifts, ranging from military chevrons (brought in secretly until 1991, when anti-religious fervor eased) and Communist Party cards to baseballs and valuables in gold and silver. Crutches and medical objects stand as trophies to miraculous cures.

“It is a miracle how people feel the presence of God every day through the virgin,” said Rev. Rafael Couso Falcon. “It is the Virgin who saved the faith of the people. Every day her presence grows across the island.”

North of Cobre, on the road toward Holguin, the Sierra Maestra in late spring can test the mettle of the best country driver. Storm clouds blown in from the sea swell into voluminous thunderheads that spill upon lush jungles. Angry torrents wash scattered hamlets clean, tear through gorges and culverts, cut channels across roadways and make underwater passages of hardy mountain bridges.

But the road drops quickly on the northern side of Cuba’s spine, giving way to a countryside famed for its fruit, beans, sugar and cattle. Draped in a breathtaking array of virtually every shade of green, the gently rolling countryside is a panorama spreading backward in time.

Houses of thatched roofs and bamboo walls huddle amid sheltering Royal palms and mango trees rocked gently by balmy winds off the Florida Straits. Schoolgirls in bright red jumpers and boys in red shorts stroll toward home. Small horses pull carts choked with riders. Windmills wave giant arms at oxen weighed down by loads of cornstalks.

Smokestacks towering above giant sugar refineries - struck silent by a string of disastrous sugar harvests - stand dead in the thickening air, their lack of smoke mocked by the swirling black clouds that cast bolts of lightning at a backdrop of sawtooth ridges.

This is a part of Cuba’s soul that future travelers may never see: a pristine countryside untouched by progress and dealt with gently by time and the absence of tourists.

Cuba’s transportation disaster - caused by a dearth of gasoline and spare parts - is evident in the throngs jamming every rural bus stop waiting for carriers that often never come. Stopping next to such a gathering brings a flurry of requests for rides, an experience that brings foreign travelers face-to-face with perhaps Cuba’s finest product - its people.

“They never cease to amaze me - how nice they are with all the problems they’ve got,” Marc Frank, a U.S. writer living in Cuba, had said earlier when a shirtless man showed us directions through Holguin, leading us down twisting lanes on his bike.

To the northeast was Guardalavaca, a resort region of stunning white sand and modern hotels filled with British, German and French tourists. Women lying topless seem oblivious to leering construction workers on breaks from jobs building new hotels financed by Spanish investors.

West along the coast was Gibara, on a seashore so spectacular in its beauty that upon seeing it Columbus wrote in his log: “I have never seen a more beautiful place: has such marvelous beauty that it surpasses all others in charms and graces as the day doth the night in luster.”

A fisherman named Carlos looked across a windswept bay at a saddle-shaped mountain and nodded in agreement. “We get for free what tourists travel great distances for big money to enjoy.” Holding up a plump yellowtail, Carlos grinned broadly and said: “But back to work; if we don’t catch, we don’t eat.”

Doubling back to the south coast and the sparkling city of Trinidad takes a traveler through the Escambrays, past mountain resorts and lakeside hotels. Sturdy Spanish churches and bell towers, and block after block of colonial housing, crowd the center of Trinidad, perhaps the Caribbean’s best preserved colonial city.

Carlos Joaquin sat in his spacious 18th-century living room and spoke of his city, founded by Velazquez in 1514. Joaquin helped restore the town’s historic center in a UNESCO-backed program that began in 1965.

“This is one of the few cities in the world so well preserved,” said Joaquin. “There was a terrible economic crisis from 1856 until the middle of this century, so nobody had much of a chance to rebuild anything. That actually made restoration easier. Now you can go to one part of the city and see one epoch and to another to see a different era.”

A climb to the bell tower of the Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria de la Popa church provides a memorable panorama of cobblestoned streets and red-tiled roofs with walls covered in fragrant bougainvillea.

Farther to the west, beyond Guama and the Laguna del Tesoro, where legendary Indians cast gold into the waters to prevent its capture by Spanish Conquistadors, lies Bahia de Cochinos, which translates into a more modern legend, the Bay of Pigs.

Today a soft surf rolls peacefully onto the long shoreline, where a resort hotel, scattered cabins and a disco accommodate both Cuban and foreign tourists. Some in Giron, site of the worst fighting in the April 1961 invasion attempt, still remember the sounds of war.

“I remember the morning I first saw the first lights from the boats carrying the invaders here,” said Josefa Franeo, immediately after she raised the Cuban flag to the top of its staff in front of the Historical Museum containing downed aircraft and captured landing craft and other weapons supplied by the CIA.

Summing up our long journey, were the concerns felt at the beginning of our trip justified? Not at all.

Both the car and its tires held up beautifully over hundreds of miles of roads relatively free of potholes. Lead-free gas was available in most stations.

At no time - even after midnight in a rundown section of old Santiago - did we feel any sense of personal danger. Acceptable food was available in hotel dining rooms along the way. Ham and cheese sandwiches were ubiquitous.

No roadblocks were seen. There was no evidence of surveillance by local authorities or Cuba’s Soviet-trained secret police.