Vive El Ron!

February 18, 2008

Che Guevara: the cycle-touring years. But would he have stood up to El Ron?

CIENFUEGOS - I haven't the faintest idea what El Ron and his wife were on about but the meaning was clear: we would suffer hellfire and eternal torment if we went through with our plan. El Ron is Spanish for "the rum"; El Ron in our sense was the father of the man in whose house we stayed last night. He was a great bear of a man who had spent his life going to seed in all directions. His sleeveless blue T-shirt did nothing to conceal that he bulged everywhere, except perhaps where a man most yearns to bulge. El Ron spoke a torrent of rum-flavoured words which sounded like "el camin' tu tengay? Obramoslaiquedrevosmachinaquihorrible. Siet' kilometro' bastante bieng per' mucho grandespottimosquevienen." And so on, for ages, each readily available hint that we hadn't perhaps chosen his preferred way to get to Cienfuegos amplified and pronounced even faster when he perceived that we hadn't grasped the finest details. Finally his wife, who could have run beneath El Ron's belly without his noticing since she was so tiny, pointed at our bikes and then at the ground and said something like "mucho poncho", followed by a hissing noise to demonstrate compressed air escaping from an inner tube. That much we understood. But we also understood that it is those who don't ride bikes who are the most vocal experts on the subject. And so, against El Ron's pleading, we took not the circuitous, better-surfaced but less interesting and far busier main road that Ron took in his ancient, black car but the coastal path where we knew we'd see barely a soul all day.

El Ron was right about one thing: that the first seven kilometres were surfaced. But in every other respect, he was wrong. The path was ridable on a loaded road bike for all but rare and brief sections of sand or rock. It took a little weaving about now and then, it's true, but otherwise it was fine.

Pretty much ridable all the way: and no "mucho poncho".

It did get a bit sandy now and then, though...

The seven kilometres of hard surface ended with minor drama with a piece of string stretched across the road. A man dressed as a soldier but whose uniform badge identified him as a civil servant from the interior ministry, did his best not to smile as he stood in our way. That just made me smile all the more, which is usually the best way to deal with people in uniforms since it eliminates friction and deflates their pomposity at the same time. And it is very hard not to return a smile. It was so hard that the edges of this man's mouth came close to twitching before he got a grasp of himself and acted like the major border guardian that, behind his bit of string, he took himself to be.

"Can't we ride any further?" I asked.

"Yes, if you have passports."

Passports, to ride along a sandy path? We got them out and he got out his clipboard and a pen. Struggling to hold them all at the same time, he got the first passport open and found the computer-printed page that is in all passports and looked at it as though he had never seen one before. Maybe he hadn't. Maybe El Ron had persuaded all other cyclists to go the other way. And so we waited patiently while our guard, who maybe dreamed of one day holding up people at some truly important international frontier like an airport, realised his hopes were never going to be achieved.

"Are you looking for my name?" I said finally, to put him out of his misery.

"Si. Where is it?"

I pointed out where it is in every one of the world's passports and he wrote it down.

"And where are you going?" he wanted to know. And this was the question that showed the futility of his job. He had a column on the paper on his clipboard that required him to ask everyone where he was going and yet the path only went to one place. It went to Cienfuegos. It didn't go anywhere else.

"We're going to Cienfuegos," I said somewhat predictably, hoping the next question wasn't going to be tougher. But there wasn't another question. He wrote down "Cienfuegos", which was where I noticed everyone else was going as well, not surprisingly, then just looked at us.

"Is this a military zone?" I asked.

"Yes, it is."

And that explained why he needed the details. Armies and civil servants always want details. What it didn't do is explain what he could have done with them. Because a few kilometres down the path we came not to a piece of string but to a proper red-and-white pole of the sort all frontiers should have. It was hinged at one end, just as it ought to be, and it was left raised, as it probably shouldn't have been. To one side was not the first man's little hut but a concrete shack of a couple of rooms with no glass in the windows. There was no one there. We slowed down, we looked around, and then when nobody shouted or shot, we rode on.

Once charcoal production was all this area had. In some places, that's still the case.

The funny thing is that when we stopped a few hundred metres further on to take pictures of the sacks of charcoal that the little hamlet there made, I noticed that the border post had been lowered again. Perhaps, after all, we had been spotted escaping. Maybe even now there us a guard in Cuba worrying that he has more names of people going into the area than he has of those coming out.

This path went on for 45km, every now and then with access to a splashing blue Caribbean that was otherwise screened by trees. The coast here resembled volcanic lava that had been turned into holes and sharp rocky spikes by centuries of waves.

The Caribbean splashes over pitted, jagged rock that looks like volcanic lava...

...and fills shallow lagoons that stay filled and warm even when the tide recedes.

Only once did we find a small cove of sand, a true pirates" hide-out. And perhaps that was what it had once been, since this was the Hispaniola of legend, where pirates and buccaneers and corsairs sailed their murderous, plundering way until all the nationals concerned got together and decided that enough was enough.

Is this cotton? I've never seen cotton, so I don't know, but it was growing wild.

The path became harder to ride now as it went on but it was rarely and only briefly unridable. It turned sharp left at the edge of the entrance to the almost entirely enclosed lake on which Cienfuegos stands and finally reached the last kilometres of the road that El Ron would have preferred we had ridden.

Chance meeting along the way: Steph explains the finer points of handlebar design to a passing local...

The path and its scenery were saved by history. The area from Playa Giron to the Cienfuegos bay was to have been an industrial centre, far enough from everyone else not to have annoyed them. That was the planned consequence of the nuclear power station being built where we joined the road. "Being built" overstates the case, though, because the place was still being constructed by Russian engineers when things changed behind the Iron Curtain and everyone went home and took the plans with them.

Open for offers: half-finished nuclear power station. Suit do-it-yourself enthusiast.

The dome of the reactor and its associated building were still there, decaying along with all the mysterious, half-finished structures that go with these things. Guards stood at the entrance roads but showed no interest when we took pictures. The whole place just waits a decision on what you do next with an unfinished nuclear reactor for which you no longer have the plans. There was an irony that we had to be questioned to ride a few kilometres of sandy trail but that I could take as many pictures of a presumably secret nuclear power station as I wished.

This not being a day to end without incident, we were delighted and slightly perturbed to find a big crowd waiting for the ferry up the inlet and across the huge natural harbour that made Cienfuegos a pirates' dream. We were alarmed not at the idea of not getting on the ferry but that half our potential fellow travellers had spent much of their Sunday as El Ron would have passed his: slopping back rum. It would have taken just one naked flame and the air would have gone up in a fireball.

The ferry was a flat-bottomed barge with a wheel house and a capacity of about 40. Since there were a hundred of us on the quay, it was obvious - this being Cuba - that we were all going to be crowded on regardless. And we were. We stood shoulder to shoulder, including the man with a motorbike and the old chap who had two cats in a sack and opened it to show us them. When we made two stops to pick up still more passengers, and when a woman and a daughter couldn't get a foothold on the unfenced loading ramp, the ferry operator made a second attempt to berth at the quay so she could be dragged aboard. And then we set off for Cienfuegos, the main crossing of the harbour.

Those at the side were held aboard by a railing; for the rest of us in the bow, a blunt straight line that could be sailed straight up to a harbour wall, there was nothing. Nobody cared. Nobody noticed. This was Cuba. Somewhere in the stern, people started singing.

Just in case, by the way, you thought we were on a simple jaunt across a narrow waterway, Cienfuegos harbour is a great swathe through which pass ocean-going oil tankers and freighters visiting the oil depot and warehouses on the far bank. This was a crossing not of a few minutes but an hour.

And worth every peso we paid for it.

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