CUBAN REVOLUTIONS Biking the island’s back roads on a trip through time
VINALES, Cuba —
These nuggets of wisdom were in the pre-departure packet that arrived in the mail a few weeks before my bike trip in Cuba with Backroads, a U.S.-based active travel company that recently expanded its Cuban offerings to include a cycling trip.
My husband and I, both avid fans of two-wheel travel, jumped at the chance to go, despite socalled sonic attacks and State Department warnings. And so it was that we landed in Havana in December, expecting the unexpected.
Our Backroads group of 13 rendezvoused as instructed outside the Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski, a new five-star property in Old Havana. Backroads had us staying at the Kempinski the last night of our six-day trip, but I wondered if this was going to be one of those plans that wouldn’t go according to plan. Citing the hotel’s ties to the Cuban military, the Trump administration had recently put it on a list of banned businesses off-limits to Americans. Maybe we wouldn’t be able to cap off our vacation with a dip in the Kempinski’s rooftop pool after all.
I’d have time to contemplate this First World problem during our 2 1⁄2-hour motor coach ride from Havana toward the western tip of this narrow, tiger tail of an island. The lush countryside of the Pinar del Rio and Artemisa provinces is where we’d spend the bulk of the week, biking an average of 40 miles a day around the tobacco farms of the Vinales valley and the forested hills of the environmentally minded commune Las Terrazas, part of a UNESCO biosphere reserve.
Our bus pulled up to an adorable thatched-roof restaurant that looked especially diminutive in the shadow of the area’s famed
limestone monoliths covered in scrubby vegetation, like protruding chins sprouting 5 o’clock shadows. Our bikes were here waiting for us, as was the restaurant’s chef-owner, Jose, who greeted us with glasses of fresh-pressed sugar-cane juice.
We biked from Jose’s restaurant down lightly trafficked streets, where the rare roadside billboard gave a shoutout to socialism or Cuba, as opposed to car dealerships and KFC. It felt like we were pedaling through a living history museum as we passed farmers tending to tobacco fields with ox-driven plows, as they’ve done for centuries. We shared the streets with clip-clopping horses pulling wagons of hay and exchanged and mutually curious glances with men in straw hats whacking tall grass with Vinales Las Terrazas CUBA Havana machetes.
We witnessed a lot of this type of timelessness in Cuba, a country simultaneously suspended in amber yet in the midst of unprecedented change. Only in the last decade have Cubans been allowed to own cellphones, buy and sell real estate, and travel abroad more freely. Later this year will be the first time someone not named Castro has led the nation since 1959, when the revolution swept Fidel, and eventually his brother, Raul, to long-lasting power.
In Mark Kurlansky’s new book, “Havana: A Subtropical Delirium,” he notes a popular Cuban joke about the revolution, whose three great success stories are said to be health care, education and sports. Its three great failures? Breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I don’t think anybody goes to Cuba strictly for the cuisine, a fire hose of black beans, rice, plantains, poultry and pork. Dessert is flan or flan. It’s a culinary routine that could soon get old. But as a visitor here for a week of calorietorching cycling, the protein-rich, starchy smorgasbord hit the spot.
Some of the best things we ate were at Cubans’ homes, where our Backroads guides, Lara and Pablo, arranged for us to take breaks from biking for a little rest and refueling. I loved rolling up to these houses to find pitchers of fresh-squeezed juice and platters of ripe mango, pineapple and papaya.
Another perk of these home visits was the chance to get a peek at domestic Cuban life. Tidy, tiny kitchens often had the barest of necessities: a few coffee cups, plates, some pans, a slow cooker. In bathrooms, a toilet seat and lid weren’t necessarily a given.
Even the hotels often lack some of the modern conveniences we take for granted in the States. The water, for example, stopped working at our first hotel, Los Jazmines, forcing Lara to negotiate the entire group’s move to different rooms.
Lara and Pablo had to do plenty of adjusting on the fly. Running a cycling trip in Cuba isn’t easy. (That’s probably why it’s not cheap either. Backroads’ all-inclusive, five-night Cuba bike trips in 2018 start at $4,998 a person.) It’s challenging to navigate the island’s infrastructure, from spotty cell and Wi-Fi service to chewed-up streets that can make for a teeth-chattering ride. Government rules are often fickle and in a state of flux, resulting in some last-minute tweaks to our bike route in Vinales.
One part of the plan that didn’t change was our ability to stay at the Kempinski hotel.
Through at least 2019, Backroads says its customers will be grandfathered into the lap of luxury because the company reserved blocks of rooms before the blacklisted businesses were announced in November.
Before we could stay at the Kempinski, we had to get to the Kempinski. Our last bike ride out of pastoral Las Terrazas ended several miles away from our final hotel, depositing us in a far northwest corner of Havana called Jaimanitas. This vibrant neighborhood full of mosaics and murals is where we were supposed to get on the bus that would take us into Old Havana.
“Guys, I have something to tell you,” a solemn-looking Lara said to our group. “There is something wrong with the bus; we will not be able to take it back to our hotel.
“But don’t worry,” she said, breaking into a mischievous grin. “Pablo and I have arranged alternate transportation.”
Lara pointed down the block to a fleet of American convertibles from the ’50s, waiting at the ready. I still maintain that the best way to see a place is by bike. But at this moment, in this setting, four wheels trumped two.
We hopped into our candycolored chariots for one last wild — and unexpected — ride.