Our Man Outside Havana

The Viñales Valley in Pinar del Río is known for its limestone mogotes and for its high-quality tobacco.

The beast slinks out of the bushes. It whines a quick warning and takes the photographer’s leg in its maw. The photographer hops on one leg in as manly a fashion as possible, trying to tear free. But the beast holds firm.

The day begins idyllically enough, with my photographer friend, Lorne Bridgman, and I hiking through the lush Viñales Valley in Cuba’s westernmost province of Pinar del Río. We share the trail with aging cowboys and teams of oxen trudging off to work, wending past rice paddies, coffee bushes and tobacco plantations. Cubans swear this is the most scenic set piece in the country, where the Sierra de los Órganos mountain range and its signature formations of karst mogotes (limestone haystacks) tower over a vale of electric green palm trees and fertile red soil deposits.

Not long into our ramble, we break from the path to chat with a farmer in front of her clapboard-and-thatch bohío. Lorne wanders off into the fields while I enjoy the woman’s rich, peppery cafecito; it’s the only good cup I’ve had in days of watery hotel stuff. I’m sipping and watching the drifting clouds play against the serrated sugarloaf peaks when, all of a sudden, our predator makes its fateful lunge. Happily for Lorne, this episode of When Animals Attack! is all gums and tongue. This is no representative of the island’s megafauna having a go at his leg. It’s a goat.

Yes, our road trip through rural western Cuba is not without its perils, but that’s precisely why we’re here. Pinar del Río’s rough-hewn landscape and littorals have put the province at the forefront of Cuba’s nascent attempt to model itself as an ecotravel destination à la Costa Rica. It certainly has the requisite assets: sinuously sculpted mountain ridges, several national parks, two UNESCO biosphere reserves and extensive cave systems, not to mention unfailingly solicitous inhabitants. In other words, an antidote to the clichéd all-inclusives that dot the country’s coastline.

Left to right: 1 Ladas from the Soviet Union are still going strong in Cuba. 2 But a more fun way to transport a birthday cake is by bike. 3 Father and sons in the photogenic capital, where this road trip starts. 4 Papa keeps watch at Marina Hemingway in Havana. 5 One of Cuba’s countless musical talents practising at a disused Havana sports stadium. 6 A singer at a roadside restaurant outside Viñales. 7 Taking a break at an ecolodge in the Mil Cumbres reserve. 8 Necessity is the mother of invention, as seen in this “parasol.” 9 Who said gas stations aren’t fun?

We’re a gang of four. In addition to Lorne and me, there’s our middle-aged driver, the ruminative Alexi – a Havana cabbie for whom our pastoral excursion provides a rare but pleasing break from the snarls of city life – and Miguel, our perspicacious 29-year-old guide, who seems to know everyone along the way. An hour after setting out from Havana, we cross into Pinar del Río. We ditch the relatively smooth autopista for a secondary road that snakes up into the mountains and quickly realize that the road itself, with masticated ribbons of asphalt and man-size craters, is part of the adventure. Lorne, smitten by almost everything that rolls by, would have us stop every hundred metres if he could. Accented with villages that time forgot, the region is a full-scale insurrection of the picturesque.

Indeed, one morning as we eat breakfast on our hotel’s terrace overlooking the mist-wreathed valley, Viñales awakens to a concert of cock crows, porcine grunts and antediluvian engines sputtering to life; turkey vultures ride the thermals rising up the sides of the mogotes. The panoramic view recalls Chinese landscape paintings of Guangxi’s similarly sugarloaf topography executed in heavy brush strokes.

Miguel leads us to a trailhead west of town. We hike from homestead to homestead, making our way through jittery clouds of yellow butterflies and stopping to admire campanulas. The broad crowns of ceiba trees toss the occasional island of shade in the already percolating mid-morning sun. As we pass a citrus grove, we meet a man clipping his fields with a scythe. Luis welcomes us onto his shaded veranda. Like most people in the valley, he earns much of his income cultivating what is arguably the finest tobacco in the world, rolling part of his crop into artisanal cigars he sells directly to visitors like us. He retrieves a baggie of loose leaves from inside and unfurls them on a table.

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