Whatshot
Our Cuba Adventure - Part 7
Our Cuba Adventure - Part 7
In our third week in Cuba we decided to go on an adventure, we were getting bored lazing around on the beach, the holiday was becoming mundane and we needed to change it up. Having recently invested in some revolutionary literature by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, we started to understand a little clearer what shaped Cuba and how an island riddled with mafia bosses, drug traffickers and slaves, became a symbol of freedom.
This new found freedom and revolutionary ideas allowed us to get our brains thinking about adventure, because lets be honest, what is travel if not one big happy adventure
It took a bit of planning and arranging to get our own "Motorcycle diaries" expedition on track, we needed to shed two rucksacks and all the food we had stored in our fridge. Granny Nieves came to the recue and promised she would look after our things and made us place everything besides her bed. She pointed to our bags and then both hands went to her heart, we knew our things were safe with her. She pushed a little piece of paper into my hand and told me to connect with her 'amigos' in Playa Largo, she assured us that they would have a bed for us at a very special price.
We also needed a map and some provisions, our friend Yash made sure that we had an android phone with maps-me and fresh bread rolls for our six-hour ride to Playa Giron and then on to the Bay of Pigs.
It was almost sixty years ago, just before midnight on April 16th in 1961, when a group of about fifteen hundred Cuban exiles, who were trained and financed by the CIA, launched a disastrous attempted invasion of Cuba, from the sea in the Bay of Pigs.
The Bay of Pigs is a large isolated inlet on Cuba's southern coast. There is little here apart from mosquitoes and a crocodile-infested swamp. The beach at Playa Giron, a village with a small airstrip at the mouth of the Bay of Pigs, was the invaders' primary target. (To this day, it is referred to in Cuba as the Playa Giron invasion.)
We wanted to learn a little bit more about the history of the famed invasion and maybe meet people who could tell us more about it. We set out on our Suzuki scooter, and headed back towards Havana.
The scenery was good for the first three hours as we rode along the coast, however once we arrived at Cienfuegos, flash backs of communist Poland came on pretty strongly. Communist styled buildings everywhere, revolutionary slogans and sticky gooey industry. It was hard going and extremely hot.
Every couple of kilometres we stopped for a beer at one of the roadside diners. Drinking in Cuba is ok, beer is not even considered an alcoholic drink and the greatest thing of all was the Cuban traffic cops don't want to mess with tourists, so they leave you alone. Unlike many places where local police take advantage of reckless travellers and fine them liberally.
In the spring of 1952, two young men set out by motorcycle on an ambitious, footloose journey that they hoped would carry them from Buenos Aires up the spine of Chile, across the Andes and into the Peruvian Amazon. A 23-year-old medical student named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. Guevara's companion was a 29-year-old biochemist named Alberto Granado. Their road trip took place in an era before the Cuban revolution, before the military coups and dirty wars of the 1960's and 70's, before the democratic resurgence and economic catastrophes that followed.
It set the tone for Che Guevara's subsequent career as a political idol, revolutionary martyr and T-shirt icon - Che! - it reveals a charismatic, mysterious glow onto his early life and we wanted to find that glow.
Reading Motorcycle Diaries reminded us of the same trip we did in 2003 with our children. We travelled from Brazil to Argentina, from Argentina to Uruguay, back to Argentina, down to San Pedro de Bariloche through the glaciers into Chile and then across the Atakama dessert into Peru and the Amazonian jungle. It took us seven weeks to complete this journey and we mostly self-drove and took busses, this time we were reaching to discover Cuba's coastline on our motorbike.
While there was a worthy goal at the end of Che and Alberto's journey -- they intend to work in a leper colony in Peru - the main purpose was tourism. They wanted to see as much of Latin America as they could - more than 8,000 kilometres (about 5,000 miles) in just a few months.
Our journey was only 900km and we took five days, we took our time hopping from one perfect swimming bay to the next, swimming in perfect crystal clear turquoise seas and reading aloud from our revolutionary books. This was the epitome of adventure.
We did hook up with granny Nieves 'amigos' whom for $10 per night allowed us to camp in their spare room, this is where we met Canadian Lee-Anne and learned a lot more about Cuba than we bargained for. But that's next week's story.

