Cienfuegos

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Cienfuegos

We left Havana about 8.30am driving southeast on Cuba’s main arterial road, the Autopista Nacional. This flat, straight six-lane highway was built in the dying days of Soviet aid and much of it is as unfinished today as it was when the Soviets pulled the plug in the late 1980’s. There is hardly a town or even village to be seen, and for the first hundred kilometers hardly any agriculture either - just bushy scrubland.

We made a pit stop just before Jaguey Grande to stretch our legs and recharge ourselves on coffee (coffee and
mojitos are by far the best fare that Cuba has to offer), and then headed south on a smaller road through Australia (sic), where Castro had his headquarters in a sugar mill when directing the
Bay of Pigs defence. From here the road crosses the swampy Zapata Peninsula to Playa Larga at the top of the Bay of Pigs (Bahía de Cochinos). Along the eastern shore of the bay we stopped at the delightful Cueva de los Peces for a swim in the crystal clear water and for lunch in a wood and thatch cabana above a deep salt-water cenote in the limestone rock. As usual the choice was fish or pork, but today they were also offering squid and it was pretty good.

Further along the coast is Playa Giron, one of the points at which a CIA-sponsored band of Cuban exiles landed in 1960 in the farcical and humiliating (for the US) Bay of Pigs invasion. A small museum giving the Cuban version of events is quite interesting, as is the captured hardware parked out in front. From the Bay of Pigs we headed inland through agricultural land with herds of cows and sheep and stretches of citrus trees, sugar cane and rice. There were a few more villages and settlements around here, but the whole day we saw hardly any shops at all, and those we did manage to spot were hard for a non-Cuban to recognise as being retail outlets. We saw not a single roadside stall selling fruits, vegetables or soft drinks. Nor a single advertising sign, be it a billboard or a simple small sign promoting a local business. It all seemed very weird indeed to a western capitalist way of thinking.

Shortly before reaching our destination of Cienfuegos we entered a tropical storm with torrential rain, thunder and lightning. We checked into the Union Hotel in the late afternoon, and it was still drizzling heavily when we met up for drinks on the roof terrace. There were lovely views from here over the rooftops of Cienfuegos and down to the central plaza just behind the hotel. There needed to be something to look at since - although we were the only customers - it did take half an hour for us to get our mojitos.

Dinner was at the Club Cienfuegos, which was once the American Yacht Club - an imposing building looking out west over Cienfuegos Bay. It is not of course a club at all anymore, which is a far too exclusive concept for Cuba, but is a restaurant, café and bar. We had a good dinner of local prawns and a passable chilled white wine. Then back to the roof bar at the Union Hotel where we had been promised a band from nine o’clock. As we sat and downed rounds of mojitos, the barman apologised with increasing frequency for the lateness of the band, finally admitting that they would not be turning up after all…

After breakfast the next day - the rain had stopped overnight and it was another hot, clear morning - we walked around the historic central area of the town, laid out on a grid system by French settlers (largely from Bordeaux) in the early nineteenth century. Much of the architecture dates from the second half of that century although some of the facades were changed in the first few decades of the twentieth. The whole town centre now has a World Heritage Site listing which should put a stop to any further depredations. Cienfuegos’ main artery, known as El Prado, is a wide, centrally divided boulevard in the French style, while another of the main streets has been pedestrianised and is lined with shops; we saw more shops on this stretch than we had seen on the whole trip so far, but no food shops - where does everyone buy their provisions we wondered?

The main square is a delight. Parque José Marti is a large green square surrounded by half a dozen substantial buildings erected between about 1850 and 1920. On the eastern side is a beautifully proportioned neo-classical cathedral (Catedral de la Purísima Concepción), while dominating the northern aspect is the exquisite Teatro Tomás Terry opened in 1895. Inside, the theatre appears not to have changed one iota since it was opened in 1890, and it gives one an impression of what a boomtown Cienfuegos was in its heyday to read that performances were given here by Caruso, Pavlova, and Sarah Bernhardt.

Later we drove south down El Prado and along the Malecón, with views over Cienfuegos Bay, to reach Punta Gorda where pleasant middle class houses built in the 1930’s line both sides of the street (now, of course, all offices of government or state enterprises). Passing the Cienfuegos Club where we had dined the night before we reached the extraordinary Palacio de Valle, built by a Spaniard in 1917; it is a hodgepodge of Moorish style decorated with carvings, coloured tiles and metalwork, all topped off by turrets and crenallated balustrades. It is today a restaurant and bar, and the roof terrace has lovely vistas all around the enormous Bahía de Cienfuegos and, in the distance, the abandoned structure of what was to be Cuba’s nuclear power station before Boris Yeltsin pulled the plug. We sat up here in the cooling breeze, under a deep blue sky, sipping Rum Collins, the house speciality. Next ➤ ➤

Howard's Cienfuegos Gallery at PBase

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