Few travellers venture to Cuba’s south-eastern corner, but a little-known road offers a fascinating – and stunning – glimpse of the nation’s revolutionary past.
“We’re going the back way to Santiago,” I told the man at the car hire office in Bayamo, Cuba.
The manager looked at me and warned that this remote road lacks cell signal, and that if the car were to break down, it could be a long time before anyone arrived to rescue us.
Tracing the edge of eastern Cuba’s foot-shaped Granma province, this back road, which Cubans call the Carretera Granma (or the southern coastal road), is so isolated that Fidel Castro, who launched his grass-roots revolution against the nation’s US-backed president Fulgencio Batista here in 1956, only returned to the area once in his lifetime. The province is named after the 18m motor yacht Castro sailed from his exiled home in Mexico back to Cuba to overthrow the government. After crash-landing almost 100m offshore and thrashing their way through more than 1km of thick mangroves near this very road, Castro, Che Guevara and 80 other revolutionaries set about making modern-day Cuba.
On paper, it makes sense for travellers wishing to go from Granma’s capital, Bayamo, to Cuba’s second city, Santiago de Cuba, to drive some 130km along the central highway. But this remote – and at times, rough – road that slaloms between the turquoise ocean and the steep slopes of the Sierra Maestra mountains on Cuba’s southern edge is so magnificent in parts that it leaves drivers and passengers gawping in awe. In 25 years of travelling to the country, I’ve found it to be the most spectacular road trip in Cuba, and driving it reveals fascinating snapshots of the nation’s revolutionary history alongside the jaw-dropping views.
My trip would take me 420km in all, from Bayamo west to the coast, and then tracing Granma’s triangular shape anticlockwise to Santiago de Cuba. I’d driven this road alone before, but because of Cuba’s ongoing fuel shortages, I booked a second driver, Rafa González, through Bayamo Travel Agent. While a full tank would get us to Santiago, and Cuba is quite safe, I didn’t fancy being stranded alone in case of breakdown on such a far-flung road with little to no mobile phone signal.
Away from the Sierra Maestra, Granma is a province of rolling fields, tousled sugar cane, wide-open skies and cotton-ball clouds. It also proudly honours the region’s rebellious past. As González and I bumped through the potholed roads out of Bayamo, we drove past key figures of Cuba’s 1959 Revolution immortalised in painted portraits on large roadside stone slabs. I felt like I was travelling through the pages of a Cuban history book.
This road reveals traces of Cuban history long before the revolution, though. In the small town of Yara, 44km west of Bayamo, Hatuey, an aboriginal Taíno leader, was burnt at the stake by the Spaniards in 1512. Hatuey refused to convert to Christianity and was murdered for his heresy. His ashes spiralled skywards, inspiring the Luz de Yara legend that most Cubans grow up learning about a mysterious light sometimes seen dusting these faraway fields.
After stopping in the sleepy coastal town of Manzanillo for one of Cuba’s best snacks, a small triangular pastelito de guayaba (guava pastry), we journeyed south-west along the ridge of Granma’s “foot”, where banana plantations, coconut palms and almond, flamboyán and mango trees crowded the grassy borders between the tarmac and lilting sugar cane.
