We arrived in Havana after twenty-three hours awake and were immediately bundled into a battered yellow car with a cracked windscreen and no seatbelts. It careered through the city, past all the places I had previously seen only on a screen. They were suddenly real. Decaying, colourful, grand and gritty. By the time we were hauled up the narrow staircase to our Casa Particular, my eyes were bloodshot and my body was demanding sleep.
The following morning, Cuba began with a mango. It was ridiculously juicy, perfectly ripe and quite possibly the best mango I had ever tasted. We wandered into Habana Vieja, past the Hotel Inglaterra, Gran Teatro de La Habana and Capitolio Nacional, and into a world of grand buildings falling apart around cobbled streets. Within hours we had encountered our first scam. Tickets for a Buena Vista Social Club show and mojitos were offered with such enthusiasm that it seemed rude to refuse. Later we discovered that enthusiasm and honesty were not necessarily related. Sadly, this became a recurring theme.
It was difficult to get anything done. We needed a SIM card and a car. Three recommended places, seven hotels and a taxi ride later, we admitted defeat. Government restrictions had won.
Our carefully considered plan to circumnavigate the island disappeared and we began improvising. This was perhaps the first thing Cuba taught us. Plans were useful, but only up to a point. There was always another obstacle, another closed door, another shortage or another unexpected detour. Eventually we stopped trying to prevent these things and simply accepted them.
Havana was a good place to practice. We wandered through plazas and museums, visited a cigar factory, walked the Malecón and watched locals fish in the Straits of Florida. We ate lobster at La Bodeguita del Medio, drank rum at the Fábrica de Arte Cubano and watched rumba in Callejón de Hamel. It was at Callejón de Hamel that the contradictions became harder to ignore. The performers were hypnotic. The audience was not. One man had paid to enter the performance enclosure and spent the show thrusting his camera into the face of every musician. He was a sweat-spotted blimp of a man, white socks pulled to his knees, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was ruining the performance for everyone around him.
I found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Not because I was worried about being robbed or getting sick. It was the inequality implicit in almost every exchange. It made me question everything. Every conversation. Every handshake. Every smile.
What did we look like to the people we were photographing?
The obvious answer was uncomfortable. Economically powerful Westerners were using the force field of their wealth to behave in ways they probably would not behave at home.
Yet the line was not simple.
Over lunch I kept thinking about the man. The white socks staggering through the heat. The waterfalls of sweat. The locals giggling at him or simply ignoring him. His complete confidence in a place where he so obviously did not belong.
The disparity was not necessarily wealth. It was belonging.
Somehow I ended up feeling sorry for him. Not for the locals. Not even for the other tourists. For the desperate, unsatisfied sweat-spotted blimp and the unfortunate audience who would have to watch his terrible home movie.
Leaving Havana, the city dissolved into lush countryside. The Sierra del Rosario brought clear mountain pools, home-cooked food and rocking chairs. On the Sendero La Serafina, our guide Juli could spot birds we could barely see and produced a huge Mamay San Domingo fruit from the forest with a machete. It tasted like mango crossed with pineapple.
The power cuts were, at first, an inconvenience, but then they became a character in the story. In Viñales the power went off in our room, in restaurants and during meals. Eventually we stopped returning to the sweat box and simply ordered another mojito.
We hiked through tobacco country, explored limestone caves and rattled along on bicycles towards Los Aquáticos until my bike took a chunk out of my shin and we abandoned it. We hiked the rest of the way to a stunning viewpoint, where we drank Coco-Locos with families living on the mountainside before returning to the valley, watching the sun slowly descend over the landscape.
The Mural de la Prehistoria depicts a gigantic snail, dinosaurs, sea monsters and humans across a cliff face. Eighteen people had spent four years creating it. What a waste of time. It was horrific and had permanently scarred what had otherwise been a beautiful landscape.
In the Bahía de Cochinos, the world changed again. This watery world was gemstone blue where tropical fish buzzed around the coral. Julio, our dive guide, seemed to know every nook and cranny of the reef. Beyond it, the seabed dropped away into a dark, velvety abyss.
Our next dive took us over the edge of the reef and into the abyss. Here we found an old fishing boat tucked behind a coral ridge and followed Julio through a small cave and tunnel towards the light. My oxygen was running low. Before I really understood what was going on, Julio and I buddy breathing.
The next day it was time to leave Playa Girón. By now the journey had become less about seeing Cuba's sights and more about seeing how Cubans lived.
In Camagüey, we had our first experience of the state-run Moneda Libremente Convertible (MLC) shops. These were filled with goods ordinary Cubans could not afford, which explains why all across Cuba living rooms had become shops packed with whatever people could sell.
Water here, though, was impossible to buy until Alex arrived with two bicycles. Following a hot tip, Alex and I raced across town to an MLC shop and found twenty-two half-litre bottles at the bottom of a fridge. We were initially allowed to buy twelve.
The clock was ticking before the next power cut.
We bought twelve and for reasons I still do not fully understand, we were allowed to buy the other ten.
After saying goodbye to Alex and returning his bikes, we were walking back to our Casa Particular with three plastic bags full of water. At first we felt happy with ourselves, but soon we felt deeply uncomfortable. People stared. Three people asked where we had got it.
"MLC, pero no hay agua."
There was something obscene about having bought something as basic as water when so many people could not.
By then, "no hay" had become a sort of national punctuation mark.
No hay water.
No hay electricity.
No hay food.
No hay bus.
No hay.
And yet somehow there was always something.
There was baseball in Camagüey.
There was carnival.
There was music. Always music.
There was also ingenuity. The driver fixing the bus. The family selling coffee. The people who turned living rooms into shops. The hosts who found another solution when the first one failed.
And there was the luscious green landscape.
Whenever Cuba became too complicated, the landscape provided an escape.
In the Sierra Maestra, the history finally began to make sense. At Comandancia de la Plata, Miguel led us through the remains of the revolutionary headquarters: the medical station, meeting house, power station, Fidel's house and Radio Rebelde. The fragments we had collected from people across the country suddenly began to fit together.
The following morning we left at five. We walked beneath a starlit sky, following the ridge through banana and coffee plantations and into cloud forest. We passed Camp Joaquín and climbed towards Pico Real del Turquino. At 1,974 metres, Cuba's highest mountain was strangely anticlimactic. Shrubbery blocked the views. A small wooden sign gave the name and height, while a huge bronze bust of the Cuban national hero and poet José Martí marked the summit.
There was no grand panorama.
Just a mountain.
And us.
Fourteen hours after setting out, we eventually followed a river down to the village where Miguel was born, raised and still lived. There must be something special in the water here as Miguel was still going strong and I felt dead on my feet. I honestly do not know how he did it.
By then we had learned that Cuba was full of people who simply got on with things.
The taxi that arrived late.
The driver collecting water for his overheating engine.
The musician who played when everything else had stopped.
The shopkeeper who somehow found another bottle.
The family who opened their home to strangers.
The Cuban who had learned to live with "no hay" by finding a way to make something out of whatever was left. That was the Cuba that stayed with me. Not the Cuba of the postcards, polished American cars, perfect mojitos and revolutionary murals. Those things existed, of course, but underneath them was something much more complicated. There was simple beauty and extraordinary decay. Empty shelves, unreliable transport, bureaucracy, inequality and power cuts. Scams and tourist traps.
And there was music. Always music.
Eventually we left Baracoa and drove towards Moa. The landscape was now scarred by zinc and cobalt mining. The chimneys of the Planta de Níquel Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara pumped black and orange smoke into the sky. Further along, the Planta de Níquel Pedro Soto Alba sent out white smoke.
Eventually the landscape softened. The sea appeared. We had reached Guardalavaca.
After weeks of moving, waiting, sweating, climbing, diving, cycling, riding, being bounced around in taxis and buses, arguing with bureaucracy and drinking mojitos during power cuts, we had arrived somewhere where there was nothing left to do.
For a little while, at least.
Cuba had taught us to stop expecting things to work.
Instead, we learned to expect something else.
A detour.
A closed door.
A late taxi.
A broken bus.
A power cut.
A stranger offering help.
A ridiculous conversation.
A mango.
A mountain.
A song.
A drink.
A way around.
There was always a way around.
In Cuba, there was never a Plan B. In Cuba, they use all the letters of the alphabet.
