Cuba - Lonely Planet [140]
The Antiguo Cafetal Angerona, 17km west of Artemisa on the road to Cayajabos and the Autopista Habana–Pinar del Río (A4), was one of Cuba’s earliest cafetales (coffee plantations). It is now a national monument. Erected between 1813 and 1820 by Cornelio Sauchay, Angerona once employed 450 slaves tending 750,000 coffee plants. Behind the ruined mansion lie the slave barracks and an old watchtower, from which the slaves’ comings and goings were monitored. The estate is mentioned in novels by Cirilo Villaverde and Alejo Carpentier, and James A Michener devotes several pages to it in Six Days in Havana. It’s a quiet and atmospheric place that has the feel of a latter-day Roman ruin.
The Artemisa train station (Av Héroes del Moncada) is four blocks east of the bus station. There are supposed to be two trains a day from Havana at noon and midnight, but don’t bank on it.
The bus station is on the Carretera Central in the center of town.
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MARIEL
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Mariel, 45km west of Havana, is known mostly for the 125,000 Cubans who left here for Florida in April 1980 (see boxed text,). Once you see it, you’ll want to flee, too. Founded in 1762, Mariel is a major industrial town and port with the largest cement factory in Cuba, a huge thermoelectric power plant, military airfield and shipyards. There’s also a new duty-free industrial zone adding to the action. It sits on the Bahía de Mariel at Cuba’s narrowest point, just 31km north of the Caribbean at Playa Majana.
After Moa in Holguín province, Mariel is Cuba’s most heavily polluted town. The filthy cement factory at Mariel once belonged to American cement producer Lone Star and was later run by the Mexican cement giant Cemex as a joint venture with the Cuban government.
The local Museo Municipal de Mariel (Calle 132 No 6926 cnr Av 71) is opposite the church at the entrance to town and, with its extensive coin collection, will enthrall bored coin collectors. A huge castle-like mansion, now a naval academy, stands on a hilltop overlooking Mariel.
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THE MARIEL BOATLIFT
On April 1, 1980, Hector Sanyustic – a disgruntled Cuban dissident – drove a public bus through the fence of the Peruvian embassy in downtown Havana in an audacious escape bid. Despite being fired upon by guards in the street outside (one of whom was killed in the crossfire), Sanyustic and his four accomplices made it safely inside the embassy perimeter where they successfully claimed political asylum.
Hearing the news a furious Castro immediately demanded that Sanyustic and his colleagues be handed back to the Cuban authorities to be tried on charges of manslaughter. When Peru refused, Fidel, in a rare fit of pique, decided to remove the guards from the embassy gates and thus, unwittingly, usher in the biggest human exodus the island had ever seen.
Few observers – Fidel included – could have predicted the chaos that followed. As word of the new security arrangements quickly spread among other disaffected Cubans, the grounds of the Peruvian embassy filled up with over 11,000 Cuban refugees adamant to leave the island in the wake of a worsening economic crisis and an ongoing thaw in US-Cuban relations that had been orchestrated by the Carter administration.
With a major confrontation brewing, Castro did what he always does best: he passed the problem onto the US. On April 9, incensed at a comment by US president Jimmy Carter which had stated that America would ‘welcome the refugees with open arms,’ Fidel announced that the port of Mariel, 45km west of Havana, would be open to any Cubans wanting to leave, as long as they had someone to pick them up. Moving quickly to bail out their beleaguered compatriots, Cuban exiles in Miami and Key West resourcefully rustled up a Dunkirk-like flotilla of ships that was dispatched off to Mariel on a spontaneous rescue mission.
It was a lengthy and highly disorganized evacuation. Within weeks, the US had been inundated with Cuban refugees, many of whom – it later