Cuba - Lonely Planet [300]
Coches de caballo (horse carriages) run between Playas Esmeralda and Guardalavaca or you can rent a moped (CUC$24 per day) or bike (free if you’re staying at an all-inclusive) at all of the resort hotels.
A Servi-Cupet gas station ( 24hr) is situated between Guardalavaca and Playa Esmeralda.
All the rental agencies have offices in Guardalavaca and can also rent mopeds.
Cubacar (Map; 43-01-34; Club Amigo Atlántico – Guardalavaca)
Vía Gaviota (Map; 43-05-55; Hotel Playa Pesquero)
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BANES
pop 44,983
The sugar town of Banes, just north of the Bahía de Banes, is the site of one of Cuba’s biggest oxymorons. Cuban president Fulgencio Batista was born here in 1901. Then, 47 years later, in the local clapboard church of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad, another fiery leader-in-waiting, Fidel Castro, tied the knot with the blushing Birta Díaz Balart. A generous Batista gave them a US$500 gift for their honeymoon. Ah, how history could have been so different.
Founded in 1887, this effervescent company town was a virtual fiefdom of the US-run United Fruit Company until the 1950s and many of the old American company houses still remain. These days in the sun-streaked streets and squares you’re more likely to encounter cigar-smoking cronies slamming dominoes and mums carrying meter-long loaves of bread; in short, everything Cuban that is missing from the all-inclusive resorts.
In September 2008 Banes was pummeled by Hurricane Ike, which damaged or destroyed 70% of its buildings. At the time of writing it was still picking up the pieces.
Information
There’s an immigration office (Av de Cárdenas No 314A) here if you need a visa extension. Banes is one of those towns with no street signs and locals who don’t know street names, so prepare to get lost.
Sights & Activities
If you’re coming from the resorts, Banes’ biggest attraction may be enjoying the street life provided by a stroll through town.
On October 12, 1948, Fidel Castro Ruz and Birta Díaz Balart were married in the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad on Parque Martí in the center of Banes. After their divorce in 1954, Birta remarried and moved to Spain; through their only child, Fidelito, Fidel has several grandchildren.
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BRUISED FRUIT
United Fruit is a name riddled with historical contradictions. On one hand, the company gave the world the ‘Big Mike,’ the first mass-produced imported banana; on the other, it developed a reputation for meddling covertly in the internal affairs of successive Latin American ‘banana republics’ – including Cuba.
Formed back in 1899 when Minor C Keith’s Costa Rican–based banana-growing company merged with Andrew Preston’s Boston fruit import business, United Fruit quickly morphed into a huge global monolith that went on to become one of the world’s first multinational corporations.
Spreading its tentacles in the early 1900s, the company invested in 36 hectares of sugar plantations in eastern Cuba, where they constructed 544km of railroad and two large sugar mills – the Boston and the Preston – in what is now Holguín province. One of the company’s early laborers was Ángel Castro (father of Fidel), who helped clear land for the company’s burgeoning plantations before setting up on his own in Birán in 1915. Encased in an expansive new rural estate, Castro Senior began hiring out labor to United Fruit for a tidy profit and quickly became a wealthy man.
Holguín was soon the darling scion of United Fruit in Cuba, with provincial towns such as Banes and Mayarí sporting prosperous Americanized enclaves that owed both their existence and wealth to the omnipresent US-owned conglomerate. But dissatisfaction among Cubans was quietly growing.
Like many nationalistically minded leftists, Fidel Castro was incensed with the clandestine