Cuba - Lonely Planet [305]
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Important economically and horrendous ecologically, Moa is a big, ugly mine at the foot of the verdant Cuchillas de Moa that has covered the entire region in a film of dirty red dust. Unless you’re a Canadian mining technician, or an environmentalist investigating impending ecological disasters, there’s absolutely no reason to come here. ‘A better world is possible’ proclaims one of the billboards as you leave the town behind. Absolutely!
Sleeping
Hotel Miraflores (Islazul; 60-61-25; Av Amistad, Rpto Miraflores; s/d CUC$36/48; ) If you must stay – and it’s a viable pit stop if you’re heading south for Baracoa and the Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt – this bog-standard Islazul offering perched on a hillside on the western side of town will do the business. Its on-site restaurant is your only real eating option. The airport is 5km distant, and getting there costs about CUC$3 in a taxi.
Getting There & Around
Moa’s Orestes Acosta Airport is conveniently located beside the highway to Baracoa, just 3km east of downtown Moa. Cubana ( 60-73-70; Av del Puerto, Rolo Monterrey) has flights to/from Havana on Monday (CUC$124 one way, three hours).
The bus station is near the center of town, 3km east of the Hotel Miraflores. A daily bus leaves for Holguín and another goes to Santiago de Cuba, but there’s no bus to Baracoa. You may be prevented from using the regular passenger trucks that leave the bus station for Holguín and Baracoa, as foreigners are officially prohibited. This means that there’s no legal public transport except for hitchhiking and tourist taxis between Moa and Baracoa. Taxi drivers will ask CUC$25 to Baracoa. The road, incidentally, is a potholed nightmare, but just about passable in a standard car.
Cubacar ( 60-22-32) has an office at Hotel Miraflores. The Servi-Cupet gas station is at the entrance to Moa from Mayarí, not far from the Hotel Miraflores.
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Granma Province
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BAYAMO
AROUND BAYAMO
DOS RÍOS & AROUND
YARA
GRAN PARQUE NACIONAL SIERRA MAESTRA
MANZANILLO
MEDIA LUNA
NIQUERO
PARQUE NACIONAL DESEMBARCO DEL GRANMA
PILÓN
MAREA DEL PORTILLO
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Granma has ‘made in Cuba’ stamped all over it. This is the land where José Martí died, where Fidel Castro landed with his band of shipwrecked revolutionaries, and where Granma native Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves and formally declared Cuban independence in 1868. And, if history doesn’t swing it, you can always ponder over the geographical significance of Cuba’s longest river (the Cauto), its most pristine coastal marine terraces (in Parque Nacional Desembarco del Granma) and its third-highest mountain (Pico Bayamesa; 1730m).
With much of its interior and southwestern coastal areas cut off from the main transport grid, one of Granma’s primary attractions is its isolation and the feisty individualism that goes with it. Street parties in towns such as Bayamo, Manzanillo and Pilón are a weekly occurrence here and are uniquely enlivened with homemade street snacks, hotly contested games of chess, and the kind of archaic street organs that were last seen in Europe when Cuba was still the property of Spain.
Juxtaposing pancake-flat rice fields with the soaring peaks of the Sierra Maestra, Granma is more rural than urban and even the two main cities of Bayamo and Manzanillo retain a faintly bucolic air.
But far from sucking on sugar stalks in the safety of their remote backcountry refuges, the resourceful locals are renowned for their creativity, particularly in the field of music. Two of the giants of Cuban nueva trova (philosophical folk guitar music) were born in Granma (Pablo Milanés in Bayamo and Carlos Puebla in Manzanillo), and in 1972 the province hosted a groundbreaking music festival that helped put this revolutionary new music style on Cuba’s – and Latin America’s – cultural map.
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HIGHLIGHTS
DIY Hike Break out of the Marea del Portillo hotels and hike up to El Salto (see boxed text,)
Guerrilla Watching Trek up to La Plata in Gran Parque Nacional