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making the commute up until the turn of the 21st century. Expanded post-WWII, the oldest US military base on foreign soil has gone through many metamorphoses in the last 50 years, from tense Cold War battleground to the most virulent surviving political anachronism in the Western hemisphere. Castro was quick to demand the unconditional return of Guantánamo to Cuban sovereignty in 1959 but, locked in a Cold War deadlock with the Soviet Union and fearing the Cuban leader’s imminent flight to Moscow, the US steadfastly refused. As relations between the countries deteriorated, Cuba cut off water and electricity to the base while the Americans surrounded it with the biggest minefield in the Western hemisphere (the mines were removed in 1996).

The recent history of the facility has been equally notorious. In January 1992, 11,000 Haitian migrants were temporarily held here, and in August 1994 the base was used as a dumping ground for 32,000 Cubans picked up by the US Coast Guard while trying to reach Florida. In May 1995 the Cuban and US governments signed an agreement allowing these refugees to enter the US but, since then, illegal Cuban immigrants picked up by the US Coast Guard at sea have been returned to Cuba under the ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy.

Since 2002 the US has held more than 750 prisoners with suspected Al-Qaeda or Taliban links at the infamous Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay without pressing criminal charges. Denied legal counsel and family contact while facing rigorous interrogations, the detainees mounted hunger strikes and at least four are known to have committed suicide. Following calls from Amnesty International and the UN in 2004 to close the base down and reports from the Red Cross that certain aspects of the camp regime were tantamount to torture, the US released 420 prisoners and charged just three of them. Of the remaining 245 prisoners (as of 2009), the US government intended to repatriate some to other countries for rehab or release, and transfer the rest to prisons in the US.

On taking office in January 2009, President Barack Obama promised to shut down Guantánamo’s detention camps and thus end what he termed ‘a sad chapter in US history.’ The chances of the naval base being returned to Cuban sovereignty any time soon, however, remain thin.

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Boca de Yumurí makes a superb bike jaunt from Baracoa (56km round-trip): hot, but smooth and flat with great views and many potential stopovers (try Playa Bariguá at Km 25). You can arrange bikes in Baracoa – ask at your casa particular. Taxis will also take you here from Baracoa, or you can organize an excursion with Cubatur (CUC$22; see right).

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BARACOA

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Take a pinch of Tolkein, a dash of Gabriel García Márquez, mix in a large cup of 1960s psychedelia and temper with a tranquilizing dose of Cold War–era socialism. Leave to stand for 400 years in a geographically isolated tropical wilderness with little or no contact with the outside world. The result: Baracoa – Cuba’s weirdest, wildest, zaniest and most unique settlement that materializes like a surreal apparition after the long dry plod along Guantánamo’s southern coast.

Cut off by land and sea for nearly half a millennium, Cuba’s oldest city is, for most visitors, one of its most interesting. Founded in 1511 by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, Baracoa is a visceral place of fickle weather and haunting legends. After being semiabandoned in the mid-16th century, the town became a Cuban Siberia where rebellious revolutionaries were sent as prisoners. In the early 19th century French planters crossed the 70km-wide Windward Passage from Haiti and began farming the local staples of coconut, cocoa and coffee in the mountains and the economic wheels began to turn.

Baracoa developed in relative isolation from the rest of Cuba until the opening of La Farola (see boxed text,) in 1964, a factor that has strongly influenced its singular culture and traditions. Today its premier attractions include trekking up mysterious El Yunque, the region’s signature flat-topped