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Outside Magazine July 2001
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Free Cuba Now
Any time now, the world's last Communist stronghold will be open for adventure. But for an overzealous kayaker, that's way too long to wait.

By Peter Heller

Ghost hotel: The author kayaks to the San Pasqual, a former cargo ship, now a vacant, surreal resort.
I RAN THE KAYAK over the sand of a little cove on Cayo las Brujas, Cuba, and thought about the Chinese and the Russians. It was very early in the morning to be thinking about Russians. The sun had not yet cleared the thickets of black mangrove that hedged the bay. The sky was gray, grainy with undissolved night; it held the twilight like a fine net. The water was slick and dark, and the sand fleas, thank God, were still asleep.

After months of strenuous efforts and numerous threats of arrest, I was at last being allowed to paddle a kayak unsupervised off of Cuba's pristine northern coast. In China and in the former Soviet Union, where I'd kayaked several times on extended trips, Communist officials wanted to detain me only long enough to do some serious drinking. As I pushed the boat into the wash of a breaking wave I thought how the Russians were pliable and permissive next to the Cubans. The Chinese were absolutely laissez-faire.

The north coast is a kayaker's dream, yet no one has ever paddled it for any distance. The shore here is hot with smugglers—jet boats from Miami gunning in to pick up fleeing Cubans
I turned to Trey Barlow, a cigar-shop owner and former river guide from Colorado, who was slipping his boat into the warm water beside me.

"I feel like lights and sirens might go off any second," I said.

"I feel like Captain Kirk," Trey replied.

I knew what he meant. This was my second trip to Cuba, and it still felt as forbidding as the Delta Quadrant. A year before, I had attempted to paddle this same stretch of coast but was repeatedly denied permission by border guards who patrol the beaches like rottweilers. My written requests for a paddling permit were similarly rejected. The difficulty stemmed from suspicion of the United States and the fact that the Cuban government is a bit flummoxed by nonconventional tourism. The adventure-travel industry has worked its way into most of the least-developed nations on earth, but in Cuba, it's still an oddity. The country's highest mountain, 6,560-foot Pico Turquino, is closed to hikers because of bandidos. Pleasure boats are meticulously tracked. And though Cuba is prime for mountain biking (thousands of miles of dirt roads and several mountain ranges), rock climbing (limestone cliffs abound), scuba diving (11 world-class sites, including wrecks), and sea kayaking (thousands of offshore islands), very few foreigners come here to do any of that.

Photo Gallery
To view images from Peter Heller and James Rexroad's latest Cuban adventures, click here
Americans hunting and fishing is a different story. It's appreciated and encouraged—Papa Hemingway is almost as iconic in Cuba as Fidel. So when Bob Walz, a gravel-voiced ex-marine who's been leading high-roller hook-and-bullet holidays to Cuba for a decade, called to invite me on his next safari, I was intrigued. "I've got two kayaks above Caibarién," he said. "I promise I'll get you in the water."

I signed on. The itinerary included a lot of cigar sampling and deep-sea fishing, which was fine with me, and some dove hunting, which I'd never done. My fellow sportsmen included a Bush family attorney, two investment bankers, Trey and his two partners in the cigar shop, and a funeral director from Providence, Rhode Island, whose clientele has included several defunct mobsters. I figured I'd finally learn how to keep a cigar burning evenly, and really, I would have joined a shuffleboard team to get in a kayak down there.



The Cubans gave us one day. A whole day to explore a section of coast I'd been eyeing for a couple of years: a hundred-mile stretch from the 400-year-old sugar port of Caibarién to the beach resort of Varadero. A few miles offshore for almost that entire length is the Archipiélago de Sabana, a chain of wild mangrove islands. The waters between the coast and the archipelago are shallow, protected from wind and waves. Beyond the keys, the water deepens, bell clear, and lobsters school so densely a freediver can easily pick up dinner. There are sand beaches cut from the thickets, and on some of the islands clusters of tall cedar trees flag freshwater springs.

The north coast is a kayaker's dream, yet no one has ever paddled it for any distance. The shore here is hot with smugglers—jet boats from Miami gunning in, under the hapless watch of the slower military boats—picking up fleeing Cubans. So the coast is jealously guarded by a fierce border patrol, which has outposts strung every 15 miles along the shore and requires that the skippers of even the smallest fishing skiffs obtain a permit before they throw a net in a bay.

Trey and I paddled north and west. The keys lay close together, braiding the water into narrow channels that now, in the windless dawn, were silk smooth. A flat bright moon hung in front of us like a Che Guevara two-peso coin, in neat counterbalance to the red sun bulging over Cayo las Brujas. As the sky lightened, the water turned mauve, roiled now and then by frenzied schools of fish. For all things cold-blooded it was time for breakfast.

We cruised past an islet cut with limestone cliffs, and the new sun threw our windmilling shadows against the chalky walls. There were no other boats or people in sight. We were pioneers, outriders, going where no kayak had gone beforeÑuntil we had to return the boats at four o'clock.


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Peter Heller is an Outside contributing editor and the author of Set Free in China: Sojourns on the Edge (Chelsea Green).