Cuba’s Oldest City Was Cut Off From the Rest of the Country Until 1965

Baracoa Cuba: The road that finally connected Baracoa to the rest of Cuba is called La Farola, and it does not let you arrive gently. It climbs out of Guantánamo, hairpins up into the Sierra del Purial, and for a while there’s nothing on either side but green mountains folding into more green mountains, the kind of drive where a passenger goes quiet. Then the road tips over a ridge, the sea appears, and down at the edge of a wide bay sits a small town of low red roofs. That’s Baracoa. And the strange part — the part that reframes the whole place — is that for most of its history, this road did not exist. If you wanted to get here, you came by boat.

Baracoa is the oldest city in Cuba. It was also, until about sixty years ago, the most cut-off one. Those two facts are the whole story of the place, and they explain almost everything you notice once you’re standing in it.

The first city

The Spanish conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar founded Baracoa on August 15, 1511 — the first Spanish settlement on the island and, for a few years, its capital. Cubans call it the Ciudad Primada, the first city, and the claim is not a marketing flourish; it predates Havana, predates Santiago, predates every other town you’ve heard of. When people say Cuba’s story starts here, they mean it literally.

The town leans even further back than that. Local tradition holds that Columbus himself came ashore near here in 1492, on his first voyage, and that the flat-topped mountain he described in his log — a peak shaped like an anvil — is the one that still watches over Baracoa today. In the town church there’s a relic tied to that visit: the Cruz de la Parra, a weathered wooden cross said to have been left by Columbus’s crew. Scientists who studied it dated the wood to roughly the right era, though they also found it was carved from a local tree rather than something carried across the Atlantic — which, depending on how you feel about it, either dents the legend or deepens it. Either way, it’s one of the oldest objects of its kind in the Americas, sitting in a modest church in a town most travelers to Cuba never reach.

Boxed in by mountains, open to the sea

Here’s why Baracoa stayed so singular for so long. The town sits on the Bahía de Miel — the Bay of Honey — pinned against the water by a horseshoe of steep mountains at the far eastern tip of the island. Those mountains were a wall. For centuries there was no practical way in or out over land; the ranges were too high, too dense, too wet. So Baracoa did what island towns do when the land turns its back on them. It faced the sea. Supplies came by boat, people came by boat, and the town developed its own rhythm, largely out of reach of whatever was happening in Havana.

That changed in 1965. A road called La Farola — ‘the lighthouse’ — was carved through the Sierra del Purial, running about 120 kilometres up from Guantánamo, and for the first time in more than four centuries you could drive into Baracoa. The government of the day treated it as a showpiece, and it earned the reputation: sections of it hang off the mountainside on concrete stilts, and it still turns up on lists of Cuba’s boldest pieces of engineering. Whatever you think of the politics around it, the road did something no amount of talking had managed in 450 years. It let the rest of the country in.

You can feel the aftershock of all that isolation the moment you’re there. Baracoa doesn’t quite behave like the rest of Cuba. The pace is slower. The accent shifts. And the food — the food is another country entirely.

A cuisine that went its own way

Cut a town off for four hundred years and its kitchen goes somewhere the rest of the island never followed. Baracoa is Cuba’s cacao heartland; most of the country’s chocolate grows in the hills around it, and the town runs on the stuff. There’s a drink called chorote, thick chocolate cooked down with a little cornstarch until it’s closer to a warm pudding than a beverage, traditionally stirred with a carved wooden whisk. It tastes nothing like a hotel breakfast.

Then there’s coconut, which turns up in Baracoa the way garlic turns up everywhere else. The local sweet everyone tells you to try is cucurucho — grated coconut cooked with honey or sugar and whatever fruit is around, then packed into a little cone of palm leaf and sold along the roadsides. Savory dishes lean on coconut milk too, in sauces you won’t find in Havana. And it’s all fed by the Río Toa, the most voluminous river in Cuba, which comes down out of the rainforest and gives this corner of the island a lushness the dry, sugar-cane flatlands elsewhere simply don’t have. Baracoa is green in a way that surprises people who think they already know what Cuba looks like.

The wildest corner of the island

That green is not an accident, and it’s the reason serious naturalists put Baracoa on their list long before anyone else did. Just west of town lies Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, named for the German scientist who explored Cuba in the early 1800s, and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. UNESCO calls it one of the most biologically diverse tropical island ecosystems on Earth, and the numbers back the language up: something on the order of 900 endemic plant species live inside its boundaries — plants that exist here and nowhere else — along with a startling share of Cuba’s endemic reptiles, amphibians and birds. It’s the best-preserved mountain rainforest left in the Caribbean.

Rising over the town is El Yunque, the flat-topped mountain that probably caught Columbus’s eye — a table of rock about 575 metres high with sheer green sides, visible from almost everywhere in Baracoa. You can hike it, though it’s a hot, humid, root-tangled climb rather than a stroll, and the reward at the top is the view back down over the bay. Between the mountain, the park and the river, Baracoa offers the kind of raw nature most people don’t associate with Cuba at all. The postcard version of the island is a beach and a classic car. This is the other Cuba — wet, forested, loud with birds — and it’s been sitting quietly at the eastern end the whole time.

A town that has had to rebuild

None of this is to paint Baracoa as untouched or easy. In October 2016, Hurricane Matthew came ashore almost directly on top of it, one of the strongest storms to hit that stretch of coast in living memory. It tore off roofs, flattened homes, stripped the coconut palms the local economy leans on. The town rebuilt, as it has rebuilt before, but the scars are part of the honest picture. Baracoa is remote, it is exposed to the weather, and it has less of a safety net than the big tourist centres. That remoteness is exactly what makes it special and exactly what makes it demanding to reach — the two things have never been separable here.

When the time is right to go

Which brings us to the part we won’t skip. Right now is not the moment to book a trip to Baracoa, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Cuba is in the middle of a serious energy crisis: fuel shortages, disrupted and cancelled flights, long daily blackouts. Getting to the eastern tip of the island — always the hard part of any Cuba itinerary — is harder now than it has been in years. This isn’t the season to chase a flight to the far end of a country that’s struggling to keep the lights on.

So treat Baracoa the way the town has always asked to be treated: as somewhere you reach on purpose, when the conditions are right, not somewhere you rush. Keep it on the list. Know what you’re waiting for. When Cuba steadies — and it will — the oldest city on the island, the one that spent four centuries reachable only by sea, is worth the long road east to see.

Baracoa is also exactly the kind of place that rewards knowing someone on the ground. It’s a long way from Havana, the logistics are real, and the difference between a frustrating trip and a great one is usually local knowledge. Marysol has kept people on the ground in Cuba for eighteen years, with an office in Havana, and when the time comes to plan the eastern end of the island properly, that’s the sort of thing we’re for.

If Cuba’s first city is somewhere you’d like to reach one day, and you’d rather plan it with someone who actually knows the island, you can find us at marysoltravel.com/contact.

 

References

• Alejandro de Humboldt National Park — UNESCO World Heritage Centre, site listing 839 (the biodiversity and the World Heritage inscription):
• Cuba travel advice — UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (current, honest picture of conditions on the ground):