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There’s a Bronze José Martí on Top of Cuba’s Highest Mountain. A Doctor and His Daughter Helped Put It There

Marysol Travel

Sierra Maestra from the coast at Las Cuevas

Most mountain summits give you a view and a pile of stones. Pico Turquino gives you a man.

He’s bronze, head and shoulders, set on a stone pedestal at 1,974 metres above the Caribbean, and he looks out over the Sierra Maestra in the far east of Cuba. It’s José Martí, the poet and organiser who was killed in 1895 fighting for Cuban independence, and he has been up there since May 1953. You reach him after a long, wet climb through cloud forest, usually on the second day of the trek. And the first thing most people do when they get there is not photograph the view. They read the plaque.

“Escasos como los montes son los hombres que saben mirar desde ellos y sienten con entraña de nación o de humanidad.”

Bronze bust of José Martí on its stone pedestal at the summit of Pico Turquino, Cuba, surrounded by cloud

Martí at 1,974 metres, where he has stood since May 1953

Roughly: as rare as mountains are the men who know how to look out from them, and feel it in their gut for a nation, or for humanity. The line comes from a letter Martí wrote to his Dominican friend Federico Henríquez y Carvajal. Somebody chose it for the highest point in the country on purpose. Somebody also had to get a bronze bust up a mountain with no road, in 1953, without a helicopter.

The word that’s hard to translate is entraña. It means the innards, the gut, the deepest part of something. Martí didn’t write that these rare men think about the nation. He wrote that they feel it in their insides. It’s an odd, physical word to put on top of a mountain, and it fits the climb better than anything polished would have. By the time you read it, your own insides have had a long day.

That’s the story worth knowing before you go.

How Martí got to the top of Cuba

1953 was the hundredth anniversary of Martí’s birth, and Cuba was full of centenary projects. Most of them ended up in town squares and school courtyards, which is why there is a Martí bust in almost every Cuban town you will ever pass through. A group from the Asociación de Antiguos Alumnos del Seminario Martiano in Havana wanted something less comfortable. They wanted Martí at the highest point of the island.

The bust was made by Jilma Madera, the sculptor who later made the Christ of Havana that looks across the bay from Casablanca. The practical side of the expedition fell to Manuel Sánchez Silveira, a country doctor in Oriente who also worked as a regional delegate for Cuba’s national archaeology body, and who knew the Sierra well. His daughter came along to record it on film and in photographs. Her name was Celia Sánchez.

The bronze came in by sea to the south coast and was hauled up from there, on foot and with mules, to a pedestal built at the summit. It was unveiled on 21 May 1953.

Here is the part that guidebooks tend to blur. Four years later, Celia Sánchez was back in the Sierra Maestra for a very different reason. She became one of the key organisers of the rebel army’s supply network in the mountains, and later Fidel Castro’s closest aide. Rebel fighters climbed Turquino themselves in 1957. By 1958 Castro’s headquarters, the Comandancia de La Plata, was hidden in the forest on the northern side of the same range. It’s still there, inside the national park.

So the bust on Turquino wasn’t put up by the revolution. It came first. A group of Havana alumni picked the most remote spot in the country for a centenary tribute, and within a few years that same ridge was the centre of a war. Whatever you think of what came after, it’s hard to stand next to that pedestal and not feel the layers.

The mountain itself

Pico Turquino, or Pico Real del Turquino to give it its full name, is 1,974 metres high. That’s the figure Cuba uses officially. You’ll see 1,972 or 1,975 in other sources, which tells you more about surveying than about the mountain.

It sits on the border between Granma and Santiago de Cuba provinces, in the municipality of Guamá, and it’s the high point of a range that does something unusual: it rises almost straight out of the sea. The coast road at its foot runs at a few metres above the waves. The summit is less than ten kilometres inland as the crow flies. That steepness is the whole character of the place.

There are actually three named summits on the Turquino massif: Pico Real at 1,974 metres, Pico Cuba at 1,872 and Pico Suecia at 1,734. The Swedish name gives away who did the naming. In April 1915 the Swedish botanist Erik Leonard Ekman climbed the mountain with a companion and two local guides, Regino Verdecia and Joaquín Rodríguez, and he believed he was probably the first person to reach the top. He may not have been. The 1915 party found the remains of an old campfire, and a man called Fred Ramsden claimed an ascent back in 1860. Nobody has settled it. I rather like that Cuba’s highest point starts its written history with an argument.

Since 1980 the mountain has been the core of Turquino National Park, around 229 square kilometres of the eastern Sierra Maestra, and in December 1991 the peak was declared a National Monument.

Cloud forest, not jungle

People expect palm trees and get moss. The lower slopes are farmed and forested, with coffee in the valleys. Somewhere around 1,000 metres the forest changes: the trees get shorter and wetter, every branch is padded with moss and bromeliads, and for most of the day you’re walking inside a cloud. Near the summit it thins out into stunted, wind-shaped scrub.

This is where you have a real chance of hearing the Cuban solitaire, a small grey thrush with a song that sounds like someone running a wet finger round the rim of a glass. You’ll probably see the tocororo, the Cuban trogon, the national bird, red, white and blue like the flag. On a clear morning you see the coast and the sea below you. Clear mornings are not the rule. The cloud is the reason the forest exists, and it’s the reason the views, when they come, feel earned.

Cloud forest on the Turquino trail

What the climb is actually like

There are two ways up, and the classic trip uses both.

The northern route starts at Alto del Naranjo, above the village of Santo Domingo in Granma province. You get to the trailhead on one of the steepest paved roads in Cuba, which is an experience in itself. From there the path follows the ridge, up and down, through the cloud forest, with a basic overnight stop at a mountain camp before the final push to the summit. The southern route starts at Las Cuevas, on the coast road in Santiago de Cuba province, practically at sea level. That means close to 2,000 metres of climbing on a narrow, rocky trail, much of it in the open sun before you reach the trees.

Most people do it as a traverse over two or three days: up from Alto del Naranjo, over the summit, and down the long southern side to the sea at Las Cuevas. Finishing at the coast with your legs shaking and the Caribbean right there is one of the better endings any hike in the Caribbean can offer.

A few things are not negotiable. You can’t climb Turquino alone; a licensed park guide is required, and there are park entry and guide fees on top. The trails are steep, wet and often muddy even in the dry season, which runs roughly from mid-October to April. You need proper hiking boots, a rain layer and a warm layer, because the summit gets properly cold at night. Accommodation on the mountain is rustic: think a shelter and a bunk, not a lodge. If that sounds like a lot of effort for one bronze head, it is. That’s sort of the point.

Getting to the start

Neither trailhead is close to anything you’d call a hub. For the northern route the usual base is Bayamo, the capital of Granma province, and from there the road climbs through Bartolomé Masó to Santo Domingo, a small village on the river where people traditionally spend the night before the hike. For the southern route you come along the coast road west of Santiago de Cuba, one of the emptiest and most dramatic roads on the island, with the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. Either way, the drive is part of the trip, and it needs a car and a driver who knows the roads.

The people who guide on Turquino mostly come from families who have lived in the Sierra for generations. Ask them about the coffee, about the mule tracks, about who in their village remembers 1957. The mountain has been a national symbol for seventy years, and for them it’s also the place they grew up.

La Plata on the same trip

If the history is part of why you’re going, the Comandancia de La Plata is reached from the same trailhead, a guided walk of a few hours from Alto del Naranjo. It’s a cluster of wooden huts in the forest: Castro’s command post, a small field hospital, the radio hut. It’s also guided only. Seeing La Plata and then standing next to Martí a day later puts the 1953 story and the 1958 story side by side, and that is what makes this mountain different from any other high point in the Caribbean.

A straight word on timing

Eastern Cuba is going through a hard period. Fuel shortages and power cuts affect road transport, local services and the people who run the park and guide the trails, and what works one month may not work the next. We’re not going to pretend otherwise, and we’re not going to publish a date or a price that might be wrong by the time you read this.

Turquino isn’t a mountain you book on impulse for next weekend. It’s a trip you plan around the season, around your own fitness and around a current, honest picture of conditions on the ground. That’s exactly the kind of trip we at Marysol Travel would never plan from a brochure.

Why this mountain stays with people

By world standards Turquino is not a big mountain. Climbers who have done the Andes or the Alps sometimes arrive expecting something easy and leave with a different opinion, mostly because of the mud and the 2,000 metres from the coast.

What people remember is less about the height. It’s the plaque. The idea that a group of people in 1953 decided the country’s hero belonged at the top of the country, in the cloud, where hardly anybody would see him, and then actually carried him up there. And the line they chose, about how rare it is to look out from a high place and feel responsible for something bigger than yourself.

You don’t have to agree with every chapter of Cuban history to feel that up there. You just have to climb.

At Marysol Travel we’ve been working with Cuba since 2000, and the best trips we’ve built there have always been the ones designed around one person or one small group: their pace, their interests, whether they want the cloud forest, the history, or both. If Pico Turquino is on your list for a future season, tell us what you have in mind. We’ll give you an honest answer about what’s possible, and when.

Thinking about the Sierra Maestra for a future trip? Write to us at marysoltravel.com/contact/ and we’ll talk it through, no obligation and no pressure.

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