Kayaking Cuba

Paddling on the Hanabanilla Reservoir

Day three, and my hunt for Cuban whitewater has, until now, been an unmitigated failure. But I can feel my luck changing. I’ve been hanging my contraband GPS unit out the bus window, tracking our location and, especially, our altitude. It’s looking good. We’ve just climbed past 1,200 feet, and the Caribbean Sea lies just 16 miles due south. The streams shown as thin, straight blue lines on our roadmap must fall at a rate of almost 80 feet per mile. This is whitewater country.

But the mountain stream I have my eye on is no longer; most of it is buried under the Hanabanilla Reservoir. By the look of the forested riverbed far below the causeway, there are no scheduled releases. We’ll do our paddling on the reservoir, launching in a cold rain from our once-grand hotel. Mist rises from the tepid lake, and as the sun sinks away and a fat moon rises over the ridge, the feeling is ethereal. We follow the hotel’s dim lights back to shore, where we stand knee deep in the lake, munching potato chips and passing a three-dollar bottle around our circle. I’m no connoisseur, but I’ve never tasted better rum.

The next day we paddle our sea kayaks up a long, narrow arm of another reservoir. We exchange greetings with fishermen in boats crafted from driftwood and 55-gallon steel drums, and explore a deep mangrove cove where vines hang from above and tendrils of sun stream down as if from the high windows of a cathedral. We follow the lake as far as it will go, ending at a small eco-lodge on the creek that feeds the reservoir. I head upstream to scout the potential whitewater. It’s not much: a short, technical creek that would rate Class III or IV if there were enough water to run it, which there isn’t.

Back at the lodge, the Seakunga crew is sitting in a circle, huddled under blankets against the unseasonable cold and smoking 12-inch Cohiba Esplendido cigars. Another three-dollar bottle is making the rounds. Andy tells the first joke, and we spend the next three hours telling every funny story we know. When an old woman walks by, Isa asks for una chiste. The woman sets down her bucket and rattles off three of them, and my Spanish is good enough to get this one: “How many people from Pinar del Rio does it take to milk a cow? Twenty-two—two to hold the udders, and 20 to lift the cow up and down.”

I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing out on Cuba’s best paddling. It’s not that the paddling is bad; it’s perfectly fine. But our route so far—a tidal river, the reservoir attached to a rundown tourist hotel, a stretch of nondescript coastline between a tourists-only restaurant and a luxury hotel—seems to have more to do with the central planning commission’s idea of a proper tour than it does with paddling.

This impression is bolstered each time we encounter another tour group that has nothing to do with paddling, or even the outdoors. We meet a group of women on a salsa-dancing tour in Havana, and four days later in Trinidad they sashay to our table to say hello. Later we cross paths with another group who have spent the last few days learning the words and percussive rhythms of the Cuban anthem Guantanamera. This is the second time we’ve encountered the music girls, and their harmonies are getting tighter.

The next afternoon we arrive at our last paddling stop, yet another tourists-only hotel. The coast here is a succession of deep, rocky coves, and fabulous coral. Tom and Jackie snorkel for an hour and pronounce the reef world-class. Meanwhile I wander off in a 14-foot single kayak, enjoying my first real taste of autonomy in nearly a week. As I nose into sea caves and examine sea urchins clinging to the pocked limestone cliffs and boiler rocks, I get that tingle in my gut, the buzz of exploration. I paddle half a mile straight out into the Caribbean, using the setting sun as my compass, then paddle back to sit with Ray and watch the sky change from gold to orange to purple. We paddle hard back to the hotel, steering in the twilight by the tiny red and green navigation lights marking the hotel cove.

This old sugar mill worker "always liked the Americans"

Karl and I stay on a few days by ourselves, exploring Old Havana and learning more about the country and how it operates. The most important revelation comes when I decide to rent a bicycle. The only place in the city to rent them is inexplicably closed, so I retreat to a park across the street to assess my options. Soon enough a man in a tri-colored Rastafarian hat sits at the other end of my bench. He looks exactly like the Bob Marley of the Legend album cover, except that instead of Jamaican-accented English, he speaks in Spanish without looking at me. “What do you want, my friend? Do you like blonde girls? Black girls?”

Isa puts flame to a Cohiba cigar

I tell him I want a bike, which fazes him only for a second. “Wait here,” he says. It takes him three tries and half an hour, but soon enough I have my bike and a new appreciation for Cuban capitalism. It’s another of Cuba’s little ironies—the system, ostensibly designed to eradicate capitalism, instead promotes it. The entire country seems to run on what Karl dubs “the elemental capitalism of the hustle.”

That evening on the Malecon, I buy some peanuts and share them with Rafael, another Rasta hustler from El Oriente, the even more impoverished, eastern end of Cuba. The steepest, wettest terrain on the island, as best I could glean from Isa’s French-language Lonely Planet guide. In the worn pages, between blurbs about Fidel’s mountain hideout and a description of the three-peso note bearing Che Guevara’s iconic likeness, I’d deciphered a few lines about the big eastern rivers and the tropical storms and hurricanes that occasionally inundate the region. That’s it, I’d thought. The place for whitewater. Now Rafael fills in the blanks—the timing of the rainy seasons, the names of the big rivers and of his three brothers, who can get a car. Yes, the rivers have rapids, he says. And then he repeats the words that every whitewater boater longs to hear from a local: “You don’t want to take your little boat in the rapids. You would be hurt, for sure.”