Castro's Military Hideaway in the Sierra Maestra Mountains

Leaving Santiago we travelled westwards across rolling countryside and through small villages where bicycles and horse and cart were the main form of transport.  Chickens and pigs ranged freely and goats often obstructed the road.  A few larger banana plantations or sugar cane fields were evident but the majority of the land was given over to low level subsistence farming where the fields were cultivated by hand or by oxen pulling ploughs.

 

 We stopped for the night at Bayamo, a typical Cuban town that gets on with its business as normal despite the arrival of tourism.  Our hotel, the Hotel Royalton, possessed a fading, slightly decaying colonial charm, but provided a clean room, comfortable

Bayamo

bed and an adequate breakfast.

 A cold front that had been making its way West to East greeted us with a tropical deluge that lasted through the night.  Next morning as we set off early it was still raining and the weather did not look promising.  Rain before 7, bright by 11, said one of our party, and true enough, as our bus

The Canteen at Castro's Military camp

arrived in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, the rain abruptly stopped and the mountains were revealed. We transferred to a jeep to negotiate the steep roads up to the village of Santo Domingo, and then on into the National Park. Here we climbed the steepest road in Cuba, and as the road ran out we continued on foot for 6km to Fidel Castro's revolutionary stronghold hidden high up in the mountains.

Castro's hideaway

 In December 1956, after 3 years in exile in Mexico, Fidel and Raul Castro, together with Che Geuvara and a band of 82 like minded revolutionaries, returned to Cuba by boat.  All but 12 were killed as they set foot upon the beach, but the Castros, Guevara and a few others fled to set up a base in the remote mountains.  In his haste to escape Che picked up a box of ammunition rather than his medicines, a mistake that led to Fidel calling him a better soldier

Inside Castro's hideaway

than doctor.  Within 6 months they had recruited more than 2000 men, and the mercenaries set up hospital facilities and a radio station from which they broadcast to the Cuban people.  Batista, with his 100,000 troops never found them, possibly because in his arrogance he considered them no threat.  We visited the command post, the hut in which Guevara performed dentistry, the canteen and Castro's hideaway complete with bed and fridge donated by local farmers.  From here Fidel planned his campaign and subsequently engaged in 3 years of fierce fighting ending with Batista fleeing to the Dominican Republic on 1st January 1959.  Castro, to universal popular acclaim, entered Havana and assumed control of the island.

Castro's hideaway

 Returning by jeep down the mountain we spent the night at the Villa Santa Domingo where our group enjoyed a superb meal of a whole spit-roasted suckling pig for a mere 12CUC each (about £9 STG).