Las Coloradas Cuba

We left Cabo Cruz at 0750hrs on Monday 11 February, calling the Guarda Frontera office on the VHF radio, as we had been requested to do, but we had no reply – perhaps the English-speaker (if any) wasn’t on shift.  The Guarda Frontera might not have heard us but the crew of Nomadica, whom we had met briefly at Santiago de Cuba, did and we chatted with them for a short while before heading our separate ways.  We sailed 12nm up the coast in a gentle northeasterly wind, to anchor off Las Coloradas, whilst Nomadica headed into the Archipelago de los Jardines de la Reine, where we intended to follow in a couple of days.

BV anchored off Las Coloradas

The track of the Granma from Mexico to her ill-fated arrival in Cuba

The area around Las Coloradas is hallowed ground in Cuba because this was where, on 1 December 1956, Fidel Castro and 81 armed men, came ashore from the yacht Granma to start the revolution.  It’s an exposed coastline (which might explain why the Granma was wrecked here) but the weather was benign and it looked as if we should be able to get ashore.  I doubt that many cruisers stop here but we thought that we’d give it a go to see if we could visit the museum commemorating the Granma landing.

At work, trying to clear the gunk from the generator’s fuel supply system

The previous day’s work on the fuel supply seemed to have the engine running well again and it certainly proved to be good enough to get us from Cabo Cruz to Las Coloradas, but we really needed to solve the fuel supply issues properly or we’d risk a further failure of the main engine in the near future.  This being an out of the way area of Cuba it was definitely a case of self-help.  So, I stayed aboard to work on the fuel system whilst Nicky and Charlotte went ashore to do the tourist bit and visit the Granma museum.

Collecting fertilizer for the fields Cuban-style

[Continued by Nicky]  Almost the first thing we saw after our Las Coloradas landing was a small team, complete with oxcart, collecting seaweed, presumably for use as fertilizer on nearby fields or allotments.  Apparently, in some areas of Cuba teams of oxen are a common sight but this was the first time we had seen any.

Left and top: You can see why this area is home to a Cuban holiday camp – even without the lure of the Granma.  Bottom: the road to the National Park and theGranma Museum

We took a stroll along the beautiful beach we’d landed on and then walked inland to find the road to the Granma museum.  We came off the beach at the only obvious path and found that we were walking through a small Cuban holiday village.  Happily, the staff and punters didn’t seem to mind and on our return to the dinghy we found the public route to the beach from the main road.

Top right: The museum guide. Bottom: A reconstruction of the motor yacht Granma

A short distance along the road we entered the Granma National Park and were immediately accosted by a keen but friendly National Trust employee requiring our Park entry fee (5CUC pp). It seemed quite a lot given that we only planned to walk along the main road to the museum where there’s a further 5CUC pp entry fee but we had little option if we were to visit the museum. About 1km further along the road we found the reconstruction of the Granma, sheltering under a sunshade and surrounded by a blue skirt to hide the fact that it’s on wheels (for ease of taking it for maintenance as the museum curator later explained).  Ironically, given Fidel Castro’s hatred of America, the Granma was originally commissioned by a wealthy America, who named her in memory of his Grandmother, before being purchased by a Mexican friend of Fidel Castro (who was exiled in Mexico at the time) and donated to the revolutionary cause. As you can see from the photos, the Granma wasn’t a large vessel, just 63ft long if the datasheet next to the reconstruction is to be believed.  Eighty-odd armed fighters and all their kit, plus skipper and crew, on a 63ft boat, designed for a maximum passenger load of 20, for a week in poor weather – not a pleasant thought!

Left and top right: Of course, had Fidel, Raúl, Ché and chums landed at the end of this splendid path through the mangroves, the revolutionary story would have been a lot less dramatic. Bottom right: Now imagine fighting your way through the mangroves, and the harsh cutting grass that Charlotte’s standing close to, having just survived a shipwreck, whilst carrying goodness knows how much kit and equipment

At the museum we were greeted by one of the guides who spoke little English, but enough for him to make himself understood with a few Spanish words thrown in and the useful technique of using his right index finger to trace on his left palm any numbers he was trying to say. He started by telling us that on 1 December each year up to 3000 people gather in the open area close to the Granma reconstruction to witness the annual re-enactment of the landing of Fidel Castro and his freedom fighters.  There is now a long concrete path through the mangroves to the point where the Granma was wrecked.  It’s a distance of about 1400m and Fidel Castro and his team had to make their way through thick mangroves and then an area of tall, razor-sharp grass to get to terra firma and thence to the Sierra Maestra mountains.  They happened to come ashore at dawn and Castro followed the rising sun eastwards until he came to a coconut palm.

Reconstruction of the farmer’s house that Fidel Castro spotted from his palm tree vantage point in the mangroves

He climbed this and saw, some distance away, the hut of a local farmer, so he changed his direction of travel and made his way towards it.  Here he and his team were welcomed warmly – clearly the farmer was a member of Celia Sánchez’s Farmers’ Militia – and had some time to recover from the effects of their landing (as Che Guevara later commented “it wasn’t a disembarkation; it was a shipwreck”!).  From Las Coloradas the men headed east towards the Sierra Maestra but, 3 days later, were spotted only a few miles from their beach-head by some of Batista’s troops.  The revolutionaries were routed with only 12 or so managing to escape.  To help increase their chances of evading the Government forces, they broke into 3 small groups to make their way further east. Eventually, and probably entirely due to the help of the Farmers’ Militia and the local peasantry in general, all the survivors regrouped at Cinco Palmas, Fidel Castro gave a rousing, if somewhat premature victory speech, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Museum visit complete and with a far greater knowledge of the beginning of the revolution Charlotte and I retraced our steps back towards the dinghy.  Along the way we indulged in a little coconut scrumping, since the palms seemed not to belong to anyone and were all laden with fruit.  It seemed a nice idea to have some fresh coconut water to go with sundowners or to add to a rum cocktail.

We also took a short wander through the village close to the holiday camp but there was little to see except for a local trader driving his horse cart….

….so we returned to the beach and dinghied back to BV.

Diesel bug (brown sludge underneath the pink diesel)
 – not what you want to find in your fuel tank when you are
 in Cuba and miles from any marine engineering support

[Continued by Reg] Whilst Nicky and Charlotte were ashore I opened up the fuel tanks and confirmed that we had a minor diesel bug issue.  It didn’t come as a great surprise because modern diesel now has a lot of biodiesel in it which is more susceptible to diesel bug growth.  Whilst we do use a fuel additive which is supposed to stop the bugs, a bit like antibiotics, some bugs are resistant to some products.  We will need to do a shock treatment with a different diesel bug killer and maybe get the fuel polished when we got to a more mainstream harbour, but that will probably be in a few months’ time when we are in the USA; I don’t think that we’d find suppliers of that sort of chemical treatment or fuel polishing support in Cuba. So, the priority was to clear the fuel lines and get rid of the diesel bug debris from the fuel tanks. I used a large syringe and a length of tubing to suck fuel and growth from the bottom of the fuel tank and removed any debris clinging to the corners and exposed sides of the tanks by hand. Then I blew through the fuel lines to the engine and generator, reconnected everything and bled the systems.  It was most satisfying when engine fired up first time and ran well so, to finish the job, I rebuilt the saloon and everything stowed everything again in the machinery space.

Whilst I was clearing up, I started up the generator and used it to run the watermaker.  All was going well, until, after an hour or so, it faltered and stopped.  This happened a couple of times; again, the symptoms of a classic fuel supply issue. Clearly I had missed a blockage somewhere.  I was just trying to run the generator again when Nicky and Charlotte returned to BV with their coconut trophies and stories of the Granma museum.

Sadly, relaxing and hearing all about the museum had to be put on hold whilst, yet again, we attacked the fuel system.  I changed the generator’s main filter which was a bit gungy but not badly dirty.  Most telling, though, was that I couldn’t prime the new filter with fuel: there was a blockage in the fuel line. Nicky and I took the saloon table off again (the worst bit about working on the fuel system) and, once more, I disconnected the fuel supply pipes.

I was just about to open up the tank again when, at 1600hrs, we had an unexpected visit from the Cabo Cruz Guarda Frontera officer.  This time he had managed to obtain access to a motorised boat and he’d come to say that we couldn’t stay anchored where we were.  He claimed that there was going to be some military firing/exercise in the area [Ed: right next to a holiday camp?] or maybe we just got the wrong end of the stick – there was quite a lot of sign-language involved.  Either way, he was clearly unhappy about our staying where we were and we needed to move, and soon, both at the behest of the Guarda officer and because sunset was only a couple of hours away.  But we had just disconnected the engine fuel supply!!!!! Nicky managed to negotiate a 1700hrs departure for us, which gave us some time to rebuild the engine’s fuel supply, though it didn’t help with the onset of night, and as soon as we were able, we up-anchored and headed north as fast as we could to find a new anchorage before it got dark.

Las Colorades, Cuba