Marea del Portillo Cuba

Arriving in the anchorage at Marea del Portillo at sunrise

BV bread version 1

We arrived at Marea del Portillo at dawn on Friday 8 February and dropped anchor very shortly after sunrise. I had spent some time the previous day baking bread (bread can be surprisingly hard to come by in Cuba) and we enjoyed some of the small loaf [Ed: version one of many] as part of breakfast whilst we considered how we were to find the local Guarda Frontera officer.

The fishing boat compound from where the Guarda Frontera officer was rowed out to us when we arrived and when we departed.  In every village we stopped in, the fishing boats were all located in fenced compounds, locked at night and guarded by, we think, one of the fishermen.  We saw fishermen at sea at dawn and dusk so presumably they are allowed to fish at night but the State is still clearly concerned that unsecured vessels might be misappropriated by someone wishing to leave the country

We had just inflated the dinghy and were about to head ashore when we saw that the officer was being rowed out to us in a fishing boat so we completed the formalities on board BV instead. The Guarda Frontera officer was a lovely chap.  We speak little Spanish and he spoke about the same amount of English so doing the paperwork was a bit of a challenge.  He asked lots of questions, some of which took a lot of thought and the application of sign-language and/or an English/Spanish dictionary to work out the question and the answer [Ed:  why did he need to know BV’s air draft??].  He wrote all our answers down painstakingly on a scrap of paper using what looked to be a treasured pen, peering through pink rimmed reading glasses which he had produced from his breast pocket, carefully wrapped in tissue paper.  With the question and answer session complete, he carried out a short inspection of BV and then indicated that we were free to go ashore.  He kept our despatcho in his bag and we gathered that he would return it to us the following morning shortly before we left.

This is the main road through Marea del Portillo.  We saw one car on it and a horse-drawn cart.  All the other ‘roads’ in the village are dirt tracks

Marea del Portillo is an extremely rural village with little for us other than the invaluable opportunity to see some of today’s well off the beaten track rural Cuba.  But we did feel a little like voyeurs as the village appears so very poor.  We tied the dinghy to the quay close to the fenced fishing compound and were immediately greeted by ladies wishing to sell us bracelets and other small crafts. From here we followed our noses along unmade tracks, which must be nightmarish when it rains, through the village.

The place is obviously very poor, with people scraping a living doing…… well, we’re not really sure what.  But there are 2 hotels on the other side of the bay (of which more later) so perhaps many of the villagers work there. Despite the obvious lack of wealth, we found the houses to be generally well cared for, sometimes even well-painted, and the gardens tidy and being used for growing fruit and vegetables with, sometimes, a small space in which to relax.  There were plenty of pigs and chickens wandering the roads (how do they know who they belong to?) but there was little litter and no piles of rubbish or junk as in gardens or on the roadside as we have seen in so many other Caribbean countries (and, indeed, sometimes back in the UK and at home). This mirrored what we had observed on our motorbike taxi ride to El Morro a few days previously and we later found this to be the case in most places we visited in Cuba.  Sometimes there are rubbish dumps on the outskirts of a village but more normally it seems that waste is properly disposed of somewhere.  We also suspect that many items are recycled several times over, given that it can be very difficult to obtain consumer goods in Cuba.

Marea del Portillo’s not much more than a one horse town and the one horse we saw was scrumping sugar cane

After an hour or so ashore we returned to the dinghy and took a run across the bay to the far side of the entrance where our cruising guide talks of 2 hotels with a watersports centre between them.  The guide mentions them for their internet access but we were more interested in seeing if we could have our dive tanks refilled, since we had been unable to do so in Grand Turk.  Happily, the member of staff we spoke to was happy to fill the tanks (though we have been told that one may only dive in Cuba with a qualified local guide) and did so for a very modest fee.  The compressor he used was large and loud but more than adequate for our tanks.  He explained that the dive centre had a much newer, German compressor but that a part had failed on it.  “It’s too complicated for Cuba” he said.  “The new compressor is all electronic and needs specific parts which we have to get from Germany.  It had taken over a month already and the parts still have not arrived.” But, he explained, the old (in use) compressor failed less frequently and yet, when it did fail, it could be fixed using any unbranded parts obtained, manufactured or bodged together in Cuba.  And the Cubans are very good at keeping old machinery going – just look at the cars.

It’s not exactly a busy cruising ground

We had a lazy afternoon back on BV, enjoying the sunshine and the peace and solitude of being the only vessel in the anchorage.  Nicky, continuing to put together our plan of campaign for the next 3 weeks, read the Lonely Planet Guide to Cuba that Charlotte had brought out and decided to start making some changes to the itinerary.  The next day the plan had been to continue about 40 miles to the west to anchor off Cabo Cruz but Nicky spotted a potential gem in the Lonely Planet Guide.  Pilón, the next town along from Marea del Portillo, was noted as being worthy of a visit, particularly on a Saturday night when the square hosts a big party with lots of Cuban dancing.  With Pilón being only about 10 miles west of us and the next day being Saturday, we just had to stop in.

A spectacular sunset.  Note the dinghy lifted out of the water as required by the Cuban authorities and, likewise, the outboard has been taken off the dinghy and locked to BV

Marea del Portillo, Cuba