Pilón Cuba

The Marea del Portillo Guarda Frontera officer on the shore waiting to be rowed out to return our transit papers

We’d told the Guarda Frontera officer at Marea del Portillo that we intended to leave at 0800 and he had nodded and said (we think) that he would return our transit papers (the despatcho) to us before that.  Sure enough, one of the fishermen rowed him out in good time and at 0750 on Saturday 9 February we raised the anchor for the short passage to Pilón.

View east along the coast as we entered the approachedsto Pilón

We had an uneventful motor in very calm conditions to Pilón.  We hadn’t expected to visit the town but the Lonely Planet Guide that Charlotte had brought out suggested that it was worth a trip.

View to our left with the chimney of the old sugar mill at Pilón visible just right of centre

The bay off the town covered in shallow reefs but the channels between them, though rather convoluted are deep. Some of the marks shown on our chart were in place but several were not [Ed: and nor was the cay that we had intended to anchor behind!].

Pilón from the sea.  The sugar refinery is long closed and the quay for ships to bring in/take out goods to/from the refinery (left of the picture) has fallen into some disrepair and been converted into a public park with wifi and internet access.  The fishing boat compound, behind which is the Guarda Frontera office, is to the north of the quay (under the chimney in this picture)

Nicky had been a little concerned about swell in the anchorage as there was a good 2m southeasterly swell offshore and little land between Pilón and the open sea.  However, the fringing reefs and shallow water which stretch from around half a mile off Pilón to about a mile and a half off the town, broke the swell entirely so that the waters off Pilón were entirely flat.

Top:  Anchored off Cayo Purgatorio, Pilón.  Bottom left: view out from the disused quay now a public park. Bottom right: cement statue on the edge of the public park.  It’s surprisingly life-like from a distance!

We anchored in the lee of Cayo Purgatorio a quarter of a mile south of the disused quay.  Cayo Huevo, in the lee of which we had planned to anchor, whilst shown on our charts no longer seems to exist in real life.  We dinghied ashore left it on the beach at the roof of the old quay.  The quay has been spruced up and turned into a public park with wifi and internet access. But we needed to check in with the Guarda Frontera before we could explore so we made our way towards the building marked on our map as their HQ.

Good first impressions of Pilón

We were standing at a junction of dirt roads wondering if this was really where our map said we were, when a man came up and explained that we needed to report to the Guarda Frontera.  Excellent – a guide!  He took us to their building, now located directly behind the fishing boat compound, and in an entirely different place to that which we had marked on our map.  We worked through the expected question and answer session again, with many of the same questions being asked but with a couple of curved balls being thrown in. Happily, one of the officers spoke remarkably good English but, once again, all our answers were noted down. Clearly, sharing information from one station to the next is not standard practice.  They took our papers and said that we should collect them from the office when we were ready to leave.  They also asked us to leave the dinghy in the fishing boat compound in future ‘for safety’.

A local taxi

Paperwork complete we went off to explore the town.  Like Marea del Portillo we found it very rural but with an air of affluence that Marea del Portillo didn’t have.  It was busy and the people seemed purposeful too, also in marked contrast to Marea del Portillo.  We met a street trader with a handcart selling small sweet peppers so we bought 2 measures (a plastic pot that would have held about 750ml) for the princely sum of 5CUP (about 20p) and decided to fry them like pimento padron as sundowners nibbles.  Like Marea del Portilllo, may of the neat and tidy houses had fruit trees in the garden. Nicky wondered about trying to buy bananas and other fruit from a local family but decided that her Spanish wasn’t up to it [Ed: something to work on over the summer perhaps].

Celia Sánchez’s house; now a museum

Part of the way into the centre of Pilón we stumbled upon a reminder of the town’s most notable moment in history. Celia Sánchez, frequently known as ‘The First Lady of the Revolution’, was a local woman who was instrumental in the success of the 1956 revolution.  Her house in the town had been turned into a museum though there are relatively few displays, primarily some memorabilia and pictures of her from throughout her life, as well as a section on revolutionary fighters.  It’s a very local, low-key museum, with hand-typed labels for the displays, all of which are in Spanish.  But it was still quite fascinating to visit.  We later found out a little more about Celia Sánchez. In late 1955 she was tasked with showing 4 of Fidel’s fighters suitable points on the south coast of Cuba where fighters could land in secret from a boat and make their way into the Sierra Maestra mountains to take on the might of Batista’s army.  A couple of months later, she was further tasked with organising assistance to the fighters.  She did not know where the fighters would land, and the terrain over much of the southeastern coast of Cuba is very rugged, so she hit upon the idea of setting up a network of farmers, fishermen, ranchers and cattlemen, the Farmers’ Militia. It was hugely successful and, indeed, is credited with saving the revolution.  On 1 December, the Granma, the motoryacht bought to transport the revolutionary fighters from Mexico to Cuba, was wrecked on the coast north of Cabo Cruz, a long way from where it was supposed to land its passengers.  Despite this, and the subsequent loss of the majority of the shipwreck’s survivors to Batista’s troops, 21 of the fighters were discovered by the Farmers’ Militia and made their way to the rallying point from where they began a guerrilla campaign against the Batista regime.  As if her role in setting up and organising the Farmers’ Militia were not enough, Celia Sánchez was later called into a higher level leadership role within the revolution.  In August 1957, Frank Pais, one of Fidel’s right-hand men who had been running a number of well-armed urban fighter groups in and around Santiago de Cuba, was killed. Writing from his hide-out in the Sierra Maestra mountains, Fidel tasked Celia with taking on Frank’s work, as she know more about his plans and systems than any of the others in the revolution. How long she fulfilled this role we do not know but, from the pictures we saw at the museum it is clear that Fidel Castro held Celia Sánchez in high regard and that she continued to work in support of the Cuba after the revolution’s successful overthrow of the Batista regime.

One of the Pilón’s main streets. The building with the flag is the town council’s office

From the museumwe made our way towards the centre of the town to try to find the venue for the evening’s music and dancing. Pilón’s a quite a large place and surprisingly affluent, given that the sugar refinery was closed down, like many in the provinces, shortly after the fall of the USSR.  We later discovered that when the Cuban government closed the refineries to save money and fuel (Cuba used to import oil and gas from the Soviet Union) the government continued to pay the laid-off workers, which might explain why, relatively speaking, Pilón does not seem to have suffered in the way that, say, the mining and steel-producing towns of Britain did when their main industries closed.

The main square in Pilón

We didn’t need to buy food in Pilón, Nicky had provisioned BV so thoroughly in Santiago de Cuba that we virtually had no space left on board for more food, but had we needed to we could probably have done so reasonably successfully.  At the least, we would probably have been able to top up on the essentials to cover us for a week or so.

The disused quay at Pilón viewed from the south

After a few hours ashore we returned to BV and then headed back ashore in the evening.  On our first trip ashore we left our dinghy on the small beach to the left (to the southwest) of the quay…

The disused quay at Pilón viewed from the southeast, with the fishing boat compound centre-right of the picture. The pale blue building (centre of the picture behind the fishing boats) is part of the Guarda Frontera office and is surrounded by a very new chain link fence

… but the Guarda Frontera officers had made it very clear that we should have left it in the fishing boat compound to the right (to the northeast) of the quay.  When we went ashore in the evening, that was where we left it, tied up to a rickety dock.

Sadly, the evening’s music and dancing was not as we had expected.  The Lonely Planet Guide had implied live bands and talked of people dancing local variations of salsa and rumba.  But in Raul Castro’s Cuba, where internet access, smartphones and newly introduced opportunities for travel are providing Cubans with greater access to global fashions and trends outside their shores, taste in music is changing rapidly. Consequently, Pilón’s Saturday night street party is more now thumping reggaetón nightclub than slinky, salsa dancehall but it was an experience and all the people we met were incredibly friendly, wanting to know where we were from and what we thought of Cuba, the food and, of course, the rum and cigars.

So, at about midnight we returned to the dinghy, only to find the fishing boat compound securely locked. Climbing through a hole in the fence didn’t seem a particularly sensible idea given the proximity of the Guarda Frontera building but happily one of the Guarda officers was still up and about and he roused the night sentry to let us through to our dinghy.  As the only yacht in the anchorage, it was easy to find BV, though less easy to work our way through the ruined pilings off the old quay. But we got back unscathed and, having locked the outboard to BV and lifted the dinghy out of the water, collapsed into bed in preparation for another prompt start the following morning.

Pilón, Cuba