Bicycle Breeze

Ciclo Temba (Middle-Aged/Old Cyclist) is a great way to do a fully supported end-to-end Cuba bike ride in the company of like-minded riders. This tour takes its own sweet time and deliberately skips the longer stretches of the “Full Monty” Trans Cuba Sportive event to allow time to savour the varied and often spectacular Cuban countryside. With daily rides ranging from 40km to a maximum of 100km, the availability of the support bus means that riders have the option of riding all or part of the distance planned for any given day.

Given the length of the ride and the relatively good quality of the roads, a road bike is required. Skipping some of the longer stretches of the Trans Cuba Sportive will leave time for a visit to Santiago, the lively and beautiful port city known as the Cradle of the Cuban Revolution as well as to nearby Cobre, the home of Cuba’s patron saint, La Virgen de la Caridad. This ride will allow for dallying a little more in these and other Cuban cities and towns and to experience Cuba in way that escapes most visitors. The youth cycling club in Las Tunas, for example, will host us for a traditional Cuban Barbecue and we will be able to meet ordinary Cubans in smaller towns all along the way to the far west of this fascinating and largely unspoiled island.

See it all: Holguín, the city of leafy parks and plazas; Baracoa, where Columbus first made landfall in 1492; Guantánamo and Caimanera, overlooking the United States Guantánamo Bay Naval Base; Santiago, Cuba’s most Caribbean city; Bayamo, where Cuba’s first war of independence from Spain was launched; Las Tunas, a city of artists and public sculptures; Camagüey, whose confusing city streets were deliberately laid out to foil invading pirates; Trinidad, a living museum of colonial architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage site; Cienfuegos, a stunning seaside city known as the “Pearl of the South”; Pinar Del Rio, a centre of tobacco growing and cigar production; María La Gorda, a diver’s paradise in a secluded location on a great beach near impressive mangroves; and, Havana, Cuba’s imposing capital city and the home of the spectacular Malecon, a broad seaside esplanade running for 8 kilometres from Old Havana past some of Havana’s most iconic buildings and monuments.

This ride is a photographer’s dream. It begins in the very east, ends in the far west and, in between, provides an un-paralleled opportunity to ride through an incredible variety of landscapes, micro-climates, protected biospheres and large and small urban environments and to meet everyday Cubans where they live.

There are hills and rolling countryside on this tour so a reasonable basic level of fitness is recommended.

This tour is a hybrid of both our Fat Mary ride and The Mountain Bike Christmas route, created for a group that wants a shorter ride. We aim to bring you a good look at our beautiful country in a short tour through western Cuba. We have included the historic capital city of Havana, some stunning beaches, a glimpse of city life, connections with the Cuban people, a visit with a youth cycling club and a climb into the mountains where a horse is the best choice of transport – or a bicycle. Come along with your leader Jim Michler and become a Cuban addict as well.

For the most part the cycling is not difficult,. As for the surface of the roads, these can be very rough in places. Wider tires (over28c) are recommended. The use of a hybrid bike or a gravel bike, is your best choice on this tour.

Enjoy a walking tour in the mountains where coffee, fruit and cocoa are grown. See the City of Santiago de Cuba and ride the coastal road where the Sierra Maestra falls to the sea. The breathtaking vistas will stay with you forever. Walk to La Plata, Fidel’s hideaway camp, high up in the mountains and see where the Granma boat disembarked the rebels to start the armed struggle. You will be amazed that those young men made ashore to rid Cuba of Batista.

Celia Sánchez for whom this tour is named, was the heroine of the revolution. She was a girl from the Sierra Maestra and knew the area well and she was acquainted with the mountain people because she assisted her father in his medical practice serving the poor people who lived up in those high mountains. Not only did the locals know Celia well, they loved her for her kind work helping the people as she worked with her father, who had his practice in the small town of Pilón at the western end of these famous mountains.

In the City of Las Tunas, we will be hosted by a youth cycling team and donate bicycle equipment. Our involvement with this club has produced a number of regional and national champions. These achievements would not be possible without your help. Your support for this group keeps their high school cycling program alive and well.

A visit to eastern Cuba will benefit from learning the history, you will be passing so much of the revolutionary culture on this tour. We suggest reading the book: Nancy Stout, One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution.

Quiet back roads, for the most part, a little city cycling. There are hills and rolling countryside. A reasonable level of fitness is recommended. As through most of Cuba, roads can be rough in places so wider tires (28-35 mm) are recommended.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them… Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” – Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway travelled extensively and spent a large chunk of his life in Cuba (1939 – 1960).

Cuba fulfilled Hemingway’s desires for solitude and big game fishing. Basing himself in the hotel Ambos Mundos, for a decade, room 511 at this hotel has been preserved as Hemingway liked it with the original furniture and typewriter. Then he decided to buy the Finca Vigía, a villa and farm on the outskirts of Havana.

Hemingway wrote some of his best works in Cuba. A Cuba-inspired novella for which Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953, and the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year. The Old Man and the Sea was Hemingway’s last major work of fiction and is thought to be partly based on Gregorio Fuentes, a seafarer who became Hemingway’s fishing companion and who migrated to Cuba at 22 having been born in Lanzarote. In this respect Cuba was arguably more inspiring for Hemingway, especially considering that his most famous work, For Whom the Bell Tolls, was conceived there as well. Hemingway was at his Cuban villa when he received the Nobel Prize in 1954. He said; “This prize belongs to Cuba since my works were created and conceived in Cuba, with the inhabitants of Cojimar, of which I am a citizen.” Having said these words Hemingway placed the Nobel Prize at the foot of a statue of the Virgen del Cobre. The Virgin was recognised as a saviour of sailors.

There are no hills, city and county side rides, so a reasonable basic level of fitness is recommended.

This Cuba bicycle tour is called Guantánamo Mango. Ride through the coastal lowlands and scenic mountains of eastern Cuba in the historic old province of Oriente, the birthplace of Cuba’s revolution and earlier wars of independence and where Fidel Castro was born and raised.

Beginning in Holguin, a city of leafy parks and plazas, the ride will head east into the world-renowned biosphere around Baracoa, Cuba’s oldest city, famous for its chocolate, unique cuisine and large, beautiful bay. The tour will linger at a wonderful beach, take in the city and enjoy a short boat ride up the unspoiled Toa river to a riverside restaurant for lunch.

Following a climb into the majestic mountains, the tour will follow up the coastal road to the Eastern most part of Cuba and a small settlement called Punta Maisí. The Faro (lamp) Maisí consists of the lighthouse and the small hotel beside it. The scenic coast highway to the city of Guantánamo and will include a stay in. Going on to Santiago, Cuba’s liveliest and most Caribbean city, the tour will linger for three days to explore the sights and absorb the rhythms of the city known as the Cradle of the Cuban Revolution. From Santiago the tour will head past El Cobre, the home of Cuba’s patron saint, la Virgen de la Caridad, before heading into the picturesque hill country making up Cuba’s back of beyond.

After visiting Birán, the homestead of the Castro family and Fidel’s birthplace, two days will be spent even farther from civilization at a charming rustic hotel in a cool pine forest in the Cristal Mountains, with the second day dedicated to riding to Cuba’s highest waterfall. From this high mountain retreat the tour will descend to the beautiful rolling green hills that lead to Guardalavaca and its white sand beaches for two days of relaxation before heading home.

Mostly paved rolling or flat roads, some easy ridding dirt roads, some rough roads.