The road from Havana to Viñales is 180km of often grinding, bumpy and gravelly surfaces. We reached Cuba’s far-western province (Pinar del Río) and closed in on Valle de Viñales, a destination well worth the three to four-hour haul. The 11km long Viñales valley is situated in remote countryside but the whole valley has a “postcard pretty” Arcadian look to it, a veritable, verdant green-belt of agrarian plenitude. Everything is lush and green, everywhere, acres and acres of tobacco fields stretching back to the mountains.

The built-up area of Viñales isn’t very “built-up” as townships go. In fact Viñales probably qualifies as no more than pueblo (village) size, it is really an aldea (hamlet) and a laid back, low-key one at that. We drove up and down the main drag, Salvador Cisneros, to get a feel of the place…sleepy and slow-paced even here. A few cars and trucks around, but mainly they were sharing the road with oxen and horses pulling carts. Small and off the pace it may be but there’s a good scattering of restaurants and bars (both alcoholic ones and Tapas ones), sufficient variety to satisfy hungry visitors. One store I spotted on Salvador, breaking a continuous line of eateries, was doing a roaring trade – it was, naturally enough, the pueblo’s rum and cigar shop!

Viñales is devoid of hotels (nearest: Pinar del Río) but tourist accommodation is amply catered for through casas particulares (private guesthouses), which there are in droves. Every street in the village had its fill of brightly painted colonial wooden houses which functioned as homestays. We stayed in a very compact casa two blocks back from the village centre, it was tucked in among a row of about ten or so casas all side-by-side. From the front the houses looked cutely quaint, or quaintly cute (take your pick!), with their colourful walls and sillóns (rocking chairs) on the porches. We had a friendly pair of hosts, guajiros – as rural folk are commonly called in Cuba.  . Desayunos were right up to expectations, omelette of choice, porridge with exotic fruits, tea or coffee (breakfasts in the casas all over Cuba were uniformly similarly) [see PostScript on Cuban casas].

Outside of the village the landscape is dotted with distinctive geographical features called mogotes (craggy limestone monoliths, many the size of massive boulders), which provide a fitting, ambient backdrop to the flourishing green fields covered with tobacco farms. We visited one nearby farm and did a tour on foot round the fields (another popular option for tourists in Viñales is to tour the tobacco farms on horseback)…we were taken (in meticulous detail)  through the process involved in making the distinctive cylinders of rolled tobacco Cuba is famous for. Although tobacco and cigar production is the name of the game here, the plantation also engages in diversified (secondary) farming, other crops (sweet potato, beans, corn, etc) were being grown on any soil that was not already taken up with tobacco plants.

We were in the drying hut being shown by the carga de mano how to smoke a cigar Cuban-style when something humorous but also quite poignant occurred. Roaming purposelessly all over the tobaco granja were these countless, mangy dogs, one of them lumbered slowly into the hut in the middle of the cigar demonstration and lay down on the floor. Unexpectedly, to my surprise the old dog started wheezing, laboriously, continuously and heavily…the tobacco farm dog, it seemed, by dint of its constant exposure to the harmful weed, had become a victim of passive smoking!

PostScript: Casa particulares
Several years ago, as part of their liberalisation initiatives, the Cuban regime gave a nod to the existence of small-scale private enterprise and specifically to permit home-owners to let out their rooms to visitors. In Viñales as elsewhere in the country this opportunity has been taken up with gusto! The bulk of the hosts seem to be older Cuban women (often the casas have names like Mirtha, Isabelita and Elisa), many of them are easily of retirement age※. This concession by the government seems to have been of double benefit to many – providing a bit of extra income to supplement their modest pensions, and at the same time there’s the social dimension of older folks making contacts…from the comfort of their own porches they are meeting the world! One host proudly showed me the various gifts she had received from guests from across the globe (and of course among them was the clichéd furry toy koala!)

From staying at quite a few casas in different parts of the island, what was crystal clear was the variance in quality between guesthouses (just like with hotels!). Quite a lot (in Havana especially) were very poky and some were offering the most basic of “no-frills” facilities. Others were roomy, well-serviced and welcoming (the host’s command of English helped with this). Generally the (front) ante-rooms were quite extravagantly arranged and decorated. Unfortunately, something that did not vary much was the water pressure, in many casas it amounted to no more than a pitiful trickle, a reminder in the plumbing if we needed it that Third World conditions were still the norm here, especially when it came to the basics!

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※ another observable pattern are homestays or casas run by mother-and-daughter teams