Race Design Thread

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 4: Artemisa - Matanzas (Ermita de Monserrate), 180km

GPM:
Peña del León (cat.3) 1,1km @ 6,1%
Loma del Pocito (cat.3) 1,0km @ 5,5%
Loma del Pocito (cat.3) 1,0km @ 5,5%

The fourth stage of the race also maybe “strictly speaking” counts as a hilly stage, but it isn’t really; this is far more a flat stage with a couple of bumps in it that more accurately fits the bill of what we might expect from racing in Cuba - lots of flat stages through the centre of the country where the race designers have to work hard to come up with ways to create intrigue. We’re still west of Havana at the start, but the stage will pass across to the south of the capital and we will commence our long run eastward through the flatlands and rolling low hills that characterise this part of the island’s geography.

The city of Artemisa is also relatively young, having been founded officially in 1818 from a cluster of settlements set up following the relocation of a number of families displaced by a fire in Havana in 1802. Its official name appears to be from the Greek goddess, though Artemisia is typically preferred in nomenclature; it was also consolidated inadvertently in the late 19th Century following the policies of Spanish colonial Valeriano Weyler, who pacified the Cuban nationalist Rebellion of the time by separating rebels from civilians, forcing the concentration of the civilian population into small urban clusters and practising scorched earth to starve the rebels out from their rural hideouts; this policy greatly increased the population of Artemisa, but it also led to rampant disease and starvation among the urban population. Nowadays, Weyler’s Reconcentración policy is viewed as a direct precedent of the British Boer War strategies that themselves served as a predecessor to concentration camps, and his successes were only pyrrhic; he crushed the Cuban Rebellion but at the cost of alienating the population and turning international opinion against Spain, and he was recalled to Spain in 1897. The city played an important role in the Revolution too, with close Castro ally Ramiro Valdés being from the city, a Politburo member from 1965 to his retirement in 2021 at the age of 89, and a two-time Minister of the Interior. Artemisa nowadays is best known as the “Jardín de Cuba” thanks to its coffee crops and its agrarian landscape, thanks to its fertile red soil.

Central Artemisa

Artemisa only appeared in the 2000s Vuelta a Cuba as a stage start, invariably in a stage to Pinar del Río, but in the original incarnation of the race it was not an infrequent sight to see a stage finish in the city; Vladimir Poulnikov is probably the most well-known name of those to have raised their arms in victory in Artemisa. This one is going to be more suited for the rouleurs than the first two road stages for most of its duration, heading through the flatlands of the suburban area around Havana; our first notable stop-off is San António de los Baños, a city of 50.000 people linked to Havana by the Autopista del Mediodía, which has an enduring connection to the visual arts; the painter and satirical cartoonist Eduardo Abela was born in the city, as was the actress Blanquita Amaro, who performed prolifically in Argentine films through the country’s own golden age of cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, before becoming a television presenter and star in Panama in the 1960s. It is also the home of the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV, a school of cinematic and televisual theory and practice which was founded by the local film directors Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in collaboration with the Argentine poet Fernando Birri and the Colombian writer Gabriel García Marquez, and its alumni span the film industries all over the Hispanic world, not just in Central and South America but also in Spain itself. The next stop is Bejucal, the terminus of the first ever railroad in Cuba, and home to one of the oldest carnivals in Cuba and, formerly, Soviet nuclear missiles. And, briefly, for the first five years of his life, the actor Andy García, who has become an esteemed veteran of the film industry and although he has never won at these, he has been nominated for both Oscars and Golden Globes and at times served as an unofficial spokesperson against the Cuban government from afar.

Rolling slight uphill follows before the first intermediate sprint in San José de las Lajas; the capital of Mayabeque province, home of 80.000, and crossed through the centre by the Carretera Central. The next section is again undulating, between San José and Jaruco, an area I initially had been exploring for a potential stage host, however the only paved road that climbs this mini-range at steeper than 3,5% is only accessible by a long unpaved section. As a result we simply traverse this for some rolling false flat up to the high point of the Escaleras de Jaruco range, which is another popular day trip retreat for the people of Havana, offering clean air and water and stunning views down to the north coast.

We don’t go all the way to the north coast here, though, turning eastward after San António de Río Blanco, across to the Sierra de Camarrones, another low lying range which serves as a retreat. At the top of the Sierra lies the Comunidad Peña del León, and the road that runs to this (slightly below actually, because the last part is a dead end) gives us our first categorised climb of the day, just over 1km at just over 6% - so maybe some of those riders who only got the same points for the cat.3 ascents in stages 2 and 3 might feel a bit aggrieved! - before some flat and downhill false flat into Aguacate, and 30km of flat terrain that takes us to our stage town of Matanzas.

View from the Sierra de Camarrones

Capital of its own eponymous province, Matanzas is known as the City of Bridges as it sits at the mouth of a bay where three different rivers drain into the sea, resulting in a large number of bridges spanning these and connecting the sections of the city. Originally founded as San Carlos y San Severino de Matanzas (Matanzas meaning “massacre”, after an early 16th Century - and possibly apocryphal - incident where Spanish soldiers attempting to attack an aboriginal camp were betrayed and drowned by seemingly complicit native fishermen) late in the 17th Century, it was settled primarily by people from the Canary Islands and developed for the sugar industry which then saw extensive import of African slaves to work the plantations. This led to the Afro-Cuban population swelling to exceed 50% of the city’s dwellers and the city being at the centre of multiple slave revolts, most notably the Conspiración de la Escalera in 1844, the punitive punishments for which are known as the “Year of the Lash”. This cultural melting pot, however, has proven at later dates to be inspirational, with the city developing a significant connection to music and dance, being the apparent birthplace of rumba music, with many famous long-running ensembles such as Los Muñequitos de Matanzas and Sonora Matancera being based in the city, but the most famous would be the world-renowned bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado, often just known by his surnames (always both), who started out as a pianist and arranger for the latter band but branched out on his own, popularised the mambo in the 1950s with classic interpretations of pieces like “Guaglione” and, most famously, his own oft-covered composition, “Mambo No.5”. Today, racial tensions in Matanzas are much more restrained, and in fact the city’s favourite son of recent years is one such Afro-Cuban star, the high jumper Javier Sotomayor - an Olympic champion in Barcelona and a two-time World champion in 1993 and 1997, who set the world record in 1988, and improved it twice, with his personal best being 2,45m in 1993, a record which still stands over 30 years later. Although injuries prevented his attempting to defend his crown in the Olympics, he won a silver in Athens before retiring in 2001 at the age of 34 after a positive test for nandrolone which placed some of his prior achievements under the kind of scrutiny you might expect (although it had been years since his best), though nagging injuries at the time enabled him to argue that these were the ‘real’ reason for his departure.

Matanzas also used to be a regular stop-off for the Vuelta a Cuba, often a couple of stages before the finish and with an ITT, or in the older times, three or four stages out when the race used to extend out to Pinar del Río before returning, in a reverse version of how I’ve paced my version of the race. People like Milan Jurčo, Asiat Saitov and Eduardo Alonso won here back in Ostbloc cycling days, while when the race returned in the 2000s it hosted an ITT on six occasions out of eleven editions, two of which were won by local legend Pedro Pablo Pérez, but the most recent of which, in 2007, was won by Svein Tuft, during his long stint in North American domestic cycling before founding a niche at the World Tour level in his 30s. The most recent winner in a Matanzas stage is, in fact, still a part of the present péloton, as another Canadian, Guillaume Boivin, won the road stage from the city to San António de los Baños in 2010 as a 20-year-old espoir and, although he returned to the Continental level after a run with Liquigas and SpiderTech, he has found himself at the team that is now Israel-PremierTech and become part of the furniture there, now in his 9th season with the team at age 35. Another familiar face from the present péloton was among the men he beat that day - a 21-year-old Elia Viviani can be found in 4th place on that result sheet.

For my stage, we have an intermediate sprint on our first arrival into the city, but then there are two laps of an 8,5km circuit - a fairly short one admittedly, but long enough to avoid too many issues - which take us down to the bay and then back up and around the north of the small Loma del Estero hill that overlooks the town. I am told that this is all paved now, although google’s satellite images seem to suggest that at least when those images were captured - not sure how recently this is as some areas of Cuba have seen relatively recent updates - it was still gravel between Cueva del Indio and Plaza Camilo. Either way, this allows us to get to the west of the city and into the Valle de Yumuri, which means that we have to return by way of the short dig up to a pass between the Loma del Estero and a neighbouring summit to the south; it’s certainly not the hardest climb a rider will have to face, being just 1km at 5,5% (last 400m are the steepest, though), and in many circumstances wouldn’t even merit categorisation, but since we have two laps here, cresting just 14,4km and 5,8km from the finish makes this worth giving some points for, even if only to incentivise some GPM competition to force some moves as people look for the stage win.

However, after the second time around, we head down to the bay again, crossing the intermediate sprint line that marks the start/finish of the circuit… but it’s not the finish of the stage, because instead we have something slightly different in mind. Not quite a puncheur finish, but a bit tougher than just a bunch sprint, we are climbing up to the Ermita del Monserrate, a scenic, peaceful hilltop hermitage that offers vistas over the bay and out to the Straits of Florida. Essentially, starting from Plaza de la Libertad, the finale is 2,5km that climb about 75m vertical for an average of 3%. The first part is barely perceptible, then at 1500m from the line we turn a 90º right onto Calle 306, and the gradient slowly dials up toward 5 and 6% on a long uphill grind. Then there is a curve to the left at about 450m to go, as things ease back down to around 2% before the final 150m gently curves back to the right. This one is perhaps too drawn out to be one for the pure sprinters, but at the same time is not automatically hard enough for the puncheurs. It could be a drag race sprinters can hang on for, but it’s more one for, say, Biniam Girmay, Michael Matthews or Jonathan Milan, of the top level. I see it as a comparable kind of finish to something like the uphill-but-not-too-uphill finish at the Tour de Vendée, or perhaps something like the Arcos de la Frontera stage of the 2014 Vuelta that Michael Matthews won. It’s not quite a hilly stage, but with a couple of hills - albeit easy ones - in the last 15 kilometres, and an uphill drag race that should make organised leadouts difficult, this will be a bit more than just a pure sprint. Which is just as well as we’re headed into the middle of the country now.

Matanzas, the long straight approaching the finish stretching out in front of us

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 5: Varadero - Santa Clara, 181km

No climbs at all on stage 5 as we go into a more ‘classic’ Vuelta a Cuba transitional stage, one which the sprinters should gladly gobble up as they’ve been forced to wait far deeper into the race than they historically have had to before getting their first real opportunity to duke it out.

Around 40km up the coast on the east side of the bay from Matanzas lies the city of Varadero, which forms a sort of dual city with Santa Marta. Also known as Playa Azul, or “Blue Beach”, the city is home to just over 40.000 people and is essentially a long thin spit stretching out northeastwards, separating the Bahía de Cardenas from the Straits of Florida. Originally utilised as a dry dock (from which the name varadero derives), the area was extensively used for salt mining, but permanent residents would wait until the 19th Century, as it was by and large serviced by commuters from nearby Cárdenas until that point. In the 1880s the potential of the peninsula for vacation homes was recognised and a resort village was constructed, and since then it has thrived not as an agricultural or resource mining town but as a tourist sector hotspot. The long peninsular protrusion of the area has produced over 20km of pristine sandy beaches ideal for holiday brochures, and for decades it was the preserve of the elites, especially after the commencement of annual regattas in 1910 and the discovery of the potential of the area by American billionaires in the 1930s.

Curiously, and unusually, this was one of the few areas where the Revolution did not entirely upend the town despite its reliance on tourism; wealthy domestic homeowners were exiled or saw their possessions confiscated while overseas - mainly American - vacation home owners and resort managers fled the country. The PCC constructed a central park for the town in 1960, the Parque de las 8000 Taquillas, where visitors from all over Cuba could come for R&R, locking possessions in the basement, accessing restaurants and sanitary installations, and hiring bathing equipment. Various shops and stalls sprang up around the park, various concerts and sporting events were brought to Varadero, and it became a new city with a new life, as Cuba’s premier domestic vacation retreat. Former mansions were reappropriated as hotels or museums and some of them, such as Irenée DuPont’s Mansión Xanadú, remain open to this day.

While the change of policy to open up more international cooperation and attract more overseas tourism since the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe hasn’t changed the city’s focus on the sector, it has, however, drastically altered the makeup of the city; the old central park beloved of the Cubans fell into disrepair in favour of four- and five-star resorts for Western visitors, while the permanent population of Varadero swelled drastically with the demand for staff to service the number of visitors, which now exceeds 1 million annually, mainly from Canada and mainland Europe, especially Spain. A new airport had to be constructed - which Fidel Castro inaugurated personally in 1989 - to service the increased footfall, as the old Kawama Airport was right at the foot of the peninsula and required flights to come in extremely low over the beaches; with bigger and more powerful aircraft progressively required as tourists came in from overseas, the air traffic had to be moved to the new airport down the coast and closer to Matanzas. Both airports have also seen a number of hijacking incidents, the old airport in the 1950s and 60s and the new one in the early 1990s, due to its being the closest airport in Cuba to US soil. Varadero has only occasionally cropped up in the Vuelta a Cuba, normally at one end of an ITT to Matanzas; this was the case in 1987 (local star and record winner of the race Eduardo Alonso won on this occasion - he won in 1984 and then five times straight from 1986 to 1990), while 2006 and 2007 both also saw the same route with Matija Kvašina and Svein Tuft winning respectively. This same route has been used frequently in the Clásico Nacional de Ciclismo, a national-only non-UCI race that follows some of the same formats as the old Vuelta a Cuba.

Varadero-Matanzas CRI in the Clásico Nacional 2018

Our first notable stop-off is Cardenas, or San Juan de Dios de Cardenas to give it its full name, the capital of the municipality that Varadero is in. This was founded by families from Matanzas and was one of the first cities in Cuba to have fully integrated electrical systems; it was also one of the first cities in the country to be based on a North American grid pattern rather than a Spanish concentric model. Several pitched battles in the Spanish-American War were held here, but its main connection to Cuban history has been that a Venezuelan general took the town in 1850 with the help of Cuban rebels and raised the flag of Cuba for the first time. More recently, it has been the base for José Arechabala SA, a large conglomerate attached to the sugar industry which is most famous for its production of Havana Club rum. We then move on to the town of Perico, home of the pro-democracy dissident Félix Navarro, who has spent much of the last 20 years in and out of jail for his campaigning, before passing on to Colón, which hosts the first intermediate sprint. Originally called Nueva Bermeja, the city is home to the comedian Óscar Núñez, best known for his appearances in the American version of The Office.

We then move on into the less densely populated second half of the stage, mostly small towns as we move into Santa Clara province. Esperanza, at ~12.000 people, is just about the largest of these, before we get to Santa Clara itself, the fifth largest city in Cuba at just under a quarter of a million people, and a cultural and revolutionary centre which made it an almost essential stop off for me, even though the stage to be here was inevitably going to be a pretty featureless sprint stage.

Founded by people moving inland from the coastal city of San Juan de los Remedios, Santa Clara dates its origins back to the late 17th Century, with its centrepiece being the Loma del Carmén, an ancient tamarind tree beneath which - possibly apocryphally - an original mass was taken and the city’s centre was located around that site. The development of the railroad and the reduction of dependence on the boat and the horse for travel in the country meant that this previously quiet colonial inland site became a transport hub thanks to its convenient central location. The city expanded greatly in the late 19th Century and early 20th thanks to the benefice of Marta Abreu de Éstevez, a wealthy contributor of much income for the country’s rebels during the war of independence, who was married to the nascent country’s first vice-president and whose donations led to the development of a number of buildings, schools and cultural institutions in the city.

More importantly for the modern nation of Cuba, however, this was the site of the last major pitched battle of the revolution, for it was after Santa Clara fell to the rebels, on New Years’ Day 1959, that Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba and Fidel Castro was able to claim victory and a successful revolution. By this time the government forces were in disarray, and Che Guevara’s forces, standing at around 350 guerrillas at this point, had been cheered all the way from Caibarién, a port 40km or so to its east. They passed through the government post of Camajuani unhindered due to the government forces deserting, and divided in order to capture the Loma del Capiro hills overlooking the city and intercept an armoured train containing supplies and backup for the government forces - achieving this by hijacking tractors from the local school of agronomy to bulldoze sections of track and prevent the train being relocated by the government forces, and using Molotov cocktails to raise the heat within the carriages to unbearable levels and force the officers out of the train; ordinary soldiers’ morale was already at rock bottom and many were keen to simply stop fighting, especially against their own people, so this quickly accelerated the surrender and retreat. Despite being outnumbered 10 to 1, Guevara’s troops were able to commandeer the train and use its resources to force a quick surrender, with the only significant loss suffered by M-26-7 being Roberto “Vaquerito” Rodríguez, the commander of what Guevara called the “suicide squad”, who had been tasked with capturing the Loma del Capiro. The symbolic final fall of Santa Clara - the armoured train had been a final Hail Mary from Batista - led to rapid concessions and surrenders sweeping through the Fuerzas Armadas; Guevara was able to simply walk into Havana in just a day after taking the city, while Castro took almost a week, largely because of essentially conducting a lap of victory on the way, stopping to rally support in several cities en route.

Today, the Tren Blindado still sits in the city, as part of a sculpture commemorating the event commissioned by the Castro government and realised by José Delarra as the centrepiece of a cultural centre, memorial park and museum; it includes some of the original derailed cars, a monument to the bulldozers, an obelisk in honour of Che Guevara, and a sculpture park. Museum exhibits are located within the cars of the armoured train and it is a major tourist attraction and pilgrimage site for those remaining loyal to the spirit of the revolution.

We could finish here, but we won’t, because we’re instead going to travel up to the other reason people flock to Santa Clara - for its connection to that ever-iconic revolutionary figure, the man whose face has launched a million high school rebellious phases and adorned more T-shirts than minutes he spent on the planet, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, whose remains are interred in Santa Clara in symbolic recognition of his greatest triumph. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Libertine, really? More Communist hagiography? You keep on bringing up various protesters and left wing movements in these Latin American races, you’ve rewritten thirty years of history to justify your love of Ostbloc cycling in this thread and even in your Asian races you went eight paragraphs on Dèng Xiăopíng, and even longer on Hồ Chí Minh!” I get it. I shouldn’t need to tell you much about Che, and besides, he isn’t actually from Cuba, despite his enduring connection to it. But he is, however, interred here in Santa Clara, and we will finish close by the Mausoleum in which his remains are kept, because you know, Communist race, Communist ethos and all that. While there’s far too much to say about Che to give a potted history, we ought at least to mention a bit about how his remains came to be in Santa Clara in the first place.

Mausoleo Che Guevara

If there’s one thing that I can understand about Guevara, it’s how he came to be the burgeoning revolutionary he became; his travel through Latin America and seeing the exploitation of the locals by the US and its corporations set alight a spark in him, but the crucial moment was seeing how the United Fruit Company, a US corporate conglomerate who had used nepotism, corruption and threats to secure a huge amount of economic power in Guatemala, were mortified at the policies of moderate social democrat Jacobo Árbenz, who sought to redistribute land in order that subsistence farmers of his country didn’t starve to death by taking only land which was owned but had not been used in a number of years, and leveraged their economic strength to secure the CIA’s backing for an overthrow of the democratically-elected leader and its replacement with a genocidal military junta. The CIA’s treatment of Árbenz, who was hounded and ostracised thanks to falsified documents and a smear campaign during the height of McCarthyism (a famous quote was “if he is not a Communist, he shall do until one comes along”), is some of the worst of the US’ behaviour in that part of the world, and these actions took the left-leaning Guevara and really solidified his stance as not just a Communist, but a revolutionary one. In his own words, "One thing I learned in the Guatemala of Árbenz was that if I would be a revolutionary doctor, or just a revolutionary, first there must be a revolution.” He met Raúl and Fidel Castro in Mexico and became a key part of their revolution in Cuba, which of course is what he is best known for, and served for a time in government before travelling around the world as essentially a mercenary revolutionary for Communist forces across the globe, contributing his knowledge and expertise in innovative guerrilla warfare tactics to military campaigns in the Congo and Bolivia, where he was eventually captured and summarily executed before any kind of prison break or public trial could take place.

Guevara’s corpse was displayed and photographed in nearby Vallegrande for the media, after which his hands were removed and sent to Buenos Aires for fingerprint identification and the remains of his…er… remains were taken by the Bolivian military and disappeared into obscurity. And there they remained, until 1995, when an American biographer interviewed a retired Bolivian general as part of research, and was advised that the remains lay near an airstrip in Vallegrande. After over a year of searching, a Cuban-Argentine expedition located the corpses of seven bodies in mass graves, one of which was missing his hands; while there remained some scepticism, when an Argentine forensic anthropologist found a small bag of pipe tobacco in the pocket of the handless man, a Bolivian helicopter pilot named Nino de Guzmán came forward and confirmed he had given a bag of the same tobacco to Guevara on the day of his capture and execution. The seven bodies (Guevara, four Cubans, a Peruvian and a Bolivian) were exhumed and transported to Cuba where they were transported by motorcade and accompanied with parades from Havana before being lain to rest with full military honours in the specially-built mausoleum at Santa Clara; the complex had already been planned and constructed from 1982 to 1988, with a monument and a museum celebrating the life and times of the great revolutionary. It only lacked the man himself, and now, nearly 30 years after his death and almost a decade after the complex’s inauguration, it was complete.

In the time since the discovery of Guevara’s body and those of his final revolutionary comrades, the remains of a further 23 of his collaborators and guerrilla troops from the Bolivian campaign have been discovered deep in Bolivian territory and transferred to Cuba for interment at Santa Clara; 20 of these were killed in action, two were executed by Bolivian forces, and one was given a mercy killing by his comrades after being mortally wounded. Eight are Cubans, twelve Bolivians, two are Peruvians, and one Argentine/East German. The first ten were interred on the 40th anniversary of the Battle of Santa Clara, and the rest were added across two further groups of burials in 1999 and 2000. Over a quarter of a million people visit the mausoleum annually and it stands on a large ceremonial square called Plaza de la Revolución Che Guevara; this will be most likely the site of our first sprint, so the images of the finish with the iconic revolutionary looking down over the riders in statue form will likely be the main takeaway from the day.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 6: Cienfuegos - Topes de Collantes, 125km

GPM:
Alto de Gaviña (Pico de San Juan)(cat.1) 7,1km @ 8,4%
Alto 17 de Mayo (cat.3) 1,4km @ 8,8%
Topes de Collantes - Mirador del Caribe (cat.1) 4,3km @ 10,9%
Topes de Collantes - Vegas Grandes (cat.2) 3,1km @ 8,5%
Topes de Collantes - Escambray (cat.3) 1,9km @ 6,3%

Ah, our first real mountain stage, and it’s a short but sharp one which will test the riders’ climbing legs for real for the first time. It starts after a short post-stage drive from Santa Clara to nearby Cienfuegos, 40km or so to its southwest (yes, we’re travelling westward, sort of, although our stage is very much southeastward in trajectory), capital of its own eponymous province, and home to 180.000 people. In an example of inadvertent nominative determinism, the city was originally founded in 1819 inland from a castle at Jagua designed to protect the inlet from piracy, and named Fernandina de Jagua, but it was later renamed for its founder, Capitán General of Cuba, José Cienfuegos Jovellanos, whose surname translates as “a hundred fires”; the city was originally settled by French immigrants, primarily from the Bordeaux area and then supplemented by peoples displaced by the American acquisition of Louisiana. Sat on an inlet bay now known as the Bahía de Cienfuegos, the city was a late addition to competition for anchorage rights for trading vessels, but its convenience for ships sailing from Jamaica and en route to South American cities like Cartagena, Barranquilla, Maracaibo and Coro made it a fast-growing success. Although historically a port city which could have been useful to the government forces, Cienfuegos rose up against Batista’s rule in September 1957, for which it suffered extensive bombing as retribution. The rebuilding of the damaged parts of the city coming after the revolution, reconstruction was undertaken in the Communist ethos; power plants and factories being the main order of the day, making the “hundred fires” a lot more apt than they were at the original time.

Following the revolution, the city retained its name, however this was symbolically changed from honouring a former Spanish colonial captain to honouring Camilo Cienfuegos, Fidel Castro’s right hand man and one of the most prominent and powerful figures of the Cuban Revolution, who had served as a close confidante and vanguard leader of Che Guevara’s forces before becoming a leader of the forces primarily in the east of the country. He and Guevara had then split their forces and gone on separate, but simultaneous, westward marches, arriving in Matanzas on January 2nd, 1959, just before Guevara would march on Havana; with Castro conducting his victory tour around the cities of the west, Cienfuegos became the face of the revolution in Havana in his absence, as his being a born and bred Cuban was thought to be better for rallying and consolidating support than Guevara - Castro himself backed Cienfuegos for the role, as he was Cuban born and bred, and not publicly known to be a Communist, which made him more relatable and palatable to the less revolutionary sectors of society than Che. Cienfuegos was also less of a firebrand, legalising the Popular Socialist Party, commissioned its members to high ranking positions, but himself elected not to take governmental positions, instead resting somewhat on his laurels, but his importance to the revolution led to his being a very significant figure in the consolidation of the revolution, serving as leader of the revolutionary armed forces and as a more moderate voice in the room. Although he was later replaced by Castro’s own brother as time wore on, his public profile made him a helpful figure to keep on-side, and his disappearance after his plane vanished from radar en route from Camagüey to Havana after reorganising the armed forces in the area following a dispute between the regional general Huber Matos and the government, sparked a huge manhunt - Fidel Castro himself participating, although the death of one of his former aides followed by the murder of the perpetrator led to many fanciful conspiracy theories. Castro’s participation in the search led speculation about his actions given that Cienfuegos was then made a revolutionary martyr while simultaneously removing that voice that shared public support but preached a moderate stance from the room, but all primary sources concur that when the news of Cienfuegos’ plane’s disappearance was brought to Castro first hand (by Raúl), he had been visibly shaken and upset. Huber Matos, for his part, whose mistrust of Castro had set the entire process in motion, suspected Raúl Castro, not Fidel, of having planned the flight’s fate, but Che Guevara, who had remained fast friends with Cienfuegos to the last, always stood by his belief that the brothers were not involved. Every year, on October 28th, the anniversary of that fateful flight, Cuban schoolchildren throw flowers into the sea or rivers in honour of the revolutionary forefather who was at least presumed to have died younger (aged 27) and more controversially than even the one whose face we all know the world over.

More recently Cienfuegos has been home to well-known sportspeople like former All-Star MLB pros Joe Azcue (mainly successful in the 60s and 70s) and (more recently) Yasiel Puig and Yoán Moncada, and the two-time Olympic gold medalist featherweight boxer Robeisy Ramírez, winning in London at age 18 and then defending his title in Rio before turning pro in 2019; sadly the greatest sportsman to come from the city never got to strut their stuff on the biggest stage, this being Cristóbal Torriente, a hall of fame baseballer who dominated the Cuban League and was a superstar in the Negro Leagues, unfortunately for him being well before the colour barrier was broken down. The city was an ever-present in the 2000s version of the Vuelta a Cuba, hosting a stage finish and start every year from 2000 to 2007, and then hosting a criterium/circuit race before a stage start on split stages from 2008 to 2010. Some of the winners here include local favourite Pedro Pablo Pérez outsprinting Borut Božič in 2006 and ex-ice hockey pro Keven Lacombe who won the crit stages in both 2009 and 2010, but perhaps for this forum the most notable would be the notorious US domestic pro turned established doper turned established drug dealer Joe Papp, who can probably fill me in with a few more of the details of the race if he ever reads this thread since he has been a part of our forum furniture for over a decade.

Cienfuegos is happy hosting bike racing to the present day

The stage is a short one but it includes the most climbing we’ve seen yet, as we have our one and only incursion into the Escambray range, which is a scenic low Sierra in the south of the country arguably best known for the 1959-65 counter-revolutionary insurgency known as the Lucha Contra Bandidos, a protracted battle on the part of Castro’s forces to control a motley alliance of former Batista troops, locals protesting against collectivisation policies, and disillusioned ex-guerrillas dissatisfied with the direction of Castro’s actions since the revolution, for some time with support from the CIA, as this area was a planned refuge during the Bay of Pigs invasion, but this never got as far as using the site thus. We enter the Sierra from the west, between Gavilan and La Sierrita, and immediately climb up to the road on the shoulder of the highest peak in the range, the Pico de San Juan.

Pico de San Juan and its surrounding summits

The summit of the Pico is 1140m above sea level, but the road only reaches about 350m below that, close to the hamlet of Gaviña. It is nevertheless a pretty challenging climb, 7km at 8,4%, but with the first 3,5km averaging over 10% before things even out and become a bit more, well, ‘classical’ gradients. Profile-wise it’s a cat.1 around here, but would be borderline cat.1/cat.2 in bigger races. It’s similar to, but slightly easier than, Cruz de Linares; perhaps its best facsimile in European cycling that we might be aware of would be the Col de la Mûre that has appeared a few times in Paris-Nice, or the Col du Platzerwasel. It also isn’t likely to see major action here other than thinning out a few of those who simply won’t contest the stage, seeing as the summit is at 80km from the line in a 125km stage.

After this, we ride along the high plateau for a while, one of very few altiplanos in Cuba and, given it gets up above 800m at times, a rare sojourn up to altitude for the Vuelta a Cuba. Around 20km on the high plateau takes us through rolling terrain and scenic territory before another small uphill that is long enough to categorise, before we pass into the Topes de Collantes national park, named for the third highest peak in this part of the Escambray range, and our stage finish for the day. But we are facing the wrong direction; instead we will be rolling on through the finish and descending what will later become our last climb - well, climbs - of the day. So we’ll cover this more on the way up than we do on the way down, but at least we can view the three-stepped, inconsistent gradients for the first time before we get to the base of the climb and head for the first of two intermediate sprints, both of which will be held in the city of Trinidad, and enter a flat looping section of the stage around the south coast.

Originally founded by conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuellar under the name Villa de la Santísima Trinidad, this city of 75.000 inhabitants was crucial to the sugar trade in the 18th and 19th Centuries and has been a UNESCO-inscribed World Heritage Site since 1988 as a result of this cultural and economic importance. Nowadays it is more known as a tobacco processing city, or as the gateway to the Escambray mountains, but it has a certain historic colonial feel that, like much of Cuba, has kind of frozen in the 1950s thanks to the trade embargos, but this means it still has the old school cobblestone streets and architecture from the Spanish era that makes it into a real time capsule. To its east lies the Valle de los Ingenios, a cluster in the eponymous valley of around 70 sugar mills that serve as a remnant of the city’s historic significance, but we’re not headed that way just now, instead we head south to the port of Casilda, southern terminus of the railway that links Trinidad to the sea, and more recently developed as a tourist destination thanks to its scenic beaches that are ideal for snorkelling and diving. Most notably the Playa Ancón beach area was one of the first resort destinations to be established and developed by the Communists after the revolution and remains a popular getaway for both Cubans and overseas tourists to this day.

Certainly I’ve seen worse beaches in my time

The 20km or so between the two intermediate sprints - both held in Trinidad - are basically a flat loop around the Bahía de Casilda, taking in some of Cuba’s Caribbean coast, but then it’s time to climb back up to Topes de Collantes, the most famous and legendary of Cuba’s cycling climbs, and one which has been almost ever-present in the history of the Vuelta a Cuba thanks to its prominence and significance - and also that, even when they reduced down the race to a single MTF, it was located more westerly than Gran Piedra meaning that the flow of the race could stand the inclusion of this climb much more than its rival summit. Naturally, the climb - which can be subdivided into multiple smaller ascents - has been the focal point for many climbers’ assaults on the GC here, for better or for worse, and has seen the triumph of many a specialist. Sergei Morozov, twice King of the Mountains at the Tour de l’Avenir and once at the Peace Race, won here, as did record Vuelta a Cuba winner Eduardo Alonso, whose climbing skills would later see him become only the second rider from neither Venezuela nor Colombia to win the Vuelta al Táchira. Andrey Teteriuk, later a podium finisher at the Critérium du Dauphiné, and Milk Race winner Yuri Kashirin would also triumph there prior to the race’s first major hiatus, and then since the rebirth in the 2000s, summit finishes would be rarer but when included, the likes of Gregorio Ladino, a mountain specialist who has won races at high altitude like the Vuelta a Chiapas and Vuelta a Bolivia, and Arnold Alcolea have won. The most recent winner in an international race at Topes de Collantes is José Alarcón, a Venezuelan who was part of the launch roster of Movistar Team América and is still active today (winning a stage of the Clásico RCN in 2023, even); it is his only win outside Venezuela, but he has won both the Vuelta al Táchira and Vuelta a Venezuela in his lengthy career. The climb has also been an ever-present in the short-lived Guantánamo-La Habana Clásica, a stage race that largely followed the Vuelta a Cuba format but only for the national péloton and which ran 2014 to 2018.

The domestic péloton suffers en route to Topes de Collantes

Topes de Collantes is a tricky climb to deal with, realistically. Overall it doesn’t seem that threatening, after all we climb just over 700m in 12km for an average of just under 6%. 12km at 6% really doesn’t seem all that tough, it’s kind of in the same ballpark as, say, Passo Tonale east, Coll d’Ordino, or Le Bettex, hardly Zoncolan-alikes. However, it is a super inconsistent climb which is broken up into three parts which I have elected to classify independently of one another - shape-wise, it most clearly resembles the traceur favourite that is Collado de los Frailes via Hoyo de Charilla, only it’s 50% longer than that one. Although admittedly its first part is not quite as steep as the Portillo de Alhucema, the initial ascent to Mirador del Caribe is a pretty brutal climb which is worthy of cat.1 status, despite its short length. At 4,3km in distance but 11% in percentage, this one is a comparable for climbs like Xorret del Catí, Más de la Costa or the Sella Carnizza. But when we get to the top, however, it’s not the finish, just a staging point on the way as we’re still about 8km from home.

As with that Frailes profile, each successive part of the climb gets easier, so this is one that you’re best served making hard from the word go. The second stretch of climbing gets a cat.2 status and is a little shorter at just over 3km, but averaging 8,5%. This is far from inconsiderable, but is nevertheless comfortably more rideable than the prior ascent at double digits. The crest here also takes us to one of the most popular attractions of the Topes de Collantes natural park, the scenic multi-waterfalls known as Vegas Grandes.

A second downhill stretch takes a bit of the sting off before a final 2km at 6,3% up to the line; this is fairly consistent and so shouldn’t be an issue in and of itself, so differences would need to be opened up earlier on on the climb. This final ramp takes us to the Villa Caburni complex, a holiday resort and health retreat that is one of the most well-established escapes in Cuba, and serves the same kind of function in the country that hill stations historically have in South and Southeast Asia for the former colonial masters.

“Topes de Collantes” is both the name of the third highest peak in the eponymous reserve and the natural park itself. However, it also lends its nomenclature to a small settlement and tourist centre which is developed around the Villa Caburni village. The area was largely settled solely for agriculture, especially coffee plantations, until the Fulgencio Batista administration, which recognised the potential of the area for health purposes and commenced construction on a large sanatorium; the story goes that - possibly apocryphally, given this tale was furthered post-Revolution - Batista’s wife fell in love with the area and fell ill with tuberculosis, which meant that it was a favoured spot for a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in order for Batista to keep his significant other happy. How true that story is, nobody knows, unfortunately - though her own personal house at Parque La Represa remains open to this day. While the resort is not solely used for this purpose, though, there does remain sanatorial usage of Topes de Collantes, however other parts of the Kurhotel are in service as an art gallery and cultural centre. With the UNESCO-inscribed landmarks nearby and the popularity of the beach at Playa Ancón, the PCC saw the potential of packaging the landmarks of south-central Cuba together as an offering and have redeveloped the area to capitalise. Waterfalls and caves make for scenic hiking destinations, while a multitude of miradors offer spectacular views down to the Caribbean Sea below. This means of course that we have all the amenities at our disposal to host a good mountaintop finish, and this one will, for all intents and purposes, truly ignite the GC battle at this race. Even if broken up into three climbs for the purpose of the GPM, breaking it down to just the climbing sections, they average out at 9,3km @ 9,2% - obviously that’s a bit of a misnomer with the descents breaking the climb up, but nevertheless, the cumulative climbing segments are more than enough to guarantee some serious action, you would hope.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 7: Trinidad - Ciego de Ávila, 142km

This is our second pan-flat stage, after stage 5, and one of the very few that includes not one single, solitary categorised climb. This one is a short and straightforward one which will probably get the shortest of any and all stage write-ups in the race. Not least because the stage starts in a city I already wrote up about yesterday, since we passed through it - Trinidad. The city is used to this kind of role in the Vuelta a Cuba - not hosting a stage finish, but hosting a stage start because it would typically take the stage start the day after the Topes de Collantes mountain stage; usually, these stages would be from Trinidad to Santa Clara or Cienfuegos and winners include Tom Barth and Asiat Saitov. The city would not, however, be seen in the 2000s version of the race, with the post-Topes de Collantes stage usually starting already in Cienfuegos, so its reappearance in the race is somewhat overdue. The first third of the stage is a flat - as all of it is - run along the southern tip of the Sierra de Escambray, and the main noteworthy part of this stretch is heading through the Valle de los Ingenios, the UNESCO-inscribed sugar plantations and their centres.

This World Heritage Site comprises three inter-connected valleys, names San Luís, Santa Rosa, and Meyer, and at their height these valleys hosted upward of 50 sugar cane mills which were serviced by up to 30.000 slaves, mostly imported from Africa or of Afro-Cuban origin, through the late 18th and early 19th Century, following the near extinction of the native inhabitants of the valley areas due to their vulnerability to diseases inadvertently introduced by the European settlers. Most of the mills are in ruins or have since been dismantled, however, those that remain are popular tourist attractions, including the Guachinango plantation house, and Manaca Iznaga’s tower and barracones, with the plantation manor shown in the picture above. We are almost at the halfway point in the stage by the time we reach our next point of significance, the city of Sancti Spíritus, which serves as the provincial capital for the day’s route, but does not host the stage itself - however we do at least stop by for an intermediate sprint.

Sancti Spíritus is actually one of the oldest cities in Cuba, having been established by the conquistador Velázquez de Cuellar early in the 16th Century and as one of the earliest inland establishments settled by the Spanish, and Hernán Cortés counted inhabitants of Sancti Spíritus among his first collaborators on his first expedition to Mexico. Home to 140.000 people, its most famous descendent for many years was the Basque speculator Francisco Iznaga, who helped found the sugar mills that brought industry and wealth to the area. The city has appeared several times in the Vuelta a Cuba, appearing periodically - often as a stage start - in the Ostbloc era, before being almost ever-present in the 2000s version of the race. Winners in Sancti Spíritus include Olaf Ludwig, Jan Svorada and Zbigniew Spruch in the old version of the race, and former Liquigas man Frederik Willems, ex-Kelme rider António López Carrasco, Continental Tour stalwart Gregor Gazvoda and even some guy called Elia Viviani who has made a decent fist of a pro career since, since the race was reintroduced.

After this the next point of interest is the second intermediate sprint in Jatibonico, where the first new oil field was discovered in the post-WWII world (having been struck in the early 1950s), at around a depth of 350m. It was briefly part of the Las Villas province in the 1970s but has since been returned to Sancti Spíritus’ eponymous domain. Taking its name from pre-Columbine inhabitants’ words for “wooded place”, it is known for its extensive forests and its hot and humid climate. It is also known for abundant agricultural pottery from aboriginal populations that have been well preserved around here, and also gave insight into the lifestyles of the Cuban people prior to Spanish incursions, as it displays evidence of the crops grown here as well as materials of provenance engineered from substances not present in the local area, suggesting a more mobile and quick-moving population than had initially been thought. A formal town only came with the introduction of the railroad at the start of the 20th Century, and its industrial nature made it a key part of the early revolutionary movement, with some of the M-26-7 charters being signed in Jatibonico, and it being the hometown of António Dario López, who stormed the Bayamó barracks in 1953. More recently it has been home to the playwright and thinker Rómulo Loredo Alonso, known as one of the great voices of the Cuban peasantry. It was also the first city to declare full literacy following one of the Communists’ major initial drives, to ensure that revolutionary thought and ideology could be fully spread to the populace.

Finally, however, in our long, and rather featureless odyssey, it is time to reach our finishing town of Ciego de Ávila, another provincial capital and home to 160.000 people. Lying on both the Carretera Central and the national railroad, this city was originally a cluster of farming settlements under the jurisdiction of the city of Morón, about 35km to its north, which grew enough to be considered a town in their own right in the early 19th Century. It had been a somewhat backwater location, with Morón being far larger and more significant, until the construction by the Spanish colonists of the Trocha de Júcaro a Morón, a fortified military line of trenches established, as the name would suggest, from Júcaro, on the Caribbean coast, to Morón, just inland from the Atlantic. Ciego de Ávila was the central of three key staging posts along this line, the others being Venezuela and Ciro Retondo, which was constructed to impede the westward movement of the seditionary forces in the 1st War of Independence in the 1870s, while Cuba’s very first railroad was constructed to help supply the staff and soldiers manning the Trocha. Many of the fortifications last to this day, although they were notably not enough to keep General Máximo Gómez at bay. However, despite the role for which they were built, the historical significance of the Trocha has led to it being a cultural monument which the Cuban state is responsible for the upkeep of to this day.

Blockhouse on the Trocha de Júcaro a Morón

Outside of the fortified walls, the city is known primarily for well-preserved colonial architecture, thanks largely to the patronage of the socialite Angela Hernández (not to be confused with the much-lampooned baseball umpire Ángel Hernández, even though the remainder of Ciego de Ávila’s famous sons and daughters owe their prominence to the sport). The most notable of these would undoubtedly be Atanásio “Tony” Pérez, a Hall of Fame first and third baseman who played 23 professional seasons from 1964 to 1986, was part of the Cincinnati Reds dynasty of the 1970s known as the “Big Red Machine”, won two World Series as a player with the Reds and one as a coach and assistant GM at the Miami Marlins, was a seven-time All Star, and has seen his number retired by the Reds for what he achieved in the 13 seasons he played for them.

Ciego de Ávila would appear on a sporadic basis in the Vuelta a Cuba in the 70s and 80s, depending on how long the Topes de Collantes stages were (sometimes it would be a stage start if the organisers were going full Unipuerto in a longish stage, but often it would take a back seat to Sancti Spíritus for this purpose), but it would see occasional finishes with the likes of Asiat Saitov, Eduardo Alonso and António Quintero winning there. Often in the 2000s, however, there would be a longer route between Ciego de Ávila and Sancti Spíritus, heading north to Morón, west to Mayajigua and then south into the latter city in order to generate a full length racing stage of 170-180km, which made the city into an almost ever-present on the route - however stages were invariably flat so would typically involve a sprint. Joel Marino, a fabled Cuban sprinter of the time, won the first couple, but subsequent winners in Ciego de Ávila would be Pablo Getafe, a Spanish espoir who had a brief career in Portugal; Pablo de Pedro, another such rider who would vacillate between the Spanish elite amateurs and the Spanish and Portuguese continental teams throughout the 2000s after winning the Volta do Futuro; Kyle Wamsley, a veteran of the NRC who forged a decade long career in US domestic cycling; Matej Stare, a stalwart of Slovene domestic cycling; Pedro Pablo Pérez, a superstar of Cuban domestic cycling and one of the great heroes of the race at the time; Bruno Lima, a veteran of the Portuguese scene, mainly with Boavista although he did have a stint with Milaneza-Maia; François Parisien, a French-Canadian who ploughed a furrow with SpiderTech and was successful enough after their step up to the ProConti level to earn himself some time at Argos-Shimano/Sunweband then finally in 2010, Dutch mercenary Peter Woestenberg won a road stage in Ciego before the following day an ITT from Morón to Ciego de Ávila over 35km was won by long-time Canadian racing mainstay Ryan Roth, just ahead of eventual GC winner Arnold Alcolea.

This one will be a sprint. Can’t really say much more.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 8: Florida - Camagüey, 39,1km (CRI)

Yes, we continue this pan-flat run through central Cuba with another flat stage, but at least this one will have a noteworthy impact on the GC, being the main and primary test against the clock in the race. Historically the race would stand a lot on its contrarreloj, with the race consisting of many flat stages, punctuated by the one or two MTFs and a couple of ITTs, so it was kind of like stage racing with reductio ad absurdum if you like. I’d rather not put the relatively quiet TV spectacle of the ITT on a weekend stage, but unfortunately for me, well, the long and narrow shape of Cuba does, much like certain other nations with similar geographic limitations, rather impose a level of control over what we can do, a similar problem can be found with places like Chile, Vietnam or Panama, where going from one end to another is almost the only viable plan for a stage race, thus by default placing restrictions of what can be done in the central part of the race. But while many such countries are narrow because of mountainous topography serving as part of the border, that is not the case for Cuba, as an island, and while the extremities of the island protrude as a result of the mountainous extensions upwards into the sky, the central part of the island features extensive sprawling lowlands which offer little to the traceur. Hey Zam, at least I tried, right?

Not to be confused with the nearest part of the US mainland and the target for many an escapee fleeing the island, the city of Florida was established around 40km (just under, as you can tell from, you know, the distance of this time trial) from the provincial capital of Camagüey, along the Carretera Central. It is a relatively young city, having only split off from Camagüey’s control in 1907 and been an independent municipality since 1924; this was short-lived however and the modern municipality dates back only to 1971. About 70.000 people live here and the city even has its own somewhat small airport, but it’s usually just a transitory stop for the Vuelta a Cuba, as it heads through the central plains from Camagüey in the direction of cities like Ciego de Ávila and Sancti Spíritus.

Our stage basically follows the Carretera Central - going to need some contraflows I reckon - along a very straight, hard and flat pure rouleur test en route to Cuba’s third largest city, Camagüey, with its population of almost 350.000. It’s a city with a somewhat interesting history, not least because this is neither its original name nor location. Originally it was founded under the name of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe in 1514 and was one of the original seven colonial outposts set up by the Spaniards on the island we now know as Cuba. However, for reasons which haven’t entirely stood the test of time but can probably be guessed from the outcome, the city was moved inland (the town of Nuevitas now sits on its original site) and set up on the site of a Taíno settlement which was called Camagüey (or at least in Spanish orthography it was, anyway). Nevertheless, despite no longer possessing a port or even being all that close to the sea, Puerto del Príncipe kept its original name. During the Anglo-Spanish War in the mid-17th Century, though, this inland location wasn’t enough to spare it being captured and ransacked by the Welsh privateer and plantation owner Henry Morgan, who regularly raided around the Caribbean and the Antilles from his base in Jamaica, and had been searching for an opportunity to raid Cuba and seek spoils for some time. Puerto del Príncipe was well defended from the north, but from the southern approach via the Gulf of Santa María, it had far less security. Morgan landed at what is now Santa Cruz del Sur and marched on the city, going via dense jungle in order to disguise his intentions.

While Morgan left after occupying for two weeks, the impact of the event was significant for the city’s history, with the city’s ruins being redesigned in an irregular, complex network of curved roads to give a maze-like structure, making it difficult for a would-be captor to move around the city and know where they were at any given time relative to those with local knowledge. Subsequent urban expansion has been along much more orthodox lines, with typical grid patterns, plazas and so forth, but the not-quite-original maze-like interior has remained intact. This inspired decision was honoured by UNESCO, who granted the city centre World Heritage Site status for this unique and creative solution that has also thus preserved the city’s interior much as it was developed in the latter half of the 17th Century.

Camagüey’s irregular Casco Viejo

Old colonial buildings

Wider city vista

Nevertheless, despite this effort, the city still suffered significant damage under bombardment during the Guerra del Asiento, known rather idiosyncratically as the War of Jenkins’ Ear to Anglophones. Later, it would serve as the birthplace of Ignacio Agramonte y Loynaz, a crucial figure in Cuba’s early independence movements, and a revolutionary who was a key player in the uprising in Puerto del Príncipe on November 4th, 1868. He was elected (by the council of the rebel leaders) as a joint secretary of the “Government of the Center”, alongside António Zambrana, and was the main driver of the authorship of the Guáimaro Constitution, the first constitution drawn up by Cuban insurgent rebel governments and imposed on to Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the initial president who was a conservative moderate - Agramonte would leave the rebel leadership due to butting heads with Céspedes, as the latter advocated for strong presidential power while Agramonte favoured a democratic parliamentary model. He went on to become a Major General in the Cuban rebel army, but would die in service in 1873, struck by a stray bullet, and was succeeded by Máximo Gómez.

Although the Ten Years’ War was not wholly successful for the Cubans, they did eventually, of course, win their independence, upon which the city of Puerto del Príncipe was renamed Camagüey. The province surrounding the city had already come to be known as Camagüey, from the Taíno, and the city was located on the site of a prior Taíno town which was called Camagüey so it was a fairly easy change to make to overthrow and dismiss the colonial name for the city and restore the name the site had had prior to the establishment of the Spanish community there. The city has gone on to have something of a pivotal and Janus-faced role in Cuba - it is the home of both “Poet of the Revolution” Raúl Rivero, who was an ardent supporter of Fidel Castro and one of the first journalists to graduate under the PCC’s regime, but by the late 1990s and early 2000s had become a dissident writer critical of restrictions of press freedom and of governmental crackdowns; also it was the birthplace of the author Severo Sarduy, who again had been pro-regime but became disillusioned - Sarduy however became disillusioned much sooner, travelling to Paris for study in 1960 but refusing to return fearing censorship of opinion and persecution for his open homosexuality in a still outwardly Catholic nation, he became a prominent essayist and author on subjects such as gender and sexual identity, but his works remain almost entirely unknown or difficult to obtain in Cuba to this day. On the flip side, though, there is Nicolás Guillén, the National Poet of Cuba, a political writer who had opposed the Machado regime in the 1930s and joined the PCC early on, even standing for office as a Communist in 1940 and being exiled from the country during the Batista regime. He would eventually return after the revolution and serve 30 years as the President of Cuba’s National Writers Union; his works were often feted for their political content, even back in the 1930s he had issued protest poetry about treatment of Afro-Cubans and of the working classes and fusing musical traditions that emphasised the nation’s melting pot nature with the written word.

Camagüey being one of the country’s largest cities as well as its somewhat central location has meant it has been seen many, many times in the national race. Winners in Camagüey include Anatoly Yarkin, Olaf Ludwig, Zdzisław Wrona, Asiat Saitov and Rolf Aldag back in the Ostbloc days, while the city appeared on the route in each and every year of the race’s second run in the 2000s. Pedro Pablo Pérez was the first winner after the return of the race, and he would also win in 2007; however as far as I can see we have never had an ITT in Camagüey, it has always been road stages, and these have invariably, somewhat unsurprisingly, resulted in sprint finishes. As such, fast men have been the main benefactors here, from Venezuelan sprint specialist Artur García to WT stalwart Kristijan Koren… via the most revered and morally upstanding member of the Cyclingnews Forum, 2003 Camagüey stage winner Joseph Papp.

Vuelta a Cuba in Camagüey back in the day

This of course will not be a sprint, but 39km against the clock should set us up nicely for the second half of the race.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 9: Las Tunas - Sierra Maestra (Mirador El Alto del Naranjo), 146km

GPM:
Altos del Brazón (cat.2) 5,0km @ 7,0%
Sierra Maestre (Mirador El Alto del Naranjo)(cat.1) 3,6km @ 16,0%

The middle Sunday of the race, the last day before the rest day, and it’s a return of the climbs, but it’s going to be a while before we get there - yet when we do, then it’s going to get ugly fast.

We start off in Las Tunas, a city around 120km from Camagüey to its east, which is the capital of its eponymous province and home to just over 200.000 people. This province is the least visited of all Cuban provinces, lying awkwardly too far east for the main cities of the island outside of Oriente, but in less interesting terrain and outlying for those visiting the Oriente end of the island to see places like Baracoa, Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba - although it is trying to rekindle some tourist interest, becoming known as the City of Sculpture after investing in a number of artistic installations in the city centre and pushing an identity as the access point to the Cuban East encouraging more tourists to give the place a look on their way to the likes of Baracoa. Another stop-off on the Carretera Central, Las Tunas was founded at the end of the 18th Century and split off from Oriente Province in the mid-19th Century in order to try to break up the oppositional movements that were frequently spreading from that part of the country at the time. The city’s most notable contribution to that opposition was as the birthplace of Vicente García González, a general in the Ten Years’ War who served as de facto President of the Cuban Republic after the capture of sitting de facto President Tomás Estrada Palma; Máximo Gómez was the preferred choice but he declined the position, with García the second choice; after the Spaniards were successful in suppressing the republican movement, he escaped to Venezuela, but after he became involved in further revolutionary activity from afar, the Spanish forces had him assassinated. More recently, the city is the hometown of Houston Astros’ star hitter Yordan Rubén Álvarez, nicknamed “Air Yordan” for his propensity to get under the ball and send it skyward on some long distance bombs, which have helped him to three All Star games in a career that is only six seasons long at the MLB level.

The city has, however, had a frequent visitor in the form of the Vuelta a Cuba; it has commonly shown up on routes and played hosts to wins by the likes of Sergei Nikitenko, Vladimir Vavra and Jan Svorada, although it fell from favour in latter years. For much of the 80s it would host a 70+km TTT as well as a road stage, with the DDR and the Cuban hosts’ national team being the most successful teams in these.

We aren’t headed east, though, unlike the majority of tourists who do find their way to Las Tunas; nor are we headed west, unlike the majority of Vuelta a Cuba routes that would depart the city in the direction of Camagüey. Instead, however, we are heading south, towards the Sierra Maestra, a vast mountain range that characterises the south coast of the island on its easternmost extremities. The first part of the stage, presumably before it makes air, is pretty straightforward, pure flat and little to punctuate it until the first intermediate sprint comes at 75km into the stage, almost the halfway point, at Bayamo, the capital of the Granma province that plays host to most of the day’s route, and home of 170.000 people. One of the original seven cities established by Velázquez de Cuellár, the city developed high importance as an agricultural hub, but over time its inland location giving it security from bandits while simultaneously retaining good access to ports made it into a crucial trading centre for the Cuban island. This importance led to it becoming a hub for plantations and rendered it a major trading centre on the island through the 18th and 19th Centuries, but this also made it a focal point for the revolutionaries and secessionists of the nationalist movement. Locals to Bayamo include Francisco Vicente Aguilera, the richest man in the East during his lifetime and the man who played host to the first Cuban Revolutionary Committee, which he also chaired and moderated. Disappointed in the lack of support he gathered for his cause rallying expatriate Cubans in America and Europe, he became an insurrectionist and quite literally put his money where his mouth was, placing all of his property and livestock on the free market to raise money for the Cuban revolutionary cause. Pre-1959, his visage adorned the 100 peso bill.

While Aguilera chaired the first Cuban Revolutionary Committee, he did not attend the second, and his role was filled by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in his absence. Céspedes has a certain romance to his revolutionary heroism; he was a former plantation owner, who sounded the “Cry of Yara”, ringing the slave bell for the sole purpose of freeing his slaves and inviting them to join him in a battle for independence. He served as President of Cuba in Arms from 1869 but was deposed in 1873 in a leadership coup; he was denied safe passage to exile and was killed by Spanish troops when they found him seeking refuge in a mountain hideout. He was originally the face that adorned the 10 peso bill, but he was moved up to the 100 peso bill after the 1959 Revolution and though there are certain complexities to the esteem he was held in (while he did free the slaves to take up arms, he had owned them in the first place, and his romantic life was…let’s be blunt and say not the most morally upstanding), his role as the first to formally declare independence has led him to be seen as Padre de la Patria.

After the deposition of Céspedes, his role was assumed by Tomás Estrada Palma, another born Bayamo man. He was captured and exiled by the Spanish, but they couldn’t keep him at bay for long, working with José Martí to rally support for the Cuban cause in the US and becoming the leader of the Cuban Junta and serving as its primary diplomatic tie. It has left him with a complex legacy; his success in this role brought great benefits in the form of American support for Cuban independence efforts, and gave him the leg up to become the first President of a genuine independent Cuba rather than just a President In Arms, a role he took on in 1902 as he was backed as leader by both competing parties - despite remaining in the US where he had achieved naturalized citizenship; however, it means that it was him that signed the Platt Amendment, an oft-criticised amendment to the Cuban constitution that allowed the USA the right to intervene in Cuban domestic policy, a clause which caused great consternation and disillusionment with politics in Cuba all the way until it was formally revoked by the post-revolutionary leadership in 1959. As a result, his legacy of fighting for the country’s independence and the great achievements in equality, education and infrastructure made under his leadership are mostly overshadowed in the mind of the common Cuban today by his being the man that allowed Cuba to be treated as a plaything by the United States for half a century.

Another attendee at the first Cuban Revolutionary Committee was fellow Bayamo native Pedro Felipe Figueredo, known mostly as “Perucho”. He was a committed anti-colonial fighter who was executed for his actions in 1870, two years after his daughter, Candelaria, became the stuff of legend as one of the first women to carry a revolutionary flag into battle. Perucho’s most enduring contribution to the efforts, however, was to compose El Himno de Bayamo, which serves as the Cuban national anthem to this day.

Bayamo central plaza

This part of the world also is known for violently windy conditions, in fact in this region a particular fashion of weather system generating a fierce wind is known as “a bayamo”, so there is definitely the possibility of echelons in this part of the stage. This is probably for the best as it encourages tired legs for later; after all, the first 130km are all flat, all the obstacles created by terrain are crammed into the last 15km, but that doesn’t mean that if the weather plays ball we don’t have any potentially selective racing before that.

Continuing our tour of figures in the early revolutionary history of Cuba, the second intermediate sprint - and the municipality that plays host to the finish - is in the town of Bartolomé Maso, around 25km from the line. This town of just under 50.000 people is a relatively young town named for another Cuban independence fighter, Bartolomé de Jesús Maso Márquez, who was born in Yara - the same town in which Céspedes made his infamous declaration - to parents from Bayamo and Manzanillo, who was one of the first recruits to Céspedes’ cause in 1867 and participated in the capture by the rebels of the city of Bayamo. He served as War Secretary in the Cuban Government In Arms, and was imprisoned at the end of the Ten Years’ War, first in Cuba and then transported across to Spain. After his release, he returned to Cuba and kept a low profile until the outbreak of the Guerra Necesaria, where he served as the Vice-President of the Republic in Arms, before acceding to the Presidency in 1897. He was the only candidate to run against Estrada Palma in 1901, but withdrew from the race thanks to heavy US pressure - likely due to his vocal opposition to the terms of the Platt Amendment. He was honoured after his death in 1907 with the renaming of this small town near Yara, which has grown in stature thanks to its role as a point of access to the Sierra Maestra’s isolated encampments which served a crucial role in the country’s revolutionary history rather more recently than Masó’s own.

Comandancia General de la Plata

The Sierra Maestra’s inaccessibility has led to its use by many groups as a point of defence against incursion, either as defence from sea-bound invaders, or from inland challenges. The Taíno initially resisted enslavement by the Spanish colonists by hiding out in these mountains in the 16th Century, and later a rebellious post-slave mini-culture of escaped Afro-Cuban slaves and Cimarrón Taíno and neo-Taínos developed out of those who had escaped their enslavement or refused to submit to it; the Afro-Cuban uprising of 1912 (sometimes called the Race War of 1912, but officially known as the Armed Uprising of the Independents of Color - no, really) saw several massacres of Afro-Cubans after US Marines were deployed to protect the holdings of large American sugar plantation owners (seriously, how many times in this thread have I said it, the most effective propaganda tool the Soviets could ever have had in fomenting anti-American sentiment would be simply to distribute books about the history of Latin America), leading acting PIC leader (after previous leader Evaristo Estenoz had been killed) Pedro Ivonnet to lead a guerrilla campaign from hideouts in the mountains; American-born Cuban progressive António Guiteras y Holmes led a brief uprising from these mountains in 1935 after the progressive Gobierno de los Cien Días, in which he had played a key role, was deposed following Fulgencio Batista’s intervention with assistance from the US ambassador forcing sitting President Ramón Grau to resign. Guiteras’ uprising would be short and he would die in a gun battle in Matanzas some months later while waiting to be transferred to Mexico by boat. But, most crucially, after the failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, Fidel Castro was exiled from Cuba, and after his return in 1956, he set up camp in a difficult to access site, deep in the Sierra Maestra, from which he would plot and prepare the move that would change the entire world - and this, the Comandancia General de la Plata, is at the Alto del Naranjo, a scenic mountain peak on the shoulders of the Pico de Turquino national park, where we are headed in today’s finale.

Pico de Turquino National Park

The interesting thing about the route up to Castro’s old base in the mountains is, you have to get there by a road which goes up, then down, then back up again. You don’t have any alternative roads to take, so after the 5km @ 7% climb - a three-stepped climb including some unpleasant ramps of its own - 1,6km @ 10%, some false flat, 1km @ 10%, then some flat before a final 700m at 6% - there is no choice but to forge onwards; there is no village or potential finish at the base of the descent. Instead, we are headed deep in the jungle, in order to see just what those rebels and guerrillas had to endure to maintain their loyalty to Fidel all those years ago.

Ominous music begins

Entering the national park. Images from Jennyfaraway.com

To get to the Comandancia General de la Plata, you have to ascend some 750m in 5km from the hamlet of Santo Domingo, the only sign of permanent dwellings since Providencia. Yes, that averages 15%. However, we don’t go all the way because the road ends about 600m above the village, where guide jeeps and 4x4s end their route (you can’t get tour buses and things like that up here, they just can’t handle the road), and the rest of the way you have to trek on foot. This nevertheless means a final 3,4km that average just over 16%, an absolutely brutal, soul-crushing, leg-destroying, lung-busting grind of the kind that we see cause motorcycles to burn out in European racing on occasion. Yes, this is a short ascent, but it will take some serious time to survive.

This is going to be a short but extremely challenging finale, a similar kind of vibe to those brutal walls we often see in the Vuelta a España. Its closest relatives are things like Les Praeres and La Camperona although if anything it’s even steeper than those - not as bad for a maximum kilometre as La Camperona’s, but it stays at that steepness longer; it’s also like Montée de la Bastille in Grenoble that was in the Dauphiné recently, but nearly twice the length. This is officially recognised as the steepest road in Cuba, so it was a necessity.

Now the road starts to really hit hard. Image from Christopher P Baker at startupcuba.tv

Up to the summit

Of course, back in the 1950s when Castro and his fellow rebels were camping out in the Sierra Maestra, this road was not there. After the failed attack on the Moncada Barracks, Castro and 19 of his comrades who had survived the aftermath of the attack set out for the mountains, but were rounded up by the military and placed in a show trial by the Batista regime. Castro’s testimonies in court embarrassed the military and he was sentenced to 15 years on Isla de los Pinos, a comfortable modern prison. His rebellion was formally named M-26-7 after the date of the failed Moncada attack, but he was freed after the 1954 elections, ironically with US pressure, but continued dissident action saw him and his brother flee to Mexico the following year. Setting sail from Tuxpan, Veracruz in November 1956, he returned to Cuba with 81 armed revolutionaries, and set into motion the conflict that would eventually become the Cuban Revolution. After running aground at Los Cayuelos, they headed inland under pressure to seek the shelter of the mountains, and established the base camp at the almost inaccessible spot above the Alto del Naranjo. Fidel, Raúl, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos were among the central command, while urban-based M-26-7 members would send aid packages to keep them alive, while they would raid army posts for weaponry and machinery, winning local support by sparing ordinary soldiers but executing disliked local enforcers; Frank Sturgis - later to become notorious as one of the Watergate burglars - joined to train the forces in the ways of guerrilla war, and armed with this knowledge and the guile of Guevara and Cienfuegos, M-26-7 eventually drove the government out of the Sierra Maestra entirely, even after Batista’s aggressive response with Operación Verano. Following the success of the revolution, the small camp from which it had all began, and from which, once the region had been secured, Radio Rebelde would broadcast the rebel’s side of the news in an attempt to debunk the propaganda attempts of the government, and to initiate its own, would be turned into a monument, left largely unaltered and turned into a museum piece. It remains a difficult-to-access site and is not exactly an easy trip for Cuban locals, let alone foreign tourists, to make, but it is still a site of great honour and history for the Cuban government and so the road was constructed and maintained to enable the site so crucial to the revolution to be viewed and attended by the general public. Which is good, of course, because it enables us to add a new MTF to the annals of the Vuelta a Cuba. The steepness probably made it an impossibility back in the 2000s run of the Vuelta a Cuba, and definitely back in the Ostbloc days, but in today’s cycling, where things like La Camperona are possible to see in competitive races, this should be achievable.

 

[E_F_]

2021 Tour de France

I've spent the last few months looking at races in the undiscovered parts of the world; Tour of Cambodia, Tour of Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan. However, I decided to jump firmly back into the mainstream with an edition of the Tour de France. I should point out here, I haven't really done any revolutionary with the route, I think that one of the joys of designing a TdF is that you really have to stick to the major routes, almost without exception. That reduction in scope presents an interesting challenge to still create an exciting route.
I've decided to start the race in Denmark, based on the rumours that a Tour will begin there in the 5-7 year future. We'll then trend west into the Jura and then into the Northern Alps. I'm very happy with the final week in the Pyrenees but I've tried not to backend the drama and the mountains. I'll kick off with the first three stages here but I'd love to hear your thoughts about the race and stuff I should've missed. I'll go back to the esoteric races in the near future.

Stage 1 - Copenhagen TTT - 14.6km

Screen Shot 2016-07-29 at 2.38.34 PM by Sam Larner, on Flickr

Screen Shot 2016-07-29 at 2.38.46 PM by Sam Larner, on Flickr

It's a fast opening team time trial setting out from the island of Christiana. The riders will tackle minimal technical patches in the first 5km as they race through the city, passed the Tivoli Gardens, and out north along the coast road. The city is sheltered somewhat by Sweden but where there's a coastal road there's a chance of wind playing a serious role in the proceedings. The final third of the course has three 90 degree bends but they're linked by long stretches of straight which should keep the average speed up. The fastest ever Tour stage was 57.7kp/h, that could be under threat with this run.

Stage 2 - Copenhagen - Odense 169.8km

Screen Shot 2016-07-29 at 2.41.04 PM by Sam Larner, on Flickr

Screen Shot 2016-07-29 at 2.41.26 PM by Sam Larner, on Flickr

If the wind doesn't blow, this is one of the easiest stages on the whole Tour. There's just 690m of climbing and no classified climbs on the course. However, we do cross the Great Belt Bridge which means that for 17km the peloton will be at the mercy of the sea breeze. There could be a huge number of riders who completely fade away from contention after this stage.

Stage 3 - Kolding - Kiel 191km

Screen Shot 2016-07-29 at 2.42.15 PM by Sam Larner, on Flickr

Screen Shot 2016-07-29 at 2.42.32 PM by Sam Larner, on Flickr

Another flat stage, another stage with no categorised climbs - that continues in stage 4. The stage should be slightly more straightforward because we're setback from the coast so the wind should be less of an issue. But, after two and a half stages we're departing Denmark and heading into Germany. The last 3kms are quite technical and the finish is on the harbour front so the wind my play a part in deciding how late the sprint begins.

Just noticed this prophetic post... Danish organizers originally wanted Odense, even.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

Stage 9: Las Tunas - Sierra Maestra (Mirador El Alto del Naranjo), 146km

GPM:
Altos del Brazón (cat.2) 5,0km @ 7,0%
Sierra Maestre (Mirador El Alto del Naranjo)(cat.1) 3,6km @ 16,0%

The middle Sunday of the race, the last day before the rest day, and it’s a return of the climbs, but it’s going to be a while before we get there - yet when we do, then it’s going to get ugly fast.

We start off in Las Tunas, a city around 120km from Camagüey to its east, which is the capital of its eponymous province and home to just over 200.000 people. This province is the least visited of all Cuban provinces, lying awkwardly too far east for the main cities of the island outside of Oriente, but in less interesting terrain and outlying for those visiting the Oriente end of the island to see places like Baracoa, Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba - although it is trying to rekindle some tourist interest, becoming known as the City of Sculpture after investing in a number of artistic installations in the city centre and pushing an identity as the access point to the Cuban East encouraging more tourists to give the place a look on their way to the likes of Baracoa. Another stop-off on the Carretera Central, Las Tunas was founded at the end of the 18th Century and split off from Oriente Province in the mid-19th Century in order to try to break up the oppositional movements that were frequently spreading from that part of the country at the time. The city’s most notable contribution to that opposition was as the birthplace of Vicente García González, a general in the Ten Years’ War who served as de facto President of the Cuban Republic after the capture of sitting de facto President Tomás Estrada Palma; Máximo Gómez was the preferred choice but he declined the position, with García the second choice; after the Spaniards were successful in suppressing the republican movement, he escaped to Venezuela, but after he became involved in further revolutionary activity from afar, the Spanish forces had him assassinated. More recently, the city is the hometown of Houston Astros’ star hitter Yordan Rubén Álvarez, nicknamed “Air Yordan” for his propensity to get under the ball and send it skyward on some long distance bombs, which have helped him to three All Star games in a career that is only six seasons long at the MLB level.

The city has, however, had a frequent visitor in the form of the Vuelta a Cuba; it has commonly shown up on routes and played hosts to wins by the likes of Sergei Nikitenko, Vladimir Vavra and Jan Svorada, although it fell from favour in latter years. For much of the 80s it would host a 70+km TTT as well as a road stage, with the DDR and the Cuban hosts’ national team being the most successful teams in these.

We aren’t headed east, though, unlike the majority of tourists who do find their way to Las Tunas; nor are we headed west, unlike the majority of Vuelta a Cuba routes that would depart the city in the direction of Camagüey. Instead, however, we are heading south, towards the Sierra Maestra, a vast mountain range that characterises the south coast of the island on its easternmost extremities. The first part of the stage, presumably before it makes air, is pretty straightforward, pure flat and little to punctuate it until the first intermediate sprint comes at 75km into the stage, almost the halfway point, at Bayamo, the capital of the Granma province that plays host to most of the day’s route, and home of 170.000 people. One of the original seven cities established by Velázquez de Cuellár, the city developed high importance as an agricultural hub, but over time its inland location giving it security from bandits while simultaneously retaining good access to ports made it into a crucial trading centre for the Cuban island. This importance led to it becoming a hub for plantations and rendered it a major trading centre on the island through the 18th and 19th Centuries, but this also made it a focal point for the revolutionaries and secessionists of the nationalist movement. Locals to Bayamo include Francisco Vicente Aguilera, the richest man in the East during his lifetime and the man who played host to the first Cuban Revolutionary Committee, which he also chaired and moderated. Disappointed in the lack of support he gathered for his cause rallying expatriate Cubans in America and Europe, he became an insurrectionist and quite literally put his money where his mouth was, placing all of his property and livestock on the free market to raise money for the Cuban revolutionary cause. Pre-1959, his visage adorned the 100 peso bill.

While Aguilera chaired the first Cuban Revolutionary Committee, he did not attend the second, and his role was filled by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in his absence. Céspedes has a certain romance to his revolutionary heroism; he was a former plantation owner, who sounded the “Cry of Yara”, ringing the slave bell for the sole purpose of freeing his slaves and inviting them to join him in a battle for independence. He served as President of Cuba in Arms from 1869 but was deposed in 1873 in a leadership coup; he was denied safe passage to exile and was killed by Spanish troops when they found him seeking refuge in a mountain hideout. He was originally the face that adorned the 10 peso bill, but he was moved up to the 100 peso bill after the 1959 Revolution and though there are certain complexities to the esteem he was held in (while he did free the slaves to take up arms, he had owned them in the first place, and his romantic life was…let’s be blunt and say not the most morally upstanding), his role as the first to formally declare independence has led him to be seen as Padre de la Patria.

After the deposition of Céspedes, his role was assumed by Tomás Estrada Palma, another born Bayamo man. He was captured and exiled by the Spanish, but they couldn’t keep him at bay for long, working with José Martí to rally support for the Cuban cause in the US and becoming the leader of the Cuban Junta and serving as its primary diplomatic tie. It has left him with a complex legacy; his success in this role brought great benefits in the form of American support for Cuban independence efforts, and gave him the leg up to become the first President of a genuine independent Cuba rather than just a President In Arms, a role he took on in 1902 as he was backed as leader by both competing parties - despite remaining in the US where he had achieved naturalized citizenship; however, it means that it was him that signed the Platt Amendment, an oft-criticised amendment to the Cuban constitution that allowed the USA the right to intervene in Cuban domestic policy, a clause which caused great consternation and disillusionment with politics in Cuba all the way until it was formally revoked by the post-revolutionary leadership in 1959. As a result, his legacy of fighting for the country’s independence and the great achievements in equality, education and infrastructure made under his leadership are mostly overshadowed in the mind of the common Cuban today by his being the man that allowed Cuba to be treated as a plaything by the United States for half a century.

Another attendee at the first Cuban Revolutionary Committee was fellow Bayamo native Pedro Felipe Figueredo, known mostly as “Perucho”. He was a committed anti-colonial fighter who was executed for his actions in 1870, two years after his daughter, Candelaria, became the stuff of legend as one of the first women to carry a revolutionary flag into battle. Perucho’s most enduring contribution to the efforts, however, was to compose El Himno de Bayamo, which serves as the Cuban national anthem to this day.

Bayamo central plaza

This part of the world also is known for violently windy conditions, in fact in this region a particular fashion of weather system generating a fierce wind is known as “a bayamo”, so there is definitely the possibility of echelons in this part of the stage. This is probably for the best as it encourages tired legs for later; after all, the first 130km are all flat, all the obstacles created by terrain are crammed into the last 15km, but that doesn’t mean that if the weather plays ball we don’t have any potentially selective racing before that.

Continuing our tour of figures in the early revolutionary history of Cuba, the second intermediate sprint - and the municipality that plays host to the finish - is in the town of Bartolomé Maso, around 25km from the line. This town of just under 50.000 people is a relatively young town named for another Cuban independence fighter, Bartolomé de Jesús Maso Márquez, who was born in Yara - the same town in which Céspedes made his infamous declaration - to parents from Bayamo and Manzanillo, who was one of the first recruits to Céspedes’ cause in 1867 and participated in the capture by the rebels of the city of Bayamo. He served as War Secretary in the Cuban Government In Arms, and was imprisoned at the end of the Ten Years’ War, first in Cuba and then transported across to Spain. After his release, he returned to Cuba and kept a low profile until the outbreak of the Guerra Necesaria, where he served as the Vice-President of the Republic in Arms, before acceding to the Presidency in 1897. He was the only candidate to run against Estrada Palma in 1901, but withdrew from the race thanks to heavy US pressure - likely due to his vocal opposition to the terms of the Platt Amendment. He was honoured after his death in 1907 with the renaming of this small town near Yara, which has grown in stature thanks to its role as a point of access to the Sierra Maestra’s isolated encampments which served a crucial role in the country’s revolutionary history rather more recently than Masó’s own.

Comandancia General de la Plata

The Sierra Maestra’s inaccessibility has led to its use by many groups as a point of defence against incursion, either as defence from sea-bound invaders, or from inland challenges. The Taíno initially resisted enslavement by the Spanish colonists by hiding out in these mountains in the 16th Century, and later a rebellious post-slave mini-culture of escaped Afro-Cuban slaves and Cimarrón Taíno and neo-Taínos developed out of those who had escaped their enslavement or refused to submit to it; the Afro-Cuban uprising of 1912 (sometimes called the Race War of 1912, but officially known as the Armed Uprising of the Independents of Color - no, really) saw several massacres of Afro-Cubans after US Marines were deployed to protect the holdings of large American sugar plantation owners (seriously, how many times in this thread have I said it, the most effective propaganda tool the Soviets could ever have had in fomenting anti-American sentiment would be simply to distribute books about the history of Latin America), leading acting PIC leader (after previous leader Evaristo Estenoz had been killed) Pedro Ivonnet to lead a guerrilla campaign from hideouts in the mountains; American-born Cuban progressive António Guiteras y Holmes led a brief uprising from these mountains in 1935 after the progressive Gobierno de los Cien Días, in which he had played a key role, was deposed following Fulgencio Batista’s intervention with assistance from the US ambassador forcing sitting President Ramón Grau to resign. Guiteras’ uprising would be short and he would die in a gun battle in Matanzas some months later while waiting to be transferred to Mexico by boat. But, most crucially, after the failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, Fidel Castro was exiled from Cuba, and after his return in 1956, he set up camp in a difficult to access site, deep in the Sierra Maestra, from which he would plot and prepare the move that would change the entire world - and this, the Comandancia General de la Plata, is at the Alto del Naranjo, a scenic mountain peak on the shoulders of the Pico de Turquino national park, where we are headed in today’s finale.

Pico de Turquino National Park

The interesting thing about the route up to Castro’s old base in the mountains is, you have to get there by a road which goes up, then down, then back up again. You don’t have any alternative roads to take, so after the 5km @ 7% climb - a three-stepped climb including some unpleasant ramps of its own - 1,6km @ 10%, some false flat, 1km @ 10%, then some flat before a final 700m at 6% - there is no choice but to forge onwards; there is no village or potential finish at the base of the descent. Instead, we are headed deep in the jungle, in order to see just what those rebels and guerrillas had to endure to maintain their loyalty to Fidel all those years ago.

Ominous music begins

Entering the national park. Images from Jennyfaraway.com

To get to the Comandancia General de la Plata, you have to ascend some 750m in 5km from the hamlet of Santo Domingo, the only sign of permanent dwellings since Providencia. Yes, that averages 15%. However, we don’t go all the way because the road ends about 600m above the village, where guide jeeps and 4x4s end their route (you can’t get tour buses and things like that up here, they just can’t handle the road), and the rest of the way you have to trek on foot. This nevertheless means a final 3,4km that average just over 16%, an absolutely brutal, soul-crushing, leg-destroying, lung-busting grind of the kind that we see cause motorcycles to burn out in European racing on occasion. Yes, this is a short ascent, but it will take some serious time to survive.

This is going to be a short but extremely challenging finale, a similar kind of vibe to those brutal walls we often see in the Vuelta a España. Its closest relatives are things like Les Praeres and La Camperona although if anything it’s even steeper than those - not as bad for a maximum kilometre as La Camperona’s, but it stays at that steepness longer; it’s also like Montée de la Bastille in Grenoble that was in the Dauphiné recently, but nearly twice the length. This is officially recognised as the steepest road in Cuba, so it was a necessity.

Now the road starts to really hit hard. Image from Christopher P Baker at startupcuba.tv

Up to the summit

Of course, back in the 1950s when Castro and his fellow rebels were camping out in the Sierra Maestra, this road was not there. After the failed attack on the Moncada Barracks, Castro and 19 of his comrades who had survived the aftermath of the attack set out for the mountains, but were rounded up by the military and placed in a show trial by the Batista regime. Castro’s testimonies in court embarrassed the military and he was sentenced to 15 years on Isla de los Pinos, a comfortable modern prison. His rebellion was formally named M-26-7 after the date of the failed Moncada attack, but he was freed after the 1954 elections, ironically with US pressure, but continued dissident action saw him and his brother flee to Mexico the following year. Setting sail from Tuxpan, Veracruz in November 1956, he returned to Cuba with 81 armed revolutionaries, and set into motion the conflict that would eventually become the Cuban Revolution. After running aground at Los Cayuelos, they headed inland under pressure to seek the shelter of the mountains, and established the base camp at the almost inaccessible spot above the Alto del Naranjo. Fidel, Raúl, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos were among the central command, while urban-based M-26-7 members would send aid packages to keep them alive, while they would raid army posts for weaponry and machinery, winning local support by sparing ordinary soldiers but executing disliked local enforcers; Frank Sturgis - later to become notorious as one of the Watergate burglars - joined to train the forces in the ways of guerrilla war, and armed with this knowledge and the guile of Guevara and Cienfuegos, M-26-7 eventually drove the government out of the Sierra Maestra entirely, even after Batista’s aggressive response with Operación Verano. Following the success of the revolution, the small camp from which it had all began, and from which, once the region had been secured, Radio Rebelde would broadcast the rebel’s side of the news in an attempt to debunk the propaganda attempts of the government, and to initiate its own, would be turned into a monument, left largely unaltered and turned into a museum piece. It remains a difficult-to-access site and is not exactly an easy trip for Cuban locals, let alone foreign tourists, to make, but it is still a site of great honour and history for the Cuban government and so the road was constructed and maintained to enable the site so crucial to the revolution to be viewed and attended by the general public. Which is good, of course, because it enables us to add a new MTF to the annals of the Vuelta a Cuba. The steepness probably made it an impossibility back in the 2000s run of the Vuelta a Cuba, and definitely back in the Ostbloc days, but in today’s cycling, where things like La Camperona are possible to see in competitive races, this should be achievable.

And we thought Pilotegi was a hard little climb.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 10: Manzanillo - Tercer Frente, 160km

GPM:
El Yayal (cat.3) 1,6km @ 6,6%
Alto de Juba (cat.3) 2,1km @ 7,1%
El Yayal (cat.3) 1,6km @ 6,6%

After the rest day, we are back in action with a hilly stage which sees us travel along the northern edges of the Sierra Maestra before heading into its foothills for some climbing - nothing as tough as Alto del Naranjo, of course, but still enough that should hopefully give us some interesting competition. After descending from the mountains we have our stage start in the city of Manzanillo, on the western edge of the irregular protrusion at southeastern Cuba, on the Gulf of Guacanayabo. It was first built in 1784 and got a fort nine years later following being ransacked by the French, with its port being opened for commerce in the early 19th Century, although it remains mainly agricultural in nation, having been a long way behind the already-established Santiago de Cuba for this purpose. However, discovery of zinc and copper led to a mining industry being established in the region, while industrial development has led to fish-canning being a major employer in the city, which at 125.000 has the fourteenth largest population of any city in the country, making it the largest city on the island not to hold the status of a provincial capital.

The city was the birthplace of Bartolomé Maso, who I covered in the previous stage, and also to the trovadore and singer Carlos Puebla, a composer and performer with the group Los Tradicionales before 1959, but his political stance supporting the revolution brought his music - which was already regionally respected and popular - to a wider audience. He toured in 1961 to promote the ideals of the Revolution worldwide, and from 1962 became part of the rotating house ensemble of performers at the Bodeguita del Medio, an iconic bar and restaurant in Havana which attracted artists, poets, writers and thinkers as well as being the claimed birthplace of the globally popular mojito cocktail. He became known as the Cantor de la Revolución, although his most famous work would - despite its clear political content - come several years later, as he composed the classic Hasta Siempre, Comandante (sometimes just called Hasta Siempre, as per the link above) as a celebration of Che Guevara in 1965, when he left the government. It has been covered dozens of times, not only by Cuban legends like Compay Segundo and Silvio Rodríguez, but also by internationally acclaimed performers like Robert Wyatt and Wolf Biermann. My reasoning for including Manzanillo on the route was not for its industrial heritage, though, nor to honour the musical voice of the revolution. Rather, it was to do with cycling. Women’s cycling, to be exact, where the Cuban flag is flying higher and more proudly than ever, albeit only on the jersey of one particular rider, who happens to be from Manzanillo.

Arlenis Sierra

Cuba did a surprise 1-2-3 at the Pan-American Championships in 2011, but the bigger surprise was that the winner, coming in solo in Guadalajara, Mexico on a tricky circuit, was 18-year-old junior prospect Arlenis Sierra. In 2012 she finished 5th in the Vuelta a El Salvador against a very good world field, beating the likes of Noemi Cantele, Rossella Ratto and Alena Amialiusik; she would go on through her early 20s becoming a major challenger all over Latin America and winning back to back Pan-American Championships in Puebla and Zacatecas. While a couple of races like the Vuelta a El Salvador had worldwide participation, though, a lot of these races kind of happened in a vacuum, hidden away from the highest levels of women’s cycling in Europe or the NRC in the US. Come 2016, however, Europe could no longer ignore her; she finished 2nd on the Mirador del Potrero climb in San Luís and won multiple stages and the GC in Costa Rica, before being invited to race the Tour de Brétagne with the UCI World Cycling Centre team, where she won two stages and the GC and with Cuba for the first time in several years opening up to professional contracts overseas for their riders, after some offers to race on the NRC had to be turned down owing to the lack of diplomatic support she could receive in the US, an offer came in from Europe and her results earned her a contract with the relatively low-budget but medium-profile Astana women’s team.

With access to the Women’s World Tour, she made waves finishing 2nd in the Trofeo Binda, being outsprinted by Coryn Rivera, and finishing 3rd at the Tour of California women’s race after being 3rd in the puncheuse finish at South Lake Tahoe. And although 2017’s Giro Rosa was one of the less selective routes we’ve seen in recent years, the fact she could even come 10th at the Giro was a major breakthrough. While you can only take people by surprise once, Sierra had become a known figure around the péloton and the public face of Cuban cycling back at home, finishing 7th in the Ronde van Drenthe and 4th in Gent-Wevelgem, before getting her first WWT wins with a stage of the Tour of California and the Tour of Guangxi one-day race. Although she was known for her fast finish, especially in stages requiring more durability to get to the end, even finishing on the podium of the Giro dell’Emilia atop the steep Bologna-San Luca climb, and winning the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race solo after a tactical move between the last two ascents and then escaping solo to drop Lucy Kennedy and take the line alone, not usually her modus operandi.

After the 2020 season, which was somewhat disappointing for Arlenis, but easy to wave away given different countries’ differing reactions to lockdown and opportunities to get out there and train, Astana withdrew and Sierra was on the AR Monex team, an Italian-based, Mexican-backed squad that emerged from its ashes. It was a solid return to form, but apart from another podium on San Luca, her wins and podiums were largely in smaller races, but nevertheless she drew the attention of the Movistar team, perhaps unsurprisingly as the largest and most prominent Spanish-speaking squad out there. Shorn of leadership responsibilities (Astana and AR Monex had relied on her quite heavily for results, while Movistar only had, you know, Annemiek van Vleuten), she built into the season, mostly again succeeding in small races (winning the Ruta del Sol outright after finishing 1st, 1st and 2nd in the three stages), and then returning to the top step of the podium in the WWT, winning a stage of the Tour de Romandie. Sierra doesn’t win so much as she used to now that she’s regularly racing WWT level fields, but she has become a dependable source of points for the Movistar team, with top 10s at races like Trofeo Binda, Ronde van Vlaanderen and Gent-Wevelgem, and stages of the Giro Donne, the Tour de Suisse and Itzulia Women.

This is a stage that Arlenis would like, if it were a women’s stage, in all fairness - there are a few climbs that will make it tricky for the purest of pure sprinters to contest, but not enough that the more durable types will be removed from contention entirely, and riders who wish to win by means other than sprinting will need to do some work to distance them. The first part of the stage, however, is archetypal flat stage terrain and more along the lines of stages 5 and 7 through the centre of the country. The first notable stop-off is Yara, which we avoided in stage 9 but has a crucial position in Cuban history, famous as the place where the very first rebel in documented Cuban history was burned at the stake, the Taíno leader Hatuey who organised a guerrilla campaign against Spanish colonial expansion in 1512, and it was also of course, as has already been mentioned in earlier stages, where El Grito de Yara, the first declaration of Cuban independence, was made, sparking the Ten Years’ War, or the first Cuban War of Independence. Previously a small sugar plantation town in the Manzanillo municipality, its significance earned it an identity of its own, and more recently it was the birthplace of another pair of revolutionaries, Harry Villegas and Huber Matos. Villegas was a loyal comrade to Che Guevara who fought with him not only in Cuba but also in Bolivia, and remained loyal to the last, also fighting on behalf of the Cuban voluntary mission in Angola and Namibia after Guevara’s death; Matos is a more complex figure, a former teacher in Manzanillo who escaped to Costa Rica after Batista’s coup and supported the rebels in the Sierra Maestra, even personally flying five tons of air cargo munitions and supplies to be dropped secretively in the mountains for the guerrillas. He became a commander in the rebel forces and the military leader of Camagüey after the revolution. However, Matos was more of a progressive socialist than a Communist and opposed the direction taken by Castro after seizing control of the country. He tried to resign but his initial resignation was not accepted; the second attempt to resign resulted in Camilo Cienfuegos being despatched to arrest him - the very journey from which Cienfuegos would not return, as his flight back to Havana disappeared from radar. Matos claims to have warned Cienfuegos that his popularity made him dangerous, but was nonetheless arrested and incarcerated for 20 years for his insubordination; a baying crowd, whipped up into a frenzy by the reactions to another counter-revolutionary at the time, called for his execution but Castro wisely spared him to prevent his martyrdom to the counter-revolutionary cause; after his release in 1979 he joined his family in Costa Rica and moved to the USA, from where he has participated in protests and oppositional movements in Cuba, as well as broadcasting uncensored news to the Cuban people from a radio station in Florida, similar to Radio Free Europe in the Cold War.

From Cruce Paralejo to Bayamo we retrace our steps from stage 9 in the opposite direction (Bayamo again hosts an intermediate sprint), but then we continue eastward, joining the Carretera Central, onward to Jiguaní, a stronghold of the independence fighters in the Guerra Necesaria. At the next town, Baire, we deviate from the main east-west thoroughfare of the nation to head southwards into the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, via our only - yes, remarkably - stretch of sterrato in the entire race, an 8km stretch from 60km to 52km from the stripe between Baire and Los Negros which includes 2,5km of uphill, but not at steep enough gradients to merit categorisation. There is a paved route from Contramaestre to Los Negros which would only extend the stage by a few kilometres, but I wanted to use this route to commemorate the Grito de Baire, a key declaration of insurrection in the first Cuban War of Independence. We are also just to the south of the battlefields of Dos Ríos, where Cuban national hero and martyr José Martí was killed in action by the Spanish colonial troops.

Once we arrive in Los Negros, the road becomes paved again, and we enter a circuit of 35km which we have one and a half laps of, taking in the villages of El Yayal, Comecará, Matías, and our stage town of Cruce de los Baños, the main urban area of the Tercer Frente (“Third Front”) municipality. 30.000 people live in Tercer Frente, around half of which in Cruce de los Baños, and the majority of the remainder in Matías. It is one of the few municipalities on the route which I haven’t included with any historical significance or Vuelta a Cuba relevance, but purely in the hunt for hilly stages and interesting topography to use for the purpose of race designing - although its alternative name of Doctor Mario Muñoz Monroy was given in honour of a local doctor who served with Castro in the storming of the Moncada Barracks. This is mainly an agricultural area whose economy is built around the cultivation of coffee and citrus fruit, and to a lesser extent cocoa.

Cruce de los Baños, finish area

Roads around here are fairly recently paved, but they are all nicely tarmacked on the circuit, meaning this will make for an interesting finale. The circuit is hilly, including two climbs, one of which we take twice. I did think about adding a further lap but I wanted to keep distances realistic and having had a couple of 190km+ stages with hills earlier on in the race I thought this would likely be better at around 160km, so this was the outcome.

Upon entering the circuit we have a slight downhill into the basin of the Río Mogote, one of those that drain into the reservoir above the Río Contramaestre, which gives the neighbouring municipality to its north (and its capital city) its name and is also one of the Dos Ríos in the battleground’s name. From the bridge crossing the river, we immediately start climbing, and this is the first - and last - climb of the stage, albeit on the first and second passages, as the small village of El Yayal sits on a crest above this gorge, which requires 1,6km of climbing at 6,6% to escape. There are around 46km remaining the first time we crest this summit, and just under 12km remaining the second time, so this offers some decent opportunities for action at least the second time around. The slightly larger village of Comecará lies at the base of the descent, which is easier in terms of gradients - 4-5% mostly - but does include a sequence of technical corners near the top. From here there is an uncategorised repecho - it really ought not to be decisive in and of itself and certainly wouldn’t from a large group, but if we have a small group here - as we may, after all it’s week 2 so there may well be unthreatening breaks allowed to go, or simply exhausted domestiques leaving leaders to do their own marking - then it does give an opportunity; there’s over a kilometre of uphill here, but the average is meagre. The last 650m average around 5% however, so it is enough to consider worth a dig on for some baroudeurs, especially the second time when it’s only 5-6km from the finish - however the finale is very, very straight and will favour the chase somewhat.

Finishing straight in Cruce de los Baños

After crossing the finishing line for the first time and taking the second intermediate sprint, rolling, slightly uphill terrain takes us to Matías, the second largest of the population centres in Tercer Frente. A two-stepped, uncategorised climb of 2,2km at 4% takes us up to La Jorobada, before a brief dip and rise around the Río Mogote once more. After passing through Matías, we take on the more significant of the two climbs on the circuit, the 2,1km at 7,1% up to the Alto de Juba, which crests at 22km from the line. This is where I suspect most reasonable moves for the stage will take place, not least because the toughest gradients in the stage are here, some reaching double digits.

Ramps and repechos in Tercer Frente

After a short plateau, the descent from here takes us back in to Los Negros; the descent is gradual at first but then has around 1,4km at 7%. At one stage I had this exact stage but with the circuit in the reverse direction, however, while that leads this run from Juba to Los Negros and then down to the Mogote into a climb of 5,6km in length, the meagre average reduces its value, with only that 1,4km at 7% being particularly noteworthy, as well as reducing the challenge of the El Yayal climb by making it a 4-5% grinder. Besides, you could only do half of the Juba climb from Los Negros the first time, not the full climb, so negating the value, and so I preferred to have this circuit in a clockwise direction. The run-in means we might still see a sprint, but it will be of durable folks. And the fact that most of the circuit is at least undulating, if not downright hilly, means it offers plenty for the puncheur and baroudeur. I see this as similar to the kind of routes we often get from races like the Tour de Brétagne, but transplanted to Latin America. If, given the nature of Cuban colonial history, you prefer to run your comparisons to Spanish cycling, then things like País Vasco “flat stages” or those repecho-laden finales in the Vuelta a Burgos are your comparison.

Or, for women’s cycling aficionados… this is the kind of stage Arlenis Sierra will like and be a contender in.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 11: Palma Soriano - Felicidad de Yateras, 140km

GPM:
Alto del Boquerón (cat.2) 2,1km @ 9,8%
Alto del Boquerón (cat.2) 2,1km @ 9,8%
Alto del Boquerón (cat.2) 2,1km @ 9,8%
Alto del Boquerón (cat.2) 2,1km @ 9,8%

A short transfer to Contramaestre then takes us to the start of stage 11, in the city of Palma Soriano, again on the northern edges of the Sierra Maestra. The second-largest city in Santiago de Cuba province, this colonial city is home to 120.000 people and was formed by the merging of the spheres of influences of a number of cattle ranching areas in the vicinity of the Cauto river. It has grown rapidly since the arrival of the Carretera Central, and is now one of the main eastern stops on the as-yet-incomplete A1 Motorway. It is perhaps best known for being where José Martí’s body was brought after his death in the Battle of Dos Ríos, and as being the hometown of Ana Fidelia Quirot, one of Cuba’s most distinguished ever track and field athletes, a former 800m runner who still holds 5th on the all-tine fastest list (even if that time being recorded in 1989 does raise suspicions as to how it was achieved, given the climate of the time in the sport). She also ran the 400m, which was not so common at the time (usually 400 was considered the longest sprint, and 800 the shortest middle-distance, so athletes transferring between them were rare), where she won two golds each at the Pan-American and Central American and Caribbean Games, and it was where she had her first breakout, in 1983 at the age of 20, but her greatest achievements on the world stage were all at 800m. She was the favourite for the 1988 Olympic Games in the discipline, having gone all season undefeated and ranking #1 in the World (she in fact would be undefeated for three whole years from 1987 to 1990 in the discipline), however the Cuban boycott meant she had to withdraw, leaving the Olympic title the great gaping hole in her palmarès; she would fight to make up for lost time later in her career, but could only manage a silver in Barcelona, and a bronze in Atlanta; she remains arguably the greatest 800m runner without a gold medal to her name to this day. It wasn’t that she was fading, tough - in her mid-30s she was still an elite runner, in fact her two World Championship golds were scored in Gothenburg ’95 and Athens ’97, so at the ages of 32 and 34 respectively and after coming back from a tragic domestic accident while pregnant that killed her unborn child - admittedly less uncommon in the middle distance disciplines than the sprints, but nevertheless impressive longevity. Speaking of longevity, Palma Soriano is also the home of Orestes Kindelán, the most prolific hitter in Cuban domestic baseball history across a 21 year career with Avispas, and a winner of four Baseball World Cups and two Olympic gold medals with the then-dominant Cuban team.

Palma Soriano

Our first noteworthy stop is San Luís, the birthplace of legendary son musician Ibrahim Ferrer, a legendary musician who played as part of Los Bocucos for over 30 years and was one of the most recognisable performers in Cuba from the 1950s all the way to his retirement in 1991. However, he was coaxed out of retirement twice, first for the one-off Afro-Cuban All Stars project, but then more enduringly as one of the most prominent figures in the Buena Vista Social Club film and album, as the then-70-years-old Ferrer enjoyed a remarkable and unexpected revival and expansion of his influence into the wider world, even winning a Grammy in 2004 at 77 years of age (although he was unable to go to the USA to accept it due to sanctions), and just one year before his death.

We then have an early intermediate sprint in the municipality of Songo-La Maya, choosing La Maya, the second and larger of these, to host the sprint itself. Soon after this we relocate onto the as-yet-incomplete A1 autopista, as this is as far west as the eastern stretch has yet got to (it replaces the Carretera Central at San Luís, but loops south to Santiago de Cuba at Dos Caminos, before restarting east of La Maya) and follow it until exiting again at Niceto Pérez. This is the last town of note before we arrive in Guantánamo, a historic city that has become familiar to almost everybody worldwide in recent years not for its city life or culture but instead for its eponymous bay to the south, the last remaining US holding on Cuban soil and where a number of famous (and infamous) crimes against humanity were alleged against the US military, with apparent torture, sexual abuse, squalid and inhumane conditions and extorted confessions against prisoners in the military prison on-site, especially following a controversial document being posted on WikiLeaks in 2003. Guantánamo itself is served by the La Caimanera port which is adjacent to the US military site, and the Cubans have, since the revolution, on numerous occasions tried to argue the unlawfulness of the US site; the Americans for their part have cited that the lease they signed on the site had no expiration date and just because the Cuban constitution has since changed it does not affect their deal on the premises. The notoriety of the site as a detention base, however, has led to it - and its military code of GTMO, spoken as “Gitmo” - becoming notorious, and during his presidency Barack Obama attempted to close the camp, decrying it as a “sad chapter in American history” (evidently President Obama had not read much Latin American history either, it seems), but his attempts were stymied by Republican congressmen. It has been immortalised in film and television several times, with everything from hard-hitting drama to sophomoric humour like Harold & Kumar, as well as appearing in both of the most revered stealth video game franchises of all time, Splinter Cell (which tasked the player with escaping Guantánamo Bay), and Metal Gear Solid, which used the camp (using the fictionalised name Camp Omega) as the setting for Ground Zeroes, a stand-alone prologue to the final instalment in the franchise timeline.

I didn’t want to show any real pictures from Guantánamo Bay, so here’s Big Boss/Naked Snake/Venom Snake/Whoever the hell this is in the insanely convoluted Metal Gear timeline looking down on its facsimile

Guantánamo city, on the other hand, is a thriving city of over 200.000 which is one of the largest and most important, after Santiago de Cuba, in the Cuban East, and famous for its production of cotton and sugar cane.

Much less grim

Its name meaning “land between two rivers” in the Taíno language, the Carretera Central passes through the middle of town and it served as a market town since its founding in the late 18th Century for various traders around the plains of the east, and a resting spot between Baracoa or Moa and Santiago, since it would come after the requirement of crossing the mountains. It is largely a sporting city and most of its famous sons and daughters have come from sports disciplines, such as Golden Glove baseball player Luís Robert Jr, Pan-American Games double gold medal long jumper Jaime Jefferson, Olympic bronze and World silver medal-winning discus thrower Luís Delís, Olympic bronze medalist triple jumper Yargelis Savigne and - although coming only after her defection to the United States - gymnast Annia Hatch. The city has, however, got no fewer than four gold medal-winning Olympic champions as its progeny - boxer Joel Casamayor won bantamweight gold in Barcelona 1992; “El Ciclón de Guantánamo” Yuriorkis Gamboa won gold in the flyweight class in Athens 2004 (before defecting two years later); at the same games, Yumileidi Cumbá won shot putt gold (which I’m sure resident forum shot putt expert RedheadDane would have been very angry had I failed to mention), while the most successful of all was Dayron Robles, a specialist in the high hurdles who won Olympic gold over 110m in 2008, and also two World Indoor golds over 60m in 2006 and 2010 to go with it.

Perhaps more significant than any of them, though, would be Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, an orphaned Afro-Cuban who had been adopted by a Cuban couple (whose surnames he adopted in kind) who had joined the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces with ambition of becoming a fighter pilot. To this end he was sent to the Soviet Union for training, then flew reconnaissance missions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, fought in Vietnam and eventually travelled to the USSR to become part of their Intercosmos program. Travelling along with Yuri Romanenko aboard Soyuz-38 to dock at the Salyut-6 space station and conduct experiments in 1980, Tamayo Méndez thereby became not just the first Cuban, but the first Latin American and simultaneously the first person of African origin to go into space. He became the first recipient of the Hero of the Republic of Cuba award, as well as the second Cuban (after Fidel Castro) to have the Hero of the Soviet Union distinction and medal bestowed upon him - as well as being the first and, as far as I can tell only, black recipient of the award. Not bad for an orphan who started work as a child as a shoe-shiner, hey?

Leaving Guantánamo city, there are around 20km of gradually uphill terrain until we reach a circuit which takes up the remains of the course, at least until the last couple of kilometres. We have three and a half laps of an 8km circuit - yes, it’s a little short, but there’s no choice - that includes a shortish but significant climb that we will therefore take four times. The steeper of the two roads that connect Guantánamo to the altiplano (well, that’s a bit of an excessive term for what is really a plateau at only 450m; it’s more like the Meseta in Spain than the Altiplanos of Colombia, Venezuela or Ecuador that might spring more to your mind in a cycling context) on which the stage town of Felicidad lies is a couple of kilometres long but averages as near as damnit to 10%, which starts decently steep and then gets steeper, the final 2/3 averaging nearly 11%. It’s not the hardest of climbs, but it’s going to be tough enough to make a difference. I think this profile matches up pretty perfectly to that of San Luca di Bologna, the traditional finish of the Giro dell’Emilia, which of course also finishes on a circuit including this super steep ascent, as you can see from this profile of the 2023 edition. The circuit there is around 8,5km in length and so I feel like the Giro dell’Emilia is a perfect kind of guide to what we can expect here, as although we have one fewer ascents of the final ramp (four instead of five) and there are both no climbs preceding it and around 60 fewer kilometres’ racing to do, the fact of the matter is, the field participating here will be a couple of levels below the one we tend to see in a race whose winners’ list in recent years includes Enric Mas, Aleksandr Vlasov and Primož Roglič, you know?

Climb of the Alto del Boquerón

The four ascents of the Alto del Boquerón come at 27,2km, 19,3km, 11,4km and 3,4km from the line, and the summit serves as the boundary between the municipality of Manuel Tames municipality and the municipality of Yateras, which is where we finish our stage today, in the second largest settlement in the municipality, Felicidad de Yateras. Yateras itself actually links back to one of my more recent projects in that it has been, since 1977, twinned with Boulder, Colorado (an oddity given the lack of diplomatic ties between the two countries of course). It was very tempting to continue on to Palenque, the largest, and that would have given us an additional climb as well as giving us a finish in a town of around 10.000 inhabitants rather than about 6.000 (which makes Felicidad de Yateras our smallest stage host, at least out of actual places that are settlements rather than resorts or historical monuments which are likely to be included for touristic purposes and are in municipalities with higher population anyway), but it would have been adding 5km at 5%, a descent of similar characteristics, and then best part of 10km flat to the line and I don’t think that would have done as much for the racing unfortunately. It also serves as the entry point to Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, a UNESCO-inscribed heritage site celebrating its incredible biodiversity and karst landscape, named (despite the odd Spanish nomenclature) for Alexander von Humboldt, who visited the area in the early 19th Century. The summit of the climb is marked by a sculpture that advertises the nearby entrance to the other point of interest in Yateras, the Parque Zoológico de Piedras, effectively a park and gardens decorated with sculptures of a variety of animals carved in stone and dotted throughout the premises.

Summit of the climb - straight on takes us to Felicidad de Yateras, and turning right takes us into the Parque Zoológico. We emerge from a road on the left, opposite the park entrance, which is not clear in this photograph but links up to the road in the previous photo, and then heading back down the road, toward the camera, takes us down the winding, gradual descent of about 5km at 4,5%

This placing of a steep climb before a not-quite-descent of around 3km to the line suggests something in common with Vuelta stages to Xorret del Catí or similar climbs, but this ascent is only just over half that length even if we do take it multiple times. Something like the 2011 Vuelta al País Vasco stage to Zumarraga may make for an apter comparison. Either way - four times up this climb should hopefully create some gaps and make for some interesting action, as GC men can’t afford to let their competitors up the road, but simultaneously it offers the breakaway opportunities too. This one ought to be fun, and coming after 10 days of racing there may well be some tired legs to take advantage of even in a short stage like this.

Felicidad de Yateras, finishing town

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 12: Guantánamo - Baracoa, 145km

GPM:
Alto del Gobernador (cat.3) 1,3km @ 6,5%
Alto de Cotilla (cat.1) 10,2km @ 4,4%
Alto de Yumuri (cat.3) 1,0km @ 8,9%

Ah, now it’s time for a Cuban classic, as we take on one of the great feats of engineering of the Cuban Revolution, the famous La Farola Highway, en route to our easternmost point in the race. We descend back down the hill after yesterday’s stage for a rest day in Guantánamo city, but today’s stage is likely to be familiar to all of the nationals in the péloton at least - just not this way.

Ciudad Guantánamo

I already discussed the city of Guantánamo in the previous stage, so we’ll get straight down to the business of the stage, which begins with a short run to the outlying village of Glorieta and then a short uphill ramp of a road called the Alto del Gobernador, which features a mirador at its summit that offers views over the city (and at least part of the US naval base). After that we head on to the 120km road known as La Farola, which was one of the great early achievements of the PCC after assuming power, as until then - yes, in the early 1960s - the fabled eastern city of Baracoa had only been accessible by boat. While cities only accessible by boat or air remain to this day, these are often in relatively inaccessible areas or where distances from other cities are enormous; Juneau, Alaska and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy in Russia are two others that spring to mind, but each have their own road networks covering their sphere of influence. Baracoa had been an island unto itself within the island of Cuba, cut off from inland transit by the Sierra de Purial mountain range, until the completion of the highway, which had been planned but oft-delayed during the Batista regime.

Following the completion of the highway, it became a focal point of the Vuelta a Cuba, and indeed many editions saw the race start in Baracoa and a stage along the La Farola Highway became a staple of the race, usually starting with a prologue and then a road stage that followed the road to Guantánamo on the second day. Carlos Cardet, the most prominent Cuban rider of his day, won the La Farola course, as did former amateur World Champion Bernd Drogan of the DDR, his compatriot Uwe Raab, Viktor Demidenko, Eduardo Alonso, Jonas Romanovas (the Lithuanian then going by the Russified version of his name, Ivan Romanov), Zdzisław Wrona, Osmany Álvarez and Viktor Klimov. When the race was resurrected in the early 2000s, the very first stage was a replica of the Baracoa-Guantánamo stages of yesteryear, Pedro Pablo Pérez emerging victorious in both of the first two editions of the reborn race, and then Damián Martínez winning likewise in both 2002 and 2003, before Pérez reasserted his dominance the year after, and, winning the identical stage in 2006, made himself very much the king of La Farola. The last couple of editions were slight curios, with 2009’s stage won by former Major Junior ice hockey player Kéven Lacombe, and 2010’s final edition’s La Farola stage being won by Miguel Ubeto, a Venezuelan journeyman who had an unlikely flirtation with World Tour cycling after being promoted to Androni at age 35 and Lampre at age 36 - and remains active on a part-time basis back at home to this day.

Since the demise of the international, UCI-categorised Vuelta a Cuba, a national calendar, amateur equivalent of the race has taken place, namely the Clásico Guantánamo-La Habana, which was established in 2014 and after an initial 9-stage edition quickly grew to match the two weeks of the international race. As its name suggests, it would start in Guantánamo, usually beginning with a criterium, rather than in Baracoa as the Vuelta a Cuba had, but the La Farola route was brought back for 2018’s edition which indeed, despite the nomenclature, began with a road stage from Baracoa to Guantánamo which was won by Yan Carlos Árias. For 2019, the race was reduced down to 10 days and rebranded as the Clásico Nacional, but started with the same exact stage - won by the same exact rider. A|so in 2019, the Gran Premio La Farola was initiated, a three day, four stage race which would essentially be all about linking the two cities of Guantánamo and Baracoa, featuring an ITT and a criterium on one day, and two road stages incorporating the La Farola highway, either between the two main cities, or stopping off at municipalities such as San António del Sur, or La Maquina, the easternmost municipality on the entire island. After a couple of years’ absence due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it returned in 2023 and featured a final stage which this stage is an exact replica of, which was won by teenage espoir Randol Izquierdo, enabling him to snatch the overall GC. Just to add to the cycling involvement over this neck of the woods, the Vuelta a Cuba Oriental was introduced in 2022, a short stage race covering the former Oriente provinces, and which has opened in both editions to date with a road stage from Baracoa to Guantánamo along the ever-popular route.

Yans Carlos Árias wins in Guantánamo

Péloton in the Gran Prémio La Farola

So, Libertine, I hear you say, enough about the historic races, what does this course look like? I get you. It’s quite scenic, as you can imagine, through the mountains of the east. Before that, though, the first 70km or so are flat and such that you wonder what the challenge was that caused such a delay in establishing the road? We have our first intermediate of the day in San António del Sur, which with 25.000 inhabitants is our largest stopping point between the two stage hosts, We continue to hug the coastal road until our second intermediate sprint at Cajobabo, commemorating the isolated, hidden beaches where José Martí first disembarked back on Cuban soil in 1895 in order to precipitate the Guerra Necesaria, and then the climbing begins. Let’s have a bit of a look at the road, since the Cuban authorities are so proud of it, shall we?

The climbing, inasmuch as it is in earnest, begins in Las Guásimas, and has the most severe ascent almost immediately. 10,2km @ 4,4% as an overall climbing total makes it seem like it really isn’t too much, but it is worth noting that half of that is basically false flat; the first 4,2km of that average 8% and then the final 6km average only around 2%, so very much the categorisation is about that first part of the climb. In all honesty it’s pretty generously granted 1st category, but since 2km at 10% got cat.2 yesterday, this is several times as long so I felt that cat.1 was earned - just about. Especially given the somewhat inconsistent and unpredictable GPM awards in this part of the world (meaning Latin America in general, not anything specific to Cuba or the Caribbean).

After hitting the high point of the road, the Alto de Cotilla, which is host to a scenic mirador which you can see on the hilltop above the road in that image, we have a short and sharp descent of 2,8km at 6% into the hamlet of Yumuri, where we cross the river of the same name, and then climb up to a secondary crest with a short, punchy climb of a kilometre at around 9%. This double summit comes with Cotilla at 34km from home and the secondary summit at 29km from home, so a little far for anything more than speculative action, but it is still possible, especially deep into week 2 of the race, especially if this is action from the breakaway who will be expecting a chance to duke out the stage, because solo or small group moves in this kind of terrain is kind of their staple diet. We then have a few kilometres on the plateau before it gradually turns into ever more of a descent, taking us back down approaching sea level to Paso de Cuba, before a flat final 15km as we hug the coastline once more, taking in Cuba’s far eastern boundaries.

Looking down to the Caribbean coast from the Alto de Yumuri

In many ways, the isolation of the eastern edge of Cuba prior to the construction of the La Farola road is very surprising; Baracoa (officially Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Baracoa) is the oldest Spanish settlement in Cuba, having been founded by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar in 1511 on the site of one of Columbus’ first landing spots. Often nicknamed Ciudad Primada due to this status, its name apparently derives from an Arauaca word meaning a sea port or coastal settlement. Columbus apparently set a cross in the vicinity known as Cruz de la Parra to mark the spot, and after Velázquez established his personal villa here it became known as the first capital city of the Cuban colony, the seat of the first governors and has some of the oldest remaining colonial architecture and monuments remaining on the island.

However, as Cuba became more intensively explored and settled by the Spanish, it became ever more difficult to rule the island from the isolated city on its eastern coast, and so the capital was moved west; Baracoa became a haven for black market trading and piracy, especially with the British and French. This also lent it a certain sanctity because of the difficulty in regulating it - many from the French part of Hispaniola would escape here when fleeing the Haitian Revolution, and many exiled nationalists such as José Martí and António Maceo would choose Baracoa as their landing point when they returned to Cuba in order to foment national awakenings and uprisings against the colonial powers, as while the city was fortified, the difficulty of procuring reinforcements to the three forts overlooking the city meant that it could be overrun.

Although it offers great historic sights and an idyllic location, however, Baracoa remains a primarily agrarian centre, with cultivation of fruit and cocoa still its main economic driver, and tourism kept relatively limited by the difficulty of access - too far to travel for many ordinary Cubans, too out of the way for many overseas visitors who will typically prioritise Havana or the beach resorts, and its small airport only serves regional traffic. However, for those who are hunting a nature escape, it is an excellent base, being close to the eastern entrance to the Parque Alejandro Humboldt and overlooked by the iconic El Yunque, a table mountain that serves as the city’s Hausberg, and Salto Fino, the 20th largest waterfall in the world. Realistically, this will be a reduced sprint or a stage for the baroudeurs, with the flat run-in and 29km from the final summit to the line, but there are possibilities there should a rider want to get creative in their need to gain time late in the race - although they may take care not to pay for their efforts in the following days…

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 13: Moa - Holguín (Loma de la Cruz), 194km

GPM:
Loma de Rejondones (cat.3) 1,7km @ 6,2%
Loma de Rejondones (cat.3) 1,7km @ 6,2%
Loma de la Cruz (cat.3) 1,1km @ 5,8%

The city of Moa, on the northeastern coast of Cuba, about 60km up the coast road from Baracoa, is a relative backwater for the Vuelta a Cuba, as given the propensity for the race to use the La Farola highway, it has never hosted the national race as far as my records-checking can tell; I did check through to find a few stages marked as being “Baracoa - Baracoa” which may have gone there as an out-and-back, but they were all identical in length to future years’ Baracoa - Guantánamo stages with ensuing stages from Guantánamo to Gran Piedra so it suggests to me that these were mislabelled stages that used La Farola. As a result I therefore think this will be a brand new stage host for the race!

It is possibly not surprising that Moa has not been at the front and centre of the national race, given that compared to old colonial cities like Baracoa and Guantánamo, it’s actually more of an eyesore than a matter of national pride; the city is one of the youngest in Cuba, and was only established in 1939; its expansion was largely precipitated by the discovery of large nickel and cobalt deposits in the nearby area, and a large proportion of the 70.000 inhabitants of the city are employed in the industries involved in the mining and subsequent processing of these metals, which is divided between the state-owned Cubaníquel company and the Canadian mining concern Sherritt International and responsible for the vast majority of the city’s economic performance. Like many other cities involved in the processing of these kinds of metals such as the notoriously barely-habitable Norilsk, however, this comes with the downside of deep environmental spoilage, and the city is also one of the most polluted in the country, with contaminated soil and water in the coastal area and as a result life expectancy is lower than in the rest of the country, meaning it has the youngest population as frequently older inhabitants will get out after their stint working the mines or metal processing.

Luckily for our riders, though, we aren’t going to be sticking around here for long, as we immediately head down the rolling coastal road on the Circuito Norte, the second longest road in Cuba after the Carretera Central. Essentially, almost the entire distance of our stage shows off the non-expressway part of this road as it heads through Holguín province, mostly flat with a few rolling sections. For the most part this means cruising through smaller towns and cities on our way, with only a few notable locations to pick up, such as the access point to Cayo Mambí in Frank País municipality, named for one of the revolutionaries that fought alongside Fidel Castro. Nicaro-Levisa is one of the larger settlements in the area, but it is rather two villages that have combined with one another rather than one; the road passes through the latter while the former is on the coast. Mayarí, an 18th-century colonial settlement, is one of the more interesting, having been immortalised three times in song by the veteran trovador Compay Segundo, most notably in “Chan Chan”, the lead-off track and arguably the best known on the Buena Vista Social Club album that brought many of these musicians to the public eye late in life - celebrating the travel along the north coast to retreat from city life in pursuit of simpler, happier times of youth.

We, however, are going the opposite way to Compay and his Buena Vista Social Club colleagues; from Mayarí we go to Cueto, then Marcané and Alto Cedro. Strangely, apart from this namecheck from Segundo, there isn’t much to distinguish the location, suggesting that this may have been based on personal memories or experiences when travelling rather than any historical significance behind the choice or any shared history among Cubans to suggest these locations are synonymous with holidays or vacations, in the way that many locations elsewhere evoke particular shared memory among the population. Either way, due to its relative size - 30.000 people in the municipality, around half of which in the centre itself - Cueto gets to host our first intermediate sprint.

At Caballeria we then swing north, and follow the road in a northwesterly direction up toward Holguín, and reach the town of Báguanos. Well, we kind of do. We reach the junction for it, as it is not specifically on the Circuito Norte, though its access road is. Passing this marker point then leads us to a short categorised climb on the Loma de Rejondones, a short steep road that elevates us up onto the Rejondones plateau, a slight elevation on which the city of Holguín stands. This is not an especially tough climb - a little under 2km at a little over 6% - but it is definitely worthy of categorisation. The interesting thing here, however, is that as the Loma de Rejondones road is somewhat notorious for vehicular accidents descending it, the Cuban authorities have also paved an adjacent road from El Manquito (the village at the summit) down into Báguanos village itself, enabling us to take a lap of a 13,3km circuit and ascend the climb a second time (the alternative road is less steep but slower, given it detours and also includes urban traffic), placing the two crestings of the climb at 48 and 35km from the line respectively. Not close enough to make anything but the most speculative of moves if you’re a GC guy, but maybe a stage hunter could be allowed some rope here.

Once we’re on the plateau for a second time, however, it’s a fast and undulating but mostly flat route into Holguín, Cuba’s fourth largest city. With over 350.000 inhabitants, this is one of the oldest cities in Cuba, having been established in 1523 by Captain Francisco García Holguín, who had been bequeathed the land on which the city originally stood by Velázquez de Cuéllar. García named the city San Isidoro, adding his maternal surname in honour of his mother’s family, and over time, like many cities of the Spanish New World (who honestly says “Santa Fe de Bogotá” or “Santiago de León de Caracas”?) the Catholic part of the nomenclature has been dropped over time to differentiate the city from other places with the same name and so Holguín has become the accepted term for the city.

The site the city was focused upon had previously been settled by the Taíno people, but a combination of introduced diseases decimating their populace and brutal suppression of their attempted uprisings resulted in their being wiped out from the area, although artefacts from this era remain and are displayed in the city’s museums. It has largely been a somewhat peaceful city, but it was held by rebel mambises (a term for the nationalist guerrillas, from an Afro-Antillean term “mambí” which was applied to nationalists all across the Greater Antilles at the time) from 1868 to 1872, as a result the colonial forces made sure to put it on the railroad when establishing the island’s infrastructure post-Industrial Revolution, so that it be better served for reinforcement. The city’s connection to the Ten Years’ War largely was tied to its position as the birthplace of Calixto García, a general for the rebels in three separate national uprisings, the Ten Years’ War, the Guerra Chiquita and the Guerra Necesária. The grandson of his namesake, a general who had fought in the Venezuelan War of Independence, García was a criollo who opposed the colonial rule from a position of ideology, and in fact had attempted suicide to avoid capture in 1872, but after failure remained imprisoned back in Spain until being released as part of the terms of the Paz de Zanjón, whereupon he travelled first to Paris then to New York, joined António Maceo’s forces and contributed to his second uprising.

Gradually, thanks to his military prowess, usurping Maceo’s role in the Cuban guerrilla army, he took many major cities including Bayamó and Las Tunas, and when the Americans intervened, he helped secure their landing spots and fought alongside them to neutralise Spanish guerrilla tactics due to his knowledge of same from the time prior to the rebels taking these cities - for which assistance he was awarded the accolade of… no wait, the Americans denied him entrance to Santiago de Cuba to claim the city because the American generals did not want to share the spoils of victory. One day after the war ended, García was on a diplomatic mission to Washington DC as a representative of the negotiations on behalf of the new Cuban leadership when he fell ill suddenly and died, which was later attributed to pneumonia. For years he lived on in - curiously - American slang, thanks to Elbert Hubbard’s essay A Message to García - for a period in the early 20th Century, to “send a message to García” was a term meaning to accept a difficult or thankless task. Closer to home, the main park in Holguín was named for him and a statue to the rebel liberator was erected in 1916, and since 1976 his visage has adorned the Cuban 50 peso banknote. His name was also given to the city’s baseball stadium.

More recent sons and daughters of Cuba have been more from sports and entertainment, however; the opera singer Eglise Gutiérrez calls the city home, while two of the musicians connected to the Buena Vista Social Club film/group/movement are from the city too - the pre-revolutionary popular singer Puntillita, who later appeared in the Afro-Cuban All Stars and from there became involved in the BVSC project, providing lead vocals for two tracks on the associated album and backing vocals on two others, and the composer Faustino Oramas, better known as “El Guayabero” after his most famous composition among other alter egos which make tracking his oeuvre difficult, who contributed the song “Candela”. It was also the hometown of the dissident poet and writer Reinaldo Arenas, a former contributor to the revolutionary war on the side of Castro who had been ostracised and felt distanced by the movement thanks to his sexuality and opposing the indoctrination school of teaching that was favoured by the PCC post-revolution, with his literary works courting extreme controversy due to these opinions and their moral implications; he survived imprisonment by helping write and smuggle letters to loved ones for violent criminals, before fleeing to the US as part of the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. Now based in the US, Arenas continued to write and serve as a public face of anti-governmental dissidence in Cuba, but he would die young; in 1990 Arenas, who was suffering from AIDS at the time, depressed and in failing health, would intentionally overdose and pass away at the age of 47. More positively, at least for the regime, Holguín has provided Cuba with two Olympic gold medalists - the judoka Odalis Revé, who won gold in Barcelona 1992 along with two world silver medals, two Pan-American Games golds and four Pan-American Championships golds in the 66kg category; and the lightweight boxer [urhttps://www.mediastorehouse.co.uk/p/773/mario-kindelan-25115625.jpg.webp]Mario Kindelán[/url], cousin of domestic baseball legend Orestes Kindelán (who I mentioned in an earlier stage) and winner of two Olympic golds in Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004, along with three world titles, two Pan-American titles, two Goodwill Games titles and two Central American and Caribbean Games titles including a five year unbeaten streak from 1999 until his retirement after the 2004 Games.

While Holguín is the host city for the stage, the finish is not in the middle of town; instead, this is simply home to a final intermediate sprint, just 4,6km from the line, alongside the aforementioned Parque Calixto García. Rather, the finish is at a viewpoint overlooking the city on the Loma de la Cruz, an iconic landmark of the city offering impressive vistas, which can be accessed by two means. Either a 450-step stairway from the city for pedestrians, or a road from the northwest side of town which, after being accessed by a couple of kilometres of false flat, is 1100m at around 6%, maxing at 9%, so not a super challenging climb, kind of a slightly easier Cauberg in nature. Translating as “hill of the cross”, the summit features a scenic mirador which is marked by - you guessed it - a cross.

View into Holguín from the Loma de la Cruz

Stairway up to Loma de la Cruz from Holguín

Slight gaps are to be expected here when it comes to the main contenders; it’s not a hard final climb, but a few seconds can be won and lost. If bonus seconds are still available it might see some action, otherwise this will be one for the break. It’s the last hilly stage, so Zam’s request is hopefully now fully fulfilled, but there are still two stages remaining.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 14: Holguín - Gran Piedra, 190km

GPM:
Puerto Boniato (cat.2) 4,2km @ 6,6%
Las Lajas (cat.3) 1,3km @ 5,7%
La Gran Piedra (cat.ESP) 13,4km @ 8,1%

Ah, the big mountaintop finish to signal the final weekend, where would we be without it? To be honest, in many races, better off. But here, it’s just a matter of pure logic to have this as the final major canvas on which the contenders are to paint. The rouleurs and less adept mountain goats have had to make their time up before this, and now the grimpeurs, who have been at a disadvantage - especially those who need longer climbs - since the rest day, have their final chance to shine. And it’s a wholly different beast of a climb to the ones we’ve seen in the previous MTFs at Topes de Collantes and Alto del Naranjo, one that fans of WT level cycling and Europeans should be far more familiar with - not some insane wall with gradients to make Javier Guillén baulk, not some multi-stepped chaos, but a classic, bona fide Alpine-style HC.

Well, sort of. We’ll get to it.

On the plus side for the riders, as we’re getting to the end of a two-week stage race, there is no transfer at all for them after yesterday’s stage, at least not unless you count just coming down into the centre of Holguín from the hilltop above it at least. We’ve essentially done something of a loop-de-loop around the eastern tip of the island, and now we’re heading south-south-east in pursuit of our grand finale. The first part of the stage essentially - nay, literally - retraces our steps from the tail end of the previous stage, as far as El Manguito and Báguano, and on the lower plateau toward Cueto, but then we turn southwards and head toward the south coast again.

Soon after this, still in Cueto municipality, we pass Marcané, which is the gateway to Birán, a small village which is nevertheless iconic in Cuba as a farmhouse to the north of the village has been transformed into a museum, the Casa Natal de Fidel Castro, which is precisely what it sounds like: the birthplace and childhood home of Cuba’s long-time leader, and his brothers and sisters who also played key roles throughout the history of Cuba. I’ve included a fair amount of Communist hagiography in this (and other) race(s) before, of course, and having passed over the opportunity to give a full history of Che Guevara, there is far too much to be said about Fidel and his siblings to give them a full history here (as opposed to some of the unfairly maligned or forgotten contributors to the history that I like to highlight), but nevertheless it is pretty difficult to manage a trip around Cuba without seeing physical examples of the veneration and reverence afforded (and imposed somewhat mandatorily) by the man that controlled the country for over 50 years.

Although he was the one in charge and the popular face of the revolution and of the Cuban leadership afterward, the actual roles filled by Fidel are not always clear, and sources conflict on when he actually adopted his position as the First Secretary of the Communist Party - in fact, at the time of the Revolution, technically Blas Roca was still in charge, having led the party since 1932, been a key contributor to protests that overthrew the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and oversaw the transition of the Communists from a fringe protest group to a national power; as such he was still the leader in 1959 but largely ceremonially; he had helped legitimise the party, but also following on from this had helped legitimise Batista’s role by backing him against the Fascists - a fact that would be used against Batista when he attempted to undermine Castro and the others on the hard left. Having gone into voluntary exile following Batista’s coup in 1952, he returned as a symbolic leader of the Party with the success of the Revolution and enacted a series of reorganisations of the splintered party and its orbiters that essentially served as a coronation of Fidel Castro as the chosen leader.

Although the best known, of course, Fidel was not the only one of the family to have significant involvement in the Revolution. Although not militarily active, the eldest of the boys, Ramón Castro served as their quartermaster and was tasked with maintaining supply chains, pipelines, procuring food and weapons, and even manufacturing fuel. However, while he may have spent many years at the front of the Revolution and was a founder member of the post-reorganisation PCC, Ramón also as the eldest brother had always, prior to the Revolution, been expected by the family to carry on the family farm, a dream and duty he always held close, and always kept one foot firmly grounded in his agrarian origins. While he helped oversee and manage the country’s sugar production for several years under his brothers’ rule, Ramón also opposed collectivisation and resisted the attempts to apply this policy to the family holdings, an irreconcilable difference of opinion that led to him being publicly denounced - although he was able to maintain a close enough relationship with his brothers to remain in the mix, albeit in a more background role, for decades until his death at the age of 91; wearing the same style of beard and fatigues, he would frequently be mistaken for his brother, or told that he looked like Fidel - to which the more jovial Ramón would often respond with a cheery riposte that actually, as the elder of the two, it was Fidel that looked like him.

His opposition to the collectivisation policies were recounted by his younger sister Juanita, one of four female Castro siblings, and who had also helped procure weapons to supply the revolutionaries, having been based in the US in 1958. Feeling betrayed by the ever-increasing role of Communism in the post-revolutionary government, Juanita would emigrate to Mexico in 1964 and eventually to the USA, where she would collaborate with the CIA. She is an interesting and complex character bound by both her disillusionment and her family loyalty; shielded somewhat from consequence for some time by her familial ties, her home became an informal meeting point for anti-Communist and oppositional thought in the early 1960s, and when she defected she called a press conference to denounce her siblings (eventually becoming a naturalised US citizen in 1984), but on the other hand she also sued Castro’s illegitimate daughter for publishing memoirs that Juanita claimed were defamatory about not her but the family as a whole - before publishing her own tell-all memoir a few years later. Finally, of course, there’s Raúl, aged between Fidel and Juanita, and one of the military leaders during the Revolution, for which he was rewarded with the role at the head of the Cuban Armed Forces for half a century. Raúl served as the interim leader as Acting President from 2006 during his brother’s illness, after which he assumed the role of President from 2008 and as First Secretary of the Communist Party in 2011. He stood down from the former role in 2018 and the latter in 2021, being succeeded in both roles by the current incumbent, Miguel Díaz-Canel, the first leader to not have been active in the Revolution itself - however as First Secretary he effectively maintained oversight over the President and so was considered the de facto leader of the country until the handover of the party reins three years later. Despite many reservations about the continued Castro dynastic rule, and Raúl’s somewhat questionable decisions and controversies earlier in life (as mentioned in an earlier stage, many suspect he may have been behind Camilo Cienfuegos’ fatal flight, removing a rival for secondary power and a more moderate voice with cache in the room), however, the elderly Raúl presided over a surprising level of rapprochement with the US, appearing in public shaking hands with then-US President Barack Obama, a deal brokered by Pope Francis I, in a remarkably cosmopolitan move for the often very inward-looking Cuban state; later full diplomatic ties were re-established in 2015 and Obama even visited the island the following year, however this was short-lived and Castro was himself re-sanctioned following his support of Nicolás Maduro in the 2019 Venezuelan Crisis. Retiring at age 89, Castro may have passed over his primary responsibilities, but he does retain a seat on the National Assembly to this day, at age 93.

Fidel and Ramón Castro with François Mitterand, 1974

Juanita Castro talking to anti-Communists at the Cuban Mission of New York in the late 70s

Raúl Castro between brothers-in-arms Che Guevara and Raúl’s actual brother, Fidel

We continue along a flat route before intersecting the start of stage 11, and holding an intermediate sprint as we pass through Palma Soriano. This time there’s no steps to retrace, however, as we cross over and continue to head south through the eastern parts of the Sierra Maestre, past the Gota Blanca hydroelectric project and on to the Puerto de Moya, one of the most commonly-ascended climbs in the history of the Vuelta a Cuba. Except… we’re not really climbing it, because it’s one of those classically lopsided climbs, where one side is on a slightly higher plateau so there’s only false flat on one side. You know, think of those Spanish passes like Escudo, Urkiola, Somiedo or Pajáres. Except noticeably smaller, since the actual climb side of Moya, the one we’re descending, is only 3,5km at around 5%. However, frequently in old times, after the opening stages brought us to Santiago de Cuba, the ensuing stage from Santiago to either Bayamó or Holguín would have this as a GPM en route. Instead of this, however, we trace along the southern edge of the mountains and climb the more severe and serious Puerto de Boniato, historically the access point for Santiago for most of the island, a twisty and formerly cobbled mountain road that has survived generations before being rendered somewhat obsolete by the coming of the A1 Autovía.

Archival image of Puerto Boniato from days of yore

Nowadays, with the coming of the motorways, the road is much quieter, and is known for the splendid views from its mirador, and as a launchpad for extreme sports pastimes, with hang-gliders and gliders frequently setting off from the summit. You can see a little of it here as well as briefly some of the road in its present state near the end of that video. The modern climb is hardly super challenging, at least not compared to what follows, being a little over 4km at around 6,5-7%, wearing its toughest gradients near the bottom with the first 1500m averaging 8,3%. Cresting at 50km from home, realistically it’s just a warmup climb here, but fatigue may mean we lose some of the most chronic climbers of the bunch given we’re on the penultimate day of a two week race. We descend into El Cristo, an outlying village of Santiago de Cuba municipality, but while we do head down the main road back into the geographical alcove that the city inhabits, we take a side road that enables us to avoid the city (more of it tomorrow, spoiler alert, although that’s really not much of a secret), and take another minuscule climb, the 1300m dig to Las Lajas. We have a second intermediate sprint in another outlying suburb that is being subsumed by Santiago, Vista Alegre, before heading due east to Las Guásimas. And then, se armó un zapatiesto.

Yes, it’s La Gran Piedra, or the Great Rock, an icon of Cuba and the highest point in the eastern Sierra Maestra, and also the longest and biggest and baddest continuous cycling climb on the whole island. At 1249m it is the highest point in its region, and it is paved up past 1100m; after this you must walk the remaining distance up to the summit and the small number of amenities beyond it, including a restaurant/café and the Cafetal La Isabelica. Its challenging access made it a popular site for rebels to hide out in, but the ongoing build of the road to the summit and its proximity to Santiago had resulted in it becoming too accessible for this purpose, but the difficulty in ascending the road made it a perfect hideout for traders, which has resulted in a lot of tourist trap stalls and stands cropping up on the way to the summit, which is marked by, well, a Great Rock. A huge volcanic mass measuring 51 metres wide, 25 metres high and 30 metres long, this colossal outcrop weighs over 63.000 tonnes and is home to an observatory and a mirador from which you can see all the way to Guantánamo.

While the rock has been there as long as records have been established, the cafes, the traders and the road have not, however. Obviously during immediate post-Revolution times, things were somewhat frugal, but as the Vuelta a Cuba began to develop, showing off development to the Cuban populace became a key factor in the race’s organisation, and much like the completion of the La Farola road made for a regular stage from Baracoa to Guantánamo in order to demonstrate this, in 1966, for the first time, the Gran Piedra access road was introduced to the race as a spectacle in order to introduce ordinary Cubans to the sights from the summit and the mirador. And what a special climb it was, unlike anything that had ever been seen before, even the Topes de Collantes climb.

Travelog from the La Gran Piedra mirador, 2024

Look at that challenge there. It’s a legitimate Hors Catégorie climb in any cycling; the overall figures are somewhere similar to many well-known favourites from European cycling - the Col de Joux-Plane (13km @ 7,6%), Lagos de Enol (the end of the steep part of Covadonga)(12km @ 8%), Alpe d’Huez (13,8km @ 8,2%) and Passo di Fedaia (FEDAIA!!!!!!!)(14,2km @ 7,5%). Not only that, but the first 2,5km are more or less false flat, and the final 500m are flattish also; the remaining 11km average 9,2%, a very savage, steep gradient that puts it in a similar kind of vein to Passo di Pampeago (11km @ 9%), Ancares via Pan do Zarco (12km @ 9,1%), Colle San Carlo (10,4km @ 10%), Ovronnaz from Leytron (11,6km @ 9,5%), Plateau des Saix (10km @ 9,1%) or the last 10km of Passo Giau south or Agnel east.

Now just imagine how brutal that will have been for the péloton of the 1966 Vuelta a Cuba. Most of those climbs above were still rarities or novelties at their time; San Carlo had been seen once (in 1962), but even long-time staples like Giau and Fedaia (FEDAIA!!!!!!!!) had yet to appear in the Giro, while even Alpe d’Huez had only been seen once and was at the time a somewhat forgotten summit. Things like Joux-Plane and Lagos de Covadonga were discoveries that were still miles away from arriving in elite races, so even if there were riders arriving in the Vuelta a Cuba with elite péloton experience in the west (which at that point there weren’t), this would still have been savage. With ramps supposedly reaching almost 30% on the 800m at 16% stretch in the middle - a veritable Cueña de los Cabres but over 30 years before it - and a couple of other kilometres jumping up past 10-11%, this ribbon of tarmac was feared before it was ever raced, and in the nascent race - it was only the third edition - it wasn’t really known who the climb would favour; especially because, due to the geography of Cuba, the climb would feature on stage 2 of the race, so before anybody was able to really get a handle on who was likely to be strong and in form. In the end it would be Manuel Sánchez, a relatively unassuming but lightweight domestique, who found that his legs were better able to withstand the punishing gradients than the others, and he won the inaugural climb to the Great Rock.

Sánchez’ time would be short, however; until the climbs he had never stood out as a finisher, largely because of being outmuscled on the flat and in the sprints, and his time gained on the climb was not enough to offset his losses in other stages, with Sérgio “Pipián” Martínez, the winner of the first Vuelta a Cuba, dethroning him before the race reached Havana. While he could take solace in the mountains prize, he wouldn’t have the chance to relive his triumph in future years as from 1967 onwards, the race saw an influx of foreign teams, usually Eastern Bloc squads competing for spots in later season goals like the Peace Race, who would travel to Cuba for some warm weather training and racing in February and, as Sánchez himself would recall, taught the Cubans how to race what we would now know as echelons, and brought many more concepts of racing unknown to the young scene of Cuba at the time.

Aldo Arencíbia leading the ascent to Gran Piedra in the Vuelta a Cuba during the 1970s, an era where the race was dominated by the battle between him and Carlos Cardet, each winning three Vueltas from 1972 to 1980

After sporadic appearances in the 1970s, eventually the parcours would become almost set in the Vuelta a Cuba, with only minor modifications, and the start of the race would always be a stage over La Farola from Baracoa to Guantánamo (with or without a preceding prologue) and then the next stage would be from Guantánamo to La Gran Piedra, more or less unipuerto, and around 114-115km in duration. Coming early in the race meant that it would have a good chance to be played for by the domestic riders, before the travelling Ostbloc champions acclimatised to Cuban conditions, having travelled from February weather in Eastern Europe, and popular local favourites like Aldo Arencíbia, nicknamed “Búfalo” long before José Enrique Gutiérrez, would also take the summit. The USSR’s greatest climber, Sergey Sukhoruchenkov, would win here in 1978, becoming the second overseas winner of the race after Henryk Kowalski in 1967, and would also be the best from the péloton a year later, but would be beaten by the breakaway.

With the advent of the 1980s, however, amateur cycling had a different, new power emerging in the mountains, and that was the Colombians. With the Colombian teams starting to head over to Europe to compete, and the Eastern Bloc teams coming to enter Venezuela’s nearby Vuelta al Táchira in the early season too, the Vuelta a Cuba became a race in the sights of the Colombian péloton, and 1981’s stage would be won by Segundo Chaparro, who would win the same stage in 1984 too and would later go on to a decade-long pro career and finish top 15 in the Dauphiné. 1983’s stage would see the Ostbloc fight back, with Olaf Jentzsch beating Jiří Škoda. Chaparro’s second stage win would follow a year later ahead of Ricardo Salazar of the home nation; Salazar would win the stage himself the following year after impressively dropping a young Piotr Ugrumov. After a couple of years of home winners (including most successful Vuelta a Cuba champion of all time Eduardo Alonso), Jentzsch would win here again in 1988, and then Alonso would win once more in 1989. Israel Torres would take a brilliant solo win in 1990, a minute up on the remainder of the field, to be the last champion of Gran Piedra for many years.

For a long time, though, that was it. The iconic climb was no more; the Vuelta a Cuba was no more. Even when the race returned, the world of cycling was very different. No Communist bloc of strong amateur riders to enter, and a very different calendar. La Gran Piedra was forgotten about, the idea of putting the main mountaintop finish on stage 2 of a two week race just didn’t fit with modern thoughts on the sport, with control of flat stages far greater than before, and the climb didn’t feature at all in the 2000-2010 run of the race. It was supposed to appear once, in 2004, and you will even see some reportage list it as a stage town, but the stage was changed to a flat finish in Santiago de Cuba, although you could probably have guessed just looking at the results sheet, with over 40 riders finishing on the same time as Pedro Pablo Pérez, and figure out that this stage did not finish on an 11km at 9% mountain. Not even the 2020 Tour stage 6 péloton could have managed that. However, that hasn’t been the end of the story.

After the death of the Vuelta a Cuba, as has been mentioned in previous write-ups, came the Gran Prémio Nacional de Cuba, or the Guantánamo - Havana Cycle Classic, essentially the same race but with a domestic only péloton and no prize money, and fulfilling the role of a national Tour without actually being one - I guess in the same manner as something like the HTV Cup in Vietnam or the Vuelta a la Independencia Nacional in the Dominican Republic, where it is instead of a national race, as opposed to the sponsor-name alternative Tours of a country like the Clásico RCN in Colombia, Rutas de América in Uruguay or Clásico Banfoandes in Venezuela which run as well as a national race. Building up slowly, the race decided to introduce the Gran Piedra climb in the 2015 edition, and it was a resounding success, seeing José Mojica win ahead of Yennier López, the two of them demolishing the rest of the field by three minutes with Monica dropping López with under 3km to go and setting a new record time for the traditional 114km route that had stood since 1984 (although improvements in bike technology over the 25 years since the stage was last held may well have been an impact on that). Commissaire Héctor Marcos insisted that the stage needed to be retained and run annually to assess the international potential of the Cuban domestic riders. Mojica, for his part, would return to the race the following year as national champion, and ride internationally with the Start team, a 13th in the Vuelta al Tachirá, 5th in the Volta do Rio Grande do Sul and 19th in the Vuelta a Costa Rica his most notable outside results. He would be beaten by 43-year-old Vicente Sanabria on La Gran Piedra, but take the lead soon after before winning on Topes de Collantes to take the GC once more.

However, despite Marcos’ enthusiasm, the climb would go back into disuse; the tarmac was in a bad state and it was impossible to run the stage in 2017. It came back in 2018 when Yasmani Balmaceda won, but since then it has been back on ice, with the road conditions having been deemed too poor for use in race conditions. The Guantánamo - La Habana Classic was replaced by the one-off Clásico Nacional de Ruta in 2019, but that replaced the Gran Piedra MTF with a much easier Puerto Boniato HTF/MTF on stage 2 instead, which Alejandro Parra won in what essentially amounted to a hilltop sprint. But all hope is not lost!

Yes, just three months ago, La Gran Piedra got a shiny new coat of asphalt, ready to make a new generation of cyclists wince and grimace. Let’s just hope we get to see it.

In the fictional universe in which these Race Design Thread races take place, however, this is the backdrop for what will probably be the final decisive moves of the race, and an iconic backdrop on which to set those battles.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 15: Santiago de Cuba - Santiago de Cuba, 112km

And so we come full circle with this, our final stage, a simple circuit race around the second largest city on the island, home to over half a million people and the economic and social hub of the eastern part of the island, making it the second most important city in the country as well. One of the oldest European settlements in the New World, this was the seventh village founded by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, dating all the way back to 1515, although its initial history was rocky, the original settlement burning to the ground less than a year later and having to be rebuilt from scratch. Its position on the coast with the opportunity for calm anchorage along with the Sierra Maestra protecting it from inland incursions made it a valuable site, and it would be the base from which Hernán Cortes and Juan de Grijalba would sail to Mexico, and its importance for trading purposes made it a capital of Spanish Cuba, a title it held from 1522, when Baracoa was decided to be too isolated to continue in the role, to 1607, when the capital was moved to Havana - but it would also make it attractive to outsiders competing with the Spanish for holdings in the Caribbean and on the American continent, with the French plundering the city in the 1550s, and the British following suit twice, in 1603 and 1662. In addition to this the city was ravaged by fires several times, with considerable rebuilding required in 1526, 1535 and 1613.

Old colonial heart of Santiago de Cuba

Although the city was located around 5-6km inland in the Santiago Bay, these regular incursions by corsairs, privateers and pirates were enough of an issue for the local authorities to get Spain to sanction the construction of a large fort at the mouth of the bay to protect the city, the Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca, informally known as the Castillo del Morro, a cliff-top fortification that has guarded the city since the 17th Century and has been inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as one of the best preserved examples of Spanish-American colonial and military architecture in the world - standing firm and protecting the city against a further British incursion from Jamaica in 1741. It is now one of the city’s primary tourist attractions as not only is the fort interesting and scenic in its own right, but it also sits on a hilly outcrop that serves as the southern shoreline of Cuba, and affords wonderful vistas out across the bay and into the city from one side, and across the Caribbean coast and along the Sierra Maestra - for this purpose a luxury hotel complex called Balcón del Caribe has been constructed, offering precisely what its name suggests - an experience only dulled by the frequent appearance of aircraft, as this is directly under the flight path of the neighbouring Santiago de Cuba airport, owing to the lack of alternative flat terrain nearby.

The accessibility from the sea also contributed to rapid growth of Santiago de Cuba during periods of unrest in the Caribbean region, especially from the neighbouring French colony of Saint-Domingue, i.e. modern-day Haiti. This also created social havoc, with many freedmen of Afro-Caribbean origins now integrating into a Spanish colonial society that still allowed slavery, at the same time as the French were also held under great suspicion given the recent revolution that had taken place back in European France, and indeed French citizens were ordered out of Cuba following Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1809, but allowing the African-origin Saint-Dominicans to remain. They founded the tumba francesa, a specialised and specific genre of Afro-Cuban music and dance which is regionally popular, and the oldest troupes performing it have been around for over 150 years as parts of specialised societies set up in Santiago de Cuba to protect the culture of these French Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the island; this history also likely explains the large following of syncretic religions like santería and vodún in the city and its surroundings. Following the industrial revolution, the city became a gas-producing one but is also the home of the Bacardi brand, the world famous spirit distillers having been established in 1862, with the original distillery now being repurposed as an art gallery.

Santiago de Cuba has also been closely tied to insurrection and rebellion on the island of Cuba; both the social and economic melting pot that trading ports often create, and the position as the economic hub of Oriente, where the presence of the Spanish forces and elites was lower and the majority of the dissatisfaction with colonial powers resided, meant that it would frequently become the urban axis around which dissidence and opposition would rotate in Cuba; it was the hometown of independence fighter António Maceo, second in command in the Cuban Army of Independence and one of the most prominent and revered guerrilla combatants of the 19th Century, who had opposed the Paz de Zanjón and was killed in action during the Cuban War of Independence. The city also found fame early in the Ten Years’ War for the Virginius Affair, when during the midst of the conflict, a US-registered ship manned by Americans and British mercenaries under the command of Cuban insurrectionists was captured by the Spanish, sparking a diplomatic incident when 53 of the crew were executed as pirates, resulting in diplomatic settlements between Spain, Great Britain and the USA in order to avoid a costly war. The US had until that point maintained an uneasy peace with Spain by not recognising or acknowledging the Cuban rebels, however as many were based in exile in the US, especially in Florida, the Spanish viewed the American stance with suspicion; war bonds were being sold independently in America to support the Cuban insurrection, and with money raised through this, Manuel de Quesada commissioned John F. Patterson to purchase the ship in question; it had been running back and forth in aid of the Cuban rebellion under the mercenary command of a former Confederate Navy commodore for three years by the time the Spaniards were able to capture it.

Although war was able to be averted, the aftermath of the Virginius Affair would last for a long time, not least because this prompted the US to realise that they were ill-equipped for naval warfare with the Spanish and accelerate a reconstruction and reform program to ensure they could mount adequate battle should further incidents spark conflict. In fact, this arguably runs to the present day, as when during the next Cuban War of Independence, a US armoured cruiser sent to protect US interests in the area exploded and sank in harbour at Havana (the causes of which are debated to this day), America, now far better equipped for such conflict, declared war on Spain, fuelled by patriotic fervour and sensationalist press - President William McKinley had been trying to avoid conflict, so the mysterious sinking has attracted conspiracy theories, with many believing it was actually sunk by the rebels in order to encourage active US participation in their cause. After defeat in the Battle of San Juan Hill in July 1898, US General William Rufus Shafter laid siege to Santiago de Cuba - poorly defended from the land side, the city quickly surrendered and proved one of the major turning points of the Spanish-American War, consequences of which included the handover from Spain to the USA of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. With Puerto Rico still a US possession to this day, the consequences of the Virginius Affair, albeit indirectly, persist to this day.

Monuments and memorials at San Juan Hill

The association of Santiago de Cuba with dissidence doesn’t end there, though. Although originally from Havana and largely raised in Valencia back on the Spanish mainland, the great forefather of Cuban independence, poet and writer of the national awakening and martyr to the cause of the Cuban nation José Martí is buried here, after his remains were taken from the battlegrounds of Dos Ríos where they were originally buried and paraded to Santiago once the Spanish forces became aware of the magnitude of their bounty. Santiago is also the hometown of the revolutionary Frank País (sometimes known by the slightly erroneous “Paris”), who was one of the participants in the attack on the Moncada Barracks and later founded Acción Nacional Revolucionaria, an informal revolutionary group that consisted of many small cells set up in urban areas around the country under País’ overall direction, largely comprising teenagers and young adults from students and workers, organising labor unions and publishing uncensored news cribbed from local knowledge around the island and pirated overseas bulletins and broadcasts. ANR would merge with M-26-7 when Castro was released from jail, and País would become instrumental as the coordinator of urban efforts, creating distraction and procuring resources for the more active guerrillas fighting in the mountains. He would successfully radicalise almost the whole city in Santiago de Cuba, as after instructing each of his cells to paint the name of the movement on neighbouring buildings, almost the whole city was daubed in graffiti reading “M-26-7”. He also directed several days’ unrest in Santiago de Cuba that created distractions allowing some of the most significant guerrilla actions to be carried out elsewhere in the Oriente region. However, being located in a major urban centre made it harder for him to hide, and after being betrayed by an informant, he was captured trying to reach a getaway car and shot by police on July 30, 1957. He was just 22 years old.

The death of País created a significant uproar, and brought the city of Santiago out in mass protest, and the spontaneous uprising that followed the wake of this news being broadcast is one of the most decisive points of the Revolution. In fact, he was even allowed to be buried - despite clear governmental orders to the contrary - wearing the M-26-7 uniform; the anniversary of his death is commemorated as the Day of the Martyrs of the Revolution, and his remains have since been interred in the Santa Ilfigenia cemetery alongside other national figures like José Martí. Curiously, though, he remains a popular figure on all sides of debate in Cuba; Raúl Castro named his guerrilla unit after País, and the international airport of Holguín bears his name while his childhood home has been turned into a museum and revolutionary monument; on the other hand, one of the protest movements in Cuba, M-30-11, also bears his name; this movement largely consists of people (and their descendants) who had been members of M-26-7 and fought against Batista but who were either never Communists or who had grown disillusioned by the direction or the actions of Castro’s regime in the name of Communism, and who have named their movement using the same nomenclature standard as Castro, but honouring the death of País as a somewhat un-spoiled figure of the revolution; as they say, you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. We at least know a bit about what Camilo Cienfuegos would have wanted to see happen in the aftermath of the revolution, but Frank País never made it that far. As such, he remains “pure” to all sides; as a revolutionary who died to give the country its better life to the pro-governmental side; and as a revolutionary who never sold his people out or compromised his beliefs to the protest movements. To this day he is often commemorated as the “most valiant” of the insurgents. On January 1st, 1959, it was from the balcony of the city hall of Santiago de Cuba that Fidel Castro proclaimed the success of the revolution,

Frank País

The city’s association with rebellion didn’t end with the Revolution, however, as to this day prominent dissidents against the Cuban regime call Santiago de Cuba home, such as Anyer Blanco, one of Cuba’s few Twitter posters and an anti-regime voice of some repute who has also supported and helped serve protest movements abroad, most notably in Venezuela. More commonly, nowadays, however, celebrity sons and daughters of the city are likely to come from the sports and entertainment worlds, with prominent figures in the arts including 19th Century icon José María Heredia, the prominent Afro-Cuban actress and performance poet Eusebia Cosme, and a number of singers and musicians, especially in the son genre which is based around the city. This includes the historic and world-renowned Trío Matamoros, singers and composers in the son and bolero genres whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1960s, and Sindo Garay, a founder of the trova genre who lived to be over 100 and even contributed to the Cuban War of Independence, being one of few men to have attested shaking hands with both José Martí and Fidel Castro as a result; also many veteran members of the Cuban music scene who found international fame via Wim Wenders, Ry Cooder, Afro-Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club film and album, have been based around Santiago de Cuba; Compay Segundo, once of the Los Compadres group, and who I mentioned in the Moa to Holguín stage due to the place names immortalised in his song “Chan Chan”, the best-known song of the Buena Vista Social Club project, who has sung for Pope John Paul II and Fidel Castro and is interred in the same cemetery as Martí and País; Ibrahim Ferrer, who was born in a dance club in San Luís, just outside the city, and was the leader of Los Bocucos for over 30 years before retiring in 1991 only to be coaxed back by Nick Gold and Ry Cooder for what would become his most famous work; and Eliades Ochoa, one of the youngest participants in the BVSC and who remains active to this day, at the age of 78.

Music has also been a part of the history of other natives of the city beyond the confines of Cuba; Bob Marley’s wife Rita was also born in Santiago de Cuba before moving to Jamaica in her childhood, as was Emilio Estefán, a Cuban expat in Florida who helped found and for many years performed with the Miami Sound Machine - while you may not be familiar with his name, you will probably recognise that of his wife Gloria. The city is also the original home of the musician Marco Rizo and the actor Desi Arnaz, who would both find fame in America thanks to the sitcom I Love Lucy, with Arnaz, a former bandleader, enlisting former bandmate - and prominent concert pianist - Rizo to provide the musical arrangements for the show, as Arnaz would be busy co-starring in it, acting as the fictitious Ricky Ricardo, a singer and bandleader who served as husband and foil to the titular Lucy, played of course by Lucille Ball - Arnaz’ real-life wife.

This mix of national and international successes extends to the sporting prowess of the city; the most renowned would probably be 1970s athlete Alberto “El Caballo” Juantorena, a former basketballer who was one of the best runners in the world through the middle of that decade, being the only man to have won Olympic gold at both 400m and 800m, winning both - including setting a World Record in the latter - at Montreal 1976. He ranked #1 in the world at the 400m in 1974 and then every year from 1976 to 1978; he only took up the 800m shortly before that Olympic title, but won the World Cup ranking in both events in 1977 and also won the 800m in a new world record at the Universiade that year. However, persistent injuries to his feet - he had already required surgery in 1975, which is why he was unable to maintain his undefeated streak from the previous two seasons over 400m - prevented him from adding to his tally in Moscow, and then the boycott of the 1984 LA Games effectively meant that the Friendship Games were his swansong. Another Olympian is the boxer Yordenis Ugas, who won a bronze in Beijing to go with a World Championships gold before turning pro and scoring wins over the likes of Manny Pacquiao. Beyond Cuba, however, more people are likely to be familiar with Charles Rudy Ashenoff (born Carlos Espada), better known as the hulking Konnan, a Cuban-born professional wrestler whose mother brought him to the US in childhood and gave him an Anglicised name based upon that of her new partner, who fell into wrestling almost by accident; he was sent into the US Navy as a punishment for juvenile delinquency and posted to San Diego, from whence he broke into wrestling in Tijuana and became a massive star in Mexico; however for international audiences he is probably best known for his run in WCW in the mid to late 90s, being part of the nWo and also being considered largely responsible for the introduction of many of the Mexican luchadores that were a staple of WCW’s undercard to the American audience; however, wrestling’s tendency to over-rely on stereotypes and pigeonholing of athletes, especially given he broke into the business in Mexico means that Ashenoff is frequently mistakenly considered a Mexican even though in his early career he would frequently carry a Cuban flag to the ring.

Modern Santiago de Cuba cityscape

As the second largest city in the country it will no doubt not surprise you to learn that it has been a regular host of the Vuelta a Cuba, although not infrequently it would actually only be a stage start, owing to the proximity to Gran Piedra when that was hosting MTFs. However, sometimes, following the Gran Piedra stage, the following day’s race would be a loop stage starting and finishing in Santiago de Cuba, or sometimes even a crit or circuit race in the city. Winners here include Andrey Vedernikov, a Soviet rouleur who rode in service of Ivan Ivanov in the Ostbloc attempts at the Vuelta in the 80s; Andreas Petermann, a former winner of the DDR’s biggest one-day race, Berlin-Cottbus-Berlin and 2nd in the Peace Race in 1979; Sergey Uslamin, who would go on to race several GTs across the early 90s; and since the rebirth of the race in the early 2000s, veteran German sprinter Robert Förster, Cuban longtime stalwarts Pedro Pablo Pérez and Arnold Alcolea, longtime Diquigiovanni/Androni Giocattoli climber Jackson Rodríguez, Slovene all-rounder Jure Kocjan, who spent much of his career either in Balkan or US cycling but had a cup of coffee at the World Tour level when Euskaltel signed him in their pursuit of points for 2013, and long-time Colombian domestic sprint specialist Jaime Castañeda (who has more recently cropped up in the US scene) are among those to raise their arms in Santiago de Cuba.

My stage is a short one, consisting of four laps of a circuit of approximately 28km in length which doesn’t feature any categorised climbs, but nevertheless isn’t a straightforward flat stage, at least not after two weeks of racing and the resultant attrition. I’d describe it as rolling; there is nothing that is long enough to be a categorisation-worthy climb at a gradient steep enough to make a difference, and the longest sustained stretch of uphill, up to the Versalles suburb, is 1100m but only averaging 4%. It’s also very early in the circuit; we start and finish at the Distrito Abel Santamaría, between the park and the Museo de Historia 26 de Julio. This is to enable there to be plenty of space, but the first part of the circuit will see us travel through the old colonial casco viejo, past Parque Cespedes and the old centre.

Start/finish area

Parque Cespedes in the casco viejo

After the uphill drag up to Versalles, we have a twisty, technical section around the Mirador del Caribe and the Castillo del Morro, before we snake around the coastline at the mouth of the Bay of Santiago, including 500m at 5% and then a descent, then a very short ramp of 200m at 9% up on a small outcrop at Punta Gorda, and then 800m at 4,5% up above the coast before sweeping with some curves back down into the city, where we follow along the coast road and then sweep around the north of the city. The last corner is around a 120º right-hander at 1300m from the line, but it’s a wide open corner between two four-lane roads, so can be negotiated safely; then there’s a long straight with a slight left-hand kink and a final uphill 700m at 4,0% which should give plenty of chance for a nice safe sprint and also be slightly different than a pure drag race. It should be a sprint stage, but there are options to do something with it if the GC is close and somebody wants to give it a try.

So this was my Vuelta a Cuba - three MTFs, one inconsistent but changing in gradient, one short but super-steep, and one long and classic in style. An ITT, a TTT. Several hilly stages, doing almost everything I possibly could with the island to shake it up. And only two or three sprints. After all, the Vuelta a Cuba in its rebirth era from 2000 to 2010 was all about those, but the island offers so much more. You just have to work to find it, and I hope that I’ve been able to prove that.

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Time for my next design. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last two years making and throwing out designs(looking at my five unfinished Giro projects) and just not liking the end result to them(A Tour de Suisse that didn’t feel right). So, I took a break from race making, as there was no inspiration at all.

A couple months ago, I started going back into Cronoescalada and kept finding myself making races close to home. Having a lot of untapped potential and some brutal climbs, New England seemed ample for me to jump back in.

Cycling in the modern day here largely consists of mountain biking and cyclocross up on the mountains of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, with the exception of the Tour of Somerville(more on that with our last stage)

Personally, I have little interest in mountain biking and cyclocross, so I wanted to create a proposal for a new stage race. Originally, I wanted to have a 9 day stage race like the Tour de Suisse, but found I left too much out for me to be satisfied with the result. With an area not a big amount smaller than the UK, one week did not do justice for the region .



So I present to you: The JumboVismaFan’s Tour de New England
This stage race would very likely be in mid-September or mid-October, as that is before ski season and is relatively dry compared to the spring.
4 MTF’s
1 HTF
3 Medium Mountain
2 ITT’s
2 Hilly
3 Sprint finishes

Stage 1-Narragansett Town Beach to Narragansett Town Beach, 11.9km

We start with the first of our two individual time trials in this race, on the shore of Rhode Island. 12k’s, pan flat, and it is an out and back on the same road. Not too much to stay about the race profile.


Narragansett’s town population doubles in the summertime months, which is thanks to the appeal of the beaches of Scarborough and Narragansett Town. Both are prized for their position to receive favorable southwardly swells off the Atlantic Ocean.

(Narragansett Beach and Pier)


The winner of this one surely should take a swim in the water after, a celebratory measure after a gritty ride along Ocean Rd.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Personally, I have little interest in mountain biking and cyclocross, so I wanted to create a proposal for a new stage race. Originally, I wanted to have a 9 day stage race like the Tour de Suisse, but found I left too much out for me to be satisfied with the result. With an area not a big amount smaller than the UK, one week did not do justice for the region .

This is always my big problem with areas where there aren't extant races or where the terrain isn't limiting: cramming everything I want into a single week.

However, your idea ties in with an idea I had a while back, which was that rather than trying to establish a single state race and build that to GT kind of level (because a race that only tours part of a country doesn't really feel like a Grand Tour equivalent, but a country like the USA is far too big to satisfactorily tour the entire country in just three weeks), there could be a two-week intermediate point between the likes of Avenir and the Baby Giro and the GTs, that would be like the Tour de France of the universe of the North American péloton but also have WT and PT teams sending their younger and developing GC riders. The idea would be to be the "Great American Road Race" and it would tour a rotating cast of regions rather than a single state or similar, so one year it could be New England and the East, another year it could be the south using the mountains of Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas, one year it could be in the North West around Idaho, Washington and Oregon, one year it could be through Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. The problem would then be that it would become harder to establish the lore if you only used a particular mountain range or area every few years.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

I still haven't posted the last stage of my Fraustro Tour, because I kept being unsatisfied with its design. Then LS started posting her Cuban excursion, and I never got around to finish my race. But it will happen one day.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

I still haven't posted the last stage of my Fraustro Tour, because I kept being unsatisfied with its design. Then LS started posting her Cuban excursion, and I never got around to finish my race. But it will happen one day.

I know that feel. So many times I've got a race I'm happy with and halfway through posting it I suddenly get the urge to change one of the stages or I discover something and suddenly a whole bunch of rewriting is necessary.

 

[Netserk]

This is always my big problem with areas where there aren't extant races or where the terrain isn't limiting: cramming everything I want into a single week.

Another option is to design multiple editions (you are at what now, 11 Vuelta editions?).

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Another option is to design multiple editions (you are at what now, 11 Vuelta editions?).

11 posted editions. There are at least 2 more that have been completed but require some revisions, plus a few abandoned versions where stages or stage ideas have been cannibalised into later routes.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

I know that feel. So many times I've got a race I'm happy with and halfway through posting it I suddenly get the urge to change one of the stages or I discover something and suddenly a whole bunch of rewriting is necessary.

In this case, it didn't have that much to do with the write-up, as I've tried to keep them fairly brief for this race, apart from my summary of Cavellar's life and career. I did however end up including too many sketchy roads I wasn't fully sure about the quality of, and a lot of the stage would also take place in Germany. Right now I'm considering abandoning the original finish and going for a different kind of a stage than originally intended.

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Tour of New England, Stage 2- Foxwoods Resort Casino to Goshen(CT), 223km

Leaving Rhode Island, we journey west and start our day at the Foxwoods Casino. One of two Tribal owned casino locations in Southeastern Connecticut, it has evolved to include go karting, ziplining, brand name shopping outlets, and a new massive indoor waterpark set to be completed in June of 2025.

(Foxwoods Resort and Casino)

Leaving out the casino, we continue in a northwesterly fashion for the next 40 kilometers until we reach the town of Willimantic for the intermediate sprint.

(Willimantic ~1950’s)

Willimantic is one of many towns in New England that was founded and flourished due to the presence of the textile industry. Remnants of the era still remain with a museum detailing the history of the 19th century in Willimantic and Victorian houses dotting the Prospect Hill neighborhood.



Leaving Willimantic, we venture more in a direct west direction, reaching our first KOM Sprint of the race, Blackledge Falls.

As with many hill sprints of this race, I had to take inspiration from the nearby area to name the KOM, and since the parking lot for the hike to Blackledge Falls was at the crest, the name was born

(Blackledge Falls)

Continuing on, at KM 80, the race undergoes a roughly 70km horseshoe pattern to avoid Hartford, the state capital, and the traffic crapshow to get in and out of there.

(Hartford Skyline)

Rejoining a relatively more “direct” route to the finish on kilometer 150 in Avon, the peloton also enters the hillier phase of the race as we adjourn onto US 44.

Our next KOM, North Canton, has no special naming to it, but is the first difficulty in about 100 kilometers.

(North Canton)

Continuing downhill, the peloton passes the most picturesque moment of the stage, the Barkhamsted Reservoir.

(Barkhamsted Reservoir “House” in fall)

We head back to US 44, and continue onwards until Winsted, where we head south onto CT Route 263 and our second KOM

Likewise to North Canton, Winchester has no special meaning, other than being a tougher climb than the last and coming with roughly 25 kilometers to go. While North Canton is roughly the same grade, Winchester continues the climb for roughly 2 more kilometers, with the race leaving CT Route 263 shortly after the KOM sprint.

(Winchester)

From here, the race dashes into Torrington, another one of the former mill towns of New England, but one of a more formidable size, sustaining twice the population of Willimantic.

Perhaps most famous of people to be born in Torrington, however, had nothing to do with textiles.

John Brown was born in 1800 here in Torrington. If you’re not a buff on American History, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard this name. To prevent myself from going on a long winded history lesson, I’ll just put the short notes on who he was.

(John Brown)
John Brown was born in the wrong era. He believed that all men were created equal, which he’s right, but was not widely accepted in the early 1800’s, especially in the American South where he eventually campaigned in. Brown participated in the Bloody Kansas campaign(decided if Kansas was a “slave” or “free state”) and incited murderous riots and rebellions on white slave owners. Brown met his end at Harper’s Ferry, where a slave rebellion led on a federal arsenal ended horribly as state and federal militias enclosed his group. John Brown was publicly hung and was allowed to move his final resting place to North Elba, New York, closer to his hometown of Torrington.

(Harper’s Ferry)

Anyways, back on the race, once we enter Torrington city limits we continue to head south until reaching North Elm Street, where we head west onto our final climb of the day.

A theme of the last few KOM’s, no originality was had in deciding the name for this climb. Route 4 was the simplest, so it stayed. However, this climb of roughly 2k’s at 5% with pitches up to 10% will cause some commotion in the peloton and have a ending to a race not too dissimilar to Longwy in 2022.

(Part of Route 4 on route to Goshen)
After the climb tops out with roughly 5k’s to go, it doesn’t go completely downhill. Rather, the remaining of the race, it’s rather flat with a small rise about halfway between the sprint and finish line.

As you can see here the last couple k’s has a sharp bend to the left and a right angle turn very close to the finish line but not one too dangerous for it to be very problematic.

The race finishes right in front of the Goshen Fairgrounds, home to one of the more popular Connecticut fairs on Labor Day Weekend and provide a worthy backdrop to a stage that can bring some surprises, right before the second-toughest challenge tomorrow.

(Goshen Fairgrounds)

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Stage 3 of the Tour of New England: Windsor Locks(CT) to Mount Acustney(VT), 213.6km

Today’s journey along the Connecticut River will culminate in a first true test to see who’s up to snuff for this race.

We begin in Windsor Locks, eastward of yesterday’s finale. Windsor Locks is most notable for housing the biggest airport in Connecticut, Bradley International Airport.

(Bradley International)

We head north for the duration for the stage, with few exceptions of heading far from the Connecticut River. One of the two exceptions is heading west to avoid downtown Springfield Massachusetts and head through West Springfield, Westfield, and Holyoke.


The race passes through downtown Holyoke, which is most well known for its Irish Heritage and subsequent St Patrick’s Day Weekend celebrations. Over 400,000 spectators line the streets of Holyoke on “parade day” to celebrate the cultural backbone Holyoke was founded upon.

(Holyoke Parade Festivities 2023)

Out of Holyoke, we head into South Hadley, and on the road out of South Hadley is where our first KOM point of the day will be contested, at the Notch overlook trailhead.

(Top of the Notch trailhead looking eastward)

Past the Notch, the race continues due north, bypassing the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and eventually meets up with US Route 5 in Bernardston on the border of Vermont and Massachusetts at kilometer 109.


The race enters a false flat, which the bottom of it consists of our intermediate sprint in Brattleboro.


Brattleboro is likewise another town that has seen economic decline in the past 100 years or so, but not because of textiles. Brattleboro was home to many large bookbinding companies and one of the largest pipe organ manufacturers in the world. When those industries went by the wayside, so did Brattleboro on a global economic scale, however it still is important for trade for the rest of Vermont due to its position on the Connecticut River and key cargo train tracks.

(Brattleboro)

Continuing on US 5, in the town of Putney, we reach our second KOM sprint, aptly named “US 5 Putney”.

(Putney)
The race enters its flattest portion of the race, all the way to the foot of the brutal Mount Acustney.

Just by the profile you can tell it’s a brute of a climb. Of the climb proper, the 5.6 kilometers averages a gradient of 12.2%, and has extended stretches of over 15%. The second toughest climb of the race(if you know anything about bike climbs in the United States you know what’s the toughest) should prove worthy of being a key decider of the general classification.

(View from Interstate 91 Northbound of Mount Acustney)

 

[firefly3323]

Stage 3 of the Tour of New England: Windsor Locks(CT) to Mount Acustney(VT), 213.6km

Today’s journey along the Connecticut River will culminate in a first true test to see who’s up to snuff for this race.

We begin in Windsor Locks, eastward of yesterday’s finale. Windsor Locks is most notable for housing the biggest airport in Connec

Being from New England myself I have often thought about a 'ToNE' and what it would be. I love that you are doing this, you're more motivated than me LOL.

One critique; you're not going to utilize Mt Greylock? Best climb in MA and Melville's inspiration for the Great White Whale! Or am I jumping the gun and you will come back to it?

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Being from New England myself I have often thought about a 'ToNE' and what it would be. I love that you are doing this, you're more motivated than me LOL.

One critique; you're not going to utilize Mt Greylock? Best climb in MA and Melville's inspiration for the Great White Whale! Or am I jumping the gun and you will come back to it?

With this race, my biggest disappointment was the lack of Massachusetts Berkshire climbs, and that was necessary to incorporate the best areas of Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire for climbing. The ending of this race was up in the air, and a Greylock finish got axed for what I ended up doing. As a native of Western Mass, personally was a little disappointment but the entertainment wouldn’t have nearly been as high in that form of the race.