Strolling through Cuba's Greatest Gardens by Isabella Tree

Everything is beginning to look like a fish - every patch of weed, every rock, every shimmer of water. It is high noon and we have been wading around the mangroves, in the turtle-grass flats, for well over four hours. Ahead of me, Koki, arguably the best fishing guide this side of the Antilles, is stalking through the shallows like a heron. He beckons me with an impatient flicking of his wrist, wincing visibly as I splash up to him as surreptitiously as an elephant at bath-time. “Bone-fish” he hisses, pointing, “ten o’clock”. Poor guy. I feel he is minutes away from throwing in the towel and taking up a desk job. Though this is Cuba and that probably is not an option. I have had five bonefish on the line this morning and lost them all. I’m feeling tired and emotional and quite close to tears. I’ve even hooked a couple of barracuda that came whistling in from nowhere and took my fly inches from a bonefish’s nose, and then snapped the line.

But it is bonefish we’re after – albula vulpes, literally ‘white fox’ - perhaps the most sought after sporting-fish in the world. It is a consummate challenge even for veterans of the sport – I say in my defence – which is why bone-fishing can be so frustrating, and so addictive. Trophy-hunting is not the issue, since every fish is released, and we’re not talking a Hemingway battle of the deep (bonefish here weigh only about 6lbs and live in very shallow water); this is all about skill and lightness of touch. It is the difference between being a white hunter and a Kalahari bushman.

For the bonefish, or makabi as it is known in Cuba, is one of the most difficult fish in the world to catch. It has a mouth made of plates like a garbage-crusher which it uses for grinding up molluscs and crustaceans. If you strike too soon, the hook simply pings back out at you; if you reel in when the fish is fighting, its granular teeth sever the line. Once it is hooked, the bonefish has to be played with a taxing combination of patience, strength and sensitivity. But getting it to take the fly is a feat in itself. The bonefish is wary, and very, very fast. Everything preys on it, including shark and barracuda. The slightest movement will spook it. Cast too close and an entire school will evaporate in a tiny puff of sand.

“Nine o’clock, now, look, look”, Koki is saying, with the urgency of a man down to his last glimmer of hope, “they coming closer. Cast, cast, ten metres.” I can see them now, gently finning, a dozen shadows slowly shimmying towards us over the sand - upwind. I’d have as much chance of catching them, I reckon, if I just chucked my rod and all the tackle after them into the water. Above us some frigates are catching thermals. An osprey is perched high in a pine-tree watching me, disdain written all over him. The mangroves are an auditorium of egrets and pelicans. We are all here doing the same thing, only some are clearly better at it than others.

Five days ago the Jardines de la Reina seemed a very different place. The ‘Gardens of the Queen’, so-named by Christopher Columbus, is now the last uninhabited archipelago in the Atlantic, possibly – of its size – in the world. To me, fooled by the thrilling but also faintly uneasy knowledge of being light years from human habitation, a shop, a flushing loo, a car, it seemed utterly deserted. In these 250 islands, in a thousand square miles, there are probably less than a hundred people, most of them lobster fishermen from the coast of mainland Cuba, a long day’s chug away; the rest, a handful of foreigners like us, with our delightful, and consummately tolerant, Cuban diving and fishing guides. I wondered what Columbus had been thinking. There seemed nothing garden-like about the Jardines at all. There was nothing here but mangroves, and sea-grapes, and the odd Caribbean pine; the only land-mammal an indigenous coypu-like tree rat called jutia that scuttled about through the underbrush like something from ‘The Life of Pi’.

But five short days and some spectacular dives off the reefs have thrown these first impressions to the winds. We have finned through coral canyons lined with waving lobsters and moray eels, parted hanging curtains of yellowtail and giant banks of silvery tarpon, glided balletically with rays and hawksbill turtles, made friends with potato cod seven feet long, and yesterday, in a final surrender of all preconceptions, we were playing with a school of silky sharks. I even managed to kiss one. It has become obvious that this is one of the most densely populated regions in the world, a rare, pristine marine wilderness; and that the gardens Columbus was so adroitly referring to lie, of course, beneath the sea, not above it, and remain just as he saw them, half a millennium ago.

The Jardines de la Reina is one of Cuba’s 20 marine reserves. Cuba has an extraordinary conservation record, not entirely, it must be said, of its own volition. The US embargo has effectively denied Cuba the chance to join the industrial ‘green’ revolution or to participate in the economic globalisation that has taken its toll on environments elsewhere in the world. And, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of its economic support for Cuba in the ‘90s, the beleaguered Caribbean island has had to become self-sufficient, relying entirely on its own limited resources, embracing organic and low-energy agriculture because it can afford to do little else, and scrapping its fishing fleet because it cannot afford to maintain it.

That said, though, conservation in Cuba is a matter of national pride; it is institutionalised. The Cubans are leaders in biological research, with thousands of graduates from Cuba’s ten universities and institutes, devoted to work in ecology. In the 1980’s, long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba was one of the few countries in the world with a negative deforestation rate. Now, over 15% of the country’s area is designated as some form of national wildlife, biosphere or forest reserve.

But it is the waters around Cuba that are the country’s real treasure. The diverse habitats of Cuba’s coastline and its mangrove archipelagos make it one of the most productive regions in all the Caribbean, a breeding ground for 750 species of fish and 3000 other marine organisms. And foremost among the champions of Cuba’s extraordinary underwater world is none other than Fidel, “The Beard”, himself. In his younger days Castro was such a fanatical scuba diver it was almost his downfall. Among other madcap schemes designed to overthrow the wily revolutionary, the CIA invented an exploding clam which, it was hoped, would blow him up at one of his favourite dive-sites. They even doctored a wet-suit with fungus spores and contaminated his regulator with tuberculosis bacilli. But, like the famous exploding cigars, the hallucinogenic milk-shakes and the powder that was supposed to make Fidel’s beard fall out, these aquatic assassination attempts also failed to meet their mark.

Now in his forty-fifth year as dictator, Castro has signed over twenty international conservation treaties, and has recently revealed plans to designate a staggering 25% of Cuban land and surrounding waters over the next 5-7 years as marine reserves. Doubtless this is in order to encourage the tourist dollar which is proving such a life-line to Cuba in the straitened circumstances of President Bush’s tightening blockade; but Cuba is also well-placed to become a leader in conservation and is winning itself important allies in the rest of the world for this reason.

It seems ironic that this last bastion of communism on the doorstep of America should be providing such a shining example of low-impact eco-tourism. But then Cuba is full of ironies and even out here, in this remote archipelago, they hit you with full force. The Florida Keys, for example, once looked just like this; now they are so heavily developed they can never hope to recover their original eco-system. Yet the depleted marine stocks of the Keys and all the coastal lagoons of the south-eastern United States are endlessly replenished by fish and other organisms carried there on the currents from Cuba.

Yet, again, the very same currents also carry desperate refugees on their rafts and inner tubes away from Castro’s regime. We are all aware, though no-one mentions it, that Koki and the rest of the crew on our boat are carefully vetted and observed to be sure that none of them will suddenly turn the engine full throttle and head for Miami.

Miraculously my fly lands a few feet in front of the lead bonefish’s nose and, more miraculously, he turns to pursue it. “Strip, strip”, urges Koki, “not so fast, not so fast”. I draw in the line with my free hand in little tempting jerks to imitate a swimming crab and my heart is in my mouth as I watch the bone-fish closing in. Suddenly it has taken my fly and gone like a torpedo and my reel is screaming and so is Koki, “let it run, let it run!” and he’s jumping around, lifting the line over the mangrove bushes, shouting “Reel in, reel in”, then “let it go, let it go”, and my arm is beginning to ache and for a moment I think I’ll never manage to land it, I’ll die of a heart-attack instead. But somehow, a life-time later, the fish is in my hands though I can hardly see it for tears of excitement and relief and emotion and the adrenaline pumping through my system, and Koki is taking out the hook and showing me how to hold it gently in the water to revive it and then, at last, to let it go. And for a fleeting moment we are bound together, capitalista and comunista, arms around each other, gazing across the shallow sand flats, at one with the jinking flutter of our bonefish returning to freedom.


Travel Information

Ciego de Avila is the nearest airport in Cuba (domestic flights daily from Havana) to the archipelago, 24kms from the Embarcadero de Jucaro where you pick up your transfer (3-4hr boat journey) to the Jardines de la Reina. This is best co-ordinated by your tour operator.

Air Cubana flies direct to Havana from Gatwick and is the cheapest option, but be prepared for delays, poor food, poor service, no in-flight entertainment and a tight squeeze.

Iberian Airlines or Air France are the more civilised options. Air France flies from Heathrow to Havana via Paris for around £650 return.

Travel to the Jardines de la Reina almost inevitably involves an overnight stay in Havana; and anyway, Havana is not to be missed. Consider extending your stay for a few nights to experience this extraordinary city.