The clamor of Havana fades as oxen join our car on the road. Eyes peer from doorways and we meet their gaze. The gaps between houses reveal lush fields of malanga, yucca and, of course, tobacco. This is cigar country. Tobacco grows in fields. Tobacco dries in thatched huts. Tobacco is transported in bushels on trucks. As the road steepens, we glimpse the verdant valley. We are entering a place of regeneration.
We have three days here, traveling—as Americans do—in brief stints onto which we pin year-long hopes for revelation and release. I walk onto our cabin porch to look around. Emerald corn grows elephant-eye-high from rust-red soil. Piglets nose the grass. Farmers call across the valley, their voices traveling farther than we can see. Viñales may just meet the challenge. A horse switches his tail, indifferent. My mind begins to uncoil.
We ride to the beach in a beat-up ’52 Chevy. From wood-block door handles to ragged carpet square floors, it is a ship of Theseus, tended for three generations. A vial of holy water dangles from the rearview and in front of the odometer, a mournful Jesus touches his red heart. Javier cranks the engine, filling the car with fumes and reggaeton. Along the dirt roads, we transgress worlds, this dome of American steel our vessel through Eden, wired for music and blessed by God.
A travel illness is overtaking me, absolving me of any itinerary. At the beach I rest in the grass, watching a ghost crab purge his burrow of sand, clawful by clawful. His Sisyphean pursuit is modern life, my life. But here I doze. When I awake, the crab has finished and nibbles a black leaf. My sneeze sends him dashing back into his hole.
Rain cascades in sheets as we drive back. Javier and my husband wipe water from the windshield, and when the road turns to mud, we pull over and roll up the windows with a shared crank. We wait out the storm, listening to rainfall add free-jazz percussion to the pulsing reggaeton.
The next day we journey on horseback, reaching further back in time. The horses heed only our guide, Miguel. Cabaaaaaaallo. His plaintive call stirs something ancient in me, and I imagine us nomads traversing the valley, knit together by nature.
We dismount at Omar’s farm, following the campesino through banana groves and vegetable plots to his fields of tabaco negro. This is his family’s land, his self-contained world. Omar has not traveled as far as Havana. He sees no need. He rolls a cigar and dips the tip in miel. We smoke at a picnic table among the tall grass and buzzing insects.
Back at the cabin, dizzy with fever, I crawl into bed. The boundaries between worlds feel as gossamer as the mosquito netting above. I drift between this century and the last, between English and Spanish. I belong to no one world. I am at the intersection of many.
“Last day in paradise,” I say into my plate of mangoes the next morning. An acid-green lizard puffs his electric coral throat.
“It’s too hot to be paradise,” my husband laughs, and stands to arrange a taxi.
On the drive out, we trail two flatbed trucks loaded with pine trees. “For the drying houses in the south,” our taxi driver explains, “where they grow tabaco rubio.” I bristle with sectarian indignation—taking their pines! I am tabaco negro for life. As the road stiffens to highway, my concerns resume spinning. But Miguel’s call lingers. Cabaaaaaaallo. I will hear it long after leaving Viñales.
Sarah Van Ness is a writer based in Los Angeles with a particular interest in sense of place. Her work has appeared in California Magazine.
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