Ok, ok, I know, it’s not one of the 50 states. It almost was, almost being a bit strong, but like the more successful annexation of the Republic of Texas, it was one of those bits of early American expansionism that seem so obvious if successful and so completely whacko if not. The annexation of Cuba is definitely in the completely whacko category, like those times we tried to invade Canada. The United States made offers twice to buy Cuba from Spain, once in 1848 under the Polk administration, and again in 1854 under Franklin Pierce. It wasn’t just a shopping spree either. There was a political motive for the Southern Democrats who supported the purchase. Adding Cuba would have added at least one and maybe more slave states and would have strengthened Southern interests–the preservation of slavery–in Congress.
We were not trying to buy Cuba in Support of the Cuban People.
After the 1898 Spanish-American War, Cuba was an American occupied protectorate, and for the first half of the 20th century the Cuban Constitution allowed the United States to intervene pretty much at will in Cuban affairs. Cubans resented U.S. authority, and that residual anger helped Castro turn the revolution anti-U.S.
The U.S. embargo against Cuba has now lasted 60+ years, with a brief period of better relations under President Obama. Currently there are 12 reasons a United States citizen can legally travel to Cuba, including journalism, religious missions, family, education, and support of the Cuban people. I went in support of the Cuban people. I fished a lot. Unlike President Polk I didn’t try to buy Cuba.
I did buy some cigars and a bottle of rum. I smoked some cigars. I drank some rum. Ok, I drank too much rum. We were in Cuba, and to support the Cuban people you have to buy some cigars and rum. Strictly speaking, you can’t bring cigars or rum home, so what can you do? You have to drink it and smoke ’em.
For most people, Cuban sport fishing brings to mind Ernest Hemingway’s drunken forays for marlin in the Gulf Stream. That’s deep sea fishing, well, that’s deep sea fishing and heavy drinking. That’s not what we did. We were on the Zapata Peninsula about two hours southwest of Havana, in the Ciénaga de Zapata National Park–the Shoe Swamp National Park. We stayed in a small private hotel, Casa Frank, in the village of Playa Larga on the edge of the Bay of Pigs.
Our rooms had air conditioning and were clean. There was no bedside table, or dresser, or water pressure, but the water was hot, and there was laundry service. The power went out every afternoon if it rained, and it rained most afternoons. Getting on the internet was hit or miss, mostly miss, but it wasn’t any worse than the camp where Kris and I had stayed in Alaska. There was no water pressure there, either, and the showers were alternately freezing and scalding, so all in all the Cuban showers were better.
Sometimes in Cuba I could get cellular service on my phone, but AT&T sent me the following:
AT&T Free Msg: Welcome to Cuba! Please note Cuba is not covered by your international roaming package. Your international rates in Cuba are: data $2.05/MB, talk $3.00/min, text $0.50/text msg sent, $1.30/photo or video msg sent. You may turn off data in your device Settings.
I use megabytes of data just breathing, so I turned off my cellular and would only turn it on once a day. I sent Kris and our kids some texts. I didn’t talk on the phone. I ignored any emails that smacked of business because I’m now retired and what the hell do they expect? I ignored my fantasy baseball team and they moved up from last place to 13th, but it’s ok. The Houston Grackles are back in last now that I’m actively managing.
We fished either in the saltwater flats at the bottom of the peninsula, skinny bits of water too shallow for anything but skiffs, or in a river, the Rio Hatiguanico, in a mangrove jungle deep in the park. There were 11 of us fly fishing the flats for bonefish, tarpon, and permit, and in the river for tarpon. Kris didn’t go. She said this sounded like a guy’s trip.
There was one non-angler in our group, the wife of one of the anglers, and she took great photos of birds. Birding and beaches are the other reasons tourists go to Playa Larga. There are 27 species of birds that live only in Cuba, and birders at our hotel told me that in the park they had seen 22 of the 27 species. That included the Cuban national bird, the tocororo. That’s how it sounds, tocororo, and when I heard it I asked if it was some kind of dove.
It’s not a dove. Its breast and head are the the colors of the Cuban flag.
Temminck, C.J. and Laugier, Meiffren, Baron de Chartrouse (1838), Nouveau Recueil de Planches Colorieés D’Oisseaux v. 3, Couroucou, plate 526, Paris, F.G. Levrault.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
The first day fishing, my guide, Julio, yelled at me. It was deserved, because I was yelling at the bonefish. He insisted they took offense. “Take the hook, dammit!” I yelled. They were offended and skittered away.
“Shut up!” Julio was getting to know me.
“I can’t shut up Julio, I’m a lawyer.”
That day I caught four bonefish. “It’s normal,” Julio told me. Julio also told me about all the fish that I was missing. The problem was that I couldn’t see the fish. For bonefish, the angler stands on the casting deck at the front of the boat and stares into the water, ready to cast. The guide stands on a platform at the back and poles the boat and stares into the water. When the guide sees a fish, he calls a clock direction and distance, 12 o’clock, 20 meters; 3 o’clock, five meters; 11 o’clock, 10 meters; whatever . . . ideally, the guide isn’t just messing with you and the angler looks in the right direction, spots the fish, and casts, hopefully leading the fish a bit and not putting the fly either behind it or on top of it’s head (or into the guide, which also happens).
Julio apparently saw fish a’plenty. I didn’t. Part of the problem is that the damned old fish don’t stand still. They don’t politely wait for me to see them. They don’t even just mosey. They move along with intent and determination. When everything works right though, the guide gives the position, the angler sees the fish, and the fish takes the fly.
I couldn’t see the fish. “It’s normal,” Julio kept telling me, right after he yelled “do you see it! Do you see it! Do you see it!” Of course I didn’t see it. Some of the fish I caught that first day I caught blind, just lucky enough to follow Julio’s directions.
Do you see that water? It’s about a foot deep and there are miles of it. Do you see that fish? That’s the problem. It’s hard to see those fish against that bottom. That’s how they’re designed. If God really loved my fishing he would put a bright orange stripe down each bonefish’s back
The second day something clicked and I could see the bonefish. I was seeing fish that the guide, José, hadn’t seen yet. I could make my casts. I could keep the fish on the hook. It was one of those days when I could do no wrong, and I thought that I was now almost certainly the greatest saltwater angler who ever cast a line. I caught fish after fish after fish. I could do no wrong.
The next day I fished for permit.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
I started getting ready to go to Cuba almost a year ago. I took Spanish lessons on Duolingo, and then took a Spanish course at Rice. I tied a bunch of flies. I had long discussions with Mike and Bob and Mark, my three friends who were also going, about what rods we were taking, and what reels, and what lines. We were going to Cuba, and if we didn’t bring it, we wouldn’t have it.
This gets a bit technical, but bear with me. There are going to be a lot of numbers, but they’re all about size variations. Just think of it as a discussion about buying a pair of pants. Look at the numbers as the equivalent of waist measurements and forge on through.
I first decided to take four rods, two 8-weights (in case one broke), a 10-weight, and an 11-weight. Then I started changing my mind, which over the course of the year’s preparations I did about 56 times. I finally settled on one 8-weight, two 10-weights, and an 11-weight, the 8 for bonefish, the 10s for river tarpon, permit, and barracuda, and the 11 for migratory tarpon.
Of course that’s not what I arrived with. I had switched out rods in my luggage so often I apparently lost track. I arrived with one 8 (the wrong one), one 10 (but no backup as planned), one 11, and one 12, a mix I had never in my wildest dreams imagined.
During the year the group of us would meet at lunch and discuss the trip, or we would meet with the Houston fly fishing writer Phil Shook (who’d made this trip last year). We’d discuss flies and leaders and fly lines and fly rods, and I would go home and tie a bunch more flies and imagine new variations of rods and lines to take. I spent hours searching the internet for a tropical 30-foot sink-tip line, and finally found one from AirFlo, a British fly line company. I never knew that there was such a need for tropical fly lines in British rivers.
The biggest controversy was tarpon leaders. Other kinds of leaders only set off fisticuffs, but tarpon leaders really whipped up the passions. Tarpon ain’t leader shy, and our outfitter, Jon Covich, said that the local guides recommended six feet or so of straight 60-pound fluorocarbon for tarpon leaders.
I know what you’re thinking, that’s easy. what’s the problem? Oh, you innocent. There is a well-known 302-page fly fishing book about tarpon obsession, Lords of the Fly (Get it? Get it?), about 30 pages of which are about interesting stuff like philandering and drug abuse and drinking and divorce, and 102 pages of which are about the far more engaging dramas of tarpon leaders. This is serious stuff.
We discussed them one night over after-dinner rum. You’d think with a bunch of guys on holiday we would have had salacious discussions about women and partying and whatnot, or at least with a bunch of old guys we would have discussed viagra and artificial joints, but no. We discussed tarpon leaders.
I posited that you had to have a break-off point somewhere in your rigging, and that meant tying a bit of 16-pound tippet between the 60-pound butt and the 60-pound bite guard. Otherwise the breaking point in your rig is going to be either your fly line (which I insisted had a 30-pound test and which cost somewheres north of $100 pesos, American), or your rod (which in my experience has the breaking strength of a slammed car door or a ceiling fan and costs upwards of $1000 pesos, American).
Ron disagreed. “Neil, you idiot,” see? He was getting to know me, “your fly line has a breaking strength of 180 pounds.”
Well, just like the Virgin I treasured up all these things and pondered them in my heart, and in that rare moment three days later when we had internet, did I call Kris or reset my fantasy baseball team lineup? No. I looked up the test strength of fly lines.
Of course I was wrong, but not completely wrong. The best information we could get was that the common breaking strength of freshwater fly lines is 30 pounds, and the common breaking strength of saltwater fly lines is 40 pounds. I was closer to right than Ron, not that I would gloat. Someone in the group rustled up the box for a Rio Leviathan billfish sink-tip, a big game saltwater line, and it promised a breaking strength greater than 50 pounds. I would have ever-so-diplomatically pointed this out to Ron, but the Castros were conducting a counter-revolutionary purge on his insides, and that evening he was otherwise disposed. After four days he finally felt well enough to fish. He had probably suffered enough, so I never mentioned it. And I never will.
Meanwhile I’ll stick with my bits of light leader tied between a butt section of 60 pounds and a bite guard of 60 pounds.
As a postscript, I’ll add that on the one day we fished the river, I used that sink-tip fly line I had ordered from AirFlo, with a leader with 25-pound tippet tied in as a breaking point. I got snagged on something on the river bottom and was going to break off the fly. I’m a pretty big guy, 190+, and reasonably strong, but I could not break that leader. I pulled. I yanked. I pulled and yanked when the boat was backing away. I wrapped the fly line around my reel and yanked and pulled, and I hollered which always helps. The leader won. I could not break 25-pound tippet. Next time I’m tying in some 5X trout leader as the class tippet. I can always break that.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Back to permit, which are a kind of pompano. My roommate for the trip, Ken, is permit-obsessed. I have never caught a permit. I’ve hooked two, in Belize, and lost them both. Ken says that over 20 years of fishing in the Florida Keys, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean he’s caught about 120 permit, but here’s the thing: six permit a year for even the most permit obsessed is a mighty fine batting average. For three days while Ron was dealing with the Castros the rest of us let Ken have his own boat. Fishing with a permit devotee ain’t exactly the very thing. Permit obsession is a lonely business for a reason.
Cuvier, M. le B.on and Valenciennes, M. (1828), Histoire Naturelle des Poissons v. 6, plate 209, Paris, F.G. Levrault. This may in fact be a common pompano and not a permit, or may be a mishmash of both. The yellow belly is all pompano, but the fins seem closer to permit. The 22-volume Histoire Naturelle des Poissons was the most ambitious treatment of fish of its time, and was the standard reference for ichthyologists for the nineteenth century, but it was compiled in Paris from specimens, and sometimes the results vary. It doesn’t matter. The plate is magnificent and for that reason alone it should be a permit.
There is a brilliant essay about permit obsession, the novelist Tom McGuane’s “The Longest Silence.” I wouldn’t have wanted to fish for permit with Tom McGuane, either.
I think that Ken said his biggest permit ever was about 40 pounds, but it’s not the weight of the thing or its length that matters, a permit is a permit, and if you’re permit obsessed every permit is a permit, though some permit may be more equal than others. Our companion Alan accidentally caught a small permit blind casting into a bit of muddy water. We all kidded him, Jeff quipped that Alan had caught a learner’s permit, and then it struck us that Alan had actually caught a permit, and we hadn’t. Then we all just sorta coveted our neighbor’s possessions. A permit is a permit.
Notwithstanding Ken’s over-the-top obsession, all saltwater fly fishers are just a little bit obsessed with permit. More than any other fish (except maybe Atlantic salmon), they’re our Holy Grail, our Great White Whale. Most folk wouldn’t know ’em from a dishwasher, and they should count their blessings. Permit are a curse.
I chased permit on this trip off and on for a couple of mornings, once with the guide José and once with Roberto. José is Cuba’s champion distance caster, which means that without much effort he can cast more than 100′, which is about 30′ further than I can cast when there are no fish around to mess up my game. José found me a school of permit, about 200 meters away–200 meters being a lot further than 100′, and a whole lot further than 70′. What we saw were wakes in the water and permit tails waving in the wakes. It is a stunning sight that for some people produces the exultation of the hunt, and for me produces waves of self-doubt.
José said that to get close I had to get out of the boat and wade. I was wearing socks but no shoes when he went over the gunnel, so sock-foot wading it was. After about ten miles he put me into position to cast, but all I could think about was that my passport in my pants pocket was getting soaked. I wrapped the fly line around my head. The permit moved off, laughing.
I moved my passport to my shirt pocket.
We waded another 15 miles and I got off one more cast. It wasn’t terrible, but the permit ignored my fly. They swam right over my damned fly, and sneered at it as they passed. I watched them, and I hated them. And then they went away, laughing.
Ken caught a permit this trip. One, and I’m pretty convinced that he even snuck out of our room at night to get in a little more permit fishing. He told me that I had brought the wrong permit flies–well of course I’d brought the wrong permit flies. I had barely had time to prepare for this trip. He gave me a flexo crab.
Ken was fishing with Roberto, who had only guided for a bit more than a month, but Ken said that Roberto spotted a school about 400 meters away–1200 feet. Ken finally saw the school at about 300 meters, and when they were in range he got off two casts that the permit ignored. Roberto told Ken to cast into the middle of the school, which Ken believed to be heresy, but he did it and he caught his permit.
It was Roberto’s first permit as a guide, and both Ken and Roberto kissed the fish before they let it go. I’d guess the fish didn’t care for being kissed any more than it cared for being caught, but I’m sure it was meant in kindness. The next day Ken gave Roberto a fly rod, and he said that he thought Roberto was going to cry.
Damn. I’m going to cry.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Roberto is 31 and new to guiding. His English is about as good as my Spanish, but his guide English is great. For other conversations we kept switching back and forth. At one point he told me that before guiding he had been a commercial fisherman, which paid too little and which kept him away from his family for three weeks at a time. Guiding was better because with tips it paid better. Now every day he could see his wife, his 3-year old son, and the “novio de mi esposa,” the boyfriend of his wife.
About the boyfriend, I was heartbroken for him. Later he told me that in Spanish the sharks we were seeing were tiburónes, and after working out that cousins were primos I tried to make a joke about abogados, tiburónes, and primos. When he didn’t laugh I asked him how to say joke, and he told me it was una broma, “like my line about the novio de mi esposa, but not that thing you tried to tell me about sharks being your cousins.” I felt a lot better, even if my joke was a failure.
With Roberto as guide on our last day, I shared the boat with Raymond, and at one point there were about 15 separate pods of permit spread across our flat. I was supposed to share a boat with Mike Green, but ended up fishing with Raymond. Raymond said that he had caught a permit once 20 years ago and he graciously let me stay on the casting deck, which was just as well because I’d otherwise have thrown him off the boat. I’m glad I was fishing with Raymond because Mike Green is bigger than me.
I could hear Roberto gasping while he worked to get me into position, but every time we started to get close the permit shied away. I got off one cast which the permit disdained. It was heartbreaking stuff, and I believe there would have been a movie in it, one of those stories of failure and redemption, if I could only have caught a permit.
No permit, no movie. I didn’t get to kiss the heroine.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Our drivers drove 20-year old Dodge vans with Russian diesel motors. We spent a lot of time in the taxis. It was two hours from Havana to our hotel in Playa Larga. To get to the river from Playa Larga took about an hour and a half, and then an hour and a half home. To get to the salt flats took about an hour each way. The drivers spoke very little English, so Alan and I practiced our Spanish a lot. Alan was more fluent than me, but both of us managed some. The drivers politely talked very slowly and with lots of explanatory hand gestures and repetitions. I’m still not sure though whether flamingos flock like chickens or taste like chickens.
I talked a lot to our driver Chino. I asked Chino about his family and he showed me a picture of his wife, a microbiologista, and his daughter. His daughter was stunningly pretty. I don’t mean just a normal sort of youthful pretty, I mean really, really beautiful, without any artifice or device. He told me she was 17, very smart, and would go the next year to University in Havana.
The next day our guide, Felipe, said that Chino was his neighbor. He told me that I had only seen his daughter’s face, and that all of her was beautiful, and that she was very very smart, and very good, and that all the young guides were in love with her. All I know is that proud papas everywhere are proud papas.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Mark Marmon had dragged me into this thing, but Mike Frankoff had put our trip together. He found the outfitter, rounded up the suspects, coerced Phil Shook into telling us in detail about his trip, and played a major leadership role in our collective agonizing over fly rods and flies. Mike and I both keep skiffs in Port O’Connor, and I got to know Mike pretty well over the past year.
I fished with Mike one day on the trip. Our guide was Felipe, who runs a free school to teach young Cubans how to guide. The guides work for the Cuban equivalent of Texas Parks and Wildlife, and get paid the standard $35 a week for their 60-hour weeks, but guides get tips, and the tips from fly fishers are a lifeline. Felipe trains all of the young guides in his school.
Mike made a Hail Mary cast to a bonefish that Felipe had spotted 65 feet away, and unlike what the rest of us mortals would have managed, Mike made the cast and the bonefish took the fly. Then the bonefish started messing with him. It wrapped Mike’s line around a mangrove. While I lay on the bow getting his line untangled from that mangrove the bonefish went through the roots of another, turned back and went underneath the boat, and then wrapped itself around a third mangrove. Mike went off the boat one direction, Felipe the other, and I stayed on the boat to laugh. Somebody had to do it.
They landed that fish. It was a good fish, too. And the boat didn’t drift away with me.
Late in the afternoon, Felipe poled us along a thick mangrove bank, and it was like visiting an aquarium. Along the roots there were snappers and a big brown and white striped grouper and tiny baitfish by the hundreds. Mike pulled out a big popper, and for once in my life I cast beautifully. We kept moving further and further from the mangroves, 55, 60, 65 feet, and I would lay every cast into the base of the trees.
Retrieving the popper, mangrove fish would slam it as if the defense of their homeland relied on their ferocity. I was catching small jacks and snappers, trash fish for most salt anglers, and they were magnificent. The day was perfect and full of joy. Did I go all the way to Cuba to catch jacks and snappers? You betcha. For that and for the cigars.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Last year the State Department reported that nearly 250,000 Cubans left Cuba for the United States, and that doesn’t include Cubans who left for other countries. It’s the largest out-migration from Cuba since the Revolution, fueled by a combination of deprivation, repression, and the internet. Many of the U.S.-bound Cubans are stuck at our Mexican border, not allowed into the U.S. Those 250,000 Cubans represent more than 2% of the total Cuban population, and it’s immigration of the young. The population left in Cuba is increasingly aging.
The combination of Covid travel restrictions and then-President Trump’s reinstatement of embargo restrictions have severely damaged tourism, which is now a mainstay of the Cuban economy. Since 2020, Cuba has suffered from electricity outages, food shortages, gas shortages, supply chain issues, and civil unrest. It’s hard to buy a bottle of aspirin, or a razor, or a sanitary napkin. To preserve his Senate Majority, President Biden hasn’t eased the Trump-imposed restrictions because it would offend New Jersey’s powerful Democratic senator, Robert Menendez. Meanwhile the average salary in Cuba is less than $150 a month, or less than $2000 a year. Government pension payments are about $10 a month.
Havana, especially Old Havana, is beautiful, with magnificent Colonial architecture, but there’s little money for restoration or preservation. A beautiful building may be half occupied and half collapsing. It’s easy to imagine that if relations were open there would be a massive influx of dollars and materials and machines to turn the wrecks into vacation condos, or hotels, or something, and that the economy would roar. The City has great bones.
There are hardly any stores, hardly even any tourist trinkets. I brought back no souvenirs. Now and then on our tour of Havana we’d pass a grocery store, or foreign luxury clothing stores in a tourist hotel, or a small tourist shop, but not many. The advertising is all for the Revolution.
Amnesty International reports that in 2022 food shortages and electricity outages were frequent. Hundreds of people were still in prison after 2021 protests. Human rights advocates are in prison for crimes like “insulting national symbols.” It’s almost as if they’d protested guns in the Tennessee legislature.
Cuba is a mess.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Cuba is beautiful. The people want you to be there, and the fishing is better than I am a fisherman, even with the Ernest Hemingway beard I grew for the trip.
We only spent one day on the river. The fishing was off, and apparently it was just as well. It was hard getting enough gas and diesel to send our group to two places.
I fished on the river with Alan, which was great because, after all, he’d caught a permit. With me, Alan also caught a tarpon, and he’s such a nice guy that I hardly even resented it. I hooked three but stupidly lost them all. From time to time our guide, Bryan, pronounced as Bree-on under Communism, had to remind us we were there to fish, not chat.
Bryan complimented us on our Spanish, which for me was really stretching it, and Alan mentioned the current flood of Cuban immigrants. Bryan told us that it was ok, that a lot of Americans were coming into Havana to work in the restaurants. He told us that with our Spanish the government would easily pay us $35 a month.
Skills.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Food was generally great during the trip, as long as you don’t count the lunches. They were supplied by the government hotel in Playa Larga, and consisted of meat and buns. The guides brought mustard and hot sauce, and sometimes fresh fruit and tomatoes and cucumbers. Otherwise it was meat and buns.
But other than the lunches, the food at the private restaurants was delicious. Mango and papaya with toast and eggs for breakfast, land crab cooked in tomato sauce, black bean and vegetable soups, gently stewed calimari and grilled spiny lobster, fresh snapper, steamed pumpkin, rice, cucumber . . . Why cucumber? I don’t know, but there was always cucumber. I ate everything. Well, everything but the lettuce. I didn’t want the Castro’s revenge.
On our last night the guides came to Casa Frank to join us for dinner. Ken gave a beautiful speech, and just like any good fisherman he expanded Roberto’s extraordinary spotting of his permit from 400 meters to 4000. I drank too much rum and tried to play guitar with the band, but I couldn’t remember anything to play. The guitarist tried to teach me La Bamba.
We had all brought stuff for the guides. Jeff had gone on a spree at Costco, Mark at Academy Sporting Goods. I think Alan had brought a spare suitcase full of stuff, and left the suitcase. Everybody brought something, and there were piles of stuff. Fishing pants, fishing shirts, coloring books and crayons and soccer balls, aspirin and Astros hats. . . Our friends needed everything. I was angry at myself for not bringing more, spare fishing pliers, spare rods and reels, socks and shirts and sun gloves. Spare watches. Pepto-bismol. Spare anything. They need everything and I could have done so much more.
They were so gracious and kind to us. They are so witty. They’re good people, Cubans, and good people to support. I would go to Cuba again in support of the Cuban people. If governments got out of the way and left it to people who love the salt flats, we’d all be fine.
