Enjoying Cuba's outdoors as witnessed by the Canadian Che Guevara volunteer work brigades, 2023 and 2024.
All the places shown in this video were visited on weekends at a time when no other visible foreigners happened to be around. Thus all other people in this video/slide show are Cubans enjoying their great outdoors.
The first place, the Las Terrazas complex in the Artemisa province (neighbouring Havana), is quite a unique place. It is a biosphere preserve with a lived-in community of about 1000 people who are mostly employed in caring about the preserve and its tourist facilities. Beside that some inhabitants are artists (we visited an artist studio producing postcards on recycled paper made directly on-site). There is "Casa Polo" - the house in which popular guitarist Polo Montañez used to live, now turned into his museum. Ruins of a large 19th century French-owned farm (built by French latifundists who fled from Haiti after her black slave revolution) are visible throughout the preserve.
Las Terrazas has been a major project started in 1974 with the help of Soviet bulldozers and other technical means from the then socialist Eastern Europe. It was on a scale that Cuba could not afford at this moment due to the lack of fuel and the US blockade. Las Terrazas project involved lots of earth moving to create large terraces and man-made lakes that maintain enough water to keep the small river with swimming holes flowing through the area supplied with enough water all year round. Those swimming holes are favourite summer destination of Havana inhabitants. It was also a major reforestation projects: planting those artificial terraces with new trees DOUBLED the total number of trees in all Cuba! Before Columbus arrived, all Cuba was covered with dense forests, and it was possible to walk the length of the Island without seeing the sun. After the colonization most of the original forests were cut down, at first mainly for ship building, later to make space for various plantations. Las Terrazas managed to recreate a small bit of the original forest beauty.
E.g. tourism4sdgs.org/initiatives/las-terrazas-complex/ ; www.tripcuba.org/las-terrazas-artemisa
Polo Montañez music: e.g. ua-cam.com/video/xd1IiTVtn5c/v-deo.html
All the other places touched up here (except for Varadero) are in the picturesque western-most province of Piñar del Rio, which seems to be a great area for activities like hiking, cycling, cave exploration.
The El Mirador segment starts with the views along the bus drive from the hotel in the city of Piñar del Rio to the viewpoint.
Los Malagones is a memorial to the peasant militia of the early post-revolutionary period that will be the subject of another video. In the hills around it there is an cave system (note a door-fitted entrance to it on the slope in two of the slides) that can be explored with the help of guides/equipment available at the outskirts of the memorial.
Las Canas beach is near "Parque Nacional Cayos San Felipe" (among others, a site of important ecological projects Mi Costa and Tarea Vida; our visit to this Park will be presented in another video) in the "La Coloma" community, heavily affected by the October 2022 hurricane Ian. One can see seaside houses destroyed by Ian in this segment of the video.
We helped with beach clean-up, then enjoyed beach-combing/swimming in the sea alongside some local people. It is definitely not a sandy touristy beach. At the edge of that undeveloped beach-side parking area there was an interesting sight - it looked like a picnic/meetup of owners of small two-wheeled horse-driven carts that are often used in rural Cuba for personal transportation in their era of fuel scarcity. Many seem to enjoy that kind of low-ecological-footprint transportation.
Tarea Vida: ua-cam.com/video/APN6N45Q6iU/v-deo.html
In Varadero (Matanzas province) I stayed two more days after the rest of the group departed. In a large all-inclusive hotel complex catering mainly to the Canadian and Russian tourists. It was Sunday and Monday, apparently between major tour groups as the hotel was populated only by a few dozen Cuban tourists (and me) on those two days. Thus there were no other foreign tourists present at that late-night poolside show at the very end of this video. Also in that interestingly looking, mostly subterranean, Centro Comercial, over a kilometre away, there were overwhelmingly Cubans, as well as most people on the beach.
Time codes:
0:00 Las Terrazas
2:32 El Mirador viewpoint
3:31 Caves near Los Malagones
3:43 Mural of Prehistory
4:53 Indian Cave
5:43 Los Jazmines viewpoint
6:03 Hilltop farm and restaurant
6:18 Las Canas beach
7:04 Varadero