In this story there are a number of obvious points at which the situation might have been avoided — or, at the very least, improved upon — had any of us thought twice about what we were doing. All I can say is: we were caught up in the moment, and we learned a number of valuable lessons.
Sometime in early February — the same weekend, I believe, as I was careening around Las Terrazas on a moped — eight of the other students had rented cars and driven to a remote beach, where they spent a few nights sleeping under the stars, catching fish, and drinking tremendous amounts of rum. Faced with our impending return to the States, they decided to recreate the weekend at a different beach. It ended up that they had a few seats extra for the trip, and they invited me along. I went.
We set off early Friday morning, driving east. Our general plan was to keep inland through Santa Clara, and then cut up to the northern coast of the island near Remedios. We had been told that at Cayo Santa Maria there was a fabulous, beautiful beach, perfect for what we were looking for.
There were seven of us in the van and five in the smaller car; I was in the van. It was a hot day and the van’s air conditioner was broken, so the guys shucked their shirts not long into the trip. We made our way down the autopista, hot but happy, the windows rolled down and sunglasses on. In Santa Clara, the only one of us who hadn’t yet visited the Ché memorial asked if we could stop, and we did.
The eleven of us who had already visited the Ché memorial were, truth be told, a little bored; there’s only so many times you can visit a giant statue of Ché in a two month period without getting the impression that you’ve seen all there really is to see. I’m not going to say anything more about the stop than this: if you really want to insult a bunch of people at once, arrive en masse, shirtless and rambunctious, at their most beloved national monument — and then act really uninterested. It irks people.
We all piled back in our cars and drove to Remedios, and from kept going north until we came to a small checkpoint. A guard examined our passports, then waved us through, and we drove across the land-bridge, through miles and miles of mangrove swamp, to Cayo Santa Maria.
Remember that bit about the mangroves.
Cayo Santa Maria was, as promised, incredibly beautiful. But for some Russian tourists, we were the only people there, and when we tried to talk to the Russians they got very anxious and then left. We didn’t quite know what to make of that, but we were happy to have the beach to ourselves. We went swimming and floated out on the waves.
There was a small hut not far from where we were, and after a few minutes an old man came out of it and made his way toward us. He introduced himself as the caretaker of the beach, and asked how long we were planning on staying.
Overnight, we answered.
The old man’s eyebrows were completely white and had a surprising range of motion; when he raised them they almost seemed in danger of disappearing into his hairline. “All night?” he asked, his tone incredulous.
“Yeah,” one of us said. “We’re going to camp out on the beach.”
The conversation was interrupted for a moment while we explained the concept of “camping” to the old man. Camping is not a big thing in Cuba. For one thing, it’s almost always warm enough to sleep outside, so they don’t have any of the equipment – no tents or sleeping bags or kerosene stoves. But more importantly, it’s still seen as a bit of a privilege to have a place to sleep indoors at all; the concept of voluntarily sleeping outside, on the ground, is one that simply never crosses most Cuban’s minds.
The old man nodded along gravely along with our explanation until we got to the bit about a campfire, when he sucked in a breath and shook his head. He explained that people seeking to leave the island sometimes lit signal-fires on the beach, and if the Coast Guard should happen by and see our fire, they might assume people were trying to escape and act accordingly.
It seems remarkable to me now that this didn’t convince us to abandon our plan, but we persisted, and he finally agreed to let us have our campfire in small clearing, set twenty-feet or so back from the beach. We set about gathering firewood and, just before dusk, sat down to a lovely dinner of hot-dogs and rum around a crackling campfire. We were young, drunk, on the beach and on an adventure, and we were happy.
Then the sun went down, and from the mangrove swamps behind us rose approximately twenty-seven million mosquitoes. And they moved, as one, toward blood.
Now, I have a fair amount of experience with mosquitoes, and while I’ve never been particularly troubled by them, I’m also not among those who claims to be immune to their bites. They’ve always been a minor nuisance, nothing more and nothing less, and I while I expected we would encounter them that night on the beach, I didn’t expect to be much troubled by them.
But these mosquitoes were unlike any I have ever seen.
To begin with, they were huge, fully three times larger than any normal mosquit. They had long, spindly legs and a proboscis like a hypodermic needle. They were aggressive and fearless and they came in unimaginable numbers.
Ten minutes after the sun had gone down we all had scores of bites. We slathered on extra-strength mosquito repellent, but it had no apparent effect; if anything, it seemed to act as a kind of perfume, and attracted them in greater numbers. We threw brush on the fire and stood, coughing, in the smoke, but they kept coming. I was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved tee, and they bit at every exposed bit of skin, and even stuck their suckers through the thin fabric of my shirt.
Miserable and drunk, we huddled in the dark around our feeble campfire.
The final straw for me came when the old man came to check on us. It had been about two hours since the sun went down. He came suddenly out of the woods, a bulky mask over his face and a fogger in his hand, like some kind of mad, beekeeping troll, and it wasn’t until he came close to the fire that we recognized him at all. His expression behind the mask was absolutely unreadable, and to this day I cannot understand why he hadn’t warned us about the mosquitoes earlier. Had he assumed that we already knew? Was he getting back at America in general for the embargo? Or was he simply some kind of a sadist?
In any case, when he turned to walk back to his hut I followed, along with Katie and Sam. We retreated to the car, leaving the others to fend for themselves around the campfire.
We got in, shut the doors, and spent a few moments slapping at the mosquitoes that had accompanied us inside. When they were mostly dead we arranged ourselves in the van — Katie got the driver’s seat; Sam spread out across the middle row of seats; and I took the back row. It was uncomfortable but mercifully mosquito-free, and we all breathed a sigh of relief, and though it was only perhaps seven-thirty, we tried to get to sleep.
It was, as I said, a hot day, and in Cuba the nights don’t necessarily bring the temperature down. After a couple of hours the heat became unbearable.
“Guys,” said Katie. “Do you think it’s safe to open the windows? Just a little?”
Her tone was one usually employed only by soldiers pinned down under heavy fire, or those who have recently lived through a particularly violent and lengthy earthquake.
“I suppose so,” I said. “If they start coming in we can always close them again, quickly.”
We cracked the windows, and a slight, soothing breeze stole into the van. A few mosquitoes came with it, but not as many as we feared. It was a reasonable compromise, and I fell back into an uneasy, fitful sleep.
I awoke shortly before dawn to Katie’s voice:
“Oh my god, they’re everywhere! They’re everywhere!”
Almost as soon as I processed her words I realized she was right: they were everywhere. I could feel them on me, clustering around patches of exposed skin. At my ankles, in the narrow space between the cuffs of my jeans and my socks. On my hands, between every finger, and inside the arms of my shirt. And most disturbingly I felt them crawling and biting all around my face and neck, in the hollow beneath my jaw line and above my eyebrows and in my ears.
I sat up and a cloud of mosquitoes rose off me, flew crazily for a moment, and then settled again. I slapped at myself again and again, and the air was literally thick with mosquitoes. In the dim light I saw Katie and Sam doing the same, twisting in their seats.
“Katie!” said Sam. “Roll down all the windows and drive around really fast! Maybe we can get them out that way.”
Katie started the van and rolled down the windows. Impossibly, the van filled with even more mosquitoes; I had a tough time seeing the other two in the front of the car. Katie gunned the engine and the wheels spun for traction on the dirt road, and then jerked into motion. Off we went, bouncing crazily down the rutted land-bridge, the three of us screaming in terror and disgust.
The van hit a particularly large pothole and was (I swear) airborne for a brief moment. Then we landed with a bone-jarring thud and I suddenly had an image of the axle falling right out the bottom of the van, and of us stranded on what I had come to think of as Mosquito Island.
“Katie!” I screamed. “We’ve got to stop!”
She slammed on the brakes and, after a nauseating swerve, we came to a halt. She quickly rolled the windows up.
There were still mosquitoes in the car, but not the number that there had been, and we took a couple minutes to kill as many of them as we could. Then, shell-shocked and silent, we drove in the growing light back to the beach.
We parked the car, and even with the windows closed we weren’t safe. Before encountering these mosquitoes I hadn’t before believed any creature on Earth to have supernatural powers, but these mosquitoes seemed almost to have a sixth sense for blood. They threw themselves against the windows of the van and, when that didn’t work, they set to work on the thin rubber strip between the window and the car frame. Some even made it through, and the bottom strip of the window soon became smeared with mosquito guts as I killed the ones that made it in, over and over and over.
Finally, the sun rose above the ocean, and like the vampires they were the mosquitoes fled from the light, and the beach was beautiful and calm once again.
A few minutes later some of our friends stumbled, bleary-eyed and blemished, from inside the mangroves. They came over and got into the car, and it was a moment before any of them could speak. Then, one of the girls opened her mouth.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she said.
It was at this point that our party split into two opposing factions. Just over half of us wanted to leave immediately, and put as much distance between ourselves and Mosquito Island as humanly possible. The others wanted to stay, splash around at the beach all day, and then find someplace in Remedios to stay, in the evening.
In the end, the differences were irreconcilable, and seven of us left in the van just after nine o’clock in the morning.
We didn’t have any clear idea where we were going. Returning to Havana midday on Saturday was akin to admitting defeat. There was little to the east within driving distance save farms. So we turned the car toward Santa Clara and figured, if nothing else, that we could see the Ché memorial again.
As we were coming into Santa Clara we passed a turnoff for Cienfuegos. “Man,” I said out loud. “Cienfuegos was really nice. We should go back there.”
It wasn’t a serious idea, but the more it got batted around the car, the more sense it made. So in the end we made for Cienfuegos, and we pulled into town in the mid-afternoon, tired and swollen and very much looking for a place to sleep.
I was the only one present who had been to Cienfuegos, so I guided us through the center of town to the residential district where I had stayed before. We parked and went into the only particular I remembered how to get to – the one that, the last time I had been there, had been infested with geckos.
We all trooped inside and waited while a small girl fetched her mother, a very nice woman who I had met previously. She came down the stairs and, when she saw us, put a hand to her mouth.
“Madre de Dios,” she said. “What happened to you?”
We looked at each other and saw what she was talking about. The drive had given the bites time to swell, and we now each had clusters of bites wherever our skin had been exposed. Often the bites had fused together to form a continuous, puffy mass. We looked like outpatients from a scabies clinic. She must have thought we were carrying some kind of plague.
We explained about the camping and the mosquitoes, and at the end of it she looked a little more amused and a little less sympathetic. She was booked up, but when we mentioned that we wanted three of the nicest casas she knew of, she hurried off to the phone and within twenty minutes had secured lodging for all seven of us.
We went our separate ways. I took a long shower and then a long nap. That evening we met up and ate a huge dinner, and then walked down to La Punta and had a mojito in the gazebo and listened to the waves lap gently at the shore. Nowhere was there a mosquito to be seen. The next morning we slept late, breakfasted well, drove into the city center and shopped for a time, and then drove back to Havana.
It was the most unspeakably luxurious twenty-four hours I have ever experienced, made all the better coming, as it did, after one of the worst nights of my life. When I die, I want to go to Cienfuegos.