A curious kind of paradise

Beyond the mountains whence Castro came, lie a silver sea and a comradely Cuban resort.

The source of the smoke turned out to be a burning brake-drum. Finding itself with nothing much to stop - the nearside rear wheel having just overtaken the 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air to which it had previously been attached - the component promptly self-combusted.

The tyre sped on past the ancient hulk. This comprised no great feat of velocity, since the ancient hulk of Detroit detritus was incapable of exceeding 30mph even with a full complement of wheels. The speedometer would have confirmed this, had it not itself stopped functioning at some time in the early Seventies.

In the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, Carlos had jabbed at the brake pedal a little too zealously. Once I had retrieved the errant wheel from the ditch where it came to rest, we spent a sweaty hour re-attaching it to the axle and accepting the condolences of the occasional passing vehicle.

Carlos and I had teamed up three hours earlier, in the middle of the drowsiest of sleepy towns, Manzanillo. We had met in the usual manner for Westerners wishing to travel around Cuba these days - a combination of hitch-hiking and robust financial negotiation.

Bus and train timetables aren't worth the paper they're not written on. What once passed as Cuba's public transport system has been crushed by a pecuniary pincer movement: America's economic embargo, and the collapse of Communism (which removed Moscow's handy pounds 5 billion annual subsidy). Instead, I had walked from the somnolent solitude of Manzanillo's main square along Calle Marti, dodging the hobbling horses and carts that serve as short-haul transport, and hailing anything motorised that moved.

Not much was moving that afternoon, which meant all the more time to soak up the comfortable stupor of a Cuban provincial town. The experience is like stepping into an early Cezanne painting: duck-egg blue cuddles up against baby pink, while delicate green gives birth to fragile lavender. Maybe Manzanillo provided the inspirational palette for corporate colours, too, where Cafe Rouge gold merges with Pepsi blue to generate Vidal Sassoon green.

My target was a bay on the southern shore of Cuba, 60 miles away on the far side of the mountain range; a pounds 15 journey by the time Carlos had guided the Chevy to a stationary shambles by the side of the street and we had concluded our negotiations. This is about five times the going rate for a local, and therefore a reasonable price for a Westerner to pay to reach a curious kind of paradise.

Within two short hours, we were still in Manzanillo. Carlos had not been planning to make the drive, so before setting off we were obliged to pick up his wife from the hospital at which she works; take her along to their daughters' school; pick up two young girls, who immediately burst into fits of giggles at a gangling gringo; return to the family home, a single- storey affair on the edge of town whose two other residents squeaked and squawked respectively; and, while sipping strong, sweet coffee, discuss when the family pig and chicken would be transformed from pets to dinner.

When we finally broke free of the city limits, miscellaneous Cubans enjoyed free rides along the way - a tiny repayment for the generosity shown by the companeros. Amid the wreckage of the Cuban economy, Western visitors are absurdly wealthy. But the island is full of iniquities, such as the Cuban motorists' unending, unequal battle against built-in obsolescence.

By the time Carlos had re-attached the wheel, the full moon was already rising over the one-horsepower port of Media Luna.

We turned inland through the Sierra Maestra. This entity, which sounds worryingly like a car jointly produced by Ford and British Leyland, turns out to be Cuba's mightiest mountain range. It was where the revolution began, when Fidel Castro and Che Guevara landed from Mexico and began a bitter two-year campaign for the hearts and minds of an oppressed people, while facing the guns of the dictator General Fulgencio Batista.

We stuttered on through Granma province. If that name strikes you as unusually similar to the English term of endearment for "grandmother", then that's because it is. You are close to the very core of the revolution, the thankless point on the coast where a leaky cabin cruiser that happened to be called Granma landed on 2 December 1956.

"It wasn't a disembarkation," Che Guevara later recalled. "It was a shipwreck". The 82 revolutionaries lost almost all their equipment, and after several setbacks only 13 of them reached Pico Turquino, the highest point in Cuba. Politically, it was all downhill from there.

Carlos and I were taking a rather easier track, loping unsteadily through the brooding, craggy hills that, in the moonlight, looked the closest Cuba could get to the "little Switzerlands" curiously beloved of other Latin American countries. One final swerve through a pass led us down to the calm Caribbean coast. A glittering sea rewarded the juddering slog of the journey.

After a trip like that, what you really need is a place to stay where the air-conditioning chills you as delightfully as the unlimited beer, where a handsome dinner awaits on the table, and where you just know that morning will bring you a perfect horseshoe bay fringed by regulation palms and washed gently by water at what seems a fair approximation to body temperature.

All of which you will find at the Marea del Portillo hotel (no relation to any British politician). The comradely price of pounds 25 per person per night includes three generous meals and enough rum to fuel a Chevrolet all the way back to Manzanillo. Normally it is the preserve of vacationing Canadians, but when rooms are available passers-by are welcome.

Not everything was perfect, of course, in this revolutionary paradise: I was lulled to sleep not by the lapping Caribbean but by the chug of the emergency generator, and by morning even this had expired.

Along the coast, a road sign cautions "Capitalism is humiliating and degrading to human dignity". Perhaps, Fidel, but if it earns me enough to get back to the glorious shambles of Manzanillo to meet Carlos and Co, I think I'll cope.

Simon Calder reports from Cuba for `The Travel Show' on BBC 2 at 8pm on Thursday 28 January.

He paid pounds 485 for a London-Paris-Havana return flight, on British Airways and AOM, and pounds 25 per night to stay at the all-inclusive Hotel Marea del Portillo (00 53 23 59 40 03).