Vinales...horses and carts and rolling cigars

Staying in casas is lovely and homely and relaxing, but you are often reminded that you are the family’s cash cow – often the primary source of their hard-currency income – and they are looking up-sell as many extras as possible. The actual cost of the accommodation is minor compared with what they can earn by cooking your meals - $8-12 for dinner and up to $5 for breakfast, as well as organising tours or activities through their mates.

Vinales - rust red tobacco fields shadowed by mountains

Some of the casa owners have been quite relaxed, and will only suggest things if you ask for them, but others won’t leave you alone. To get you to eat your meals there, which is far more expensive than eating at cafeterias, they will tell you that eating in town is bad for your stomach, poor quality, not fresh etc.

That said, friendly hosts have helped organise great activities such as private salsa lessons (where the teacher comes to the house) and a horse riding trip to a tobacco farm. Adam and I hadn’t yet tried salsa, nor had we tried any form of coupled dancing, so a private lesson was a great way to minimise embarrassment. The actual step is easy, but to do it properly is pretty involved. After nearly an hour and a half we had only mastered the three most basic moves.

Horse riding was fun, but a downside is that you can’t check out the condition of the horses and how they’re being treated in advance. Our casa owner in the picturesque town of Vinales, west of Havana, organised for a friend to take us over to his stables. When they walked out the first horse, I automatically assumed from the size of it that it was meant for me, but it was actually their biggest horse for Adam to ride. Its hip bones jut out quite a bit and it had caked mud behind its ears and down its neck.

Everyone has time to stop for a chat

My pony was in an even sorrier state – hardly taller than a Shetland, its hips were incredibly bony and its neck had hardly any muscles on it at all. For some reason most of the horses in Cuba are quite small and lean, but most we have seen looked to be in better condition than these ones.

We plodded past rust-red tobacco fields and vegetable plantations on dirt tracks that wound their way in and out of farms. The landscape was dotted with A-frame palm-thatched huts where tobacco leaves are dried for three months of the year. Huge emerald-green limestone mounds provided a stunning backdrop.

There are few cars in Vinales, besides a handful of puttering 50s model buicks and oldsmobiles. The main forms of transport here are horse and cart or fixed-speed bicycle. Our trail led us into a tobacco farm where a guy with a hilarious Tshirt that said “Single…wanna mingle?” made us mojitos made with orange and honey and showed us how to roll a cigar from freshly dried tobacco leaves.

Sealing cigars with honey

Tobacco producers are self-employed but the catch is they have to sell 90 per cent of their harvest to the government. The leaves are whizzed away for drying and processing with chemicals. The remaining 10 per cent are treated with a mixture of rum, sugar and honey (I’m beginning to understand where the idea for the mojito recipe came from) and then dried in the A-frame huts. Cigars are rolled when the leaves are still a touch moist so they don’t break.

The tobacco is bunched together and firmly rolled to prevent air pockets from forming. To seal the cigar, it is rolled in a single custom-shaped leaf and affixed with honey. The fresh-rolled cigars we were given were really strong, because apparently they contained a large percentage of the top - or crown - of the plant.

We were lucky enough to arrive in sleepy Vinales during its biggest annual event. Each town in Cuba has a week-long state-sanctioned party, or carnival, once a year. Not that Cubans are prevented from partying at other times, but on these occasions the entire main street of town is closed off and a variety of performers are on show on several different stages.

Fruit store

The carnival is like a Big Day Out-style festival only it’s free and the music is way better – from Cuban son to salsa, reggaeton and techno. The main street is lined with vendors selling cheap trinkets, lollies and snacks. There were even whole suckling pigs whose meat was pulled out and stuffed into baguettes.