by On New Year’s Day 2022, I baptized my newborn son in the sapphire sea off Varadero beach. It was an attempt to prove to his grandmother a very protected Cuba that 25 degrees is not very cold for the sea water.
It was a beautiful morning, blue and gold clear and layered. Varadero is often serene in winter. Consistently voted among the best beaches in the world by Tripadvisor users, reaching number two in 2019. For 12 miles, the white sands of the skewering peninsula follow the Florida Straits, gently washed by the Gulf Stream, the warming system of the North Atlantic.
British tourists have been able to fly directly to Varadero since the nineties, first with Thomas Cook and First Choice, and later with Tui. But Tui’s twice-weekly Dreamliner from Manchester to Varadero will stop flying in April. It will be the last direct flight from Britain to Cuba, despite being hailed by The Telegraph as the biggest island in the Caribbean just over a year ago.
The love of Varadero by foreigners living in Havana is remarkable. Sadly, it took me years to visit because I snobbishly decided it wasn’t “the real Cuba”. Johnny Considine, who runs high-end Private Cuba Travel, agrees. “I think anyone who lives in Cuba understands it,” he says. “The town is brilliant.”
‘It’s still a Cuban community’
The town of Varadero is on the country side of the peninsula, close to the Kawama channel that separates the peninsula from the rest of Cuba. A 69 street three-way ladder going north. Houses slung low in faded pastels roasted in the sun, interiors shaded by wooden slats, terraces cluttered with rocking chairs.
Cuba’s famous old cars ply the routes, mints offering tours, belching jalopies plying bus routes. Horses pull carts tirelessly. The lines of houses are occasionally broken by weather-beaten hotels rising above the tongue, but it is still a Cuban community.
Travel further up the peninsula, on the highway to the edges of the mangroves on the east side, and a large selection of hotels can be seen. They were built from the nineties on by the regimes of Fidel and then Raul Castro as fundraising projects after the fall of the Soviet Union which, until then, supported Cuba. Spanish and Canadian companies such as Melia, Iberostar and Blue Diamond moved in as operators. For a while Club Med came, but pulled out again in 2003. Cuba is not an easy place to do business.
There is some amazing nature hidden among areas that are not quite denuded. There is a huge cave, batty and stalactitey, where visitors can dive. There are cays that require a catamaran trip. On the south coast, there are the Zapata swamps, home to small humps. And, of course, there is fabulously sultry Havana, 90 miles to the west.
The evolution of a holiday town
The name Varadero means dry dock, which is how the Spanish used it after their arrival in 1492. The original residents can still be seen in the drawings in the caves. It became a resort in the 1880s when 10 families from the nearby town of Cardenas built houses on the dunes.
Renée Méndez Capote wrote about the wonder of the early days in her Memoirs of a Cuban Girl Who Was Born First. “It was a quiet and desolate world inhabited only by tiny people: little white crabs and funny shells … my childhood caught in baskets of fried and eaten silver sardines, heads and all.” It is still possible to buy fish from the fishermen on the beach.
Virgina Morales has one of the most beautiful houses, Casa Menocal. On two adjoining plots facing the sea the town has stone slab roofs, a hardwood interior, Creole tiles and surrounding gardens. It is often believed to have been built by Mario García Menocal, president of Cuba since the beginning of the 20th century, but in fact it was the project of his cousin, Virgina’s grandfather.
“The population of Varadero was very slow,” she says. “The access routes were by train to Matanzas or Cárdenas and then by road to Varadero. The Via Blanca [the highway along the island’s north coast] Construction began in 1954 and ended in 1960 when the Bacunayagua bridge was built, so access to Varadero from Havana was long and tedious.
This means that Havana does not have an elegant history on the beach, despite efforts to create one. There is a photograph of the mobster on the wall at the Casa de Al Capone, but there is little evidence that he ever lived there.
The best building on the peninsula is Xanadu, on a cliff above the beach halfway up the spit. It was the winter home of French American industrialist Irénée du Pont, built in 1927, three stories with a mirador on top. It is now a strange, uncomfortable but wonderful hotel.
The estate ran to 180 hectares, with five miles of beach. Those lands are now the Varadero golf course. Thor-Erling Sjøvold, husband of a senior diplomat in Havana, is now an expert on his 18 holes, no wonder.
“It’s easy and fun to play,” he says. “The problem is, like most things in Cuba, you don’t know what to expect. Sometimes it is well maintained, and in other cases the entity is a jungle.”
So Varadero was exclusive. A friend, Magda Cruz, is old enough to remember the years before Castro’s revolution in 1959. “I don’t remember any of my family visiting Varadero,” she says. “It was not for the poor.”
The revolution changed that. Good socialites were offered holidays. The Park of 8,000 Cubicles was created so that people could store their things. Festivals were inaugurated. Then came the Soviet disaster and the eyes of the state saw profit looking for organized foreign tourism.
Fall of European trade
Varadero was doing well until the pandemic. In 2017, a record 1.7 million visitors came through the resort’s Juan Gualberto Gómez International Airport, the majority of whom were Canadians escaping their brutal winter. Someone who has seen the current figures says the numbers are still good, if nothing on the scale of 2017.
The better resorts – those that can import food without relying on the cash-strapped Cuban government – are operating at good occupancy levels. There are other signs of hope. A huge new Indonesian-owned hotel, the Grand Aston, is set to open at the resort’s entrance. Sources say that the airport is soon to receive a major investment from Spain.
Johnny Considine says many of his well-heeled clients still have a lot to love. He sends clients to Mystique Casa Perla, a small modern Royalton hotel on the edge of town that is à la carte rather than all-inclusive, and beautiful as it is.
Tui refuses to give its reasons for stopping its Manchester flights, saying only: “We constantly review our flights and our holiday offer according to demand.” But, says Considine, many tour operators in Europe are now refusing to sell Cuba.
This is the result of one of Donald Trump’s last acts as president. He placed Cuba on the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Now no one visiting Cuba can travel to the US on an ESTA visa waiver, much to the chagrin of visitors who find out too late. “For operators, Cuba is now a low volume/high complaint destination,” says one European businessman.
Varadero still lags behind its Caribbean rivals in service and food. This did not help the hotels that lost their staff due to Cubans fleeing the island’s economic crisis. “In the 1990s, people said that in twenty years Varadero would be like Cancún,” says the businessman. “But that date keeps moving further away.”
My father-in-law puts this another way when I ask how Varadero has changed since he came there on his honeymoon in 1985. He makes a Cuban joke about the caught-in-aspic nature of his country.
“How did it change?” He says. “Nothing has changed.”
