The clapped-out Moskvich is blaring Charanga Forever, the hottest salsa band in Cuba. Its owner, Yasser, is being paid to drive us to the Sierra Maestra. The blacked-out windows are de rigueur to hide his illegal cargo – the yuma (foreigner, me) and her Cuban husband. We are cutting past the Bay of Nipe, shooting at breakneck speed down straight roads banked by thigh-high sugar cane, the Sierra Cristal hovering on the horizon, when Yasser mentions that Fidel Castro's childhood farm is five kilometres away. I plead with him to make a detour.
Twenty minutes later, past a tiny hamlet called Birán, we arrive at a remote farm overlooked by mountains, set in sun-kissed meadows. There is no one there save a couple of guards who send for a guide for us. We have chanced upon an extraordinary place: the estate where the nine Castro siblings spent their halcyon childhood.
I had no idea Fidel's father was so successful. An immigrant from Spain, Angel Castro married Lina, a Cuban girl 28 years his junior, and bought a farm, which he kept expanding (Fidel ultimately confiscated land from his father: no special treatment there). Angel built a general store, telegraph room, school, hotel and mini cockfighting stadium.
You can visit the house Fidel's parents lived in until their death. Lina's bedroom is dotted with religious statues, her glass-top dresser decorated with clippings of her son in the jungle. There is Angel's old wardrobe with his clothes hanging there, and all the family bric-a-brac. In a country of closed doors, which knows about as much about museum curating as it does about hedge fund management, this is most compelling – perhaps because it was rescued from dilapidation and passionately restored in 1979 by Celia Sánchez, Fidel's friend and rumoured lover, rather than by a bunch of Communist party officials with a lot of agenda and little insight.
I don't know why I should be surprised that austere Fidel spent his formative years here, so far from the bright lights of Havana. Like many Cuban anti-imperialists, including those who fought the Spanish, he was brought up wealthy, amid great poverty, in the east. In Oriente, peasant insurrection and revolutionary passions were always easily ignited.
Today Oriente remains the Cuba of your wildest imagination, a world away from beach loungers, cuba libre cocktails and musicians singing Guantanamera on auto-pilot. It has dense jungles, hidden rivers and unvisited coasts. The weather is steamier and more temperamental; the roads peter out into tracks. The people are darker, their mores and beliefs more African, their manners lackadaisical and Caribbean.
If we feel we've seen a new side to Fidel here, where we are headed is more fearfully revolutionary: the Sierra Maestra, the tallest mountains in Cuba, where the rebels hid while they plotted their revolution (see the Stephen Soderburgh biopic, Che: Part One, for details). Santo Domingo in the Sierra Maestra is the jumping-off point for La Comandancia, Castro's headquarters. We arrive at dusk, aware that it is by the grace of God that Yasser's panting Moskvich made it up these gradients.
Villa Santo Domingo is a collection of cabanas wedged into the side of the road next to a river in the middle of nowhere, overlooked by towering peaks. We cross the river to find a village of wooden shacks and tethered horses, where they seem to husband farmyard animals in miniature: chicks, piglets and kid goats, even puppies. On the path there are two boulders, daubed with one word each – "Fidel" and "Raúl". Not the usual government-ordered murals, just villagers who still have revolutionary fervour in their breasts. We return to the villa to find them spit-roasting a pig.
The next morning we awake to discover that the downside to this apparent idyll is a complete lack of organisation. The only way to get up to the mountain is by taxi. There is a visitor centre, but you are supposed to transport your guide. There are no taxis available till midday.
In typical Cuban style, the guides in the centre are busy: watching a Rambo-style film. In typical Cuban style, our appointed guide is thoroughly miserable to be coming up the mountain with us (when our taxi finally arrives) and doesn't bother hiding it. And in typical Cuban style, he turns out to be charming and amusing, and offers an insight into the failings of the local farming economy.
When Castro had his headquarters here, he chose it for its virgin jungle, obscurity and austerity. A sympathetic local population protected the rebels. We stop at the house of a family who delivered early warning signs of outsiders. Their impossibly isolated home has turkeys, peacocks, chickens and a panoramic view from a terrace with rocking chairs. We eat juicy oranges sliced with a sabre.
Arriving at La Comandancia we see that the dwellings – hospital, radio tent, lookout and small museum, among others – were thatched shacks some distance from each other. At Fidel's hut, a nest of bees has taken residence by the front door. Whether you are a socialist or not, whether you admire what has happened in Cuba since the revolution or not, the romance and idealism of this place is moving. We are alone on this mountain today, walking in Casdtro's footsteps for the second time in two days.
We leave Santo Domingo for Santiago, which, the taxi driver informs us, is the home of the most annoying policemen in Cuba. To avoid them he peels off the motorway at El Cristo, a village in the hills just above Santiago with stunning plantation-style mansions in spectacular states of dilapidation. The closer you get to Santiago, the more overpowering the heat and humidity become.
Like so many famous places in Cuba, Santiago feels small, with a handful of key venues. The place to hear the city's cutting-edge salsa and rumba is La Casa de la Trova, where the tables and balconies are packed with tourists and lady hustlers. From the top of the Casa Grande hotel you can see the whole city, starting with the bell towers of the beautiful Nuestra Señora de la Asunción. For epic scale, there's the Castillo del Morro, the old fortress outside town, at dusk.
If you seek revolutionary history, Santiago has it in spades: Santiago people were always more Cuban, less Spanish, and prone to disobedience. The Moncada Barracks, where Fidel led a failed coup in 1953, are here but we don't visit. I'm interested in what the Cuban government calls "the triumph of the revolution" but I'm tired of being force-fed it.
More decadent is the Museo Emilio Bacardí Moreau, which houses the art and archeological collection of the former Santiago mayor and rum king. It has everything from Egyptian mummies to sinister slave-whipping devices. I wonder when the Bacardí family will return to try and claim it back.
Our last stop is the most eastern of the eastern towns: Baracoa. The road from Santiago to here passes through the wild-west-style country town of Guantánamo and skips over the top of Guantánamo Bay before hugging a deserted coastline. From our Chinese-made bus we pass resting farm workers in high, straw-thatched hats sitting in carts next to their oxen. They look like people you might squint at in a scuffed black-and-white photograph. It is hard to imagine Gitmo just "over there" on the other side of the cactus curtain, with its mini movie theatres and McDonald's.
Then the bus scales La Farola, the road that was cut through the Sierra del Purial in the 1960s and opened Baracoa to the world. The bends are speckled with clapboard dwellings with cottage gardens, where women sell mandarins, Baracoan chocolate and cucurucho – a cloying mixture of coconut, orange, guava and sugar sold in cones made of palm leaves.
Cuba was Columbus's second landfall in the New World, and Baracoa was his first port of call, in 1492. He planted a cross in the ground and got an enthusiastic greeting from the doomed Taíno Indians. Diego Velázquez founded the first colonial town in the Americas here in 1512, and it was Cuba's capital from 1518 to 1522.
You wouldn't know it. This is not a town trumpeting faded colonial grandeur; rather it is a village in disrepair, with colonnaded colonial shacks in tumbledown rows, where cockerels, piglets and strays mingle with children. The cathedral is a shell awaiting restoration, and Columbus's Cruz de la Parra has been removed to a house on a side street. The northern part of town is full of the scent of cocoa: Baracoa has Cuba's only chocolate factory.
Cut off by the mountains for centuries, Baracoa remained sequestered, the only place you could still see the genes of Taíno Indians in the faces of the locals. It was here that the 16th-century Taíno chief Hatuey raised an army to fight the Spanish. Away from the centre, the town drifts upwards into the hills, its houses dotted among palms, breadfruit and mango trees. The archaeological museum is housed in caves that are Taíno burial sites: skeletons rest in the foetal position alongside a trove of pre-Columbian artefacts. It's surrounded by shacks among banana trees; to reach it you push through washing strung between fat palms, and paths criss-crossed by piglets. We are the only people there.
We stay in hotel El Castillo, one of Baracoa's old fortifications. From its pool you can see the town's greatest asset: the whole, glistening countryside, from the mist-covered flat peak of El Yunque to the snaking rivers and brooding seas. There is no doubt that this is the most enchanted landscape in the whole of Cuba.
Much of the time we are in Baracoa it thunders and pours, so we sit in rocking chairs on the dripping porch and watch the landscape turn against itself. The skies light up, water gushes down from the hills, the rivers turn a strange burgundy and the sea goes an apocalyptic brown. When the rains abate we visit the mouth of the Rio Toa. Under storm-cloud skies we find a wilderness beach with a thousand tides' worth of coconut husks and driftwood scattered over it, huddled beneath towering royal palms.
The Toa, a dark emerald green, swirls moodily into the sea. We see three people fishing quietly, a clutch of girls washing clothes and two lovers embracing in the shallows. We hike up to El Yunque, the remnant of a plateau so isolated it has its own species of ferns and palms. At the mouth of the Rio Yumuri, which cuts through stunning gorges, we eat coconut-poached snapper prepared by women in tumbledown houses on the beach.
We end at Playa Maguana, a beach 25km north of Baracoa where we stay at Villa Maguana, an elegant beach shack, with 12 spacious timber-built rooms. A villager called Javier brings us home-cooked lobster, plantain and salad on the beach for a princely £2.60, and slices off the tops of green coconuts for us to drink. We eat the lobster, observed by a giant, malodorous pig, and ponder how to get out of here.
Rain is expected again, and tomorrow we need to find someone to take us the 25 muddy kilometres to Baracoa, so we can catch a bus to Santiago, as all the planes are booked. It's an odyssey, but then that feels right for a place that looks like the Garden of Eden at the end of the earth.
Way to go
Journey Latin America (020 8747 8315, journeylatinamerica.co.uk) can organise an eight-night stay in Cuba taking in Havana and the highlights of eastern Cuba, including Santiago, Baracoa and the Sierra Maestra, from £942. This price includes accommodation, internal flights, transfers and some meals, but not international flights. Flights from the UK to Havana with Air France (0871 6633 777, airfrance.co.uk), via Paris, start from £495.
The Conjunto Histórico de Birán, the museum in the Castro family finca, is 3km northeast of Birán (open Tue-Sun).
