Cuban Paradise for Climbers Is Inviting, but Off-Limits

Cuban Paradise for Climbers Is Inviting, but Off-Limits
By ALEX LOWTHER
Published: July 5, 2012

VALLE DE VIÑALES, Cuba — Here, the mountains weren't pushed up from
underneath, as mountains usually are. In this national park and Unesco
World Heritage site, everything but the mountains fell down. The
mogotes, as the islands of karstic limestone are called, are gently
domed, like loaves of crusty bread, but the sides seem to have been
cleaved off, leaving terrain that drops precipitously to the valley floor.

In the late 1990s, rock climbers found a paradise where the walls of the
mogotes are too steep for the otherwise ubiquitous crawling vines and
striving trees. Huge overhangs, some 500 feet tall, are covered with
chandeliers of stalactites and intermittent blobs and pockets, all
perfectly formed for human hands and feet to climb from the bottom of a
cliff to its top.

Soon, local residents caught on, and a flourishing climbing scene took
hold. Viñales became a top destination for climbers from Europe, Canada
and the United States. Hundreds of routes went up the major mountain
faces in the valley, and for years visiting climbers had essentially
free rein.

No longer.

In late March, even as Pope Benedict XVI called for "authentic freedom"
in Cuba before an estimated 200,000 people in Havana, climbers here, a
three-hour drive west of the capital, were wrestling with the
prohibition of their sport. In an era when the Cuban government has been
easing restrictions — allowing private boardinghouses, private
restaurants and now the sale of real estate and automobiles — it seems
to have moved in a sharply different direction here, threatening the
prosperity of Viñales and the future of the sport in Cuba by enforcing a
ban on climbing and regulating independent tourism in general.

In March, out in the welcome cool of nighttime, under the fluorescent
lights of a plaza-side bar and over rum-laced national cola, the
conversation among climbers centered on the guards who have been
enforcing the prohibition since early in the year. Where had they been
that day? Did anybody get busted climbing? What happened? And then, "Why
are they there at all?"

Jens Franzke, a climber from Dresden, Germany, here with his wife, Ina,
for three weeks, was fed up. "It feels like East Germany before the fall
of the Berlin Wall," he said. "There are all these rules, and none of
them make any sense. There are no signs. No detailed maps at all. You
ask if you can go somewhere and do something by yourself and they say,
'No, it's impossible.' "

During their trip, Franzke, 46, and his wife had been forced to stop
climbing multiple times, threatened with police action by park guards
and told that the "Cuba Climbing" guidebook they were using to find
routes in the valley was illegal to use because the authors do not live
in Cuba.

"It's a real shame because it's such a paradise," Franzke said. The
couple managed to climb nearly every day they wished by evading the
rules and the guards, but "we will never come back," he said.

This is the main worry for residents and climbers. Viñales is the hub of
the valley and the heart of Viñales National Park. The bustling town of
about 17,000 has more than 300 private boardinghouses that rent rooms to
tourists who hike, explore the cliffs, ride horses, watch birds and
climb in the national park. All that has allowed the valley to overcome
the poverty typical across the country.

Armando Menocal, one of the "Cuba Climbing" guidebook authors and an
expert on the region, said, "Tourism has created a strong, vibrant
economy, and it's all based on outdoor recreation." The crackdown, if it
continues, "could be devastating to tourism and climbing in Viñales."
Cuban climbers rely on tourists to donate shoes, harnesses and ropes to
climb. Equipment is not available, and even if it was the cost would be
prohibitive in a country where government salaries average $15 to $25 a
month. Without new donations, shoes, harnesses and ropes wear out.
Without replacement, the bolts in the rock that secure climbers would
corrode and eventually become unsafe. Climbing on the mogotes would
become, essentially, impossible.

Climbing was pronounced unauthorized and thus prohibited in 2003, four
years after major climbing development started. The state deemed
climbing a factor in peligrosidad, a vague designation of being
dangerous to the state. It is an offense punishable by imprisonment.

The climbing ban was never formally announced, nor was it enforced for
tourists at all. For Cubans it was often a mere hassle, but consequences
could be more severe. One veteran Cuban climber was put on notice of
being considered peligroso in 2010, and several others were taken to the
police station and had reports drawn up. This seems to have been more
likely if the climbers were climbing and socializing with foreigners,
which the state frowns upon.

When questioned by a Cuban climber, one official's explanation for the
disparity in enforcement between Cubans and tourists, according to
Menocal, was: "The tourists eat ham and cheese. You and I don't."

In January, state agents called a meeting reaffirming the climbing ban.
Climbers figured it was just more words, but suddenly guards were
patrolling the perimeter trails of the park, turning climbers back.

In March, one guard, a congenial man in a green button-down shirt, said:
"We don't like to say climbing is prohibited. Climbing isn't prohibited,
because prohibited is an ugly word."

But may one climb?

"No," he said.

He said the government was busy organizing a system through which one
would buy a daily pass or license to climb. A version of this
explanation has been circulating since at least 2003. No such pass yet
exists.

Some suspect that state security is the reason for the crackdown. Many
of the cliffs where climbing takes place are part of the national
defense plan in case of attack, and climbers say they believe that state
security officials are worried that the Cubans and foreigners are there
organizing against the government.

Official explanations say Cubans do not support a so-called extreme
sport. They are worried about serious injury, and officials have said an
ambulance would always have to be parked near the base of the most
popular cliff in case somebody is hurt. But there is no money for that.

It is possible, too, that the government has no interest in a sport that
has no chance at international glory in the Olympics — at which the
Cuban team tends to punch far above its weight.

Owners of casas particulares, as the private boardinghouses are called,
said warnings about the rules were overblown. Oscar Jaime Rodriguez,
owner of a boardinghouse that is the de facto base camp for climbers in
the valley, sought to quiet fears. "They are always saying, 'It's
prohibited, it's prohibited,' but climbers still come and they still
climb," he said. "It's worth it."

Menocal said that the Cubans were "hoping it blows over."

He added: "It could blow over. Who knows? You don't know the source of
this. You don't know what's going on. You live in this world of
ambiguity all the time." (In fact, since reporting there concluded at
the end of March, climbers have said enforcement of the no climbing rule
may have become more lenient.)

Despite the possibility of consequences, Cubans keep climbing. They duck
guards. They hitchhike and walk hours to arrive at sectors where guards
do not patrol. One night, over more rum at the bar next to the plaza,
Cuban climbers regaled visitors with stories of a steep, clean wall of
difficult routes where "there won't be anybody but us and the birds."

The trip there was a slow 40-minute taxi ride. The driver wove around
car-swallowing holes and enormous, belching Soviet trucks whose deep
beds double as public transportation.

The wall was exactly as the Cuban climbers had described. All was
silence but for the birds and the occasional iguana plunging from one
perch on a high tree branch to the next. It was a sunny, stress-free outing.

The next day the climbers walked and hitchhiked back to Viñales. The
trip, under full sun, took three hours.

"It's worth it," one Cuban climber who preferred to be called Daní said.
"No matter how strict the rules get, I'll keep climbing. If the tourists
stop coming and we don't have any gear, I'll go bouldering in my bare
feet. I don't care."

It is a bit of reassurance for him that tourists continue to climb most
days, too. They kill mornings waiting for the guards to quit, usually
around 2 p.m. They get to the cliffs before the guards are on duty,
around 9 a.m. They climb on cliffs the guards do not frequent and wear
dull colors to blend in with the rock. On Sundays the guards don't work
at all.

Still, climbing can be a tense experience.

On the main walls near Viñales, the farms run hard up on the base of the
cliffs. Farmers plow red soil behind oxen to prepare for planting the
world's finest tobacco, and chickens scratch in the underbrush. It is
beautiful, but when climbing, every motion or sound becomes a guard
approaching to end the day of adventure. "It's stressful," said Cofi
Jones, a Canadian climber. After three weeks, she said, she was tired of
it and leaving. "I'm over it," she said. "I'm over waiting until the
guards go home to climb. I'm over the guards. It doesn't feel good to be
here doing something that's prohibited."

Would-be Cuban climbers feel the same way. A climber who preferred to be
called Nagué said the number of avid Cuban climbers was probably around
a dozen. "You have no idea how many young Cubans want to climb," he
said, "but they won't, because they're afraid of the police."

On their last day in Cuba, after an unmolested climbing session in warm
early morning sun and a "coco loco" cocktail in the shade, the Franzkes,
the German climbers, reconsidered their vow never to return.

"Maybe all of the not so good stuff about Cuba will leave my memory,"
Jens Franzke said. "I'll just remember the beautiful people, the red
soil, the salsa."

He looked at the drink in his hand, smiled and said, "The coco loco." He
craned his neck in the direction of the mogotes, and added, "And the
spectacular climbing."

A version of this article appeared in print on July 6, 2012, on page B10
of the New York edition with the headline: Cuban Paradise for Climbers
Is Inviting, but Off-Limits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/sports/threatening-climbing-in-a-cuban-paradise.html?pagewanted=all