Pedro was poling us down an unpromising flat, and I was in the gun seat, loaded for bone—Loomis 8-weight, number 6 Hula Shrimp, 12-pound tippet—when I heard his cormorant croak, “Palometa grande.” And there, truffling and hustling his way up the shallows, RoboCop brow occasionally tipping down to terminate crustacea with extreme prejudice, came Mr. P, too sudden for me to switch rods. I flung him my fake, he swerved over and marmalized it, I forgot to ruin the hook set with my usual trout strike, he felt the Judas kiss of my small steel, and opened up his throttle for the coral heads and stone gardens out to sea.
Half an hour later, on the flimsy tackle, we brought RoboPermit to hand, too exhausted to revive. He weighed in at 25 pounds, and we ate him for supper—but not before a boney and a baby tarpon had been landed, to make not just my first ever grand slam, but Pedro’s as well.
That night aboard the Tortuga it was fiesta time: I strutted with unpardonable glee, drank like a horse, and later gave an improvisatory rendition of “Sympathy for the Devil” while my pal Neil played the borrowed guitar until his fingers bled into the strings.
Back home, I sewed those IGFA badges onto everything from baseball caps to pajamas, and had a replica of the trophy carved from jelutong wood, meticulously painted right down to the mustard smudge around its vent. It hangs here on a classic oak board above the fireplace in my Scottish den, as I write.
A hefty tarpon dances into the morning air. Bigger, migratory specimens arrive toward summer.
HAVANA CAN SEEM A PLACE A PLACE OF RUST and smog, falling masonry, and dripping standpipes, but it’s also a glamorous city with the beauty of a faded courtesan. In its dissolute heyday under Batista, it boasted 270 brothels and numerous opium dens. Its nightlife remains colorful, though occasionally the jackbooted “love police” sweep all the girls off the streets, to the chagrin of all those pasty-faced European men in search of “city picnics.” In most tourist dives, the food resembles roadkill with black beans, so you should seek out the pop-up private restaurants known as paladares, which you access via door buzzers, speakeasy style. One velvety night in Miramar, we were served turtle steaks by a waitress with pomegranate red lips, riding a skateboard and wearing hot pants, though I had to send back the Chablis, as it was corked.
There are plenty of daytime sights, also. You might want to check out the Museum of the Ministry of the Interior, with its supposed CIA exhibits (including exploding underpants, just one of 637 assassination attempts survived by the Jefe Máximo). An official Habanero guide saves time. One we hired was called My Lai—”after the massacre.” In a ’53 Oldsmobile, she took me out to Cojimar, where I met Hemingway’s old skipper, Gregorio Fuentes, then in his 100th year. He liked to be treated to a meal at the nearby bar, thus earning himself the sobriquet “The Old Man and the Seafood.”
Don Ernesto is still an integral part of the island’s folklore. You can prowl around his Finca Vigía (where, in a fit of pique over another prolonged fishing trip, wife Martha once castrated all his cats), or lounge in Floridita where he devised the Papa Doble daiquiri: grapefruit juice, rum, no sugar. I reckon I might have enjoyed that evening when he “made a run of sixteen” such drinks.
In room 511 of my favorite hotel, the Ambos Mundos, where he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, there is now a small museum; one evening, Esperanza (the golden-haired curator) let me type briefly on his old Royal typewriter. Of course, Papa was more an aficionado of the Gulf Stream than of the saltwater flats, taking out sharks with his tommy gun and having John Dos Passos mix drinks in a metal pail, and his passion for marlin was shared by Dr. Castro. In 1960, the author presented his billfish trophy to el Barbudo himself (the only occasion they actually met), but was convinced he had secretly not played by the rules. Now, wherever did the Yanqui get an idea like that?
Hemingway was a devoted superstitionist, toting lucky rabbit’s paws, pebbles, and once even a shrunken
human head in a Spanish hatbox. Me too. To secure an advantage over my fellow Brits, I paid a secret visit to a babalawo, a priest of the unofficial Cuban religion Santería (a potent fusion of Catholicism and Yoruba animism, with millions of devotees, including the Castro brothers). On the floor of his tiny apartment, Arsenio Martiní fell into a trance in front of his altar decorated with chicken feathers and blood. He scattered dried knuckle bones like dice and read my fortune: I had recently lost a brother (strangely true) and needed luck on the sea (a reasonable guess). He said I must wash myself with fruit each morning (easier said than done, in most Scottish fishing lodges) and wear a bracelet in the colors of Changó, my guardian deity, god of war, who, during ritual dances, sends thunderbolts out of his testicles (as My Lai was solemnly translating).
That year (2001), we fished aboard the Halcón, a nice motor cruiser that gets you closer to those honey holes around dawn and dusk. By now, bone-fish were being marginalized in favor of sábalo sorties, of which goodly numbers were being jumped. In his excitement at motoring back from one bonanza, Pedro took a wrong turn and rammed his skiff full speed into the mangroves, leaving us covered in branches and green crabs. “¡No mangli!” I quipped, thankful I was wearing my Changó charm.
On Independence Day, flying out of a salmon camp on the Kola Peninsula, I forgot to put it on. Our MI-2 helicopter crash-landed. I was in the copilot’s seat, and escaped with broken ribs, but I never again touched that amulet after my Russian grand slam.
WE ANGLERS ARE FOND OF IDENTIFYING GOLDEN AGES of the sport, constantly receding from view. After a decade, it seemed that JDR had lost its hinterland allure and we were in search of fresher pastures. In 2003 I visited the Casa Batida club on Cayo Largo, off the southern coast, and sometimes saw all three slam species on the same flat. Permit numbers were impressive, and we hooked into some migratory tarpon that were serious, Keys-style moo-moos. The pilot during our internal flight did origami tricks, our minibus driver sang karaoke at the wheel (his predecessor had recently caused an accident playing guitar), and heavy metal music was being piped into the pig farm on one cay to calm the animals. so near, yet so foreign, as the Cuban tourist posters used to put it. Boy, I’ll say.
And then, in 2010 (on my ninth Cuban safari), we discovered Cayo Romano, another tourist backwater, up to the northeast, with access to 400 square miles of unexplored territory. This became my favorite place of all.
The road to the little township of Brasil is strewn with rice laid out to dry, and the sugar factory has long since been mothballed. Smartly uniformed school kids and stately matrons beneath parasols stare as you motor past. The guest-house where we stay (La Casona) is a typical Cuban mixture of the ramshackle and the house-proud: the shower fittings may give you an electric shock, but a maid has folded your crisp, clean towel into the shape of a swan. The food is basic, but at least Brasil has soup. In the minuscule bar, they construct a powerful Cuba libre, and each night a dark lady attempts to sell you mangoes from her bucket.
In the 1940s, Papa cruised these waters in search of German U-boats. He was convinced panthers roamed Cayo Romano, survivors of a shipwrecked circus. His favorite inn served manatee paella and flamingo breast. (Pedro would have relished that.) Today, once you cross the military checkpoint and drive along the causeway to the thatched hut at Cayo Cruz, there is nobody hereabouts except the odd licensed shark netsman and a few sponge gatherers. Oh, and Mr. P, the palometa, with all his chums.
Photographer Matt Harris landed this superb permit.
First morning, softly spoken Eduardo poles me along Playa Judío. (“Jew Beach” is a strange place name out here, but then so is the little archipelago they call the Cojones de Don Quico.) Five permit are tailing in happy hour mode, and I begin double-hauling like a gibbon. “Bomba atómica,” laughs the guide as my Merkin splashes down and they streak off like muggers through rush hour traffic. Next, we wade for a small school, and I misstrike one, hook the second (a 10-pounder), and manage one other. By noon we have racked up five permit “eats,” with two fish landed. That week, all our party caught sickle-tails, including a 20-pounder that charged across a deep hole and inhaled a 2/0 Deceiver on 100-pound tarpon tippet. I would guess this area is where most permit from the Pearl of the Antilles head for their annual convention.
At times there were macabe in profusion—it proved a great place for my son James to have his first experience fishing the salt—and one morning we picked off singles for four hours without ever having to start the engine. The fish were scattered across the sand like the knuckle bones on a babalawo’s mat. We took cubera snappers, too, and hefty ‘cudas that struck like the batons of the love police. One tarpon that died of a heart attack at the boat was weighed on the dock, gutted, at 86 pounds. Veteran guide Raffa apologized that it wasn’t a better week.
Cabaret night arrived, and the local schoolmaster performed magic tricks. One involved me handing something to one of the dancing girls, which turned out to be a compressed foam phallus. How the guides guffawed. I gave them my uncut rendition of Don McLean’s “American Pie,” and even Our Lady of the Mangoes was visibly moved. But next morning I rued my lubricated minstrelsy, as reveille was at oh-daft-thirty, when Raffa took me on a 50-mile exploratory run out to some virgin tarpon flats, his Mitzi skiff hurtling without lights through the dark, followed by a breakfast of cola and cold franks. (Hasten, Jason, and fetch the basin.)
I did not distinguish myself that day. One huge ‘poon inhaled my chartreuse Toad, and I was so mesmerized that instead of stamping the deck to turn it, and then strip-striking, I did nothing. “This’ll be the day that I die,” sighed Raffa, sagging on his pushpole.
I have swum my hooks in 37 different countries, but the sport up at Cayo Romano is about as funky as it comes. As that embargo lifts (and Americans will already see a surprising number of fellow countrymen out there), I’d go quickish, before some wiseguy developer sticks a Pizza Hut on the jetty. Even if it does offer real cheese.
Back in the capital, I was working on some final cocktails in the lobby of the Ambos Mundos, mulling over the highlights of our week, when a Cohiba-limbed lovely in a dress as tight as a stripping guard asked if I’d care to escort her to the nearby discoteca. I gulped like an elderly cyprinid, but then remembered myself. “Sweetheart,” I said, “you wouldn’t want to mess with Changó on the dance floor.”
David Profumo is the fishing columnist for the UK’s Country Life magazine, and lives up a Scottish glen with a black Lab that speaks only Gaelic.
>If You Go
Customizing your travel arrangements to Cuba yourself isn’t really an option, and it’s best to go through an established operator. David Profumo visited Cayo Romano as a guest of Cuba Welcome (www.cubawelcome.com), which is run by Mike Mirecki ([email protected]), a very experienced Briton who has offices in London and Havana, and can help with Tourist cards (mandatory), flights, internal transfers, fishing licenses, and accommodation. His agency also organizes trips involving bird watching, music festivals, cigar tours, golf, and diving.
In the Cayo Romano area, fishing can also be accessed from the five-star resorts on Cayo Coco, and good tarpon sport is available at Santa María. In the south of Cuba, Las Salinas (in the Zapata National Park) has proved popular as an introductory venue, and the 2013 season saw the fishing zone there expanded, and opened to motorized boats for the first time.
The Italian-run group Avalon has gradually taken over the running of many of the sportfishing venues, with several shore-based and mother ship options down in the Jardines de la Reina, the Isla de la Juventud, Cayo Largo, and Cayo Cruz (see www.cubanfishingcenters.com, or contact [email protected]).
Peak seasons run from March to June, with low attendance during the July heat, though permit and migratory tarpon can be at their best during this period. Avoid hurricane season, September through November.
Health vaccination certificates aren’t required for entry into Cuba, but outbreaks of cholera aren’t unknown; hepatitis and rabies inoculations are recommended. Travel insurance (including air evacuation) is advisable.
The CUC$ (Convertible Cuban peso, or moneda nacional) is available only within Cuba, and is the obligatory currency. Also consider taking a basin plug, spicy sauces, antihistamine cream, bug nets, a torch, and soap. (And maybe soup.)
