GEOGRAPHY

Cuban landscapes are soft and calming, epitomized by sensual waves of lime-green sugarcane undulating like a great swelling sea – landscapes that Kenneth Tynan described in Holiday magazine in 1961 as “of soft Pissarro and Cezanne color, and the tropical intensity of Gauguin”. Emerald greens flow into burning golds, soft, faded pastels and warm ochers are relieved by brilliant tropical colors, flower petals as red as lipstick and pavonine waters shading through dazzling jade.

And yet the landscape is rarely dramatic, extended flatlands and rolling plains cover almost two-thirds of the island. Indeed, Cuba is the least mountainous of the Greater Antilles, with median elevation of less than 100 meters above the sea level.

 

 

Its topography is dominated by “llanos”, the flatlands that at times seem to stretch forever, level as football fields and just as green, smothered in swampland inhabited by crocodiles or parceled into a checkerboard quilt of banana groves, pineapple farms, citrus orchards, rice paddies, and ubiquitous fields of sugarcane rippling in the breeze like folds of green silk. In contrast, the upland plains of east-central Cuba are relatively infertile and the habitat of Cuban cowboys- vaqueros - who tend cattle.