Isla de la Juventud

Cuba'S Second Largest Island And A Special Municipality Rather Than A Province, Holding The Presidio Modelo Panopticon Prison, Pre Columbian Cave Paintings And World Class Diving · Nueva Gerona, Isla de la Juventud

Cuba's second island sits sixty miles off the south coast and is a special municipality rather than a province, which is a fair description of how separate it feels. Outside Nueva Gerona, its small capital, are three things worth the difficult crossing. The Presidio Modelo is a panopticon prison of four vast circular blocks built under Machado in the 1920s, where Fidel Castro and the Moncada attackers were held from 1953 to 1955, and it is now an empty, echoing and genuinely disturbing museum. In the caves at Punta del Este are hundreds of pre-Columbian pictographs in red and black concentric circles, thought to be calendrical and often called the finest rock art in the Caribbean. And off the south-west coast, Punta Frances offers some of the clearest diving in Cuba. The whole south is a restricted zone needing a permit and a guide, and the crossing from the mainland is cancelled often enough that a spare day at each end is not caution but planning.

Isla de la Juventud, special municipality, Cuba, Nueva Gerona, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba

The Presidio Modelo museum keeps daytime hours with a weekly closing day. THE ENTIRE SOUTH OF THE ISLAND IS A RESTRICTED MILITARY AND PROTECTED ZONE requiring a permit and a guide, arranged at Cayo Piedra checkpoint; the Punta del Este caves and the southern dive sites are both inside it. Ferries and flights from the mainland are unreliable and foreigners have needed permits for the ferry.

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