Nueva Gerona

The island off Cuba's south-west coast was known at various times as the Isle of Parrots and Treasure Island, and pirate activity around it left its mark on English literature: Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan are said to draw on accounts of it. For centuries it was thinly settled. Nueva Gerona was founded in 1830 by Francisco Dionisio Vives, then the Spanish governor of Cuba, on the Río Las Casas in the north of what was called the Isla de Pinos, the Isle of Pines.

After Spain lost Cuba in 1898, the island's status was left unsettled. Cuba and the United States signed the Hay–Quesada Treaty recognising Cuban sovereignty in 1903, but the US Senate only ratified it in 1925, over the objections of some 400 American citizens and companies who by then owned or controlled about 95 per cent of the island's land.

Between 1926 and 1931 the government of Gerardo Machado built the Presidio Modelo on the town's outskirts. Survivors of the 1953 Moncada attack, Fidel and Raúl Castro among them, were held there until 1955. After the revolution foreign-owned property was expropriated, the prison was closed in 1967, and in 1978 the island was renamed the Isla de la Juventud, the Isle of Youth.

The Isle of Youth has a character of its own. Its early 20th-century American settlers left a mark on the landscape and the island's memory, and migrants from the Cayman Islands and Jamaica settled the south coast, where their descendants, known as caimaneros, are English-speaking Cubans. Later, thousands of young people from Cuba and abroad came to study at the island's schools in the countryside.

The Presidio Modelo dominates the town's sense of its history. Its circular cell blocks, built to watch prisoners constantly, held thousands of inmates in harsh conditions, while the Moncada prisoners in the hospital wing turned their imprisonment into a school of politics; after 1959 it held prominent political prisoners of the new government before it closed. Today it is a museum and national monument.

Baseball is followed closely, with the island's club, the Piratas, playing at the Estadio Cristóbal Labra, and life in the town centres on the plaza, where the cinema stands. The pace is slower than on the mainland, and the island's isolation is part of its identity.

Nueva Gerona had about 59,000 people in 2012, the largest share of the island's population, which was estimated at about 83,500 in 2019. The town is divided into quarters (repartos) — Centro, Abel Santamaría, Sierra Caballo, Nazareno, Saigón, Chacón and José Martí — spreading out from the river to the hills.

Agriculture and fishing are the island's main industries, with citrus fruit and vegetables the main crops, and marble is quarried from the low ridges in the north of the island. As the island's capital, Nueva Gerona holds its government offices, port, airport and main services, and the old administration building of the Presidio Modelo is now a school and research centre.

Daily life follows the national pattern of shortages of fuel, food and medicine, power cuts and queues, made harder by the island's dependence on boats and planes from the mainland. Emigration has left many families divided, and remittances from relatives abroad keep many households going.

Island food is the Cuban staple repertoire — rice and black beans cooked together as moros y cristianos or congrí, roast or fried pork, chicken, root vegetables such as yuca with mojo, a garlic-citrus dressing, and fried plantain, both savoury tostones and sweet maduros — with fish from the island's fishing fleet, as fishing and farming are the island's main industries.

Citrus is the island's own crop. Its groves once supplied grapefruit for export, and citrus fruit and vegetables are still the main crops. Fresh juice and fruit appear on tables when the harvest is in, though supplies depend on what the shortages allow.

Rum from Cuba's sugar cane goes into the mojitos and other drinks served in the town's bars, and strong, sweet coffee, cafecito, punctuates the day. Bread, coffee and sugar are staples of the ration. With few restaurants, many visitors eat at their homestays, where families cook what the island's farms and boats bring in.