Hiking American Style
Alfredo had hiked many miles back home in Cuba, but hiking with his fiancée in America? For fun? That took some getting used to.

By Lea Aschkenas ’95

When I met him in Havana in the year 2000, my husband-to-be had never willingly gone on a hike. To be certain, Alfredo had hiked many miles in his 26 years, but unlike me (a cross-country runner and an avid backpacker), he had never done so for pleasure. Always, he had made his treks out of necessity—when the clunky Chinese bike he borrowed from a friend collapsed just two miles into the 12-mile ride to his father’s house; when, for the third time in one morning, the bus he caught to his job at the National Symphony passed by too full to cram in even one more person. Alfredo’s most regular exercise, the equivalent of a StairMaster-and-weights combo workout, involved a twice-daily hike up and down the dimly lit and exceedingly narrow and cracked marble staircase leading to his mother’s house. In each hand, Alfredo carried a five-gallon bucket of water, obtained from an illegally drilled hole in the asphalt that offered access to an underground water pipe.

For all of its socialist luxuries of free health care, education and housing, Cuba was still a poor country where any strenuous activity beyond that associated with the daily struggle to scrape by was considered undesirable—and potentially detrimental. Alfredo’s sister Jacqueline, a nurse who I thought would appreciate the importance of exercise, pretty much summed up the Cuban attitude toward voluntary physical exertion when I told her one day that I was going for a run and she asked, incredulously, “Why? It’ll just make you hungry.”

But, like most Cubans I encountered during the seven months I lived on the island, Alfredo was curious. In a country where the national dream seemed equally split between living in Havana and leaving the island altogether for someplace like New York or Madrid, my craving to see Cuba’s countryside—and expend unnecessary physical energy hiking in it—intrigued Alfredo. In fact, it intrigued him so much that he asked if he could come along.

Before I met him, Alfredo had never left Havana, and I suspected that his desire to set off for the country had more to do with the travel part of the trip than the hiking-for-miles-through-the-wilderness part. But Alfredo surprised me. In Topes de Collante National Park, we swung across creeks on jungle vines and, at Alfredo’s initiation, climbed 200 feet up a wall of moss-covered rocks to the upper pool of the Salto de Caburni waterfall. In Isla de la Juventud, an island off the south coast of Cuba, we hiked up a marble-encrusted mountain, crawling on our hands and knees when it got too steep to walk. After a 13-mile trek through forests of mango, banana and coconut trees in the eastern village of Baracoa, when I accidentally dropped my pocket-sized notepad (the notepad I carried everywhere, and which contained the notes that would ultimately grow into my first book) into the quickly flowing Rio Duaba, Alfredo dove in with all his clothes on to retrieve it. That was the moment I knew I was in love.

Eleven months later, when the fiancé visa we’d applied for came through and I drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles to pick up Alfredo at the airport, I had no fewer than four camping trips planned for our first 10 days together. I knew Alfredo had never been camping (in Cuba the word “campismo” means cabin), but I still remembered his enthusiasm during our outdoor adventures in Cuba, and so I assumed that camping would be the next logical step for us as a couple.

But that first night camping in Big Sur, Alfredo looked past the towering redwoods and, staring suspiciously at my tent, asked, “We’re going to sleep in this?”

“It’s really very comfortable,” I said encouragingly.

“But it’s so cold out!” he protested.

True, it was not the 90-degree weather Alfredo was accustomed to, but it was September, the warmest month in Northern California, and we were both wearing shorts.

After we’d gotten past the climate change issue, Alfredo asked me if the tent would offer enough protection from the wild animals that must surely be lurking in the woods. Once I assured him that deer didn’t attack, I pointed him in the direction of the camp store for firewood so we could stay warm and scare off any potential four-legged visitors. Alfredo had been studying English for the past year, but the thought of testing it on a real live English-speaker in the camp store (or the thought of walking a few feet in the woodsy dark by himself) now appeared to be too much for him.

“No hablo inglés,” he declared.

Later, after I’d gotten the firewood (and made and put out the fire myself) and Alfredo had fallen into a sound, jet-lagged sleep, I sneaked out of the tent and wandered through the campground, worrying that I’d made a big mistake trying to transfer what we’d had in Cuba to my very foreign country and culture.

I cancelled the rest of that week’s camping trips, and we headed home early. Over the next few months, Alfredo began to adjust to the rhythm of life in the U.S. He enrolled in English classes, learned how to drive a car and, just before his fiancé visa expired, we decided to buy our relationship some more time by giving marriage a go.

Although we had not gone camping since Big Sur, I remained persistent in introducing Alfredo to the outdoors. I took him on a 15-mile bike ride with a 2,000-foot elevation gain during which he kept asking, “How much longer?” But, when we finally reached the peak of Mount Tamalpais with its glittering view of the San Francisco Bay, he beamed just as I’d recalled him doing at the end of our scramble up the marble-encrusted mountain in Cuba. My parents showed him salmon spawning in Muir Woods, which so moved him that he’s never eaten salmon since. One New Year’s Day, we hiked in the rain to a thundering waterfall and reminisced about the one we’d visited in Cuba.

Eventually, as Alfredo began to feel more secure with his life in the United States (he got a job and enrolled in college), his sense of curiosity and interest in trying new things resurfaced, and for my 29th birthday, he surprised me with a camping trip to Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay.

Today it’s been five years since that first voluntary camping trip, and Alfredo and I have now gone on more outdoor adventures than I can count—from hiking Half Dome to backpacking in the Trinity Alps and the glacier-covered peaks of Lake Garibaldi in British Columbia. During a trip to Crater Lake, Alfredo became so fascinated by the area’s volcanic history that he decided to major in geology.

Now, when I get tired while backpacking, he’s the one who prods me on, distracting me with stories of the surrounding geology and of the delicious meal we’ll cook once we reach camp. After dinner, by the light of the campfire, we plan the next day’s hike.