Traffic is light, very light.
For the first half hour or so there are a few cyclists and twice an ox cart trudges along the verge. For the next 450 kilometres en route to Ciego de Avila we pass maybe a hundred trucks and buses. And once, memorably, the glassy-eyed head of a large cow severed at the neck and poised on a bloody smear at the roadside, a dozen metres in front of the mammoth old truck which must have hit it the previous evening. The carcass, in meat-short Cuba, has already disappeared. I'm travelling with Minor Sinclair, a transplanted American who, with his wife Martha Thompson, works as the Oxfam Canada Field Director in Cuba.