Until 1964, the only way into Baracoa, on the eastern tip of Cuba, was the same way Columbus did it - by boat. The mountain road that was later built is now one of the most pleasant drives in the country. Picture: Wikipedia/Jorge6880 Source: Supplied

Let's not be harsh. It is the kind of mistake anyone could make after a six-month journey in a second-hand boat crewed by ex-convicts without the aid of a decent map, a working compass or a supply of citrus fruit. His only guidebook - a dog-eared copy of The Book of Marco Polo - was 200 years out of date. Marco Polo is to travel guides what Beowulf is to the modern novel: a tad obscure.

His arrival sounds a bit Monty Pythonesque. Columbus dispatched a couple of chaps to let the emperor know they had arrived. I like to imagine Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres somewhere upriver in a leaky canoe urging the natives to tell them the way to the imperial court.

Luis spoke four languages but unfortunately his Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Spanish were not really up to the task of getting clear directions from the Taino Indians.

Rodrigo and Luis did discover tobacco, however. Given the stress of the journey and the difficulty in locating the Great Wall of China, they were probably on a couple of packs a day by the time they got back to the ship. Their lack of scroll paintings or imperial edicts had a dispiriting effect on Columbus and his crew. To cheer everyone up and renew their faith in their mission, Christopher insisted they all swear an oath that Cuba was part of the Chinese mainland so that they would be what today we'd call "on message" when they had to face the sceptics back home.

Geographers have identified the site of Columbus's landing as the town of Baracoa at Cuba's eastern end. Making mistakes about Baracoa seems to be par for the course. Diego Velasquez de Cuellar made it the capital of Cuba in 1511 until the Spaniards realised where it was: the first stop if you are arriving from Spain but the last stop from anywhere else in Cuba. Barricaded behind a confusion of mountains, Baracoa is a place apart. Until a road was built over the passes in 1964, the only way to reach it was the way Columbus had come, by sea.

Known as La Farola, the road is one of the great drives in Cuba, switchbacking through vertiginous vegetation as you climb from the Caribbean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. Dusk is falling as I near the top of the pass. In the great tumult of peaks not a light shines, until far below I catch sight of the old port.

After the whirlwind of Havana, I have come to Baracoa for Cuba's rarest commodity, a bit of peace and quiet. For most of its life the town has been a cross between Ambridge (the village in the long-running British radio soap The Archers) and a Siberian gulag. It is a cosy, parochial place full of people chatting on street corners about sheep dipping and Christmas pantos. Outlandishly remote, it is also the place where political malcontents were sent into internal exile.

Columbus was not the first guy to feel a bit lost in Baracoa. Whole generations of pre-revolutionary revolutionaries sat on broken-down verandas here and wondered where the hell they were.

Dilapidated, enclosed by rich and chaotic jungle, Baracoa has that wonderful end-of-the-line feeling, the sense that you have travelled as far as you can go, that there is nowhere beyond this. This is landfall for confused explorers, disillusioned revolutionaries and time travellers. The whole of Cuba is a warm bath of nostalgia, a sweet indulgence in times past.

It is not just the 1950s cars; the country seems steeped in some distant decade when life was - or at any rate our lives were - coloured with an innocent glow. Cuba is a place of quaint throwbacks, of phone boxes that people queue to use, of offices of clacking typewriters, of motorcycles with sidecars, of leaders spouting revolutionary slogans, of music played by big bands in matching hats.

In my hotel in Havana there is a lift operator in uniform: peaked cap, epaulets, a touch of braid.

On my drive to the eastern end of the island I follow a motorway that looks like those pictures of England's first motorway in 1959 with a single Morris Minor in the middle distance and a hay wagon in the slow lane. If Cuba is a time machine, then Baracoa is where it hits fifth gear.

In the surrounding countryside lean men in straw cowboy hats ride high-stepping horses. In the potholed streets cycle rickshaws overtake horse carriages. Along Calle Antonio Maceo, colonial houses lean on one another like long-suffering companions. I slide into this retro vibe with alarming ease, taking my place in a rocking chair on the balustraded terrace of La Habanera hotel, watching the comings and goings on the main street like a character out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I need only a pair of suspenders, a checked shirt and some tobacco to chew to complete the picture of a small-town idyll.

Across the street from my rocking chair I discover the barber shop. A sheet is snapped open and pinned round my neck and in a moment I am tilting backwards 50 years to the kind of place that my grandfather frequented long before the arrival of unisex hairdressers with blow-dryers and a choice of conditioners. Soap is lathered, a razor is stropped. All around me is the reassuring murmur of masculine conversation: baseball, crops and girls.

A few doors down, in the House of Chocolate, the atmosphere is hushed and reverent. People eat chocolate here as if it has just been invented. Couples whisper to one another over mugs of hot chocolate. Old men sit alone at tables, rolling their tongues tentatively around spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream. Just up the street in Plaza Independencia, townsfolk sit on park benches chatting as if it were still 1952 and no one had so far invented the television or texting.

Like Columbus, I find what I am looking for: the small-town atmosphere I grew up with. But Baracoa has other unexpected things up its side alleys, things that can't be enjoyed from a rocking chair. It begins in the evening with a falling line of notes from a trumpet. From somewhere up the street comes a syncopated rhythm on a conga. An acoustic guitar begins to strum.

Famously described as a love affair between the African drum and the Spanish guitar, Cuban music has a multitude of permutations. Rumba, bolero, danzon, mambo and chachacha were all born in Cuba. Trova, guajira, descarga, timba, habanera, charanga, songo, reggaeton, guaracha and changui are just a few of the branches of its musical family tree.

Baracoa has a special place in all this. The town is to Cuban music what the Mississippi Delta is to American blues. It is one of the places where everything began.

In its streets and bars, listeners first began to hear son, the mother and father of Cuban music from which everything else developed. The town's isolation means early musical forms have survived here. Baracoa is where Cuban musicians go to hear the most authentic son. Musicians still play the cajon, the wooden box used as a drum, which originated with fruit packing cases. And the call-and-response vocals seem to have arrived straight from Africa.

Up the street, at the Casa de la Trova, the mojitos are lined up on the bar as an eight-piece band kicks into some complicated rhythms. The trumpets ride a percussive wave of maracas, guiros and claves. The music falters, as if momentarily transfixed by its own beauty, then an elderly gentleman in a white cap steps forward to rescue the melody from among the guitar chords and the plunging line of the double bass.

Suddenly Baracoa seems not so much a provincial backwater as the centre of Cuba's greatest achievement, its phenomenal music. After a couple of mojitos and a sweaty whirl with a salsa queen, I am learning that the town is more about the dance floor than the rocking chair. It is time to abandon my preconceptions.

Checklist
Hotel El Castillo is an old fort with views over the town and a good pool. More: www.hotelelcastillocuba.com.

For a coastal idyll and empty beaches a half-hour from town, check out Villa Maguana. More: www.villamaguana.com.

Perth-based Travel Directors has an escorted 26-day Cuba and Mexico tour departing October 29 (or October 28 next year). This company is offering earlybird savings on all its 2011 escorted tours; book and pay six months before departure date and receive $500 discount a person. More: (08) 9242 4200 or 1300 856 661; www.traveldirectors.com.au.