The Cucubanos of Abra Honda

Every story has a beginning, and mine begins in a humble home in the Abra Honda ward in Camuy. I was the first born of my family and also the first grandson, but sadly I came to this world with my health compromised, and my family found out early that I was severely allergic to insects. Mosquitoes, wasps, bees, ants. A sting another child would forget by morning was a serious matter for me. So I grew up learning that most of what flew and crawled around me was something to keep away from.

The realization that the smallest things could hurt me the most made me develop a fascination with them, and I spent hours every day capturing them to see them up close and try to learn their behavior. Until one night I caught a cucubano.

I was 7 years old and I remember opening my hand and bracing for it. Instead I watched it walk across my palm. It did not sting me. It walked, and it glowed, and it let me look at it for as long as I wanted. An insect that flew, that lit up, and that would not hurt me. I had never met anything like it, and I have never forgotten the surprise of it.

After that I started slipping out of my room at night and going up into the dark to watch them. My family did not always know where I was. I was a small boy sitting alone on a rock in the countryside at night, and I was perfectly content.

One of those nights my father found me there.

He did not scold me and he did not send me back to bed. He sat down on the rock beside me and asked what I was doing. I told him I was watching the cucubanos. He put his arm across my shoulders and told me they were a gift from Papá Dios, and if I loved these so much, he was going to take me to see something even more beautiful.

And he kept his word. After a few weeks we drove down to La Parguera and boarded a glass-bottom boat.

I thought I knew what I was going to see. A hundred points of light, scattered, blinking on and off in the dark, in the water. That is what a cucubano does. What I saw instead was tens of thousands of small green points streaking past beneath the boat at speed. Not scattered. Not blinking. Moving, all of them, all at once, under my feet.

My father told me cucubanos are a gift from Papá Dios, but this is His presence in front of us. And he made the sign of the cross and said "gracias, Señor," and I followed doing the same.

I grew up. I got bigger and stronger and moved to the city, and the insects stopped being a threat. Every weekend I went home to Camuy, and every weekend I went out to see my cucubanos. But we never went back to La Parguera.

But life has a way of returning you to where it started you, to our roots. Years later, when I began running tours and scouting the island for places worth taking people to, I found La Parguera again. Standing there as a grown man was not a return. It was closer to being born a second time. I felt 9 years old again. I felt this déjà vu feeling, and I felt a profound connection with nature, with our Taíno ancestors, with God.

That is why, on every single departure, I am the first one in the water.

My purpose out there is not for guests to see what I saw at nine years old. It is for them to have what my son had. But I will tell you the truth of it: every time I go under, that water brings me nearer to God through His gift. And every time, I understand a little better why the Taíno held these waters sacred, because I have come to believe the bioluminescent waters are not only our Creator’s presence but also the only place He actually responds to us in a way we can actually feel and see.

I have been studying Puerto Rican history for close to thirty years. I have been on that water roughly three hundred nights, across every phase of the moon, every season, and every condition the Caribbean can produce. I founded Bucketlist Tours in 2018, and I still design, operate and guide every departure myself. One private group at a time.

Everything on this site comes from those two things. The historical record, and the nights.

Before any of it, I am a father.

My son, Marcos Alexis López, inherited my allergies. He also inherited the rest of it. I started taking him out to see the cucubanos when he was three years old, and when he turned seven I took him to the bay for the first time.

That night was not a tour. Before we went in, I told him about the Taíno, and I told him this story, the rock, his grandfather, the glass-bottom boat. Then I told him why it mattered. That this is the only place on earth where we can see and feel our Creator answer every movement we make.

Then we prayed.

Padre que estás en el cielo, esta noche vengo a ti con mi hijo para que te pueda ver y sentir como hace miles de años nuestros ancestros lo hicieron. Acepta nuestra presencia, lava nuestros cuerpos y nuestras almas y remueve nuestras cargas y pecados para que salgamos limpios de tus aguas. Amén.

Father who art in heaven, tonight I come to you with my son, so that he may see you and feel you as our ancestors did thousands of years ago. Accept our presence, wash our bodies and our souls, and take away our burdens and our sins, so that we may come out of your waters clean. Amen.

Then we went in. And this is where his night and mine part ways. At nine years old I saw it through glass, from a boat, looking down. Marcos was in it. The water answered his own body, every movement he made, and there was nothing between him and the light.

Something larger than the two of us, all around us, answering us.

He is fifteen now.

For almost fifty years bioluminescence has been part of my life. I have come to see it as a sign. That the Creator did something particular with the cucubanos, and gave a boy who had to fear everything that flew one thing he never had to fear. And that our island was blessed with one of the few places on earth where He answers in a way we can see and feel.

My father was Carlos Juan López Nieves. He is the reason this site exists. He is the man who sat down on the rock instead of sending me back to bed, and he is the man who told me what the light was.

Not only a gift from Papá Dios, but His presence in front of us.

Carlos A. López Ruiz