SIERRA MAESTRA, Cuba (Reuters) -To traverse these ridgelines high in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains on horseback is to travel back a hundred years or more in time.

Here, in Cuba's southernmost corner, all of the food is local, grown in small plots beside rustic wooden homes. So too is the electricity, produced by solar panels ingeniously installed by a handful of residents turned electricians and plumbers and carpenters. Internet is intermittent, a fleeting message from another world.

The passage of the eye of Hurricane Melissa just a few miles from here in October toppled a few banana plants, but little more, as residents accustomed to the elements battened down ahead of the storm. A grinding economic crisis elsewhere in Cuba is little more than noise here, where a barter economy bred of self-sufficiency holds more sway than the minimum wage or inflation.

These mountains, the birthplace of Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution, remain just as they always have.

(Writing by Dave Sherwood; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)