Cuba

A taxi rush at 6a.m., a system failure at check in, a downgrade from the Cubana business class tickets we were forced to purchase previously (with accompanying refund), a system crash again at passport control and we were set to fly south to Buenos Aires - a land of shopping opportunities awaiting us...

Another 3 hours south west by bus and we ended up at the one-hotel beach resort of Maria la Gorda. The hotel didn't have much to write home about except a characteristic typical of the rest of Cuban tourism - they like to dictate to you how you will travel and what you will do while you are in Cuba and because there is a strong monopoly on tourism here there is very little incentive for any sort of change. The water, however, was crystal crystal clear and we had such an amazing time snorkeling just along the beach. Fan coral, eels (also a giant moray eel), bright colourful tropical fish in their hundreds, blow fish, giant fish, jelly fish and much more. We had a ball. Wild life abounds - feral cats are everywhere as well as hermit crabs and woodpeckers. One night was especially entertaining when a giant tree frog decided to land on Johan's shoulder at 3a.m. while we were both sleeping. I don't know which of the two were more traumatized by the end of that event.

We had TV in our room so we watched all the latest on cyclone Ernesto (slamming into eatern Cuba), which later became Hurricane Ernesto and then later tropical storm Ernesto. We had clear skies all along and by the time we reached Havana Ernesto had become rumour Ernesto and had decided to head North to torment the 'great enemy' instead.

Vinales is an area to the west of Cuba (3 hours from Havana by bus) famous for its natural beauty. The country feel in the town was really wonderful and the main recreational pastime seems to be sitting in your rocking chair on the porch shouting conversation to your neighbours across the street or to those passing by. The heat was unbelievable and our room did not adapt well to our attempts at air-conditioning so we headed to one of the hotels to make use of their pool for the day. We drank mojitos (a typical cuban cocktail containing rum and mint) and tried to stay cool. There is not much in the way of restaurants in the town but our homestay offered us enormous meals of very tasty typical Cuban plates (like 4 pork chops each besides the rice and beans and salad!). The food was so much we ended up sharing one meal each night. Again - Che images were everywhere to be seen.

A famous Havana landmark (actually there are hundreds) is an 8 km promenade walkway along the coast called the Malecon. Walking, sitting, chatting, romancing, fishing, swimming and even doing the triumphal wedding day loop in some grand chevy seems to be of the main recreational activities here in Havana. That and drinking rum, smoking cigars, playing dominoes, dancing and making music! We were fortunate enough to catch the national Cuban ballet company doing their stuff at the oldest theatre in use in the western hemisphere - absolutely fantastic! Live music is unavoidable - pretty much every restaurant has live bands.

We met a new friend during a Malecon sunset. Gerardo is a history teacher who speaks excellent English. He took us on a free tour of the Museum of the Revolution, invited us over for an interesting diner at his home, had us dancing in the living room, showed us a great (and cheap) restaurant hidden away, shared many a Cuban anecdote with us and, of course, in the end tried to get us to purchase 'real' cigars from his friend who works in the cigar factory (we found that every Cuban who we met seemed to have a friend who works in the cigar factory) - which we graciously declined. We could never walk with him in the streets (he always walked on a block ahead) because there is a police officer on every block - literally. The government is quite uncomfortable with uncontrolled mingling of locals and tourists and locals are not allowed to offer any service or product to tourists - like playing guide, etc. Gerardo did none of these things but he assured us that the police are so corrupt they are just best avoided all together. The tour of the museum was the same and we were supposed to tell anyone who asked that we were friends of a mutual friend in Germany, Marcus, who had travelled to South Africa and given us photos to give Gerardo which were taken in 1999 while he was over in Germany on an exchange. He had the photos with him all the time. He showed us his family's ration card which is the same one which allows all Cubans access to rather dismal monthly rations of food. He shared about a time during the special period when the government did their bit by blessing wedding couples with free crates of beer and a cake on their big day. Gerardo married and divorced twice in this time with a friend of his - the sale of the beers made it a very profitable maneuver!

Probably the most beautiful (and most touristic) part of Havana is the UNESCO world heritage site of the oldest part of the city - called Havana Vieja. The buildings (or at least the facades) are well conserved (they have to - apparently 300 buidlings collapse a year in Havana!) and the number and beauty of colonial buildings in this area is truly breathtaking. Musicians here only seem to strike up the band when tourists pass by and one can easily find old woman here posing with enormous cigars waiting for lucrative photo opportunities.

There is just too much to see and do in Havana. We tried to stay off the main tourist circuit, but we did pop into the occasional art gallery as well as the national fine arts museum for Cuban art - which was actually really excellent. We visited the Capitolio - a building very close in design to that in Washington DC - built middle last century to house parliament (no longer in use). A giant 17m tall statue of a woman representing the republic is housed inside the building and there is also a 21 carat diamond positioned in the floor - well, it was replaced by a replica a while back after a brief and very interesting disappearance and reappearance...

We also took a most fascinating tour of a cigar factory where professional cigar rollers have to fulfil a quota of 110 cigars a day. The process of Cuban cigar making is almost magical and the people churn them out all day long while being read to from the national propaganda newspaper everyday. We had to purchase one or two although neither of us can say that we enjoyed the cigars at all - the rest of Cuba seems to love of them!

Another impressive site was the San Cristobal cemetery where there are blocks and blocks of elaborate graves that host more than 1 million dead. One can't help being impressed by the decadence of it all. After a while, though, we needed a break from the city and headed out to the country.

One of our final maneuvers while staying in Havana was to innocently try to buy a painting on display on the Prado (a long elaborately built walkway in old Havana). We selected the painting we desired to purchase and were told that someone would meet us presently at a nearby hotel and we would receive our painting there for the amount indicated (all in Spanish). It was like a drop-off: you walk along the sidewalk until someone starts walking alongside you. After a while the moment for transaction is indicated and the 10 CUC note leaves your one hand while a rolled painting appears in your other...

Internet locations in Havana can be counted on your fingers and at US$6 an hour locals are pretty effectively excluded from the practice - especially considering the minimum monthly wage (which counts for pretty much everyone here, from cigar-roller to dentist) is about 250 pesos (about US$11). There is nothing to buy either! Shops have the basics - arts and crafts are not legal trade opportunities for locals and in a country where everyone is supposed to have equal tiny amounts of the essentials there is nothing remotely close to variety. Rum seems to be the most widely available commodity for purchase. Literature topics and variety is obviously very limited too. Our host family's favourite topic of conversation was how expensive everything is in Cuba. These homestay businesses (called casa particulars) were begrudgingly legalized post special period and the government works hard to prevent indiscriminate gain in wealth by taxing the owners of such businesses heavily - about US$130 a month (regardless of occupancy) for the most basic rooms (like ours), US$30 extra to serve breakfast (per room) above and beyond fiscal tax at the end. We had an interesting moment because the inspector arrived on his monthly rounds while we were moving from the non-aircon room (US$15 per night + breakfast) to the aircon room (works out to US$26 with the breakfasts). We were out so the family quickly moved our stuff over as they only have one room registered with the government. If both rooms are full they just close up all the windows and pretend no one is home. Our first taste of government law evasion tactics and tensions - the first of many we would experience.

Food can also be divided up into expensive restaurants (government owned) and paladares (government owned buildings with heavily taxed tenants trying to make a business with a restricion of 12 seats per paladare) - quite a bit cheaper. Sea food is readily available and the very reasonably priced lobsters are enormous! Paladares are not allowed to serve this delicacy but they all do somehow - and we ate like kings!

Cuba is famous for their old cars - well nurtured pontiacs, chevrolets, plymouths and more abound and this really does give cuba a special feel - but there are also many modern cars as well. These cars are bought overseas by musicians and sports players who manage to get the rare permission to travel. The government also owns a nationwide fleet mainly for tourism purposes. There is also the option of horse-drawn carriage and little motos called 'cocos'.

Although most people still receive money from relatives that managed to defect to Miami (US$ taxed with 10% exchange tax - just so that the government can also be part of the fun) the system that operates here in Cuba has, to our opinion, largely created a national culture of lying and thieving - all white lies and petty crimes, of course. Prostitution in Cuba is also very lucrative and the stigma in this culture has been sufficiently down-adjusted so that people condone and even esteem prostitutes selling their bodies here in much the same way our western cultures esteem models selling their bodies for all sorts of seductive ploys in our media back home. Speaking of which - there does not seem to be something like that here because there is no advertising - yes, the city of Havana is beautiful largely because the city is free of advertising - not even the casa particulars and paladeras advertise (that would cost an extra US$40 a month) and pornography is illegal (a far cry from the continent of South America). There is just the government tabloid - the Granma (named after the boat Fidel Castro used in the great takeover attempt of 1956 - Cuba's most holy relic on display) and that is it! For all the Cubans that long for the allure of capitalism (and that really does not include everyone) - they really can't appreciate what they will have to lose to gain it.

After a 10.5 hour delay at Caracas airport the guys at Aeropostal finally managed to fix our broken plane and get us airborne. The lonely planet accurately describes what we had to pass through during passport control... At 3 a.m. we arrived at the correct street number and house name in downtown Havana and were extremely warmly welcomed and accommodated by our host family in Casa Cary. A remarkable change from the rest of South America - this friendliness would characterize the rest of our stay in Cuba.

Cuba was our final destination for this side of our globe-trot and, we must say, probably the highlight country of our trip. Just over 2 weeks in a country with so much to absorb. Arriving in Havana is so striking - all the architecture, the friendly people - a country where everyone can eat and sleep and read and be born under medical supervision... a land with so many contradictions and inconsistencies. Cuba is a dream that most people have woken up from ages ago but at the same time it is a game that everyone plays faithfully. But for all the 'no es facil' (it's not easy) that you hear - definitely the happiest country we have come across so far. August in Havana is the hottest and the most humid month. As one local responded to our question about whether is rains everyday - you wish it does! Here, we believe, the cockroaches lie dying on the streets due to the lack of hygiene and mosquitoes are absent, unable to survive the intense heat.

Money transacts in two parallel forms - the local currency (peso), supposedly the currency exclusive to Cubans, and the CUC (formerly the US$ but now called 'peso convertible') - the highly taxed currency that discriminates foreign tourists from locals. Exchange is roughly 24 pesos to 1 CUC and prices will often be similar in amount for locals and 'extranjeros' - but in different currencies - just to give an idea of how much more we often had to pay! Locals suffer too as many prices are now just set in CUC for everyone. They also are not allowed to make use of the hotels in Cuba - all state owned - reserved exclusively for tourists. In fact the government owns everything. It supervises a few joint ventures with foreign investment companies and local enterprise happens here only because communist Cuba was forced to legalise 150 types of businesses (mostly associated with tourism) to survive a period of intense depression (which they officially dubbed the 'special period') when Cuba's main sponsor, the former Soviet Union, collapsed a few pages back in history.

Cuba is like a movie in freeze-frame. Although Fidel and the crew pulled off their legendary coup about 50 years ago, by the talk, the show, the propaganda and the lives of the people it seems like it happened yesterday. The 'revolution' continues to this day and the greatest crime one can commit in Cuba is to oppose the revolution. Newspaper articles are all either about Fidel or 'that mad tyrant and terrorist' Bush. They seem to love talking about America. America owns a building (from ages past, called the US Interests Section) conspicuously positioned on the Malecon for all to see stirring messages of inspiration towards freedom. Two hours free internet per day is offered for Cuban citizens inside the complex - but no-one dare make use of it. To deal with this threat the Cuban government simply positioned a fleet of flags in front of the building - and recently there was apparently a huge billboard just next to the building depicting Bush with blood running out of his mouth...

One of the most interesting and compelling characters of Cuba's modern history is the legendary Ernesto (Che) Guevara . Being a very photogenic and adored individual - immortalized in early death - his image is EVERYWHERE - even the rest of South America - and the world. Almost all the postcards, billboards, murals, T-shirts display his image - he is like the eternal supermodel.