Cuba - Caliente!

After a three year absence from Vancouver, my amazing friends surprised me with a plane ticket home for the month of July. Apart from being wonderful to catch up with everyone, I couldn’t believe how much the city has grown and changed. I barely recognized certain neighbourhoods! I will be spending six months there in between graduating here and starting my Masters in Geneva next September, and I’m now actually looking forward to it. Admittedly Cape Town feels more like ‘home’ these days and I will miss it desperately but I need to earn some hard currency, which the Rand decidedly is NOT, before relocating to Switzerland. Naturally with my acute travel addiction far from in check I felt the need to take a side trip somewhere new. I’ve been in a Cuba state of mind lately, hoping to reach its shores before the death of Castro and the opening of borders to America. Plus, despite the distance from Vancouver, charter airline tickets to Varadero are cheap!

I fell madly and deeply in love with Cuba. Not the ‘tourist’ Cuba of Varadero five star all-inclusives – to stay at one of those is to completely miss the essence of this little island nation. Rather, I lost my heart to the real Cuba, the one that seethes with life, with colour, with culture and with music. It may be imperfect, crumbling, sometimes a little smelly and oppressively humid – but somehow every mundane little scene manages to look like a postcard. Brightly painted American cars from the 1950s and communist issue Ladas bomb around the pockmarked streets along side bicycle rickshaws, coconut taxis, scooters and horse drawn carts. Old men huddle around makeshift tables on street corners engrossed in dominoes or chess. The roads are cobble stone, the buildings perfectly dilapidated and mismatched, as if styled just so. Even the stray dogs are impossibly cute– although I found it strange to find a purebred German dachshund posing on every second stoop. The people were wonderfully warm. In South Africa, as a foreigner I often perceive a vague undercurrent of something slightly dark permeating every day life. While Cuba has faced some pretty significant struggles of its own there is a lightness, a friendliness to it that really embraces you.

First, it is a very safe place to travel. With a regime that threatens thirty year prison sentences for killing your cow (the government owns 50% of every animal) you can only imagine the penalties against anyone caught violating a tourist, tourism being the bread and butter of the Cuban economy. This means that apart from pickpockets there isn’t much to worry about. What is a scary proposition however is taking a long distance taxi. Think no seat belts, no suspension and no breaks. Oh, and no sticking to one side of the road. Luckily there isn’t much traffic since few outside the cities have cars, but it’s not an experience for the constitutionally weak.

What they say about the food is true. Cuba is not a culinary destination unless you enjoy a good bout of food poisoning. Most travellers I encountered were having adventures of the upset stomach variety. Yes the lobster is cheap, but as a general rule the food is pretty inedible – think greasy pork and bland beans. This does not apply to the cocktails however. The fresh piňa coladas are divine as are the mojitos and mango daquiris. These are people who know how to mix a drink.

A cursory scan of Varadero left me under whelmed so my trip began in Trinidad, a 500 year old UNESCO site situated on the south coast. Think cobble stone streets and rainbow row houses with ornate trims. The streets are the domain of horse drawn carts, bicycle taxis and the occasional 1950s American car. It seems like much of the population doesn’t work, instead spending their days on the doorstep. Life is lived publicly – all street facing windows open wide onto private living rooms and much takes place on the sidewalks out front. Grocery stores are almost empty save a few eggs and random products. No snacks, no supermarkets. It’s a little confusing when you are used to having access to so much how little is actually for sale here.

 Following the advice of friends, I booked myself into a casa particulare, which is the best and often only way to stay while travelling outside Cuba’s big cities. Casas are private homes where local families open their guest rooms to travellers, cooking and caring for you. It’s a fantastic way to meet locals and other travellers casually trekking around the island. I adored our host family, especially the mama who cooked the most massive meals. She must have thought despite being two we were eating for six.

Unfortunately the weather was iffy in Trinidad; apparently it was the start of hurricane season so every afternoon brought a serious thunderstorm and cascading streets. One eventful day we narrowly missed being incinerated by lightening while lining up at a horse drawn beer cart; I was left feeling electrically charged. Another time it rained so hard that a friendly local had to shelter us in her house until it abated. Our lack of Spanish meant we weren’t able to muster much conversation beyond hand drawn air pictures but after an hour our arms were tiring from all the gesturing and it was time to move along. As a parting gift they presented us with fresh mangos. This is how friendly the local Cubans are – where else in the world do they invite you in for shelter and then give you presents? We decided it would be funny to hire a bicycle taxi back to our casa because by this time the streets had transformed into gushing white water rapids – it’s a miracle we didn’t get washed away and it made for the most interesting bike ride of my life so far. That night, I joined a group of Germans on an outing to the local night club, located in a giant underground cave and reachable only by traversing unlit, dirt paths through a large-scale construction zone. The setting was spectacular, though the scene left a little to be desired and the cave ceiling dripping into our drinks was a bit on the icky side. Possibly the most exciting aspect was narrowly missing a giant scorpion in the middle of the dirt path.

The next day, craving some beach, we hopped on a moped and drove through the lush greenery down to Ancon, a white sand beach with clear turquoise water the temperature of a warm bath –ah, the Caribbean. From there we hired a catamaran and sailed out to a coral reef about a kilometre off shore for some snorkelling. It wasn’t quite up to Hawaiian standards but still made for some fun. The rest of the time in Trinidad was dominated by serious cigar smoking (are cigars addictive? Because damn did I crave them for weeks following my return); black market, back room cigar dealings and cigar factory touring; and lots of cocktails and music – live, glorious salsa and dancing in the streets late into the night. It was magical. While the government may be strict, life is lived with joie de vivre. This is not what I expected to find in one of the last strict communist regimes.

Other stops included Cienfuego, with its French colonial buildings and Santa Clara, home to all things Che Guevara – mind you, the entire country is peppered with Che and Castro tributes. But my other highlight was Cuba’s frenetic capital, Havana. It is quite different from the rest of the country – gone is the relaxed nature of the locals, and here you must fastidiously watch for muggers, pick pockets, beggars and hustlers. Actually, the constant inundation of aggressive beggars, thieving wait staff and Latino lovers does grow exhausting very quickly. But, despite this, Havana is a sparkling, historic jewel. Seventeenth century forts and cathedrals intermingle with Che and Ernest Hemingway’s old haunts, and crumbling remnants of impossibly glamorous early 20^th century Havana – the playground of  America’s rich and famous in a bygone era are interspersed with ‘Viva la Revolucion’ murals and missiles from the Cuban Missile Crisis. El Capitilio, the parliament building, is an almost exact replica of Washington Capitol building except built exactly one foot taller – to show communist dominance. Havana is a city in a state of beautiful decay – paint is chipped just so and faded to the colour of a water painting. If you love photography as I do, it is impossible to walk down a street without stopping multiple times to capture scenes. What I wouldn’t give to have seen Havana in its 1930s heyday.

Havana is a sprawling, bustling metropolis, but this doesn’t detract from its charm. It’s not a walkable city – while certain neighbourhoods like Viejo and the seaside Malecon are fine to explore on foot, to visit sights like the massive cemetery (the size of a small city) and the colossal Jesus statue, you’ll need to hail one of the 1950s vintage taxis – which is also part of the fun. Here too music is everywhere – live in every restaurant, every bar and on every street. This is a place where people break spontaneously into song. It’s funny watching the ubiquitous salsa dancers because you will immediately notice that locals move with an innate smooth precision, while tourists jerk around mechanically – there is no comparison. Don’t ever participate in a dance off against a Cuban – you will lose. And my god the younger men are gorgeous – deeply tanned skin and dark hair paired with the most crystal blue eyes. On the flip side, the older generation walk around sporting cropped tank tops that fully expose large, protruding bellies (the legacy, I assume, of a life time of greasy pork dinners). They are also ardent admirers of women. Every male, from a ten year old boy to a 90 year old grandpa will shower you with compliments. Over dinner we discussed how if you are having an ‘ugly’ day, a walk down the streets of Havana will very quickly lift your ego.

Politics is inescapable in Cuba. I was amazed how many locals wanted to engage with me on the subject, though this might be because I am a political science major. Propaganda is wide spread and done very artfully – Castro, obviously an aesthete, must have employed talented graphic designers to imbue his nation with his Revolucion chic. ‘Todo por la Revolucion’ is a refrain seen everywhere, even in the countryside. The country’s military might, for instance tanks, fighter jet and missiles, is also widely displayed. Soldiers are a frequent sight and high ranking military dignitaries cruise around town in Lada limousines.

If you’re a literature fan, Havana again has a lot to offer. As former home to Victor Hugo and Ernest Hemingway among so many others, there are many pilgrimages to make. We visited Hemingway’s hotel room (which incidentally has the best view in town) where he wrote ‘For whom the Bell Tolls’, still perfectly preserved since his last days there. In the closet still hang his clothes and Louis Vuitton suitcases. And boy, are there a lot of half-emptied rum bottles. Personally, I find the more I’ve had to drink the harder it is to write, but Hemingway obviously had no such problem. Of course it was also necessary to have cocktails at the Floridita and his other old town haunts. Of course they are now kitschy tourist traps, but when in Rome…

Havana is brimming with so many grand old buildings, museums and boulevards. The university radiates intellectual pomp, the Hotel Nacional successfully preserves its early 20^th century splendour, and the Grand Teatro is still spectacular. La Rambla, the main street through Havana Vieja, teems with activity and the Prado is lined with old mansions and marble statues of guardian lions. Old city squares are crammed with antiques dealers selling old leather bound books and revolutionary relics. Grandiose monuments dedicated to political figures are scattered throughout the city especially along the Malecon, Havana’s answer to the seawall. At sunset, fishermen line the route, hoping to secure a better dinner option to greasy pork. As with the rest of Cuba, Havana is a graveyard of sorts for old American cars in various states of disrepair. Their rainbow colours provide the perfect complement to the candy coloured buildings.

I think I can safely say that I have now seen quite a lot of the world – this is country #40. I started this blog too late in my travels hence missing covering a lot of really interesting places I have already been. But Cuba – this is one of the absolute best so far. It’s such a shame that most people come here on all-inclusives. Really, do yourself a favour - get out there and see this country for what it really is. Unless you hate culture, you will not be disappointed!