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Published: March 15th 2011
On the Yak 42 d
it was condensation, apparentlyAnd so to Cancún. The most visited city in Mexico by some accounts. Big, brash and eminently forgettable. Admittedly, we didn't do much there but prepare for our trip to Cuba. And being the opening act with
Havana to follow was always going to be a tough ask.
The bus from Palenque pulled in at the bus station and we walked the 1km or so from the bus station to the Hotel Soberanis. It was much as a hotel in any resort city would be – painted white. They're always painted white.
Fearing that Cancún would be busy around New Year's Eve we had booked rooms quite some time before, so walked in with a confident “Buenas tardes”. It mattered not – there was no record of the booking and no record of the deposit paid. To the desk bloke's credit, though, he found a room for us and took it on faith that we had paid a deposit through Hostel Bookers and reduced the rate by that amount.
We didn't do much in Cancún except to walk down to the giant shopping centre and buy a few things. We had decided to leave a backpack per
couple in Cancun and only take one per couple to Cuba. Finding a place to leave said packs was difficult. After a fruitless search of places nearby that the intertubes said would store our stuff, we returned to the hotel, defeated. We resolved to ask one last time as we left for Havana the next morning.
When we did so, the bellboy was less than enthusiastic. He ummed and ahhed, glancing now and then at the unattended front desk in the hope of support, but agreed to store our bags. At that point, the lady – the same one that had refused us point blank the night before – returned from whatever, and the bellboy started to walk over. Seeing our 'yes' answer evaporating a 100 peso note materialised, stopping him in his tracks. The affable smile returned, and our bags were in safe hands.
Quick tip – don't fret about a Cuban visa. Everyone, especially the tossers that perpetually inhabit sites like Thorntree, will tell you different stories. We completely forgot about the visa until we were standing in the check-in line for Air Cubana at the airport, at which point a bloke wandered up, asked everyone
if they had their visas, and sorted out the ones that didn't on the spot.
The Air Cubana plane was an old Russian Yak 42d which had seen better decades. The seats were tiny, and the on board luggage space limited. On the plus side I finally saw those idiots that carry oversized hand luggage get what they deserve, as their refusal to check baggage coupled with a plane from a bygone era meant the luggage stayed in their laps for the flight to Cuba. This plane had clearly been built in an era when hand luggage consisted of a duty-free bag with a couple of bottles of vodka and box of Cubans, not a Samsonite travel case only a touch smaller than a New Farm studio. As the plane filled with clouds of condensation we took off, the famous Cancún beaches a pretty strip of white against a blue Caribbean. I couldn't help but be reminded of the Paul Keating line about Darwin - the best way to see Cancún is from a plane at 30,000 feet on the way to Havana.
The flight into Havana was relatively painless, aside from that in my knees and in
the back of the bloke in the seat in front of me. The entry procedure in Cuba slightly less so. We were quite extensively interviewed by a plain clothes official who was very interested in the GPS that Dad had. They are a banned item, so we had to fill in a detailed form which Customs kept, ensuring that they would check that we still had it with us on the way out of the country. As tourists near us checked reservations and text messages on their GPS equipped iPhones and Blackberrys I remained quiet. One does not argue with the Cuban authorities. All of this would have been quite difficult without some Spanish, so months spent listening to BBC Mundo again paid off.
The taxi drive in from the airport takes about half an hour, and, although I can't speak for the other 3 Coleses, I was getting a little excited. I have read a lot about Cuba, good and bad, and I was keen to see it first hand. The first thing that strikes you is the relative absence of traffic. The roads are decent, but there's no one on them. Then, you continue to look around,
picking out the 50s vintage cars, the Soviet-era construction, but all the while something nags. It takes a bit to twig, but eventually you get it. Every airport you have ever been to has billboards, every city has signs exhorting you to buy this and that. Not here. There was none, no commercial advertising. There were billboards, but they were given over to public notices, murals and reminders of the Revolution.
The next thing you notice is that the cars you do see are mostly full, and the ones that aren't are stopping to give other people lifts. You can own a car in Cuba, but it's not so easy. Most of the cars are state owned, and these have blue number plates. These cars generally have to stop if someone waves them down. Now, sorry if this offends people in car-obsessed Australia, but it's really not a bad idea.
After a drive through mostly quiet streets we arrived in the area of Vedado in Havana. You have basically two options for accomodation in Cuba – hotels, which are supposed to be very expensive, and privately run houses, basically bed and breakfasts, called
casa particulares. The casas, as
they're known, will cost you normally around 25 CUCs for a room which can sleep 2.
And now we come across the other peculiarity of the Cuban system. Foreigners are supposed to use only the Cuban Convertible peso, or CUC (called
convertibles or
cucs), and the locals use Cuban pesos, (CUPs or
moneda nacional). The CUC is roughly equivalent to the AUD, maybe worth about AUD$1.1. And there are 25 CUPs to 1CUC. The result is that travel in Cuba can be expensive.
After a few rums I developed another theory, this time about the reason for this and, in hindsight, think it's actually a system which has some benefits. I observed that there appeared to be a lot less resentment of foreign tourists among local Cubans, and I think a large part of this is that we have to pay quite a bit more for some of the same things than the locals do. They think we have money, but at the same time they see us getting royally ripped off, and this reduces resentment.
Anyway, back to the Hotel Victoria. Not as expensive as we had thought it was, it was the 'joining hotel' for
the tour we were about to do, so we booked a couple of extra nights in it. The hotel was on the opposite corner to the Focsa building – a truly massive construction with a very Soviet feel about it. Across the road were a row of stately houses built in French colonial style, family homes that now had way more than one Western nuclear family in them.
The hotel itself was a relatively small one as flash hotels go, about 4 floors, each with 8 or so rooms on it. And it had that old world class about it – a restaurant, a gift shop and a proper hotel bar with proper wood panelling complete with a large black man in a tuxedo. We duly ordered a round of mojitos and a couple of beers, fearing the price gouging we had been told about on so many blogs. Well, those particular bloggers had clearly never paid $7.00 for a bloody XXXX Gold in the Valley, because the drinks, while expensive, weren't so bad. We could live with 2.50CUC for a beer, and 3.00 for a mojito in a hotel bar.
The beer, Cristal, was in fact fairly
ordinary, so I asked the barman about rum. What followed was a ten minute discussion about the best rum (Havana Club), the best way of aging it (oak barrels) and the best way of drinking it (well, depends on what type – the white rums for mixed drinks, 3 year aged dark rum for other mixed drinks, the 5, 7 and 15 year dark rum neat with ice....). All conducted in Cuban Spanish by a bloke with a voice deep enough to make Isaac Hayes cry in his grave.
The following day we explored La Habana, heading for Habana Vieja. We made it as far as the next street before we stopped by numerous helpful people who wanted to chat. One bloke, when we mentioned we were from Australia, went on to talk about Canberra and Cathy Freeman, leaving us slightly impressed – the usual response in Latin America is “Australia? Ahh, kangaroos!!”
Soon, a father walking with his 12 year old daughter offered to show us some sights. Not being complete morons we figured it for a bit of a scam, but went along anyway. They took us to some sights we would never have seen, including
Drinks at the Hotel Nacional
Cranky bar lady just out of shot.... a weird
callejon with painted bathtubs ande a giant rat, then sort of hung around with us, expecting a tip. Unfortunately for them our country does not have a tipping culture (and hopefully never will) so they had to be satisfied with an entire dollar. The bloke seemed slightly disappointed, but then continued on his way to wherever he had been going in the first place with a smile and a wave.
We also found the Coppelia – the famous ice cream shop. Basically a big park with weird UFO shaped concrete constructions, we got our first taste of the lack of choice common to Cuba. As we walked in we were ushered into a separate area for tourists where we could choose our ice cream. We had the options of chocolate and strawberry, or fresa y chocolate. And, at $2.50 a scoop, I can't really say it was worth it. More of a cultural experience than anything else.
This was all a lead up to the main event – we would be spending New Year's Eve in Havana. Just the sentence has a certain...sumthin. We had to do it in style. Being from Brisbane we didn't have
a lot of ideas, but figured that if you mixed Cuban cigars, alcohol and a place to consume them you couldn't go far wrong. Anything further would probably involve a whole bunch of people (which we didn't have) and salsa dancing (which we couldn't do) so we opted for a bucket load of drinks and cigars at the very swanky Hotel Nacional, overlooking the Malecon. If you're looking for the some examples of the causes of the Revolution you could do worse than to start here.
The Nacional, built in the thirties, was the very epitome of American opulence. The Cuban elite, and gangsters from Florida and New York had wild parties and meetings while the Cuban people starved outside. Now, it serves the noble purpose of gouging rich foreign tourists for all they were worth.
We scouted the bar overlooking the Malecon for the next day's festivities and the drinks were on a par with the hotel bar, so not exorbitant. The bar lady was cranky, though – with luck she had the night off for New Year's Eve.
New Year's eve dawned. We were in Havana. We braved the crappy hotel buffet breakfast, complete with
weird fish paste stuff. We ventured out to pick up a bottle of rum and some Cohiba cigars for the evening, then had a feed and some drinks at a decidedly dodgy joint where old white guys hung out with very young Cuban girls. They didn't charge us for the chips, though, so it wasn't all bad. After a long wait the other four arrived, just in time for dinner. They had been delayed in Cancún and were late, so we opted for the overpriced hotel dinner.
I'd tell you a lot about New Year's Eve if I could. As as I can recall there were cigars, giant cannons going of at midnight. And rum, quite a bit of rum. A very nice night. Bienvenidos 2011.
After dragging ourselves out of bed we spent the rest of the day looking around Havana, including a good look around the Museo de la Revlucion, which included the famous Rincon de los Cretinos – Wall of the Cretins. The pictures are cartoons of various cretins, starting with Fuglencio Batista, then the three most recent republican US presidents. With messages like- “thank you for being such an arse and strengthening the Cuban
revolution with your idiocy”.
Then, onto the hop on hop off bus, which was the best way to get around apart from walking, and it then took us to the Plaza de la Revolucion with the classic outlines of Ché and Camilo Cienfuegos – two of the heroes of the revolution. Ché you've probably heard of, Camilo is little known outside Cuba and died in a plane crash only a few months after the Revolution triumphed in 1959.
That afternoon, it was time to meet the tour guide, Tony Mas. Klaire and I had never done an organised tour before, so we had some reservations about this one. It was different, though. For one thing the group of 8 of us were all friends, all Australian (well, apart from the ex-Englishman). Also, the tour was with a small company and on the cheap side. It was to cost $1000 each for 15 days which included all transport, accommodation and breakfast. That seemed reasonable to us, given that travel in Cuba is not all that cheap in the first place. A little over our budget, but it was a bit of a break for us after 6 weeks in
Mexico travelling by ourselves. Having stuff organised is sometimes pretty good.
The next morning after another underwhelming hotel buffet breakfast we met Ricardo, the coolest bus driver in Cuba, who rocked up in a half size luxury coach. More than a little embarrassing, if I'm honest, to be sitting in this thing while most people need to catch a lift in the back of a truck.
The first stop was
Santa Clara, the site of the Ché memorial. Santa Clara was the site of one of the pivotal battles of the revolution, where Ché's men captured an armoured train on its way to Havana, capturing armaments and a couple hundred of Batista's men.
Ché was murdered in 1967 in Bolivia by the CIA and, after many years, his body was eventually brought here to Santa Clara to be buried with other martyrs from the revolution. In hindsight, it's probably good that he didn't die like Mao, Ho Hi Minh or Lenin as he would probably have been embalmed and displayed in a glass case like plastic Japanese food, and nobody needs to see that.
A massive marble and granite edifice, it also has a huge depiction
of the final letter that Ché sent to Fidel, renouncing his honorary Cuban citizenship and signalling his intention to assist fomenting revolution in places abroad. It's from this letter that the famous lines are taken - “Hasta la victoria siempre” and “Patria o muerte”. Very loosely translated, it means “until we get to Victoria or die in Patria.” I believe there's a Patria in Italy, and nowhere near Melbourne, but they both have good coffee, which is something Cuba lacks, so Ché may have been referring to espresso.
The exact meaning is still hotly debated.
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cabochick
Andrea
Thanks!
“until we get to Victoria or die in Patria.” LMAO! Thanks, that was very funny. Great blog with very detailed explanations of the odds and sods of Cuba.