London :: UK
Cuba: When cars are big and rum is cheap.
Places: Havana, Santa Clara, Trinidad, Guardalavaca & Santiago de Cuba.
Coolest thing I did: Got chauffeured around the sites of Santiago in the back of a 1950s model Fairlane. From before Ford even made the car.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Che Guevara played Rugby Union at medical school.
I think of all the places I expected to visit on this trip I was looking forward to Cuba most of all. On the day I applied for my tourist visa to go there Fidel Castro announced he was stepping down in favour of his brother, Raul and the following weeks saw the papers reporting things were being liberalised over there at a rate unseen in the last 50 years. I expected to maybe see a little bit of history in the making, something that I always seem to be about a decade too late for in most places I end up.
The first thing that strikes you on arrival to Havana is things are actually as broken as you expect them to be. There's a lot of new model Peugeots that act as offical tourist taxis and things generally seem to work pretty well. The old part of the city, Havana Vieja is undergoing a massive restoration project so old colonial buildings are being turned into either 5 star hotels or classy restaurants, giving off a certain air or, well, affluence. I'd expected everything to be in ruins after years of neglect due to the lack of money since the collapse of the Soviet Union but it appears that the Cubans have made tourism their number one priority and are reinvesting the proceeds back into infrastructure and restorations.
It doesn't take you too long to see that there's only a very thin layer of sheen on the crumbling glory of what Havana really is. Once you go one street back from most of the tourist sanctioned streets you see the gritty ruins of Spanish colonial buildings and get a whiff of that mix of wet garbage and raw sewerage that you only really get in the developing world. You do see the glorious old Yank Tank cars that have been kept in working order (and sometimes in pristine condition) with what can only be mechanical sorcery since the 1950s when Americans stopped sending cars after the revolution but the majority of cars are still those Datsun inspired Ladas that Eastern Europe churned out in the 80s. You can get some awesome food but in most cases you get exactly the same meal (I can never look at ham and cheese on white bread ever again) every where you go.
All this can be put down to, despite all the work going into building a tourist industry, the fact that Cuba is at heart still a working communist country. After spending a lot of time seeing places in Eastern Europe where communism is kept safely locked in museums it's amazing to actually see a place where it still roams the countryside free. At first I thought it was cool that they pretty much only put ideas and slogans on billboards everywhere instead of advertising for products, but at the end of the day it's always the same idea and the entire course of the 20th century kind of proved it was the wrong one. In Cuba everyone is still guaranteed equality, just no one guarantees the quality of said equality. And without any kind of working democracy you're kind of stuck with it. Still, that's communism for you.
That being said Cuba is still full of people that are generally pretty nice and full of life and music. Music is a big thing here, and it's probably the first time I've ever felt a little bit disappointed that I don't know how to dance. You end up spending a lot of nights sitting around places with a band drinking rum based cocktails (Mojitos, Cuba Libres...that kind of thing), sometimes smoking cigars and watching bands play music. At random intervals the crowd will give up a few people willing to salsa or sing along and it's always pretty good fun. Similar to the beach days, where Cubans like to do nothing much more than sit on the sand and drink rum directly out of the bottle. Still if your life was shitty and rum was cheap you'd probably think that was a pretty good Sunday out too.
Like most countries with an unelected dictator in charge they like erecting statues of their heroes everywhere and the their favourite is a writer called Jose Marti, who seems to be on every corner, despite not playing an exceptionally big part in the countries history, so far as I can tell. He just seems to be a fairly uncontroversial figure that has a name that's easy to carve on a bust. For those of you who've been to Russia think of him as Cuba's Pushkin. I did, however, quite like the massive statue of Che above his mausoleum just outside the town of Santa Clara. Must be much more impressive than the airstrip the Bolivians stuck him under after the killed him in the 60s. I was actually also fairly impressed to not see a single statue of Fidel anywhere, which if you've looked a North Korea or any of those wacky Arab dictatorships in the Middle East is pretty rare these days.
My favourite tourist thing was the cigar factory tour just to watch the skill involved in what is still a fully handmade product. It's impressive to see all these (predominately) women taking rolls of tobacco and using nothing but big flat leaves and their fingers turn out one after the other perfect looking cigar. Due to the high estrogen heavy content of the work force the factory radio also plays novellas, or soap operas all day, meaning as you tour around you're constantly blasted with the voices of actors having affairs and dramas. I also liked the fact that once these women have moved up the food chain (I assume because they've got incurable arthritis) they become like pit bosses at casinos, sitting on high chairs all days smoking cigars and making sure no one is flogging the product to sell to tourists. Many of them smoke cigars all day and have no front teeth. As the tour guide told us, smoking cigars is better for your health, you only get mouth cancer. This means you'll look ugly but you won't die.
One thing I've missed out on (thankfully) over the recent years of travel to the rich world has been hustlers and in Cuba, they're rife. Fake cigars, women, taxi rides in 1950s cars, all sorts of services and scams come at you if you turn your head towards the constant hissing people do at you on the street. Most of this seems to come from the bizarre dual class system that the Castros have created with their dual currency. There are actually two kinds of peso in Cuba, one everyone uses called the peso and one that tourists and anyone that comes in contact with their filthy capitalist ways called the convertible peso, but which most people call the CUC, after it's currency code. Most Cubans aren't allowed to either spend CUCs or convert them at the bank into pesos so the government had thought this was a good way to keep communism intact while getting much needed hard currency from the tourists. The trouble is the Cubans, like most people, have found a multitude of ways around this. What this means is if anyone can get their hands on CUCs they can usually get someone to turn them into pesos at a good enough rate to mean everyone has a scam to get in on the action.
And there's the rub. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the Cuban people faced very hard times and had to do pretty much anything they could to get real money. Many of them either started illegally renting out rooms or feeding tourists in their front rooms. The former is called running a casa particular and the later is called running a paladar. Both were illegal but the government, until the late 1990s turned a blind eye because it stopped people from starving. They eventually legalised this and taxed it, meaning you had lots of casa and paladar owners who could change US dollars (then later CUCs) legally. This meant that these people became pretty important and lots of people opened their homes to either feed or sleep tourists. All this sounds dangerously like capitalism.
Going forward its hard to say what will happen to Cuba. Inequality between the service industry and the rest is becoming more common and it's hard to see how Raul will keep things together once they end up creating a middle class. He seems less wed to the ideas that brought Fidel to power in the 1959 but I'm not sure how the Cubans will react if they're told all the pain and suffering they've been through in the last half century turns out to be because one old man couldn't admit he'd made a mistake. Hopefully they'll take it all in their characteristic stride and adapt as they seem so capable of.
I'd say Cuba has been one of the most interesting places I've ever had the pleasure of visiting, it just gives you so much to think about. It's a pity that most people who go there just won't see it. It's become possible to now fly into Havana, be protected in your 5 star hotel, be bussed down to the beach resorts where Cubans aren't allowed to go and only encounter the people on a customer level. This is a little bit sad but does seem to be the way things are going. In a country where things are changing so fast who knows what you'll miss.