Oh, Cuba!

Arrived to Cuba in a Russian airplane around 5 pm on a Wednesday. We took a taxi to the Casa Particular. In Cuba it is most common to stay with a family. Cubans can get permission from the government to rent out 1 or 2 of their rooms to tourists for around $20 per night. They always offer breakfast and most the time dinner. Our first casa was in Havana Central with a nice couple in their 50s or 60s. All the casa families were very welcoming and helpful but the conversation was limited because of my poor Spanish speaking skills. Toward the end of my trip I was quite frustrated with my inability to have simple conversation or express my gratitude to the families and the other locals I met. The four of us went out exploring Havana our first night after getting acquainted with the homesay situation. I was with 3 men, 2 Islrealies and a Dutch guy. We all met at the hostel, Poc na, on Isla Mujeres in Mexico. We found pizza for a couple dollars at a cafetaria. We come to find out pizza, spaghetti, hamgurgers (ground beef on a roll), hotdogs, and moors y Christians (black beans and white rice) are the only food items in the country. I'm somewhat sarcastic but its true. Unless you eat at expensive tourists traps or the casas it was bread and cheese with pink sauce for you. The food was so much better if eaten at the casas. They served lots of rice and beans, fried banana chips, cucumber avocado tomato (sometimes green beans) salads, and omelette for me. The boys got fried chicken or fish or something with their meal. Those meals were delicious but expensive. We ate at the casa in the beginning but soon realized we were spending way too much money and began eating street food. After our pizza dinner in Havana we continued to wander around the big city, ended up sitting on the Malecon ( the walking path parallel to the ocean) for an hour or so just watching the locals.

Thursday began with breakfast at the casa across the street. Eggs, bread with butter, banana, guyaba, orange, café con leche, pastries, cucumber and tomato slices. Best breakfast in cuba. We walked around Havana, saw the capitol building. Its in a very centralized location so we walked by it all the time. It was under renovation so we couldn’t go inside. Walked down Calle Obispo, a very touristy street that deadends at a nice square with used books for sale all around the perimeter. A taxi in an old 50s Chevy gave us a tour around the other side of the canal, Havana vieja.  That night we went to Casa de la Musica. It’s a large salsa, etc club with live music and dancing, ofcourse.

The mission for Friday was figuring out how to get to Viñales. We walked all the way to the bus station which took over an hour. After asking several people where the ticket office is we got a woman in a restaurant to help us. Turned out her friend, who we ran into while walking in the bus station, would like to drive us in his car for the same price as the bus. In Cuba the tourists ride different buses than the locals. I’m not sure why that is but they keep the tourists very secluded. For example, there’s 2 currencies, national peso and the CUC (Cuban Convertible). One CUC is 25 pesos. The CUC is even higher than the dollar about 1.1 CUC to the $US. You can buy street food for incredibly cheep, pizza 5 pesos, hamburgers 2 pesos, lemonade 1 peso. But then restaraunts for tourists are 2-10 CUC per meal. It was almost free to eat street food but it was definitely not healthy. So, anyways, we got our ride to Viñales organized and go to the Revolution Square where Castro gave his famous 4 hour speech, History Will Absolve Me, and many marches and ralleys were held during the revolution time. There’s a very tall building/memorial/museum that you can go to the top of and get a whole 360 degree view of the city with a museum on the first floor. A giant sculpture of Jose Marti is out front.

Saturday at 1pm the driver shows up to the casa we were staying at. The car was quite a shock. I wish I got a photo of it. It was like a van/car with only 1 window on the right side. The driver installed the seats himself and the 1 window had some weird rolldown contraption that didn’t seem entirely secure. The floor was extremely hot to the bare feet. Luckily, it was only a 3 hour ride to Viñales. The exhaust was going straight into the car to the point where I was wearing my bandana. Viñales is an adorable village. Very small, farming and tourism community. The four of us had to sleep in 2 different houses, they were just 2 doors apart. We got in the habit of playing cards every night after dinner in Viñales. There wasn’t much to do at night there, as you may assume with a small farming village. We played rumy 500 or hearts or a Russian game that we clearly did not know the rules to because once we all got good at it there was no game left.

Our mission on Sunday was to find an activity for the day that didn’t cost a fortune. Its expensive to do anything. They are constantly approaching you asking if you want a taxi ride, hike in the mountains, eat dinner at their restaurant, etc. So after too long, its very difficult to make decisions with 4 people, we decided on horseback riding. At 1pm we met the guide on the main route and walked over to where the horses live. We rode to a tobacco farmer’s house and smoked cigars while he made fresh juices, either coconut with honey and rum or fresh sugar cane with grapefruit juice and rum. There was the cutest orange kitten at the farm that I held most the time I was there.  The countryside of Cuba is beautiful. Many black bean and corn, tobacco, banana, sugar cane farms. Pigs all over the place, even saw a litter of pigs with their mom and a very protective dog making sure we didn’t get close to the new family. We returned at sunset for dinner at the casa. That night the tour guide took us to a concert of Havana salsa bands playing at a Revolutionary Mural. The mural was quite impressive, took up the face of a mountain and I was told it took 5 years to complete. Hard to believe but it is a giant painting on the rock so maybe that made it much more difficult to paint.

Monday was a lazy day in Viñales. The horseride in the mountains and seeing the mural that night were basically the only attractions in the town so we layed low and just chilled at the casa and wandered around town. Figured out where we would go the next day and how that bus situation would work out. Arik and I got a tour of the Prehistoric Park in Spanish by a very old Cuban man that I'm not sure knew we didn’t speak Spanish. He showed us all his fossils and was interesting despite the language barrier.

Tuesday morning, breakfast at 6am and bus by 7am. We got lucky with the bus, turned out we were the only 4 people going to Cienfuegos so it was just a van with the driver and I could even lay down in the van. Got to an adorable woman’s house by 3pm Tuesday and she welcomed us and gave us fresh fruit juice. Walked around downtown Cienfuegos and ate some gross cheese sandwiches, but they were only 25 cents so its all okay. We saw all there was to see in that one afternoon so decided to go to Trinidad the next day.

Trinidad was only a couple hours away and we were bombarded by the casa particular senoras when deboarding the bus. It was quite overwhelming. I usually let the boys make the decisions because they were, if you can believe it, more picky than I about making sure they knew their options before choosing one. The rest of Wednesday we wandered around Trinidad. A cute town but also really hard to be in for me. They have cobblestone streets and use horse carriage for transport.  As you can imagine I did not enjoy the horse rides. The horses were all starving and looked completely miserable. Loud trucks and cars constantly zooming by them with less than a foot of space between the two, honking and yelling all the time. It was a poor environment for a horse.

Thursday we went hiking to the waterfall we’d heard about around town. We just set off from the casa toward the mountains and found it! But before we actually got the the waterfall there was a restaurant and a man collecting 6.5 CUC to enter the trail to the waterfall. We made our own trail to the point we were at and knew we could continue and make it to the waterfall on our own but Lars and I succombed to the system and paid the government to enter. Yiftach and Arik on the other hand when Che Guevara style and made their own way. But in the end they couldn’t jump into the water or go into the cave created by the waterfall because there was a ticket collector there as well. They did, however, make it all the way. Lars and I were sure we wouldn’t see them again until the casa. That night we went to a disco in a cave at the top of a mountain in town. It was the most interesting disco I’ve ever seen.

Friday was a day for sleeping in until 11 and playing at the beach. The beach near Trinidad was nothing special after seeing the Mexican Rivera.. Still a beautiful tropical beach.

Saturday we split with Lars and left for Camaguey, a 5 hour bus ride from Trinidad. Lars went back to Havana instead as he had to be ready to catch a flight the next day back to Mexico. Camaguey was a lovely little city and we decided to stay 2 nights. Not much to see besides walking around the town. Lots of coffee shops and cheap food everywhere! An annual festival occurs in Camaguey and we were there for the right time. The festival included music, food, activities morning, day, and night for 1 week.

Sunday was another day of walking around and getting the vibes from yet another Cuban town. Arik and I spent a lot of time at the festival, eating cakes and whatnots on the street. We walked around looking for the market and by the time we found it it was closing for the day. Markets in Cuba are not like other places. Sometimes there is no food, sometimes just a little bit, a couple bananas and some meat. I heard there's a market the locals go to where they receive a ration for the day/week/month. I'm not entirely sure how that works. Most food seems to be sold on the road. You can just sit outside your house and wait for the avocado man to stroll by yelling ¨aguacate!!!¨

Monday we abruptly left for Santa Clara. I was not ready to leave but the guys came back to tell me that we needed to leave that moment in order to get to Santa Clara that night and thus get to Havana in time for our flight. That was another 5 hour bus ride that turned into 6. Arrived in Santa Clara after dark and bombarded by casa senoras, once again. We had to stay in different casas again as most places don’t have room for more than 2 people. We wandered over to where the Che Museum is so the boys could get a look because they left for Havana the next morning. We watched a salsa band at a little bar that night and went over to some old revolution war vets house. He showed us photos and tried to communicate about the war in Spanish with us. It was moderately successful.

Tuesday I was all alone in Santa Clara but it was great and I had a hard time actually staying alone. I saw 2 English guys that I’d met in Trinidad and went with them to the Che Museum, Mosolium and the Boxcar Museum (where the turning point of the revolution occurred, the rebel army stopped an important train). I took an evening bus to Havana that night. It went by relatively fast and luckily too because it was a full bus and I could barely move my legs and the bathroom light went out so I couldn’t see anything when I went in, a nice Spanish couple lent me their lighter so I could get my surroundings before going in with the door closed.  Met the Israelies in Havana late Tueday night at the casa we spent the first 3 nights. We chatted up and went to sleep early. Next morning we got some street pizza, pastries, and coffee and then headed off for the airport where we’d spend the next 4 hours waiting for a delayed plane back to Cancun.