Havana Good Time

Havana, Cuba

I got on the TACA plane in San Jose, bound for Havana, Cuba but it turned out to be a time machine and transported me back to another era.  With Michael J Fox it was in the DeLorean, but in my case it was an Airbus 319.  Not sure what year I had gone back to, there were 1950s American cars (Buicks, Fords, Pontiacs, Chevrolets, Cadillacs), 1970s Soviet style clothing stores (I was in Russia a couple of years before the Soviet Union collapsed so was able to compare first-hand), and crumbling beautiful colonial buildings from the 1700s and 1800s.  The whole place reminded me of the Twilight Zone tv programs.  And it is the only country I have been to with 2 official currencies running side by side.  I saw dustmen/garbage men smoking cuban cigars whilst pushing their dustcarts throught the streets in the mornings.  It was all very surreal.  There were no recognizable stores or restaurants that one would find in other parts of the world.  No one had ever heard of McDonalds, not that it matters, but as a global brand for the past several decades, it was funny that it had not been heard of in Cuba.

The supermarkets are really small and have hardly anything in them.  Every shopper has to put their bag in a separate room to prevent shoplifting.  I just walked in, not wanting to leave my bag full of valuables in another room.  They started yelling at me but I told them I didn't understand Spanish.  They let me look around for water, etc but 2 women were following me everywhere to make sure that I didn't shoplift because that is what they expect when a person walks in with their bag.

The local butcher's shops have a display of chopped up beef and pork laid out on a slab of concrete or tiles, with flies all over them.  There are queues/lines for absolutely everything in Havana.

Most people have not left Cuba and have a very limited knowledge of geography.  The whole island is like in a bubble or cocoon.  There are images of Che Guevara all over the place and quotes from Fidel Castro.  The people there are mostly living from hand to mouth.  A doctor earns 25 US Dollars per month, a nurse 8 US Dollars per month, a bus driver 10 Dollars, a waiter 6 Dollars. One doctor I met said he had quit his job as a doctor and was now a masseur, making more money.  Every citizen has a food ration card, much like Britain during World War 2.  The meagre rations only last a few days.  For example, each person can have 8 eggs per month, a couple of pounds of chicken, 6 pounds of beans, 6 pounds of sugar, 6 pounds of rice, etc.  The only meat on the ration card is chicken.  No beef, pork, or any other meat.  Milk is only provided to children from 0-7 years.  No butter either.  The prices charged for the ration food are subsidised so quite affordable but once these small rations run out, people have to use their salaries to buy food from the stores.   On their low salaries, the food they buy would not last for more than an extra week.  Therefore, as it stands, they would go hungry in the 3rd or 4th week of each month on those salaries alone.

Nearly all people do a second job or find ways to make extra money so that they can eat for the rest of the month and to have a basic living.  A waiter I spoke to sold clothes to neighbours and friends, sent over from relatives in the US and Europe.  A luggage porter in a bus station turned his living room into a restaurant to make extra money to supplement his 6 Dollars monthly salary.  Most families have relatives who live abroad and send money to them monthly to help them out.  As mentioned, they also send clothes over so one can see younsters with clothes worn by American and European youths.  Most couples have just one child as it is too expensive for them to have any more.

The majority of the people are hustling to make a buck, and if you are a tourist, it is impossible not to get approached by people wanting to sell cheap cigars, rent a room, or pimp a girl, or just to beg.

Tourists come to Cuba, but in Havana a lot of them stay in 5 star hotels or 3 hours away in the resort of Varadero.  They don't therefore get to really absord Cuba fully.  I stayed at a Casa Particular, staying with a family who rented a room to me and prepared breakfast for me every day.  This is about the only private enterprise around in Cuba but the government is hitting them very hard with crippling taxes.  A third of the month's intake would go on paying taxes and in low season, they would still have to pay this tax each month.

I met a number of American tourists in Havana.  They had managed to get through the loophole and given permission by the US government to go to Cuba because they were doing charity work or participating in cross-cultural educational programs.  Perhaps my family in the US can get visiting clearance to Cuba by creating a society for the impartation of knowledge to the Cubans of making Persian Chelo Kebab.



Havana is a beautiful city with grand architecture, a faded grandeur.  However, over time, everything is falling apart.  The streets are cut up and pot holes all over.  There is smell of urine pretty much in every street and rubbish just thrown in overflowing skips.  Dogs and cats are all over the place and doing their mess on the road and pavement.  I wasn't surprised to see a dead cat one time or a dead mouse.  However, people's homes are very clean.  Like two different worlds.  Nearly all dwelling places have very basic furniture and not very large spaces.  But, every household has a television and stereo.  Somehow they manage to buy these things and keep the same tv and stereo for years.  People love listening to latin music. 

There is a real sense of community in Havana, with neighbours sitting outside their apartments every night and talking to each other or playing various games with dominoes or playing chess.  There is no violent or aggressive behaviour by anyone.

Each apartment has around 3 generations living together.  Where I was staying was a woman with her husband, her daughter with her husband, and their 8 year old son.

Partagas Cigar Factory

This is the most famous cigar factory in the world.  I did a tour of the whole place and was amused to see that the room where around 300 people sat rolling cigars had a large tv screen in the front with loudspeakers everywhere.  On the screen they were showing the early music videos of Michael Jackson such as Don't Stop Till You Get Enough, Rock With You, and Billie Jean.  Everyone was moving around in their chairs as they made the cigars.  Who would have thought that in death, Michael Jackson was having such an influence on the making of the finest cigars in the world.  Downstairs in the cigar store, where there is also a bar for people have a puff and some rum, there were pictures of Hollywood stars with the manager of the store.  People like Arnold Schwarzenegger before he became governor, Steven Spielberg, Jack Nicholson, Gerard Depardieu, and Matt Dillon.  I became friends with the manager of the store, and he invited me to his father's house where I had lunch with the whole family.

2 tickets And My Left Sock

I bought a ticket to the Grand Teatro in Havana one Saturday to see the Cuban National Ballet that evening, choreographed by the world famous ballerina of her time, Alicia Alonso.  I then bought a round trip bus ticket to a beach around 30 minutes from Havana where everyone went to on the weekends.  Having arrived on a beautiful white sandy beach with emerald water nearby and turquoise water further out, just absolutely fantastic scenery, I decided to go for a dip.  There were loads of teenagers around.  I put my ballet and bus tickets in my left sock and put it in my left shoe.  When I returned 10 minutes later, someone had stolen my left sock with my tickets in it.  The person obviously had seen me put some paper in my sock and assumed it was money.  I got the bus back by explaining what had happened and back in Havana, the ticket office guy remembered me and even my seat number so he said he would be around that evening when the show started.  That night, when I arrived, he ushered me to my seat.  The ballet was spectacular, and not done in the traditional style, but with a Cuban, Latin, Caribbean flavour in the music and clothes.  I also saw Alicia Alonso after the show.  She was quite old but very elegant.  I was quite pleased that a rather bad start to my day ended well.  On the Monday, I bought a bottle of rum and gave it to him, which lit up his face as if it was Christmas.

Vinales, Western Cuba

This small town of 11,000, 3.5 hours west of Havana by bus, has beautiful green valleys and rolling hills.  This is the area where tobacco farmers grow the finest tobacco in the world, which is used to make Cohiba cigars.  I visited a farmer who showed me the barn where he was drying the thousands of tobacco leaves that he had harvested.  However, he would have to wait for the rainy season in order to finish the process since the dampness would make the leaves easier to roll.  I stayed with a local family in their Casa Particular and it was very pleasant.