Getting around the island

How one gets around in Cuba depends on two key things. For starters, whether you’re Cuban or foreign, and secondly, how much you’re prepared to spend. Since I arrived I’ve been able to explore pretty much all the options one way or another (bar, sadly, a backie on a bike or a ride in the sidecar of a motorbike) and can therefore attempt to paint the picture – in the absence of photographs of course! You’ll have to bear with me though, transportation is one of the biggest topics around so it’s going to be helpful to divide it into two parts: the first describing getting from a to b if you live here, and the second will be devoted to travel for tourists. Neither as you can probably guess by now are a walk in the park!  

Part I: Cuban style

You all know the story by now: oil disappeared from Cuba almost overnight when the iron curtain came down, plunging much of the country into chaos, not least it’s transport network. Queue’s for petrol became endemic and getting from a to b became everyone’s major preoccupation – for obvious reasons. What is sometimes forgotten though is that Cuba is the largest of the Caribbean islands – nearly 1000m (over 1600km) from one end to the other - so though we’re not talking massive scale, the distances are distances nonetheless, whether you’re looking at the commute into work or the trip to visit your family in another town or province.  For the average working Cuban personal transport was simply impossible, leaving the only option to go public – along with pretty much the rest of the nation.

For now I’ll focus on the most popular forms of transport in ascending order of usage (based on no facts except my observation!): buses, motorbikes (and side cars), taxis, trains (though I’m no expert on this apart from what has been covered in an earlier blog) and push bikes…

Buses, being the world over one of the most popular and efficient ways to transport a large number of people, felt the impact of the loss of fuel fast and hard. The answer Cuba found however was to upscale and switch to camels – not literally camels of course but this was the name they used to refer to the giant machines designed to carry around 220 people - though in reality were normally stuffed with 300 plus. Today camels still serve some Cuban towns but I’ve not come across any. Instead what you see now are double length bendy buses or guagua’s as they’re colloquially known. 

Guagua’s are cheap (costing less than $.50 cents or about £0.02p for each journey) but that is pretty much the only thing they have going for them. They’re irregular – both in their timetable and their (lack of) stops -  and they’re always full to the brim such that nothing, not even one of Kelvin’s spin classes, can make you sweat as much as riding into Havana on the P11! Just when you think they really couldn’t fit anyone else – on they hop accompanied by shouts from the bus driver telling people to excuse themselves and push down the bus. There are a few seats, and if you get on at the beginning of the route and join the queue specifically for those wishing to sit down, then you may be lucky. Otherwise it’s a standing job and a game to see how close to the window you can get – by far the safest and most ‘comfortable’ position, thus also the most coveted.

Occasionally if the driver really does feel he shouldn’t let more people on what he’ll do is just miss stops out – not only does this mean those waiting at the stop miss the chance to hop on but those wishing to hop off are also denied the chance, quite frequently! Even if you don’t know the route you know when the driver has missed a stop: suddenly there will be an eruption of angry hissing and yelling from those hoping to disembark!

There are other buses you can ride, but they get slightly more expensive – notably because they have more seats and thus less standing room, and occasionally they have air con. Such luxury is difficult to find though and quite unreliable – I never worked out the frequency or routes for the smarter buses and it seems that if you need to get into work before midday you don’t really have the luxury of deciding which bus to hop on. Anything that stops is fair game!

Taxis / Collectivos  by comparison are but more reliable and faster option, though you pay the difference. Normally cars, (sometimes minibuses), these vehicles span a few categories: from state owned to private, ‘new’ (post 1980s) to old (1950s), with doors or without etc. The last bit is an exaggeration but only just. My favourite bit of the same write up of the 1971 visit to Cuba was the description of an attempt to make it from Jose Martin airport into La Habana:

“We searched until we found an unshaven man asleep on a table with a peaked cap on which was written ‘taxi’. We awoke him and with very bad grace he admitted to having a vehicle. When he took us out to see it, I thought he was trying to play a practical joke. Three out of the four doors were missing and half the engine was exposed. He started it by joining two wires then leaping into the driving seat as smoke billowed out of the back and the whole contraption started to rattle and splutter. There was no silencer. We broke down three times on the way to Havana. On each occasion the driver threw me a box of matches - it was now night - and instructed me to hold one inside the engine while he again fumbled with wires. At the first sign of life, we both leapt into our respective seats and sometimes moved off.”

Amazing.

Today the situation has improved but such a story still would not be unheard of, especially when it comes to the most stereotypical of Cuban cars: the pre-revolutionary 1950s American saloons – described by one as having been “preserved in a transportational time warp”. I was warned that the number of these cars was diminishing as the government brought them up to sell them back to the USA, but though I don’t have any way to compare numbers this does fortunately seem unlikely – at the moment they seem to make up at least half of the cars driving around.

I say fortunately because persistence on the roads is a good thing – mostly because they can be beautiful cars and they’re actually pretty reliable, though it’s possible I think this because one’s expectations of reliability upon seeing most of them are pretty low?! Supposedly for example the iron they’re made of is almost invincible, but I don’t know how much such exteriors would make up for the lack of seat belts, petrol gauges, speedometers, windscreen wipers, airbags and exhausts!? 

The result of the absence of such basic components means that most journeys you are either gassed into a slumber, forced to slump down because the ceilings don’t seem to be the right height or you leave with your ears ringing. The latter is the result of the compulsory state of the art stereo system each car seems to be kitted out with (and whose importance is seemingly ranked higher than functioning break lights) that pumps out reggaeton and salsa at top volume. Sometimes this will even be accompanied by neon lights – adding dodgy visibility to the list of questionable features your driver is negotiating. This certainly is not like Luxembourg, Helen pointed out. Fair point: if the same rules applied there as they do here, no one would be able to travel at all!

All the same, once you get into it you’re always guaranteed a fun journey, and riding in them is when I tend to have most of the “OMG I’m in Cuba moments”,  even if you realise at the end you’ve been hanging on for your life to the door-handle the whole time!

Motorcycle and side cars are another pretty common option here – very versatile and presumably economical to boot. They’re also very fun to watch, often carrying not the 2 passengers we’d expect but mum, dad, little Deni, little Norma, the cat and the shopping. Somehow it seems to work but I don’t expect it’s too streamlined by that stage!  Standard motorcycles are also popular and understandably so – they’re cheaper to run, to buy and to maintain, but since they’re personal transport they’re still a real luxury.

Push bike ownership however seems to have peaked and then declined again all in the space of a couple of decades. According to Ian Roberts brilliant book “The Energy Glut” which links obesity and climate change, Cuba brought a million bicycles from China in the midst of the special period and sold them on to students for 60 pesos (around £2) and workers for 120 pesos in the early 1990s. It also proceeded to build bicycle factories in order to assemble over half a million bicycles over the coming years.  

Cycling was considered by Castro as one of the ups to the downs in the ‘special’ period, declaring: ‘we are entering the era of the bicycle.’ He was so keen to promote it because he knew the science; driving one mile burns up around 1,860 calories of fossil fuel per mile. Compare this with cycling, which burns around 35 kilocalories, and you’ve saved not only fuel but also preserved precious food calories as it comes to three times less than walking the same distance.

Despite such impressive figures however, bike ownership today seems to have gone out of vogue; you do see people cycling but not nearly as many as I had expected or the figures above would lead you to believe. When I asked about this a few reasons seemed to emerge.

Firstly, the relaxation of the restraints of the special period mean there is no longer an absolute imperative to cycle – buses might be crowded and unreliable but transport is not so much a wild card as it once was. Secondly, and related to this, many people see cycling as something you do if you cannot afford to get in a collectivo or ride the bus. Cycling certainly doesn’t have the status brought by parading a nice bike in London Fields on a Saturday afternoon for example. Finally, bicycle maintenance is a headache. Rubber tyres are expensive and supplies are poor.

Horse and carriages, however, remain a common sight – having come back with vengeance when the oil ran out. In Havana they may be used to lure tourists keen to plod around the city but if you’re in the country, or indeed a few miles out of the centre on the highway, or wherever really, and don’t have a car, horsepower is often your only option. Think skinny horses, overladen traps and Cuban’s puffing on cigars in one hand and holding reigns in the other and you’ll not be far off. Sometimes horses are used as taxis – pulling up to 20 people in a special cart, other times as a simple hauler for those needing to get to get from a to b. The horses, like cattle, have no breeding though, making them a poor sight to behold most of the time.

Part II: Tourist travel

If you’ve got very little hold of the Spanish language, as well as a limited understanding of the local transport web in each city (which to be fair we only understood in Havana) then you’re likely to be condemned to the fate of the state taxi: a network of ‘new’ taxi cabs charging a steep fair for each trip around town. It’s not the worst fate to behold but in exchange for the air con and over charging you certainly miss out on the authentic experience.

Many visitors talk of the dream they had of coming and hiring one of the 1950s American saloons to cruise around the island at their leisure. Sadly, this plan is more a romantic aspiration than an achievable reality, since those cars available for tourists are of the newer variety and you’re robbed of any chance of cruising about incognito since all number plates are colour branded: brown is for tourists, red and blue for state owned vehicles and yellow for privately owned cars. Despite this, renting a car is still a popular decision, not least to avoid the other fate: the state run ViaZul bus network!

Since Helen and I were trying to do Cuban on the (relative) cheap, and didn’t fancy either negotiating the traffic in a hire car*, joining a tour group hopping on and off at key destinations or hiring a personal chauffeur to show us the island (this would actually have been the preferable if not economical option!)  Thus we were left with the challenging (to say the least) option of joining other visitors on the only CUC (i.e. not aimed at nationals) bus service in the county.

Without wanting to moan too much, there are a few reasons that made this such a hellish company to deal with. Firstly, pre-booking was almost impossible, even in peak times, buying a return was strictly prohibited and the service was unable to cater for demand. If you wanted to take a journey the only way to book your tickets is to be physically in the ViaZul office of the town you either want to arrive in or leave from in order to achieve it. Since the former is unachievable, we spent a fair amount of time worrying about the next journey and trying to be at the front of the queue to buy the ticket the moment we hopped off the bus. One of the most unbelievable bits though were the tickets you’re given as proof of travel. Printed on larger than life turn of the century tills these scraps of recycled paper are stamped, your name written on and a scribble of the destination and departure time. Loose this and you’re basically up s**t creak. Furthermore, they take an age to get anywhere. For example, one journey of 200k direct took us 6 hours; smelly loo, erratic stops and over cold air con inclusive.

As this example shows the country is still completely unaccustomed to catering to the independent traveller, unless you can afford to do it all with a car and a guide that is. Most likely it’s all been designed and maintained to be that way, but it makes it very difficult to reach ‘off the track’ locations which is a shame.

*Having our own car would have made a difference, but as I already mentioned, we didn’t much fancy that option:  for one it’s the wrong side for me, secondly it’s not cheap, thirdly Cuban’s are crazy drivers, and four the roads are pretty awful. When you have to go into 2^nd to go over a bump on the motorway, you’ve problems. There are also a number of other road hazards: bicycles, horses, unannounced railway crossings, lone men selling cheese and mangos on the highway and lose ideas of what motorway driving should involve – no one is barred from travelling there for example, no observable lane restrictions apply and it seems to be every man for himself. Furthermore indicators don’t seem to be trusted, so sticking your hand out of the car is the accepted means.

Other miscellaneous options include tuk tuk, hitching (for which Cuba is probably the safest place in the world to do so!) and walking, which in Cuban towns is not the stressful, dangerous or confusing experience it can sometimes be in Latin American countries. Despite being pestered all the time to get in a taxi, we generally felt safe and competent pootling around, mostly with the help of the far superior maps in my guide book!  

Avoiding fawlty towers

I think it’s fair to say that Cuba is known for a lot of things, but top notch international hotels is almost certainly not one of them. Like many things, the government has a monopoly (all hotels are owned by 5 state run Cuban hotel entities) and reports of Fawlty Towers type establishments are not uncommon. Star ratings seem to be calibrated completely differently to anything we’re accustomed to with the result that however much you pay it’s not uncommon to come back to your room to find no (hot) water or broken AC for example, and the likelihood of being helped by the staff is painfully low. Castro even agreed: “Cubans are the most hospitable, friendly and attentive people in the world. But as soon as you put a waiters uniform on them, they become terrible.”

Fortunately, if you’re looking to avoid hotels, there is another option: Casas Particulares or in English, Bed & Breakfasts. They wouldn’t get that name here but that is essentially what they are - for between $15 to $35 CUC/USD you can guarantee a comfy night and for a few dollars extra, a breakfast of eggs, toast, juice and fresh fruit, as well as the possibility of dinner for an extra charge. And one of the best thing about them: whilst the standard of room and breakfast will vary from home to home, for a variety of reasons you’re almost guaranteed to find a friendly host – unlike the hotels!

Since their establishment in the mid 1990s following a ban on having Cuban guests in hotel rooms, the business of renting spare rooms burgeoned as people applied for licences to either host foreign or Cuban guests. Whilst the government isn’t currently issuing any licences it is possible to find a casa particular almost everywhere on the tourist trail – just look for an upside down anchor sign outside houses, and if they’re blue you’re in luck, whilst a red sign means they will accept national clients.

In order to stay at casas particulares we mostly made reservations a few days ahead to be safe, but this can be both advantageous and disadvantageous. Sure it guarantees you the sacred starred casa in the guidebook and safely saves you from the crush when you arrive off the bus in town to be met by what seems like hundreds of owners touting for your business, but it also leaves you without any bargaining power and thus you’re almost certainly going to pay 5 to 10 CUC more by playing it safe. We relaxed a bit as time went by though when we realised that most houses were part of one big chain: each one supporting many others in different towns, such that each time we left one casa we’d be given a suggestion of where to stay in the next town. These new hosts were often sisters, aunts or close friends of the previous casa owners, and generally recommendations could be well trusted. Furthermore, if you turn up somewhere and it’s full, you’re almost certainly going to be helped by these owners to find you another place to stay nearby.

As with every private business in Cuba however, casas particulares survive – thanks to the government - by the skin of their teeth as they negotiate the web of rules and taxes required of them. The tough rules run from the need to record visitors’ passport details and present them to the Ministry of the Interior within 24 hours, to additional fees for signs outside the house (such as parking etc), to paying a steep $150-350 CUC tax per month to the government just for having the business – tourists or no tourists.

Given what we know about the government it’s no surprise that they’re hell bent on preventing personal enrichment, but such insane regulations barely make sense. Helen and I worked out that just in order to pay the tax a casa would have to have a paying visitor for over half to two thirds of the month – and if they wanted to cover any costs and make a living, the amount they need to be earning obviously increases. At the same time any chance of making money on the side – via offering a car rental and guide service for example - is strictly forbidden. In other words, chuck entrepreneurial flair out of the window and knuckle down – any owner of a casa particular must stay open for 365 days a year, tourists or no tourists, like it or not.

Helen and I couldn’t afford the hotels, but it was their loss and our gain as we set off to enjoy a series of excellent nights in lovely houses around the island. To give you an idea of the kind of experiences to expect from a night in a Casa Particular, here’s a quick low down on how we got on during our 10 day journey round the island.

First stop, Casa Alina Pena – Havana Vieja

This was our first and definitely one of the best. Breakfast was brilliant, somehow there was internet in the house and since it was on the 7^th floor the views were spectacular.

Second, a quick stop in the tourist paradise, Varadero. This was a last minute find in an effort to escape our awful hotel and an early morning, so we didn’t really enjoy this one to its full potential. We did have a tasty dinner and breakfast though, and it was right opposite the bus station, which scored highly for an early ride to Trinidad.  

In Trinidad we were in luck: Alina had sent us to the beautiful home of Marisa, which happened to be worth it if just for the sun terrace/roof. Perhaps also for the brilliant lobster and frijoles (black bean stew). Breakfast wasn’t bad either, the air con worked, the shower was OK and the view was insane.

Our sole day and night in La Boca gets my vote as the best however: run by a very cool Cuban couple it was a fairly isolated house that backed onto the sea. It had two rooms and we got the room with the view. We divided the day into a snorkling expedition on the almost private beach, sunbathing and dinner of lobster on the patio watching the sun go down. Nice. Of course there had to be one drawback: mosquitos! 

Our night in Camaguay is a bit of a blur - we were barely in this bed long enough to record it. It’s a bit of shame as it looked like a really lovely one. Helen fell for the beautiful mosaic tiles as far as I can remember.  

At the end of our journey in Santiago de Cuba we had a lovely casa booked – apparently ‘one of the best options in town’ in fact - until we turned up and were sent away without explanation up to the host’s sister up the road. It turned out the one we’d booked was now full and we’d struck the overflow deal. The casa was fine, but it didn’t have a patio under the shade of grape vines or the splendid breakfasts we had been promised, and Helen’s legs extended about 2 foot over the end of the bed. Furthermore, it did have an exposed and explosive air conditioning system and one of those suicide showers, the ones that heat the water at the end of the shower head and give you a shock every time you touch them. The moment we left the casa and walked into town we realised it was all OK: it was excellently located for stumbling back from the town’s carnival in the early hours! 

Shop ´till you drop...

Blame it on unreliability of resources, price of imported goods, occasional indifference shown by staff to customer service, (variable to poor) quality of goods and the necessity to queue for everything: Cuba is not a consumerist society. Where we either revel in it or begrudge the time lost in the detour to the high street or supermarket, for Cubans it is one of the most trying of daily tasks that has to be met with an unbelievable amount of patience and flexibility but almost never excitement or joy.

Before I come back to the reasons it’s worth noting that things have not always been as bad as they are now. Of course they have been worse – most notably in the early to mid 1990’s – but they’ve also been much better. Isis talks wistfully of the days before the ‘special period’ when there was unlimited petroleum, tinned peaches and condensed milk. Then she talks of those born in the 1990’s and pities their not knowing the good days. Cubans of a certain age have lived through an awful lot of hardship and change and so far there is not much hope of a swift return to the times of plenty. Though the provision of government rations (including limited food and clothing) and its housing plan means that virtually no one is actually starving these days in Cuba, things are not easy – and nowhere is this more evident than in the daily necessity of buying stuff. A few observations on what makes shopping such a chore follow.

·         The unreliability of resources

Things may have improved since the ‘90s but since Cuba remains under the US embargo or ‘bloqueo’, still faces a massive and crippling debt, is still a ‘developing’ country and is still an island – thus it’s sometimes a miracle that anything gets through the borders at all! Tinned fruit, tinned tomatoes, Levis, Adidas, fruit juice etc can be discovered at a push (if you’re able or prepared to pay for them) but the list of what cannot be found is far longer and security of supply is virtually non-existent.  

As a result of such insecurities, Cuba has learnt to produce a lot itself – sugar, rice, fruit and vegetables for example, but the list is by no means exhaustive and even those goods it includes cannot be produced to the quantity required to satisfy the population.  Furthermore it does not extend to non-food goods. Thus the result is simple: many products cannot and do not get into the country or the towns and certainly not to little villages. I had to search a full week before I could find any coffee in Alamar and it was not until I went into Havana that I managed to track some down. Of course food security is not so insecure on the tourist trail. Flock to visitor enclaves such as Varadero on the Atlantic coast and Trinidad on the Caribbean and bare shelves seem to be heavily policed against – almost as if the government were putting on a façade for their international visitors. Hard to believe? Sadly not.

Our experience has so far taught us that when you see something you want: buy it! Dawdling here simply ends in tears. We’d been hunting for an umbrella for days in both Havana and the prime beach resort Varadero to no avail. When we found some shops that looked like umbrellas might be amongst the items normally stocked we were either told with a kind smile: ‘if only’, or just given a look as if to say ‘you’ve so much to learn!’ 

In addition to the unreliability of resources is the fact that you just don’t have a hope in hell of finding some things. Take for example the daily newspaper, Granma. If you’re a tourist wanting to read the (heavily biased) noticias you need to get ‘lucky’ and stumble across someone sat on the corner of a street selling it. If they see you first, you’ll end up paying at least 20 times more than its worth because you have the words foreigner/CUC written across your forehead. That and the fact that newsagents simply do not exist, and the government retains tight controls on what can and cannot be read. Unless you’re staying in an upscale hotel the only option if you’ve run out of reading material is to try and learn Spanish by reading Love in the time of cholera or to go pick some texts glorifying the socialist revolution. Staring out of the window and watch the world go by is often easier.

·         Choice

This has to be one of the very few remaining places where McDonalds has yet to arrive and where Coca Cola is less popular and scarcer than the national tu kola drink. It surely won’t last for ever but for now what Cubans eat, drink and consume is strictly guarded by the government and therefore resists American influence as much as it can. Window shopping is educational rather than entertaining, and often for want of a better word, depressing.

One of the most interesting areas for me is the Cuban supermarkets. So far we’ve only found one which could reasonably be called a supermarket: a large-ish white space with isles and shelves with a limited range of goods from long life milk to juice to coffee and vegetable oil. There is one or at the most two brands for each and no fresh food to speak of. That’s OK because there are farmers markets (if you can find them) in every town as well as butchers (or stalls with piles of meat), fishmongers (if you’re lucky) and here one minute gone the next outlets that sell goats’ milk and fast food, but the purest ‘supermarket’ of course comes nowhere near to resembling what we in the ‘developed’ world would think of a supermarket, metro or corner shop. Roadside ‘Panamerican’ stalls stock similar goods (one of everything – from biscuits and fizzy drinks to deodorant) for sale in CUC which help make life tolerable for the unaccustomed visitor, but they’re not much fun for locals: soap, nestle ice cream and a bottle of rum become real luxuries when they’re sold in divisa (CUC) by the corner shops.

·         The price of goods

This brings us onto the cost of the shop, though I’ve written a fair amount on this so won’t dwell. Basically, imported goods including toiletries, decent alcohol, tinned and cupboard staple foodstuffs, clothes, shoes, electronics etc are all sold in CUC, making them comparatively expensive for the foreigner and positively off-limits for the average Cuban – if there is such a thing?! If you want to buy a pair of trainers and you earn $18CUC per month, you’ve got to save a fair old while to afford the $50CUC price tag. If you want to buy a computer, TV or hair dryer – you’re going to need to get creative. Prices are vastly inflated and thus completely unrealistic. Somehow people do get there – whether it’s because of loans from the government, remittances from family in the USA, second hand trade, black market acquisition etc – but it’s not easy. 

As a foreigner however if you’re carrying moneda nacional you can get some bargains. Mini food stops spring up outside people’s houses selling everything from ham sandwiches to fruit milkshakes and pina coladas. Helen and I walked down the main street to the beach at lunch time one day in the mood to give everything a try and managed to acquire two fresh pina coladas, 2 little paper cones of peanuts, strange but tasty corn fritters, a bag of popcorn, soya yoghurt, what we think is a slab of peanut butter (saved for emergencies) and a handful of a yummy fruit whose name I forget and I don’t think we have in the UK -  all for under a pound. Now we’re on the tourist trail however such feasting in national pesos is a rarity and you have to be quick on your toes – buying food straight after locals is a good trick, so you can see how much they pay before they add a few zeroes onto the price.

·         The indifference of staff

For a country wishing to entice more foreign visitors and indeed hoping to grow its economy it’s a wonder they’re by and large yet to invent the concept of customer service. Seriously, the number of times we’ve tried to buy anything from a bottle of water to a dinner or even a night in a hotel and been met with a look of scorn has meant that when we find someone helpful and sympathetic, we find ourselves jumping for joy. Fortunately this doesn’t include everything, with the notable exception being the casas particulares (essentially B&B’s) we’ve been staying with on the island which have, almost without exception, been run by wonderfully friendly people.

Once we turned up at a hotel though – the only night we’ve not stayed in a Casa - only to find the booking had been confused and we’d asked for the night before instead. When we apologised to the particularly unhappy receptionist we then rather predictably tried to ask – still wearing rucksacks and after a long and delayed journey - whether she would have a room for tonight instead. She simply looked at us as if to say ‘do I look like I’m running a hotel!?’ It was then a fair wait before she begrudgingly suggested there was one room we could share, but it would definitely not be available the next night. Needless to say we went back to staying in the casas the next day!

·         The quality of goods

When it comes to quality you have to qualify what you’re talking about. If it’s apples, don’t get your hopes up, whereas if you’re looking for a tasty selection of root veg or some arts and crafts to take home you should have more luck. Cuba has gone from producing almost nothing for the tourist market to a burgeoning street stall artisan sector which sells everything from wooden afro-Caribbean carvings to kitchy paintings and silver plated jewellery. I’m still not convinced there is anything I like enough so far to carry around Costa Rica for 2 weeks in order to get it home, but inevitably this sector takes some people’s fancy. When it comes to food though quality cannot be taken for granted. Any space I have left is going to be reserved for Cigars – for which Cuba has earned a spot as number one in the world - so get your orders in!

·         The queue

Understanding the queue in Cuba is a rite of passage. To the untrained eye, the crowd milling around at the bus stop, the group waving fans whilst waiting at the bank, or even the frustrated masses sat down on the floor at immigration look like an unorganised gaggle of nationals. Believe it or not however they’re almost without exception organised into a rigid albeit fluid queue. One look to the past helps explain how the phenomenon of the queue has become a daily occupation for most Cubans.

This paragraph is an extract from an account of ‘A Visit to Cuba’ written by a Jesuit priest in 1971. It’s a fantastically vivid and well written account of a trip made and has been fascinating to read given the many changes and consistencies between today and 40 years ago. These few lines on the queue are worth sharing (specific details of where the extract is taken from to follow in future blog post):

“The most remarkable queues I encountered were those outside the few restaurants that remain open to the public in Havana. To get a meal, one has to start queuing the day before. A ticket is then issued entitling one to return on the morrow to eat but, since the quantity of tickets issued usually exceeds the amount of food, it is advisable to return early the following day - hence a second queue. If the supply holds good when one's turn comes, one eats or puts the meal into a bag to carry home. “

This was written in 1971 and though the situation is not so extreme in 2011 you can still cannot avoid the queue and have to learn to understand it if you want to get anything done. And so how do you do it and make it look so painless? Well, you just rock up to the crowd and ask who is ‘El ultimo?’- the last person. Sometimes you need to ask a few times before anyone takes any notice of you but when you do get a response you need to clock who it was or in my case stick to them like a stamp. If you’re extra sharp, you’ll double your back by asking who comes before them. Sometimes I’ve been in a queue and taken my finger off the pulse only to look up and have lost the person I was behind – either because they’ve given up or because they’ve already been seen. You can avoid being once again in the no-man’s-land by checking down the chain.

Despite these reasons and many more that make shopping such a difficult and unrewarding experience most Cubans accept this reality with admirable cheer. Again quoting from the account above, “In spite of the inconveniences, however, queues are happy places where one can still savour the humour for which Cubans are famous. I often stood in one to chat with the people. One joke doing the rounds went as follows: It is the year 2000. A Cuban boy is reading a history book on the heroic days of the revolution and comes up against the word ‘queue’. He asks: ‘Daddy, what is a ‘queue’?’ ‘Ah, my son, those were things we used to do in the early days when there were many shortages. If we wanted a pair of shoes, for example, we would form a queue. When you got to the top of the line and if there were any shoes left, you were then entitled to buy a pair.’ ‘Daddy’ ‘Yes, my son.’ ‘What are shoes?’”

Thankfully the sight of a man or woman without shoes is a rareity...but the queue lives on! 

The government’s finest accomplishment: Coppelia ice-cream parlour?

Cubans country over love ice cream. I can’t reliably suggest they enjoy it more than the Brits, Italians or Argentines, but they sure do get through it, often preferring a tub of ice cream, or a ‘salad’ of 5 large balls instead of a simple ’99 for example. Why have just one ball when you can have 5?! Why indeed, especially when it’s hot year round and is generally a cheap snack. I seemed to go a month without having any of the stuff but somehow since Helen’s arrival we seem to have made ice cream tasting an integral part of our country tour. I’m not complaining though – in addition to being an enjoyable experience, the pastime of going for an ice cream provides another fascinating point of departure into Cuban life, and in some cases is where the contrast between Cubans and tourists is most notable. This was especially the case in Parque Coppelia, which we felt compelled to visit twice: once as tourists and once masquerading as locals with some Cuban friends.  If such a case study sounds too good to be true, that’s probably because it is. But it does make for good content if we’re still interested in the difference between locals and tourists in the capital.

Coppelia is the number one brand of ice cream in Cuba. Perhaps Nestle pips it to the post in terms of sales, since it seems to have a complete monopoly over corner shop ice cream freezers, but Coppelia beats it hands down in the flavour stakes and the fact that it’s about 101% more Cuban than its competitor. In addition to a presence in most major towns, Coppelia’s number one destination in Cuba is within Parque Coppelia nestled within Havana’s Vedado district.

This parlour, built in 1966 by the government (perhaps one of their best pieces of work?!) and sprung to superstardom after key product placement in Tomás Guitierrrez Alea’s classic movie, Fresa y Chocolate, Coppelia is the biggest ice-creamery in the world: serving around 300 000 a day who flock to the parque to form snake like queues around and around the park fences.

I’ll come back to the Cuban ability to make a queue out of anything at another time (sounds boring but it really does warrant some description and explanation) but for now it will suffice to say that Coppelia is the epicentre of the queue: with no less than two on each corner of the square winding their way around the park with its length seemingly proportional to the strength of the sun. We couldn’t quite work out how you decided which queue to join but it must have something to do with where you wish to sit, given that the park was divided into zones.  

The first time we visited it was with Koral and Cassim- and it became evident from the beginning that we were going to get the Cuban experience. We arrived at around 7pm: still hot enough to enjoy but thankfully after the rush hour, and apparently we were lucky only to queue for around a half hour before being let into the park and directed to a busy seating area full of Cuban families tucking into bowls and bowls of what looked like vanilla ice cream with biscuity sprinkles on top.

We sat down and read the choice of flavours: vanilla and vanilla with chocolate swirls. It wasn’t clear whether choice was limited to these flavours usually, or whether we’d just chosen a day when they’d run out. (It’s not hard to believe that a wider choice is a luxury, though.) Once we’d sat down it quickly became apparent that the done thing seemed to be to ask for an ‘ensalada’ – 5 balls, together with some portions of ‘dulces’ (sweet cakes) - anything less “wouldn’t have been worth it!”  We waited only 5 minutes (in which time I nipped to the loo where the Cuban experience continued – no cubicle doors, water, paper or soap) for our large bowls of ice cream to arrive, and were suitably impressed by the quality. It was yum! By the time Helen and I had finished taking a couple of photos to record the experience and exchanged the verdict on the flavours however, we looked up to see both Koral and Cassim finishing off the dulces and ice cream. This explains why most people order in double quantities – perhaps like the sun the time you have to queue is proportional to the amount of balls you deserve!

After reassuring Koral we’d had a great time, and that we were more than happy to treat them (all in all our ice cream experience cost around $20 pesos moneda nacional, or less than $1 CUC –less than £1) we agreed it would be ridiculous to come here as a ‘tourist’ and pay in CUC for the same experience. Despite this we remained curious: could this really be up to 20 times more expensive for tourists, and if so what frills and extras would be available? We simply had to find out – though of course without confiding this with them.

 

So, we returned the next day, and from the moment of our arrival things were completely different. For one, we did not queue. Instead we were allowed to stream past yards of Cubans waiting patiently and find a seat in a separate part of the park, where there was a handful of tourists and a rather mediocre atmosphere. Secondly, there were suddenly five flavours to choose from. For the sake of the experiment we ordered the same thing: an ensalada of 5 balls, which this time came not with crushed biscuits but biscotti, chocolate swirls, honey and instead of a plastic bowl it came in a glass sundae bowl.

And the verdict: looks can be deceiving - being a tourist was nowhere near as much fun! For starters it felt like daylight robbery. Remembering that 5 large bowls of ice cream and side plates of cake had cost us around $1CUC the day before we begrudgingly handed over $5CUC a piece for an inferior experience. The loo may have had a door this time, but the honey and chocolate was unnecessary, the company was nowhere near as much fun and it did not taste that much better to justify the vastly inflated price. The queue in the sun, asking for a mountain of ice cream and savouring it as a family or with a group of friends seemed to be part and parcel of life for the habanero and it felt like a shame to be excluding ourselves from it - if even to do a trial. As I’ve already said I expect to pay more as a tourist but such blatant profiteering felt wrong given how superior an experience we’d had the day before sat together both foreigners and Cubans enjoying an ice cream in the sun.

"Why didn't you both take the bus?"

When faced with a broken down electric train in the middle of a sugar cane field (somewhere between Havana and Matanzas) during a thunder storm and surrounded by working class Cubans who’d had no choice but to take the train, in answer to the question: “why aren’t you on the bus?” it’s no use suggesting we climbed aboard looking for an adventure. “To soak in the ‘mesmerising’ scenery, to get an authentic Cuban experience (we were the only tourists on the train, and judging from peoples interactions they don’t often come), to get some material for the blog?” There did come a point though two and a half hours in when we asked each other a similar question: when the bus was inexpensive, took half the time, was around 100% more comfortable, and could drop us directly at our destination, (the Cuban beach resort of Varadero), why did we think this was such a good plan again? I think we probably need to blame the guide books – because there sure as hell wasn’t one single Cuban that recommended this journey to us!

For one thing, we’ve taken the ViaZul bus option enough times - (once) - to know that it would have been soulless and mundane and could not compare at all to the scenic meandering 135km journey through the old sugar plantations. “Rail journeys hold a particular magic”, we had read, “none more so in Cuba than the Hershey Train”, which travels three times a day year round (weather and electricity permitting is what they don’t say) from Casablanca (a small town across the bay from La Habana) to Matanzas. The journey through 69 square miles of lush cane fields runs along a railway built by Milton Hershey in 1916 designed to transport workers and goods using steam locomotives, which were later replaced by 60-ton electric locomotives, and then in 1998 by antique Spanish cars which currently serve the route. This is the only electric train route left in Cuba and to ride it, we were told, is to experience “Cuban public transport at its most idiosyncratic.” We can now confirm this.

The journey started well. Sort of.

We’d attempted to buy the ticket the day before travelling, anticipating problems had we not checked thoroughly for any Cuban style snags to the plan – for example, ‘the timetable is as shown except every third Thursday when it leaves 3 minutes earlier’. That kind of thing. But when we turned up at the station the lady sat outside the little ticket office assured us we would be able to buy it on the day of travel. Indeed that was the only option. “And it doesn’t get full up?” I asked. She laughed. So did we when we looked down at the overgrown railway lines and learnt that should it rain, the train being electric has to stop. Despite the drought, praying for it not to rain has become a new daily routine for us! And we were determined to give it a go, aiming for the 12.27 departure (the earlier one had left at 6am, and I’m travelling with Helen. Enough said!) leaving plenty of time to get from Alamar to Havana, and from Havana across the bay to Casablanca on the little ferry that goes back and forth. Apart from the usual hold up in flagging down a car from Alamar (future blog post to come on transport issues), we hadn’t anticipated a problem going across the water, until we remembered that on this route thorough bag searches are compulsory of course. And though this can be a pain with a couple of shopping bags, it is a bit of a nightmare with two large rucksacks packed tightly and according to the logic that items in the bottom of the middle section cannot and will not be used. Cursing ourselves for having forgotten this we headed straight in and started taking stuff out of our bags. It was all going well until my guard found my laptop. When I took it out of the case she gave me a funny look and asked what it was. “A lap top” I suggested. “Nope, you cannot come aboard with that. Bus or taxi. Bus or taxi.” We knew security can be tight in this country but not being allowed to board a 10 minute crossing with a lap top seems excessive, right?

Interestingly the paranoia is routed in previous attempts to sequester the boat and steer it not to the other side of the shore but to Miami, both 140km and a million miles away from Cuba. A few years ago a couple took a cake and birthday celebrations onto the launch only to reveal guns and explosives ready to use should the captain not take the boat ashore in the USA. This may explain the security but I’m still a bit confused about what my little acer could do. Still, we caught a cab and were taken to the port via the windy inland roads before being dropped in front of the station, giving us our first glimpse of the train. We were thinking rustic but hadn’t quite prepared ourselves for the incredibly basic collection of rusty carriages that met us. But at least it was there, and I could feel a certain amount of excitement for the journey ahead. Whatever happened it would hold more adventure than a tourist bus straight to the beach. This was true.

In fact before we even left we felt our anxiety levels fluctuate – we’d arrived early so the train lady suggested we leave our bags and go for a coffee before the train left. “And the train definitely leaves at 12.27 so will still be there when we come back?” I double checked. She laughed again but nodded confidently. Needless to say we came out of the coffee shop to find it gone! Thankfully the passengers were still sat waiting and it did come back, and it did leave on time. Almost – 2 minutes late because it was waiting for Helen and I to go to the loo: we’d realised at 12.25 that there was not one aboard, so had rushed off to empty our bladders. And this was a good idea, for apart from the 20 or so regular stops to drop off and pick up people en route (in what were some the most isolated train ‘stations’ I’d come across), the train did not make a courtesy stop until it reached the small now run down town of Hershey just over half way through. But for $2.80CUC we were not complaining; we took our tickets with small holes punched in to indicate the station where we’d got on and were going to get off, and smiled rather uncertainly about our decision to spend such an indulgent amount of time on this journey.

But it was everything we’d hoped for, and more. The scenery was indeed fascinating: the train chugged, bumped and tooted its way through miles and miles of old sugar cane fields in the Yumuri Valley, in amongst palm studded hills where cattle and goats crazed and occasionally past small hamlets and villages. Sometimes it would come upon a road and wait to cross it, other times a man would be waiting with one green and one red flag to wave us on. And occasionally the horn would be used liberally to shoo animals off the track. I spent almost three hours just leaning out of the window, transfixed by the countryside and almost getting to feel the breeze as we picked up a little more speed (we went around 40km/hour) and headed along the coast within sight of the Atlantic.

In fact, everything was magical until we heard a bang, saw lots of smoke and saw one of the conductors run towards us to the back of the next carriage and detach the electric cables of the train from the overhead cable. Despite being girls and knowing nothing about trains, we didn’t think this could have been a good sign, and were promptly told the equipment had broken and someone was calling Hershey to find out what they could do. Given Helen and my record on long distance public transport we had been thinking it was all going just a bit too well! Once we were making a 20 hour trip from Argentina down into Chilean Patagonia on a tight schedule and the bus broke down, twice. The first time we sorted it, the second time they had to send a new bus from the nearest point – 10 hours away. At least this time we were neither so remote nor so desperate to get to our destination, but it was nonetheless a little frustrating. What saved the day was the decision to join the other passengers climbing off and sitting in the shade to eat mangos and natter away whilst we waited a couple of hours for a new train to be sent from Hershey.

It could definitely have been worse: within two hours we were back on the road and just willing to reach Matanzas before the rain fell. Apparently this happened the other day and people were stuck here for 24 hours. Furthermore it was during the night. When the other train came it was able to push us along to a point where the track widened into two and we were able to change carriages and start again on the new train, which left immediately for Matanzas chugging off through the valleys. The final leg of the journey, a 37 km journey from Matanzas to Varadero, we achieved in a local bus for $2 Cuban pesos each, and finally arrived in this resort as the sun was setting rather smelly and weighed down - not at all like the usual Cuban and international clientele that flock to Varadero! Thankfully it didn’t matter; we’d reached the beach just in time to jump into the water and cool off.

Cuban bureaucracy; keep calm and carry on

The last few days, sparked by the safe arrival of Helen, have marked a change of pace on this enigmatic island; the end of my ‘work’ on the organopónico and life as I’d known it with Isis and her family in sleepy Alamar, and the beginning of our journeys further into the heart of the country. This also coincided with a temporary move to the capital, my 25^th birthday and some particularly trying efforts to renew my tourist visa. Since this blog would be both too long to bore you with birthday shenanigans and too short to translate the wonders and enigmas of Havana, I’ll not set my sights too high. Instead, I’ll attempt just to paint a picture of where these activities overlapped and leave it to Helen to eloquently translate the rest!

First and foremost, just to clarify, you really can believe everything you hear on the streets about this capital: Havana definitely has “a flavour all of its own”. Every other car really is a 1950s Chevrolet, the central buildings really are crumbling colonial mansions painted in sun faded pastel shades, and you really do turn the corner to find couples dancing salsa and sipping mojitos as the sun goes down. It’s beautiful as well as neglected and dirty, bright as well as smoggy and smelly, navigable at the same time as vast and expansive, loud and energetic whilst being welcoming and friendly. And like all cities this scale it takes time and patience to get to know. We didn’t have an awful lot of the former but we sure were ready to soak in the sights, smells and sensations.  

Our guide book suggests to allow at least a week for Havana, and to start off by getting one’s bearings through a city bus tour. We were trying to outsmart it with some alternatives. Firstly, despite not being particularly blessed with a sense of direction, living nearby had given me the chance to get my head around the key sights before Helen’s arrival. Secondly, we had some kind helpers: one day we were joined in town by Koral (from the organopónico) and her hyperactive but delightful son who acted as wonderful guides in exchange for copious amounts of ice-cream, and another evening a friend of Isis was under instruction to keep us company after dark. And finally, for better or worse, we spent two mornings racing up and down the length of Havana to sort out my visa, and in the process got to see some of the less noted everyday sights of the city.  

It also helped that we’d decided - partly out of necessity (I need a fixed address to give to immigration in order to renew my visa) and partly out of curiosity - to spend a few nights in the capital itself, and more specifically perhaps the most touristy but definitely the oldest and most enchanting heart: la Habana Vieja. The chance to experience the pace and wake up to a view of inner city roof tops, with their washing lines and sleeping dogs (note not too many green roofs in this part of town!) was – even in the two mornings of pouring rain – a real feast for the senses.  

And so it was when we woke up on the 7^th - rain sheeting in from all angles (strangely reminiscent of summer holidays in Wales) rather dampened plans of a birthday soaking in the sun whilst sipping mojitos on a rooftop bar. In addition I had the rather pressing issue of my visa to attend to, and unfortunately our plan to get up early, secure the stamp and be back carefree by lunchtime didn’t quite work out. Helen and I had both experienced Visa bureaucracy abroad to believe this wasn’t going to be easy, but we still had some hopes that this could be the exception. In fact, this could still go down as the worst yet.

Our first try failed outright. We’d been directed to the immigration office about 20 minutes’ walk from our casa particular. Not ideal in the weather but blessed with the impenetrable waterproof ponchos Helen’s mum had sent we set off in the right direction, only to be told upon arrival that immigration had moved: somehow it had been too good to be true! Instead of being in the centre of town it was now in the outskirts, around a 30 minute drive, and instead of having a system of one immigration centre per neighbourhood, it was now just one facility for Havana’s 2.2mn strong population.

So, with the knowledge of which local collectivo (a kind of local taxi that runs a certain route and is shared with other people) to get we set off again, headed up to the end of the route and walked the half hour to the centre - only to find it and be told that on a Thursday immigration closes at 12pm. Just Thursdays and Saturdays does it operate a half day, and not for love nor money - I did think now was the time for checking the corruption stakes but with no avail - arriving at 12.01 could get you in. Birthday luck hadn’t quite kicked in!

In the end we realised I couldn’t’ have done it then anyway. We knew there was a $25CUC price-tag on the visa but didn’t realise you couldn’t pay it up there in the middle of nowhere. Nope, it had to be done beforehand through a bank in town who’d take the money and exchange it for stamps. Yep, stamps just like those you put on letters. So, off we went to join the last person in the queue  (Cubans are even better at queuing than the English) for an hour or so, and then some, in order to wait whilst they looked for more $5CUC stamps. No bother, we’d done enough to get to do it tomorrow – or so we’d thought.

The second attempt didn’t end so happily either. In fact, when we arrived at immigration the next day they asked for something new: my medical insurance. They didn’t care for evidence of what date I was leaving and they weren’t even as interested as I’d imagined in where I’d been staying this last month, but they sure as hell were not going to let me through without evidence that I wasn’t going to drain them of medical expenses and not be able to cough up afterwards. The only problem: I didn’t have it printed out, and if you think immigration has a computer to hand, let alone a printer, think again! This was a job for the city centre - so back we went!  Fortunately we were travelling Cuban style so each journey cost less than one CUC rather than 8 to 10. Still, the price of connecting and printing soon took care of that!

On the third attempt it was all worth it though. Stamps, check. Passport, check. Insurance, check. Bringing Helen as proof that I was just a ‘normal’ tourist, and taking evidence of my return flight was not in the end necessary. All they did was stick the stamps onto a piece of paper, staple that together with the receipt from the casa particular and hand me back my visa with another stamp on it. No electricity involved, if you ignore the poorly connected air con. (NB if you’re a passport stamp collector you’ll be disappointed with Cuba. It chooses to stamp your visa not your passport so as to reduce conflict with passengers to and from the USA). Despite the stories I’d quickly dreamt up of where I’d been and what I had and had not been doing (i.e. not working, nor attending conferences, nor living with unregistered Cubans) we got off lightly – an unwelcome delay to our city adventure it was but after a drink or two it we agreed merrily that this was a fair price to pay for an extra two weeks exploring the island.

PS: An interesting addition to the last post on the internet: it seems that neither for love nor money can one find you an internet connection in the capital of Cuba after 6pm on a weekday evening even in the most expensive of tourist hotels. When we tried to find a means to buy some last minute scuba diving insurance we came up with blank walls on all accounts. Either: “there should be connection, there just isn’t now and who knows when it will be back”, OR, “Nope. Its 7pm now, the internet finished at 6pm – you can come back at 9am though”, OR  “all the internet cards have been used. You can connect by wifi though.” Unfortunately we weren’t in the habit of carrying a laptop around here on the off chance wifi will suddenly appear.  We gave up in the end but with a distinct feeling that such infrastructure could neither be efficient nor sustainable in the long run.

Hopscotch, marbles and dominos – the world before it become one wide web

Walking down the street here and you have to dodge kids playing marbles on the pavement and chalking the hopscotch grid road. Join your family or extended family on a Sunday afternoon and expect to spend a good chunk of time playing dominos. Whatever the pastime one thing is noticeably absent from the scene - for me at least – and that is the internet.

Of course for the majority it is not noticeably absent; the internet genie hasn’t been let out of its bottle yet and whilst it stays in there no one particularly misses it. Microsoft Encarta still rules the waves and emails are made possible through the use of a programme akin to Microsoft Outlook – which enables those lucky enough to own a computer to send their emails whilst preventing them from roaming the internet freely.  Furthermore, connecting times are limited – between the hours of 3 and 8 the airwaves are reserved for professional use only. If Isis wants to send an email it has to be after 8pm.

In the UK I’d dare to say a majority of professional work relies upon an accessible WWW; be it research, a functional internet… you name it we’ve built a world around the web. For this reason some professions in Cuba are permitted an almost free use of the internet -  I believe this includes politicians, doctors and some university professors. As a university student you can also connect. However, the days of whiling away hours surfing the net are a way away.  

This can of course be viewed as both a good and a bad thing.

Let’s lead with the good. Firstly, returning to the beginning of the blog, the absence of the internet can be seen as a small contributing factor to the continuing importance of time spent within the family unit.  If you can’t spend the evening on iplayer or chatting on facebook, you spend it someway else: Drinking a beer with friends, playing dominos, or sitting down as a family and watching a telenovella. I don’t want to take this whole ‘internet has ruined our ability to socialise and play family games theory’ too far, especially as there are obviously so many other factors involved, but it’s worth mentioning at least as an observation.

Secondly, together with the lack of advertising (there really isn’t any here unless its talking about socialism and year 53 of the revolution!), the lack of pornography in society is another interesting factor, and one which I think could have something to do with the noticeable absence of concern or preoccupation over one’s looks. Sure, there are magazines and images if you look hard for them, but what there is not is an idealist female or male image which penetrates deeply into society. It’ true that so far  I’ve not spent a huge amount of time with girls my age, and of course western films still depict a certain stereotype size zero’ belleza’ who we’re meant to try and aspire to become, but this is notably a society without pornography. It’s not that young people don’t care, but they’re not apparently being destroyed by a desire to seek perfection in their looks and relationships. Again, I’m only speculating but given the current interest in the effect of a proliferation of porn in western society, Cuba seems like an interesting point of discussion.

I’m sure there are more good things but I want to mention the bad before I lose you. The first is obviously the absence of the possibility to access the internet – free information does not exist. We raise up our arms in disgust when China censors Google, but this is a censorship of the world wide web for a whole society.  Cuban’s a curious people, I was told before I came and they themselves have repeatedly told me since, and who can blame them? Apart from what the government chooses to let onto the TV stations there is no chance for people to learn for themselves and get closer to other cultures and experiences through the internet. How can it be fair that I can sit down in the telephone centre and surf away, whilst others can only look on in curiosity?

Then there is the utility factor. The organoponoico has no web page because it cannot access the internet, but imagine how rich a resource it could be if it could develop one. An online bus timetable, the ability to make appointments online, to skype friends and family abroad, to see pictures and read tales…I could go on and on. There are no apps here – people survive of course, but they could do with for starters a happy medium between the level to which the WWW has penetrated our societies and the level at which they’re running at the moment, which is close to zero.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just frustrated because accessing the internet is such an expensive, slow and unreliable pain in the bum. It also just doesn’t seem to exist on Sunday’s. But at least I can do it I guess. This paranoid censorship may fit in with the rest of Cuban life but that doesn’t make it right.