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
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 2nd 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!
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