Cuba

Last month i went to visit my friend Ben in Panama, but i've been there several times and the trip down is so long i wanted to visit another country during the same trip. A few years a go we went to Peru; this year i thought we could go to the high Andes or Argentina. Ben wanted to go to Iguazu Falls but he could only take off about 5 days and if i go all the way to South America again i want to stay a lot longer than that. So we eventually decided on Cuba. It seemed like the timing was good with the lifting of some travel restrictions and the idea of getting down there before any possible American franchises showed up.

Some Cubans play dice in the street.

 Our first room was orange, had a high ceiling and a large chandelier.

 The view from our little balcony looking down the street.

As Americans we (or at least I was) were under the impression that Cuba was a very isolated desolate country. So it was  a huge eye opener when we couldn't get a hotel room because everything was booked. Initially i just thought maybe there weren't any hotels, but that was naive. There are lots of hotels, and there are many many visitors from everywhere in the world EXCEPT the United States. Tourism is a large industry in the country. We had such a hard time that we eventually decided to go to Columbia instead, but right before buying tickets to Columbia Ben got some calls back from people who ran hostel type accommodations.

The type of place i would have liked to have stayed, but all the better places were booked. We did save a lot of money though by staying at casa particulars.

A neat ship and door.

There is a lot of stuff overhead.

You know you are in a very different country as soon as you get off the plane in Cuba. The airport itself isn't that weird. It looks second class but not uncommon. Visually it's like a nice subway station built in the 80's or early 90's. But then you meet the people. In the airport, all the immigration and customs people we dealt with were young, thin women wearing paramilitary uniforms that included miniskirts and fishnet stockings. I felt like i had stepped into The Dictator movie or some Borat country. There are also a surplus of drug sniffing dogs. The dogs really liked my pants. They probably smelled a lot of American dogs on the fabric.

I had a bit of a nightmare flight into the country and had been up 22 hours by the time we left the airport. It was a long cab ride and i had no idea where we were being taken.What i noticed immediately was that the streets were extremely empty with virtually no traffic at all. As we got deeper into the city the buildings looked like i expected, being decayed and abandoned looking but nothing worse than the slums or old town of Panama City. But it wasn't long before i was surprised again. We eventually made it onto a major road of multiple lanes divided by a tree lined park strip. That long stretch of road was brilliantly lit by modern, neutral temperature LED streetlights. It appeared to go by some significant government buildings, maybe the capital. I was so tired i can't believe we made it without any issues to our casa particular (private home) and that the owners got up, let us in, and situated us so quickly at such an early hour.

The level of decay in the stonework is amazing. Part of that is that the stone is, i think, a younger coral based limestone and many of the buildings are quite old. But i think acid rain plays a huge role in the decay. The pollution in the city is terrible.

A living statue. I got fooled by this guy because his costume was so good and i think there were some other statues in the area.

There are a lot of schoolchildren and they all wear uniforms. Yep, this is what i call a picture of a young child.

Some parts of the city look really bad.

But the parts that are maintained look really nice.

I put zero planning into this trip. I actually put more effort into looking at things to do in Columbia since for a while it looked like we would be going there. The only thing i really did was initially look at places to stay and in what areas of the city those places would be. The only thing i knew i wanted to do was to visit the rural western part of the country where there are some fantastic karst lanscapes similar in appearance to those found in Vietnam and China. That area includes the largest cave in Latin America. But we didnt' have the time to go do that and in retrospect I don't think Americans are allowed to leave Havana without special permissions. On the flight from Panama to Havana i finally started reading a Lonely Planet guidebook that Ben offered me.

Instead we spent our three full days in Havana just wandering around on the streets. In my opinion that method worked out fine. After breakfast we'd head off in some direction and almost immediately find things of interest. First just walking around the streets themselves was interesting enough. It wasn't long before we were wandering into nondescript museums and amusing communist retail stores.  We noticed a lot of other tourists and at one point wandered into a large square that must have been significant because it was loaded with buses, horse carriages and taxi cabs. While we were debating weather or not to take a bus tour were approached by a cab driver who wanted to give us an hour long cab drive. He had a convertible and spoke English well, so we accepted.

There are many nice places to eat, smoke or drink all over the place.

But there aren't that many places to go shopping. This was a nice cigar and rum store.

A very long public concourse.

I don't know what this was but it was far from downtown and was in a large park surrounded by Banyan trees.

A John Lennon statue erected in 2000. An old woman sits nearby and every time somebody comes along she puts the glasses on the statue. She is the glasses caretaker.

A nice old Buick.  This one (and most like it) is a taxi.

We stumbled upon the famous Sloppy Joe's bar. The bar opened in 1917 and during prohibition was overflowing with American celebrities and "businessmen." The walls are adorned with a plethora of pictures from that age, many of them signed by the likes of Ava Gardner, Ernest Hemingway, Joe Louis and Frank Sinatra.

America's Prohibition period directly contributed to the conditions that led to the revolution. After the revolution the bar was closed for over 40 years but in April 2013 it reopened after major renovations that stayed true to the original look, including the original 59 foot dark mahogany bar.

After i looked around and had some food and drinks (both of which were great) i remembered seeing the bar featured on an episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations.

After a few drinks walking miles back to your place in the heat of the day doesn't sound desirable, but after a few drinks a bright yellow Pac-Man/Mario Cart taxi ride sounds VERY appealing.

No seatbelts but plenty of horses/dogs/people/bikes/car/trucks to avoid. We took one of these twice and the second time i nearly got choked into unconsciousness from all the diesel fumes and soot i had to breath.

Ben waves goodbye while the driver explains that she can't take us farther because of all the construction.

So we would wander around, see some stuff, and that would lead to us finding out about other things to do or places to go. The days went pretty fast and we did a ton of walking. I think the last day we walked over 8 miles. An example would be wandering into a square with a 16th century church, or by pure chance walking past a couple of famous bars and deciding to stop and have a drink.

Another of our wanderings brought us to this old 16th century Spanish church.

Another church, this one had one the only fountains in town that worked.

Two strangely similar buildings. The bottom one would be good for a huge gunslinging shootout in a western.

On a whim we paid to go up to the roof of this building that offered a pretty wide expansive view of the city in every direction. The tall silhouette in the background is a huge monument to the revolution.

In the distance are some huge statues on domes. I don't know what was over there.

The roofs are covered in lots and lots of TV antennae.

A reminder of past glory, some decaying ornate framework on what must have been a luxurious rooftop garden in the 1920's or thereabouts.

Another famous bar we went to, the Floridita. I think "La Cuna Del Daiquiri" means "The cradle of the Daiquiri"

The Floridita has a nice restaurant area but...

We were there for drinks. The bar is 100 years older than Sloppy Joe's, founded in 1817. It is famous for inventing the frozen daiquiri, and they are very good at making them. I have never had a better one.

It was also a famous hangout of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was quoted saying
"My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita."
We sat, unknowingly, right in his seat because it was the only place open to sit and was good for getting away from the good but overly loud live Cuban music.

Sometimes Havana can look like a war zone, especially at night.

However, we never felt threatened or unsafe.

We never ran into any problems except the day we had to switch rooms. Our cell phones didn't work there and when we got to our second room with our luggage on a street that looks much like the streets in any of these pictures, nobody was there. We could not get into the room and we could not wander around with our luggage. So we walked around the corner to have some lunch and drinks but after two hours our host was still nowhere to be seen and we knew most hotels (including the one we ate lunch at) were fully booked. In the mean time a German couple who could speak Spanish but not English also arrived and they looked even more unhappy than we were. Eventually our host did show up but we lost several hours that day to waiting for her. She made up for it 12 hours later when she got us up out of bed at 4:30am so we could catch our flight. Being cut off from the internet we had not realized our flight left a few hours after daylight savings time kicked in, so we had set our alarms incorrectly.

La Revolucion!

You can buy puppies in cages while ignoring all the stray dogs walking freely outside the cages. I was impressed they had huskies. These puppies were not sad.

You can cut the head off a chicken and nail it to a tree if Voodoo is your thing. This chicken was pretty ripe and was right next to a castle police station. As i approached to take this quick snapshot some people on the sidewalk started yelling at me "Voodoo!Voodoo!"

Their Capitol Building is undergoing renovations just like ours.

If you don't like Voodoo or Puppies you can still get your fortune told by an official government licensed fortune teller. This man had a lot of serious questions about the future.

Huge waves crash against the seawall.

Our guidebook said that only a fool would go to Havana and not take a walk along the famous Malecon. It literally said that. So, not to be fools, we followed the advice and in retrospect i have to agree.

The Malecon is a 7.5 kilometer promenade for pedestrians built in the early 1900's. Many many people gather along it at sunset to socialize, relax, play music and watch the sunset.

Some stonework on another police station. The police occupied some of the cooler structures.

The Malecon ends at the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta. Across the Canal de Entrada is a lighthouse at the Castillo De Los Tres Reyes Del Morro. Two fortifications on both sides of the entrance to a protected harbor. We went over to the lighthouse on a different day.

I'll talk more specifically about what it was like in the country in the next post or answer questions in the comments. In general, I had a good time; everyone was friendly, the food was good (but not spicy), the drinks were good if you chose the right place to get them, there's live music everywhere, dogs, children and families everywhere, pollution everywhere. The police were not an issue and seemed to often spend their time causally passing the time with citizens. The city is both beautiful and in ruins at the same time.