Travel with us: Greetings from Cuba

We've just about come to the end of our trip in Cuba and stumbled on some good internet access so here is the first update from our travels here.

From the stale air of Mexico City, we arrived in humid Havana on 7 February, our first stop in Cuba. Havana is packed with heritage buildings, mostly crumbling but many are being restored, there is a lot of UNESCO funding for these restoration projects. Havana is a sea port, with about 2 million people. There are touts on every street telling us to buy cigars because they are “the best present!” or offering us taxis. The best tout story so far was a guy who told us there was a Che Guevara/salsa/cigar festival on down the street (all in one day, I might add) – he asked us where we were from and what hotel we were staying at, all pretty innocent, we thought. When we walked away, we were approached by another guy who pretended to be the bell-boy from our hotel, and who was offering us the best prices on cigars because of the festival that was on. Surprisingly, the festival never materialised. So, some pretty elaborate schemes going on to try to extract some cash.

Hemingway is everywhere here, with statues of him at Floriditas bar which is the home of the daiquiri, and hotels dining out on the fact that he wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls” there decades ago. Havana is busy, with roaming stray dogs and cats, a lot of locals, pollution from the Chevrolets and motorbikes, and litter. It’s also beautiful, with old 17^th century buildings, two old sea forts, the malecón along the sea wall, friendly elderly locals dressed up for the tourists, and gorgeous old plazas. It’s also hard to get a feel for the place – it’s very touristy; there are bus loads of Europeans here and the city is set up to keep you away from the Cubans and to ship you around the sights. We did, however, meet a crazy Australian man who insisted that he was having some very big problems with the CIA, Australian secret services, British secret service, Australian Foreign Affairs Ministry etc etc. Very appropriate for a city that feels like you’re part of an evolving conspiracy.

Viñales, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. It’s slow moving, and rural with pigs and chickens in just about everyone’s backyards. Viñales is in Pinar del Rio province to the west of Havana. We stayed in two lovely casa particulares, bed and breakfast type establishments where you pay roughly $60 for a room with ensuite bathroom, a huge dinner, and breakfast (this is compared to maybe $250 in a state run hotel). The people are friendly and give you a real insight into living in Cuba. The food in casas is much better than the average restaurants and your hosts serve HUGE portions – soup, rice, beans, salad, potato, malanga (like taro), your choice of fish/shrimp/lobster/pork etc, fruit and dessert.

Viñales is the agricultural capital, with plantations of bananas, tobacco (it’s compulsory to grow tobacco if you are a farmer in Pinar del Rio province; you are given a set government quota), cassava, pineapple and rice. It’s also home to some beautiful beaches, and we visited one – Cayo Levisa, a key about 2 hours from our home in Viñales. We also did a three hour walk around some of the farms here and saw a little boy learning to lasso (practising with a goat!), a tobacco plantation, and loads of farm animals roaming around. It was one of our favourite places where you got a real feel for the lives of the Cuban people.