Back Through Havana heading West

Hello everyone.

We’re about 4 days from leaving Cuba and will be spending the last three in an hotel.  An Eco-hotel, whatever that is in reality.  Given the paucity of internet connections I think once we leave Vinales that’ll be it until we get home, so there should be one more of these sent from England.    

  

Heading west Havana direction, we’d decided to get there by train rather than bus.  The Hershey Electric Railway is the only electric train in Cuba and was built by ‘Big Cheese’ Hershey the chocolate man for his vast sugar holdings in this area near the coast.  To get an idea of the money this company must have had to play with, the route into Havana is 90kms long with a variety of side lines.  Now it connects the most rural bits of Cuba we’ve seen, no roads and with station halts about the size of a small domestic garage every few miles.  The biggest station apart from the termini is modestly called Hershey.   No livestock on the train except for some caged birds but full of Cubans and about a dozen tourists.  The train consists of two very worn carriages, hard seats and windows which mostly have glass in them.  It runs three times a day at a rather precisely timed 04.39, 12.09 and 16.25.  We leave dead on 12.09 on what is apparently the express service which takes 3 hours and 22 minutes to cover the 90kms.  I say apparently because each of the trains is scheduled to take 3 hours and 22 minutes.  Our tickets have cost £2 each and that’s the tourist price; goodness knows what the locals pay.  The train rattles along stopping in out of the way places and arrives only 10 minutes late at Casablanca station.  From here there’s a ferry which covers the 200 yards across the harbour to Havana old town and we’re not allowed on when, horror of horrors, a Swiss Army Knife is found in my camera bag at security check.  I said to Heather “what, do they expect us to hijack it and demand to be taken to Miami”.  Later we found out that it had been hijacked in 1994 and 2003 but never got out of Cuban territorial waters.   Great late for work excuse, “my ferry was hijacked”.   Incidentally, I read once that the Swiss Army does get issued with said knife but only officers get one with a corkscrew. 

So here we are back in Havana for a couple of days before heading further west for our last week or so.  I like Havana.  It is terrible worn and mostly in a shocking state but with more restoration it would definitely be one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  Enjoying watching all the old American cars again I was struck by the behaviour of the suspension as they go over bumps in the road because they look a bit like rowing boats on a choppy lake.  Anywhere else a collection of cars like these would be a classic car rally; here it’s a taxi rank.   We do look for the car museum which is not where the book says it is and has no indication of a new location.  Apparently the exhibits are in better shape than most of the vehicles on the roads.   I have to say that wherever we’ve been I’ve been struck by the ingenuity of the Cubans in keeping things going or constructing things out of odd bits of material.  Reinforcing rods for example are used for everything imaginable from window grilles to outside staircases. 

In the middle of Havana is a beautiful Art Deco building in good shape, standing about ten stories or so high and built by Bacardi, a company nationalised at Revolution time.  There are or have been law suits and Bacardi is made elsewhere now.  I understand that Bacardi is one of those products whose recipe is known to only three people in the company and anyone who cares to read the label on the bottle.  

Unusually, I had a particularly irritating tout in Havana following me near one of the more expensive hotels “taxi, taxi”, “no, gracias”, “city tour”, “no gracias”, “cigars”, “no gracias”, “where you from, my fren”, “ Irritania”.  He still carried on but I admit to being disappointed when he didn’t say “lovely country, my brudder lives there”.

My Ernie t-shirt has been bought at H’s insistence and on our last evening in Havana we have a drink on the rooftop of a hotel frequented by the other Ernie.  As Lonely Planet puts it, it’s another one of those bars to visit on your world tour of places where Hemingway fell over. 

We leave Havana by Viazul bus heading for Vinales, about 4 hours away and probably our last bus ride because it’ll be too awkward from now on.  Viazul is only for tourists, or at least those paying with CUCs.  There are no ticket offices in towns and the bus station is usually several miles outside the centre.  Well, the system such as it is goes as follows.  You have to go to the bus station to buy a ticket on a day before you want to travel, incurring the cost of a return taxi ride.  On the day of travel you have to book in an hour early incurring the cost of a single taxi ride, and are issued with another ticket.  Your bags are labelled and cost as much as the baggage handlers feel they can con out of you to put it on board.  The comfortable, air conditioned bus leaves on time and usually you have to show your baggage ticket stub for your bag.  There are no instructions or timetables displayed anywhere.  The Viazul office is hidden somewhere in the bus station and is usually a curtained office and it may or may not be the correct time to enter.  This is unknown until you try.  It’s like a treasure hunt.   Heather normally gets the tickets while I while away the time banging my head on a convenient wall.

I imagine most of you will know that the United States has had a trade embargo in place for Cuba since the revolution for many things – I don’t know the details but this is the reason there are still so many old American cars here.  This embargo extended to threats to embargo some other countries who were dealing with Cuba.  After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90’s and the withdrawal of their subsidies, the US turned the screw to make it more difficult, presumably with the aim of causing the collapse of the government here.  Cuba underwent something called ‘A Special Period in a Time of Peace”.  This meant severe shortages and rationing with meat virtually disappearing from most diets (and the Greeks complain that they’re expected to pay their taxes !).  It’s reported that in three years most Cubans lost a third of their body weight.  These days many Cubans, particularly the women, favour a fuller figure especially around the middle and while not as pronounced as in some other places we’ve been some are clearly poured into their skin tight clothes and forget to say “when”.   Perhaps this is partly a reaction to the severe austerity measures of the ‘Special Period’.

What we have seen because of the way we’ve chosen to see Cuba is a lot of how Cubans live.  We’ve stayed in Casas Particular every night and these are always Bed and Breakfast in a Cuban home.  Admittedly these would all be considered ‘middle class’ here because of their income derived from tourism and the fact that a number of the owners are professionals.  Clearly this is my definition of Cuban middle class and not an official demographic.  We see how they decorate, the colours, the ornamentation and the profusion of plastic flowers.  There are lots of small decorative pieces of china and wooden objects on shelves and hung on walls.  More and more I’m reminded of the working class houses with a bit of money I saw as in the late 60’s /early 70’s.   In one place we were proudly shown a short video of what we thought was the wedding of the very young daughter of the house who was still in residence.  It turned out to be her Quincinera celebration.  This is an excuse for a big party when the daughter of the house reaches 15 at which she wears a wedding dress and everyone is dressed to the nines (nine what, I wonder).  Fortunately, our Spanish was too poor to put our collective feet in it.   

One of my readers has said “lots of interesting information but are you enjoying it ?”   H’s view is that as we’re away for five weeks it can’t all be enjoyable but it is all experience.  My view is that there are some very good bits but they’re outweighed by the bad bits and so overall, no I’m not enjoying it.  In the light of experience, you know that stuff that always comes along just after you need it, we would have planned this a bit more particularly with transport, we would have tried to find out a bit more about the towns we visited first and probably not come for as long as five weeks.  Getting to places off the beaten track, and more importantly getting back again has proved difficult and in a number of cases impossible with our level of Spanish.   Perhaps we have to revise our normal travel system which is A-Plan-Which-Is-Not-A-Plan towards A-Plan-Which-Is-A-Bit-Like-A-Plan.   Much of the Cuba we’ve seen has been flat and not as scenic as we hoped although the limestone cragged landscape around Vinales is spectacular.  Havana and Trinidad were good but many of the towns we’ve seen are disappointingly similar.  Another town, another bus station.  The beaches have been wonderful but after a while (about two hours in my case) they pall.  Food has been excellent occasionally (especially those cheap lobsters) but more often than not, mediocre.  The people are all (bar Taxi drivers) wonderfully honest, friendly and helpful and we have felt safe wherever we’ve been.  H thinks I just forget how difficult travelling as we do it is on a day-to-day basis.

* yes, I know the Bacardi joke is an old one but I like it.