The Best Places to Write Home About are those that are Nothing Much to Write Home About

I’ve not said much about the Casas Particular but they are very good.  Always clean

and welcoming with air con, fan and h & c showers which are nearly always the ‘suicide’ type.  Our cheapest was the first place we stayed in Havana at 18CUC for the room plus 5CUC each for breakfast but after that virtually all have been 25CUC a night for the room and 5CUC for breakfast.  Breakfast is always fresh fruit, juice, coffee, bread and an omelette if wanted.  The omelette doesn’t appeal to me and the bread is dry so my breakfast is always coffee and fruit.  The Casas are usually in traditional houses with tremendously high ceilings of 15 feet or so, often higher than the width or length of the room.  Imagine a large shoe box stood on end and that’s it.  The front door opens directly onto a narrow pavement.  A couple have been bedroom plus sitting room with access to balconies, still at the same price.  The decorative style is 1960’s/70’s Gypsy caravan kitsch and also they remind Heather of 1950/60 bed and breakfast places without the smell of cabbage.  They’re big on antimacassars.  That isn’t a criticism, it’s an observation.  The owners seem to be as pleasant and honest as you could wish to find, unlike the scheming, venal bastard taxi drivers.

Jineteras (literally jockeys) are prostitutes and jineteros are touts but this is tout as in tickets, taxis, casas, tours, restaurants.  Basically anything where a scam, big or small can be worked.   One common one is pulled on the tired, hot and disoriented foreigners arriving at the bus station.   Apart from the fare being hiked considerably, the visitor is told that the Casa, already booked is now full and that the driver knows a much better one, which of course isn’t better and is more expensive because of the Jineteros cut.  The booked Casa may have closed, the owner may have died or been abducted by aliens (I made that one up but it’s only a matter of time) or it’s run by the taxi driver’s mother who has been taken ill – we were almost told that one.  Even with a taxi booked by the Casa, we have been told that our driver had not arrived only to find him a minute later with our names, or a vague approximation of them written on a card.  This is all part of the game and carried out in a lighthearted and friendly manner. 

This is our story. We arrive at the bus station in Camaguey where we have a Casa booked that morning by our previous host and a taxi waiting for us booked for us by the Casa owner.  The vague approximation of our names is visible.  The fare is argued about, we leave for town in a smart car and arrive at a different Casa.  Words are exchanged.  Apparently, the booked casa is full and he has brought us to the best room in town.  Apparently the booked Casa is run by his mother.  We can only laugh and then more words are exchanged.  The Casa is 30CUC but it is the best room in town.  I consider song lyrics from the 1960’s and get our bags out.  Heather, the cooler head in these situations says let’s see the room.  I should say here that a bag and driver is never left in a cab unless I’m in it too.  When we arrive at a destination, H gets the bags and when they’re all out, I get out and then pay.  The driver of course is very pleasant, speaks very good English and is a shit.   As it turns out the room is very good, it has a big sitting area and terraces, a regular ‘non-suicide’ shower and is only about a 5 minute stroll from the centre.  After all the to-ing and fro-ing which has taken about ten minutes we take the room which has cost us £3 more than usual.  The host and hostess have seen and heard and been involved throughout although they speak no English.  As we sign in, she says “bravo” which I think meant that she recognised that we knew exactly what had happened and that we had made a decision rather than having been conned.

A usual exchange in the street begins “Hello, my fren”, “where you from, my fren” and pretty soon there’s a restaurant they want to show you or a story they want to tell you or a taxi or tour.  The problem of course is that some people really do just want to chat but there is no way of telling until the hook appears, and saying no immediately which is my natural inclination does cancel out any potential interesting conversations.

I’m fully aware of what rich pickings we are.  We understand that 20CUC, in pesos of course, is a reasonable wage per month in Cuba and for those of you not paying attention that’s about £14 a month.  We’ve arrived in Cuba with 10 years worth of salary distributed about our persons in cash, let alone the cameras and other electronics.   By the way, why do some people get wages and others get a salary ?  To be honest it is incredible that all tourists aren’t whacked over the head and robbed at the earliest opportunity and yet we’ve felt quite safe walking through darkened streets at night in all the towns we’ve been in.  I always want to know what’s behind me though. The most unsafe I’ve felt was in a taxi which was a 1950’s wreck of something which started out as a car, probably in Detroit.  

What I don’t understand is that it seems very safe here surrounded by dirt-poor Cubans and yet in Miami, only 70 or 80 miles away and also full of Cubans there are definitely no-go places in the Cuban areas.  Now why is that?  I won’t accept that all the good Cubans live in communist Cuba (taxi drivers excluded) and the bad ones live in capitalist Miami.

Traffic outside towns has been very light with many horses being ridden about and lots of horse drawn buggies and ox-carts.  Drivers are reasonably safe although a certain degree of freestyle overtaking goes on here and there.  Car ownership is about 40 per thousand compared to about 850 per thousand in the USA, so by necessity there is a lot more public transport. Taxis come as cars, horse drawn buggies, bicycle rickshaws, motorcycle with passenger carrying sidecar and a few bicycle with customer carrying sidecar.  The worst transport we’ve seen is a sort of enclosed cattle truck with the top foot or so open but barred and a closed door at the back. The design is clearly based on preliminary drawings for the black hole of Calcutta with people packed into them and in an accident the whole shebang looks like it would become a huge barbeque.  Absolutely horrible things.  We later met up with some Belgians we’ve seen around who themselves had met a Taiwanese girl who’d come from Camaguey in one of these horrors for 2CUC.  She said it was fun which says something for Taiwanese ideas of fun.  The same journey took us seven hours in an air conditioned coach.

I’m writing this in Santiago which is on the south coast in the east of Cuba just along from Guantanamo.  When we left our last Casa in Camaguay we had that 7 hour bus ride (very comfortable, air conditioned) ahead of us, with arrival about 8.00pm and nowhere actually booked.  By chance on the morning we were leaving Camaguey we found out that the clocks had changed by an hour (summertime?) and we managed to arrive at the bus station before the one bus a day for our destination had left.  We had managed to email just one Casa in Santiago the previous day hoping for accommodation to be available but had had no reply.  It was called Las Terrazas.  So, just before we left them to go to the bus station the owners of our Camaguey Casa had put us in touch with an agent in Santiago who spoke very good English and lived in Cheltenham (?!!).  He would find accommodation for us.  We didn’t really have a choice other than wandering around in a strange city with our bags thinking that nothing could possibly go wrong.  So we arrive at the bus station in Santiago, see the vague approximation of our name and set off in a 1956 Plymouth Belvedere.  We pull up in this city of half a million people and we are outside Las Terrazas.   This is true and no exaggeration at all.  We are though in the Casa opposite.