There were two different blogs that I had in mind for Havana, both of them mentally drafted up before I even got here. The first was a lyrical paean to Cuba: the vintage cars and the colonial architecture and the live music and the glorious year-round sunshine. The second was a bitter rant about this ridiculous government, their 60-year refusal to grant the Cuban people any real kind of voice or economic liberty, and the wretched poverty and squalor that inevitably results.
Both blogs would have been honest, and accurate I think. In the event, I find myself caught between the two, but sadly it's the latter that wins out overall. I'm not a fan of this place.
I arrived in Havana with a big pile of Mexican currency that I hadn't bothered to change into dollars. In doing so I was following some badly out-of-date online travel advice that said Mexican currency is generally accepted in Cuba. Well, it isn't. To avoid dying of starvation I had to change the Mexican moolah into US dollars via a brief and friendly conference in a side street with various Cuban representatives of, shall we say, the informal economy. My fluent colloquial Spanish and my nerdy maths skills would have saved me from getting conned, but in fairness the Cubans didn't try. And I wasn't troubled by the prospect of getting mugged - I was more concerned that the money changers might turn on each other. It's an industry where competiton is fierce and obviously disputes are not settled in the courts.
Another dabble with the Cuban underworld came when I was doing some food shopping. Eggs are rationed here, and obviously as a foreigner I don't have a ration card. So I had to resort to buying black-market eggs. The price was a fair eggs-change, ha ha. I just hope I don't get arrested and eggs-tradited, double ha ha.
It's partly my own fault that Havana has been a bit of a struggle, because I insisted on doing my usual thing of living, commuting, shopping, cooking, and hanging my washing out to dry like a local, in an unflashy apartment in a non-touristy neighbourhood. I hadn't realised just how hard it is to get hold of pretty much anything here. There are no real grocery stores: just tiny shops selling odds and sods, and open-air markets selling semi-fresh produce. The bananas are small and spongy and tasteless; the meat was unrefrigerated and covered in flies. At least the Cuban sweet potatoes came up to scratch, although they take longer to parboil pre-mashing than their European equivalents. I'm used to 12-14 minutes back home but this was more like 20.
Anyway, the belated lesson here is that I should have just done what everyone else does, ie, sleep in a comfy Old Town hotel and eat three restaurant meals a day, occasionally venturing out on the open-topped tourist bus to see all the state-sponsored graffiti. ¡Viva La Revolución! it proclaims. Yes, long live the revolution: the next one, that is, and the sooner the better.
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| View from my rooftop terrace. I don't think I've used a filter in a blog picture before, but the 1950s look was irresistible. |
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| Big breakers by the shore at sunset. |
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| Parque John Lennon. This is the least lifelike statue of him that I've ever seen. Even worse than the one in Almeria. |
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| A typical Havana street scene. It looks like Spain would look like, if somebody had bombed the hell out of Spain.. |
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| Plaza Vieja |
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| The Capitol |
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| My apartment. Basic, but everything more or less works. Apart from the wifi... |
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| "The Good Taste Of The Beer" - slightly ungrammatical... "100% Selected Ingredients" - as opposed to what? Spontaneous hazelnuts? My favourite bit is the word "brewered", which appears twice. |
