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Havana
good time? Before we went, we read a bit such as the inevitable guidebooks and also a book called Cuba Diaries by an American (Isadora Tattlin) who lived there for four years as her husband was something in the oil industry. This book was extremely warts and all – told us there were tarantulas and that Cubans want soap and ball-points, crayons and colouring books and so on for their children and ask tourists for such things. The flight out was uneventful despite all our volcanic ash fears. On landing we went through immigration (stand on the footmarks; take off your glasses; get photographed – very thoroughly compared to passport photo and visa checked – probably about one minute in total) and we were very apprehensive as Sue’s visa said Sue and her passport says Susan. As the documentation stresses that the visa and passport must agree exactly, we felt our travel agent Craig ought to have known that the visa needed to be in Susan form. There is also a new law effective from the start of May that tourists need to carry insurance documentation that proves they would, if necessary, have cover for repatriation on medical grounds – and that the Cubans would force you to buy more insurance if they weren’t satisfied. However, nobody checked! And then we went through to the luggage carousels. Almost immediately luggage allegedly from our flight started appearing but it was only car tyres and flat-screen TVs! Eventually I left Sue watching these circulating the twentieth time and went to a different carousel where some suitcases finally started appearing including ours. Sue’s surname is Reid, which appears to be unpronounceable in Spanish. We reclaimed our luggage and exited to where the taxi drivers hang about holding up the cardboard signs with your names on. Sadly we failed to find anything looking like our names. Just as we were about to give up, a woman came and asked if I was Senor Ruy de Guar. Miraculously, though I said no, I looked at her tiny piece of paper that had Reid and Gerard on it. She took us to a taxi that took us to our hotel. The taxi was a reasonably modern Lada and it drove us for about 20 minutes through open countryside and increasingly urban Havana. As we got into town the buildings became grander but more decrepit. But when we got to our hotel it was a ‘wow’ moment. The hotel is a magnificent example of 1930s architecture at its very best. It is on the Malecon (is that said as –kon or –son, it’ll be difficult to ask the way if we don’t find out), the road that lies along the front for several kilometres. It has extensive gardens at the front, side and back, with an avenue of palm trees and various 1950s American cars parked outside. Checking
in was a typical Cuban bureaucratic process but we were given keys to
our room in the end. Our hotel room was very acceptable. Not for a 5* hotel, which the Nacional is supposed to be, but it had a bed, a working bathroom, a working TV, a few working and rather more non-working lights, a selection of chairs and built-in wardrobes and generally all one would need in a hotel bedroom. And, unlike some of the corridors in the hotel, it didn’t have an unpleasant unidentifiable smell. The interior had some very grand features of the enormous chandelier and modernized originally wrought-iron gated lifts variety. We then went for a walk near the hotel. What is there to see? Very little. No ‘sights’ as such in that bit of town; a few bars; hardly any shops or restaurants. Quite a few motor vehicles, many of which were the incredible 1950s American cars which were either falling to bits or taxis. Few tourists and fewer Cubans than I would have expected. There were plenty of police, so at all times we felt completely safe. And it was hot, humid and overcast – we were to have three days of unseasonable on-and-off drizzle before it turned hot, humid and sunny for the rest of our stay. We did find a restaurant. Very grand-looking from the outside; dingy inside; nobody else there until just before we left. Sue ordered a tuna something that they came back to say they didn’t have some twenty minutes later – so she just ate the salad she’d ordered with it. I ordered an asparagus salad (which they said straight away I couldn’t have) and a chicken something - rather nice. Let me tell you about breakfast at the Nacional. This was the outstanding feature of the entire holiday. I’ve had good breakfasts before – I’ve even had great breakfasts in places like Las Vegas and Tel Aviv – but this put them all to shame. One chef frying savoury pancakes, one frying sweet pancakes, one frying or scrambling eggs, plus a buffet with hot food and a salad buffet, and cereals and juices and hot drinks and loads of tropical fruit and and and... I was stuffed after an hour or so. That day we explored more of Havana and found it pretty much the same wherever we went. Certainly decrepit. Certainly showing its glorious past – many of its buildings as fine as any in London, Paris or Rome in tree-lined avenues. People queueing in almost empty shops. Little coco-taxis based on motor scooters with yellow spherical shells around two passenger seats. Roads and pavements, even in the centre, with deep potholes half their width. Guards outside every bank to limit how many people enter. All fascinating and very different to anywhere else I’ve been. Just don’t ask about toilets! Smart cafes where we went in for a drink and I had to stand guard outside the gents as the door to the ladies couldn’t be opened. Others with no paper; fortunately I had a phrasebook in my pocket. 5* hotels with locks on them so one could only get in with a room key. We found a ‘supermarket’ near our hotel. It was full of soft drinks, rum and Nesquick (banana and vanilla flavours), tinned tuna, jam and toilet paper which was brown and looked like sandpaper. We bought an awful lot of water there every time we passed. There was very little else: it turned out to be the only food shop we saw in Cuba. I may be wrong, but my understanding is that if something is priced at $10, we can buy it for 10 CUC and Cubans can buy it for 10 CUP – but only if they have their ration card. That evening we ate at the restaurant opposite the previous evening’s. As usual, my food was acceptable but Sue’s had two dead mini-flies in the mayonnaise and one live one walking around. The place was, at least, prepared to replace it with another that looked OK. We drank only bottled water and I had a mojito (very nice; the only alcoholic drink either of us had in Cuba). Price seemed on the high side – I paid by credit card – they added the 11% charge – I assumed this was a service charge and added no further tip. The next day I didn’t feel at all well. I think it was a combination of tiredness, the flight, the long day, the heat and humidity and call it sun-stroke because that’s exactly what it felt like. Sue puts it down to what I ate or drank or even the ice in the mojito. Who knows? And does it matter? Not really. I stayed in bed reading, watching TV, dozing or in the bathroom. At this point, I must add that Sue was superb. After my holiday the previous year in South Africa – my first without family since my wife died – I decided that I don’t much like travelling alone and advertised on www.craigslist.org for a travelling companion. We hit it off, tried Oxford for a weekend and had already been to Istanbul and Malta together. Sadly I didn’t even want to look at breakfast the next day. I just nibbled at some dry toast, but a kind and observant Danish lady noticed and offered me some of the tablets she had bought for her husband two days earlier. And after taking just one of those I felt much better so the day wasn’t wasted. We explored a bit further afield. The Museum of the Revolution seemed to be the one must-see place so that’s where we set off towards. I say towards, because we thought it was. A man we passed asked us to go into a restaurant and when we didn’t I asked whether we were on the correct road. He confirmed that we were and told us it was about ten blocks. Ten blocks or so later I asked again, the woman spoke no English but got someone who did. He confirmed that it was the right road. Another ten blocks later we saw something likely in the distance. We never found out what that was, though it looked impressive, because an armed soldier made it very clear that we were not to go there. By now, we were hot and tired, so turned round and headed back. Very soon we came across some English tourists and asked them. Their guidebook had a rudimentary map (there appear to be no proper maps; even buses expect you to know which you want) which showed that we had reached the Plaza of the Revolution, half a city away from the museum! Still, it was quite attractive to walk where we’d been and, on the way back, we passed the central bus station. Yes, buses to Trinidad did go from there – we didn’t need to book, just turn up at 10am or 2pm tomorrow. Fortunately,
the travel adviser in the hotel told us we could do better. For the same
50 pesos we could get a coach that would collect us from the hotel for
the four hour journey. We lunched in our hotel. Sue had chosen a pizza
and a Nacional salad the previous day when she was lunching alone, queried
the lack of olives on the salad and been given a bowl of them, so as I
didn’t want much she ordered the same again. Again it came without
olives. I complained. This time we were told the hotel had no olives,
so we rejected her salad and just shared the pizza. The next morning,
in the hotel’s other restaurant, there were loads of olives, of course.
In our opinion, the typical West Indies lassitude with the communist lack
of customer service stopped them using any commonsense and getting them
from ten yards away. Off to Trinidad.
We had time for breakfast before we had to check out – as bureaucratic
a process as checking in had been – before our coach came to collect
us. The four hour journey took just over six hours. The roads are pretty
good, but not often wide enough to overtake beaten-up lorries or bicycles
or donkeys. The scenery was worth seeing. Tropical trees (Cuba has 30
types of palm tree), mangos and bananas grow by the roadside and we crossed
a mountain range. The place is essentially a tropical paradise. The all-inclusive Costa Sur is the first pure resort hotel I’ve ever stayed at and it will be the last. Craig had got us one of the beach bungalows and that was pretty good. Not, by any means, perfect, but a lot better than the rooms that we saw in the main block. The place lacked facilities – there was a swimming pool for those going to a beach resort but who don’t want to swim in the sea; there were two very decrepit pool tables, a gym, a table tennis table, the world’s slowest internet-connected PC and that was about it. And, of course, there were several bars. The first evening we were sent to the smarter looking restaurant. I avoid places with pictures of food on the menu and this was such a place. The food was pretty poor, the choice very poor and the service none too good but otherwise I’d have no complaints on day one. The second evening it was identical – Cubans aren’t into good food or variety. And don’t blame the environment; the island potentially is very rich. If you want good Cuban food, try Cubana in London. All our other meals were in the buffet in the hotel’s main building, and all were virtually identical. You could tell when it was breakfast, because there was coffee. On our third day there, two or three coaches of Germans arrived and so it was worth opening the buffet in the evenings when clearly it hadn’t been before. And suddenly the hot water in our bathroom was hot, previously it had only been warm. The Germans did not take the loungers on the beach – we never saw them during the day so maybe they went off somewhere by coach or maybe they were all hogging loungers at the pool. We did have a half-day tour of Trinidad itself. We booked this from a guy in the hotel who told us more about Cuban life than anyone else. Such as a doctor friend of his who had a new car and – unusually – chose to insure it. As it happened, the car was stolen. That was ten years ago and the insurers have not paid him anything. Nor has the government given him permission yet to buy himself another car – new or used. A minibus with guide and driver collected us and two younger English girls from the hotel. Joe, the guide, spoke adequate English and even had a sense of humour. The tour took us to the ’valley of the sugar mills’ and on into Trinidad itself. There we were taken on foot round the town, into a private house, into the best hotel and various important public buildings. Once very rich, Trinidad has plenty of grand buildings but, since cane sugar has passed its heyday, a lot of the buildings are showing signs of long-term neglect. Still, that was nothing in comparison to Havana, where I understand about 300 buildings collapse annually. In one pottery studio a worker came up to us and asked for (I think) crayons for the children – we gave him crayons and pencils and colouring books and cheap ballpoints. That was the only time we were asked for anything other than money. Fascinating tour and one of the highlights of the holiday. Another thing I learned is that World Heritage Sites are worth seeing but it doesn’t follow that they justify a week of my life! The rest of the time we stayed on or near the beach. I read all the books I took and one of Sue’s and did Sudokus and other puzzles while staying in the shade as much as possible. Sitting in our lounge one day, watching CNN and wondering whether the oil would pollute Havana before we got back there, I heard a scream from Sue. Turning round I saw something black scuttling towards one corner of the room. Seeing it only for a very short time and having read Cuba Diaries, I naturally assumed this was a tarantula. Some very rude words were thought or maybe said and we made rapid plans – evacuate back to Havana before lunch or later in the day, bravely tackle it with a shoe or a towel, or... and then salvation appeared in that we heard the chambermaid’s trolley on the path outside. I called her in and together we hunted and found the tarantula. It was a three-inch wide crab! She threw a towel over it, picked it up and took it away. She then advised us to roll a towel and shove it against the door to block the inch-high gap. I improved on this plan by suggesting we put it outside the door, otherwise it allows anything in when we’re away. Sue later further improved on this plan by using one of the spare blankets to go under the door with rolls both inside and out. However, even this didn’t keep out lizards. One charming thing the chambermaid did was to make a daily sculpture of towels, blankets and flower petals. It was different every day and it seemed a shame to move it or use the towels. Finally our time in Trinidad came to an end. We took the bus back to Havana a day before our flight home as Craig had advised us not to rely on getting back on the day of the flight home. Back at the Nacional, we were given a better room than we’d had before. It had been used by Fred Astaire; it was opposite one that had been used by Johnny Weissmuller and on the same corridor as one used by Ava Gardner. What wasn’t mentioned, of course, is that all these celebrities were there in the pre-Castro era when Cuba was comparatively much richer. We found a reasonably good restaurant (linen napkins; baked Alaska flambéed at the table for dessert; pianist who got most of the notes right) for our last main meal in a basement right opposite the front entrance to our hotel. Our final day was spent doing a very poor standard sight-seeing bus tour of the hop-on, hop-off variety, which would have made more sense on the first day, gift shopping (we failed, there being absolutely nothing at all suitable, so people got Crema de Mango, which is jam), and cigar shopping. If you buy cigars from unlicensed shops or of unknown makes for a fraction of the price, they allegedly confiscate them at the airport – actually nobody asked or looked. We had more hassle on the way home. Our documentation said the transfer from the hotel to the airport with a time in brackets after the airport. Does that mean a transfer leaving at that time or a transfer getting us to the airport at that time? Totally ambiguous. We played safe and got there in time for the former. Actually, being us, we were there 30 minutes before that. The taxi turned up at precisely the time the hotel predicted, three hours before take-off and totally unrelated to either time we expected! At the airport we were photographed leaving the country (we’re an island too, why don’t we do something similar?) and I was amused at the duty free. The cigars I had bought were also on sale there at four different places and prices 20-100% higher than I’d paid in a government-licensed shop directly opposite the town hall/parliament building! Throughout our stay I was impressed by the friendliness of people. Smiles and holas everywhere. But would I recommend going there for a holiday? Not really. It was certainly interesting to see, but I feel other places would be more interesting. As a beach holiday it was OK, not that I’m an expert on beach holidays, but I’m fairly sure other Caribbean or Mediterranean islands would be better. Yet I do want to make it very clear that for all my criticisms it was a good holiday and I'm really very pleased that we went. ** Itinerary
16 May Virgin Atlantic Travel agent used Cuba Direct www.cubadirect.co.uk, Craig Everitt. Cost Just under £1000 each for the flights, bed and breakfast in Havana and full board in Trinidad, transfers to and from the airport but not including transfers to and from Trinidad. Why? I
had the idea that in the post-Fidel era, President Obama will open up
Cuba to all Americans; that they will pour in, spending loadsamoney and
that Cuba will shortly become an extension to Florida. I suspect this
will, indeed, happen but not as fast as I thought. The timing was chosen
to give a fair chance of avoiding hurricanes and bad weather there while
not missing anything much of the cricket season here. As for the places
we went Havana was obvious and Trinidad is a UN World Heritage Site “of
great architectural interest”. First published in VISA 92 (Aug 2010) |