Cuba, post #2, written a week after our return.

Time is flying by, so rather than wait until we have time to write the perfect joint post, I (Phil) am just going to go ahead and get something up here. I know Juliet shared some of my impressions, but maybe not all of them and I don't want to speak for her, so I'll just speak for myself here. Maybe Juliet will come through later and edit. 

I’m not sure what I expected Cuba to be like, but I can say it wasn’t like I expected. 

For one thing, Havana had way more tourists than I would have expected, if I had thought about it in advance. “Habana Viejo” = Old Havana was swarming with thousands of tourists, many of them from a giant cruise ship. Americans, Canadians (sure, I know Canadians are Americans too, but you know what I mean…when I say Americans I mean _real_ Americans), Germans, French seemed to be the most common, perhaps in that order. 

Any place in the US with that concentration of tourists, or anything remotely like it, would be maintained in good condition, but Old Havana is literally falling to pieces. It seems that the model is to do nearly no maintenance on most buildings, year after year, but then every now and then to do a complete restoration on one of them. There are 100- or 200-year-old buildings in which the lower floor and half of the upper are uninhabitable, with the internal walls collapsing and water leaking into one corner, while the other half of the upstairs has someone living there. Such buildings exist but are not common; much more common is buildings that are merely poorly maintained, inside and out..which you can see because  you walk down the street, turn your head, and you’re looking into someone’s living room ten feet away. I know from reading a book of travelers’ letters spanning 500 years that Havana has always had a culture of simply leaving the downstairs windows and doors open, such that passersby can look into the apartment, and this is still true, evidently.

Below is a photo from a typical Old Havana street. This one is not one of the main tourist streets, so most of the people pictured are locals. The capitol building is in the distance. The street is open to cars, but it’s rare to see one on one of these little streets: most of the locals can’t afford a taxi and certainly not a car, and tourist taxis mostly patrol the perimeter rather than getting involved with slowly picking their way through the pedestrians and pedi-cabs.

Pedi-cabs are used by tourists but also by locals. Note the American flag. 

There really are lots of ancient American cars around, mostly being used as taxis. But there are also more modern cars. The modern taxis, such as the yellow cab in the photo below, are owned by the government and leased to the driver.  Some of these have meters (maybe all of them) but although we took both old-style and modern cabs a dozen times, the meter was never used. We would negotiate the price before getting in, although there did seem to be fairly standard pricing at least for the trips we took. 

Taxis in Havana, on the border between Old Havana and Central Havana

Our few days in Havana included: visit to Independence Square (or maybe it’s Revolutionary Square or something, I forget); I got a shave; I lost a game of chess against a guy in a park; we went to a performance of The Nutcracker (very good, especially the second act) that was attended by the legendary dancer Alicia Alonso, now in her nineties; we ate at a couple of good restaurants; we went to a small ceramics museum (which is in the heart of Old Havana, cost only $3 admission, and was quite good... but we were the only visitors in the half hour or so that we were there! People are missing out!).

After that we took a long (5-hour) taxi drive to the western end of the island — a bargain at only $100 or so, prearranged by our Cuban bird guide/trip organizer who had to do a lot of shopping around to get that rate.  We went to a dive center called Maria La Gorda (= Maria the fat woman). We each did five dives, only about 50 minutes per dive (Juliet and I both climbed back in the boat with about half of our air each time). Previously, the best reef diving we had done was in Fiji, and it was awesome, but this was possibly even better.  We didn't see any big stuff: no sharks or really big fish, the biggest things we saw were some 3- or 4-foot barracuda -- but lots of small fish. What blew us away, though, were the variety and health of the corals. The reef is just incredibly healthy. It’s a national park that supposedly has no fishing (but actually the dive center has a boat that goes out daily for line fishing…but still, one boat with a few fishing lines, on miles and miles of undeveloped area….it’s _nearly_ no fishing).  No significant pollution source for hundreds of miles, either. We may go back someday just for a dive vacation, back to Maria La Gorda and/or a live-aboard boat on a reef south of the central part of Cuba.

Mostly the Maria La Gorda stay was great…except that for one 12-hour period I was violently ill with food poisoning. Started about midnight, was a lot better by noon, and I was recovered enough to do a 3pm dive. Pretty horrible 12 hours though. Incredible how quickly it came and went. Other than that, neither of us had any problem with the food on the whole trip. Except for a few nice restaurants in Havana, the menu was rather monotonous, everywhere in the country, but palatable and sometimes pretty good. We mostly were staying and eating at “hostals”, which are private residences in which some rooms are rented out…essentially a B&B.

Typically there would be Moros y Christianos = Moors and Christians = black beans and rice (black and white, get it?); tomatoes; cabbage and possibly lettuce; chicken or beef or pork or a few times fish; bread; and cheese.  Juliet stuck to her vegetarian diet, whereas I ate some chicken every few days, and a little bit of beef a couple of times. 

.According to one of our guides, most farming in Cuba is done on government-owned farms in which the farmer is required to give a fixed amount of production to the government (this is the basis for the ration) but they’re allowed to sell any excess. 

Much of the agriculture is done with horses or oxen, or by hand, and a lot of transportation is by horse cart. If the Amish can do it, so can the Cubans

I assume these are farmers selling their excess production in this very nice market.

The country was a lot less socialist than I expected. We talked with our bird guide and a second Cuban who was basically a driver, and had very brief discussions with a few other Cubans, who told us this: everyone gets a ration book which they can use to get rice, beans, and a few other staples every month. The government also provides housing for people who don’t have it.  It would be possible to live on just the ration, maybe, but the people we spoke to don’t know anyone who does that. “Maybe some people.” Just about everyone has some source of income.  Education is free, as is health care.  There are government jobs, but it’s not like everyone or even a lot of people work for the government. The driver, for example, had recently quit his government job as a veterinarian…which paid 16 cuc per month.  

A “cuc” is a “convertible” peso, i.e. one that can be exchanged for dollars. Theoretically 1 cuc is worth very close to $1 US, but there is a fee to change money that seems to be inescapable, so it costs something like $1.15 to buy a cuc.  The cuc (pronounced “kook”)  is a holdover from years ago, when there was much more government control over the economy: at one time it was illegal for ordinary Cubans to own cucs, and foreigners couldn’t own regular pesos…something like that. The system seems almost completely irrelevant now. There is a fixed exchange rate of 25 pesos per cuc, and Cubans use either. There are a few cases in which prices are different for Cubans and foreigners, such as some museum admissions (the ceramics museum was 3 cuc for us, and 3 pesos for a Cuban, so 25x more expensive for us) but except for those rare cases Cubans pay the same prices as foreigners. This surprised us because many of the prices were fairly high, like 2 cuc for a big (1.5-liter) bottle of water, but our guide assured us that if a Cuban wanted to buy one, they, too, would have to pay 2 cuc or 50 pesos.  Which means a veterinarian getting paid 16 cuc per month is getting practically nothing, roughly $0.50 per DAY (in addition to the government ration). Unsurprisingly, everyone who has any space at all has a garden where they grow tomatoes and lettuce etc., and a couple of chickens scratching around. But also — and this was a surprise — there is a huge black market that the government doesn’t seem to try to suppress. We hired a guide in Havana for half a day, and she said literally everything she owns was bought on the black market: her clothes, her cell phone, her cell phone minutes, etc. 

Next post will probably discuss the two weeks we spent birding all through central Cuba.