Havana

After flying 10 hours in economy (cattle) class, we arrived at 21:00 in Cuba (01:00 UK time). Passport control was faster than I thought for us, but very slow for others. This is the typical scene where everybody else in front of you seems to take forever, and when you get to the desk, it takes 2 minutes. Baggage and passport control, total time = 150 min. Not bad, given the online horror stories.

We got a rip-off taxi to the hotel (25 minutes for 25 dollars) from those guys who hassle you as you exit the airport before you get a chance to understand the local transportation. We fell for it because there was heavy tropical rain outside, and we were probably too tired to argue. We arrived in central Havana only to realize that our room was double-booked. Technically, we arrived the next day (00:05), and the landlady didn’t take any chances of us not showing up, so she gave our room to someone else.

She did apologize and found us another room in a nearby guest house. So far, so good…

The room (this description is for the Greek natives) is like when you visit your old grandmother’s house in the village. You forget about technology, and you know that electricity, hot water, and other utilities are “kind of” working and could break at any time. In other words (this description is for the SKY people), everything appears to be in place, but in reality, things have been broken many times before, heavily patched, and are working just enough so you can claim they are fine.

The next day, we walked around the city to explore the famous Havana. To give you an idea of the scenery, take a seaside city like Blackpool, let it rust for 30 years (like Blackpool), drop a few bombs on buildings and roads, and add a couple of hurricanes to stir things up a bit.

There is an area called the old city that is kind of preserved for tourists, but it felt a bit fake to me. The real Cuba is in the surrounding areas, where people search the waste bins to find anything they can sell alongside the pavement.

Everything is run by the government, but those public services are hidden in the background, and if you don’t know where to find them, all you see is a black market and a lot of tourist traps.

If you ignore all that (or if you book with a holiday package where you’re driven around in air-conditioned cars and dropped only at nice places), you can see a beautiful Caribbean city that lives isolated from the Western world (it is nice to see kids in the streets with no mobile phones).

One more thing to complain about, and I’m done… Everything is very expensive for tourists. Tourists have their own currency (converted pesos), which is the substitute for the dollar (before, all prices for tourists were in dollars). This means there are different prices for tourists and different (much lower) ones for Cubans (in real pesos).

For example, a beer in a bar cost 2.5 converted pesos, which is 2 pounds. A bus trip to a city 5 hours away is £35 (return). A meal costs £15-£20 per head in decent restaurants and £7-10 in budget ones. A night in a Hilton-style hotel is £130.

Feels like we never left London…

Complaints aside, the country does the best it can to overcome financial suffocation and yearly hurricanes that frequently destroy what’s left standing. The financial inequality between foreigners and locals is huge, and traveling as a backpacker, you get to see the life behind the curtains.

We walked through the city, drank the rum, smoked the cigar, and did the tour that everyone does in Havana. Not impressed so far, as I expected more. Maybe I need to change my perspective on this trip and remind myself that; first, backpacking is not a fully serviced honeymoon holiday (and rightly so). Second, we are going to visit quite a few poor countries, and we should forget about being tourists and become more like travellers.

We definitely need some time to adjust.

Tomorrow we are going to another city called Trinidad and spend the night. It is supposed to be better than Havana in many aspects, but the bar is already very low…