Cuba

03/11/2016 : With less than a week to go to the US elections, I’m happy to be in Mexico. It's so fecking hot and I think the collective sigh of relief  breathed en masse in this country when ol’ Donny Teapots makes his “but it's not fair: I always win at Monopoly, why didn't I win at this game?” speech will be massively cooling. I hope there will be celebrations. I imagine parties to celebrate the defeat of the tyrant (he’s seen very clearly here as The Enemy), I foresee dancing in the streets with piñatas shaped like a certain defeated nominee, I can envisage a national holiday being declared: the We Won't Get Buttfucked By Trump Day will be celebrated every November 9th with a day off from work and school.

On the other hand, if it goes the other way and enough people with an American passport and nothing better to do next Tuesday say “fuck you” to the rest of the world, I'll be glad to go down with the first country to get nuked when the inebriated jackass does the inevitable while he’s trying to call for more champagne and his fingers don't quite reach the right button.

By the time I get round to publishing (or even finishing) this entry, we’ll all know the winner of Who Wants to be The Most Powerful Person in the West: 2016, and that is massively frustrating. When the two people who read this blog (hi mum, hi Katherine) read this, we’ll either be living in a world where there is (fecking finally) a female president, or not living at all. And that's mildly depressing.

So let me turn to a topic which is depressing less on a global level and more on a personal level: Cuba. Jokes, our time in Cuba wasn't depressing, we just felt like we were struggling uphill wearing shoes with no grip, swimming upstream using deflated water wings, and went to bed each night hoping that the next day would be better. We had some good moments too, but as we’re massive grudge-bearing babies, it wasn't good that our first day kicked off badly.

La Habana (what Cubans call Havana) is enormous, and split into three sections: Vedado, Centro, and Habana Vieja. They go west to east in that order and are each in themselves, huge. Habana Vieja is where any tourist wants to be: it has museums, restaurants, bars, and is the part of the city which has seen the most investment in a rejuvenation project which is making the city beautiful again (perhaps I should say restoring it to its former glory, but I won't due to the fact it sounds a bit hackneyed). Centro Habana is where the least money has been invested and is all dilapidated buildings, rusting cars and broken roads. Vedado is mainly wide avenues and newer buildings and, in my opinion, pretty dull and not worth seeing if you're only in the city for a few days, as we were. Vedado was also where we were staying.

Up until that point, in all new cities and countries, on arrival we’d relied on a Google map downloaded onto our phones and a pin dropped at the location of the hostel / guest house / hut we would be staying in. I appreciate my dad would go wild at this lack of paper-and-pencil planning, heck, he did, in Peru (and rightly so, as we led him up an impossibly steep and narrow road while he was driving) and he would have been right to berate our lack of foresight when we arrived in Havana. The 30€ (30 fecking euros, and yes there's a bus but it stops miles away from the airport) taxi took us to the pin I'd dropped, which turned out to be in the middle of a primary school. Unperturbed, we trooped down to the nearest hotel (incidentally where my parents had stayed a year and a half before - they went all-inclusive, which explains why they loved Cuba) where we bought a beer and asked for the WiFi password.

“Oh there's no password,” a friendly yank told us. “You have to buy a card with a code, find a hotspot, then maybe (maybe!) you can get online. Our spirits sagged a little, I heard a ghostly voice which sounded a lot like my pops whispering “you should have written down the addressssssss,” and we used the rest of the friendly yank’s internet allowance to look up the correct address of our “casa particular”. In Cuba there are no hostels like we know and love, instead, normal people rent out the spare rooms in their houses and in some cases have converted their homes into mini hotels, with mini bars, mini white towels, and the opposite of mini prices. This describes Casa Marta, our casa, perfectly.

At dinner that night there was nothing vegetarian on the menu. Nothing. Not even a plate of chips and a slap in the face. The waiter, however, was really charming and told us the chef could make us some salad and rice and beans without meat. It was like when Mario finds a green mushroom: our energy and happiness increased, until our food came and we had to pick the meat out of the beans and goomba, and our energy went back to where it had been before. The problem with Pól and me is that we’re too polite (wusses) to complain. It wasn't the (super charming, but evidently stupid) waiter’s fault and we also generally prefer a bit of pig flesh in our food to the spit of whoever cooked it, but only slightly. To distract us from our carnivorous meal we watched an interesting -and slightly depressing- transaction between two guys out for drinks with a pair of prostitutes. When the guys were happy with their service providers (there was a quick switcheroo at one point where one girl was led away and replaced by another), they finished their drinks and fucked off, each weirdly congratulating the other, as if it were through their own charm that they wouldn't be wanking into a sock that night.

The next morning was sunny and breezy and with our mood levels brought back from Dangerously Grumpy Cus They Put Meat In Our Food to Ah It's All OK Really, Look At That Sky! we set out to walk to town. Town -being Habana Vieja- was two hours away on foot, but we didn't know that (cus we had no internet and the woman we asked plucked a number from her ass and told us it would take us 25 minutes) so we headed for the Malecón (sea wall), where we could see the Capitolio building in the distance, and headed towards it. “The people in Cuba are so friendly,” is something you hear all the time. “Watch out for shysters,” is something I'd read, and forgotten completely. Before long we had a companion: a Cuban guy named Jorge, who told us all about his life on the island, the ration cards the government issue him which are just enough to feed his family, and the ridiculously low wage he earns as a… stupidly, I stopped listening at this point as he’d taken us for breakfast and I had an omelette in front of me. It wasn't even that nice an omelette but it receives all the blame for what happened next. When I tuned back into Jorge's chat it was time to go see the casa cooperativa (cooperative house) Jorge collaborated in, where we could buy cigars and rum. But as I paid the bill ($25 for three juices and two tortillas), an alarm in the back of my sluggish brain rang and I told Jorge that maybe we shouldn't go to this place cus we didn't have that much money and didn't even smoke cigars. It turned out that while I'd been shovelling overpriced egg into my face I'd agreed to go, and he reminded me that for every purchase we made, he'd get an extra page in his ration book, and oh how he needed that because his life was so hard etc. Bearing in mind we’re too chicken to send our food back in a restaurant, only a deer caught in headlights can know how we felt as Jorge lead us, knees audibly knocking, into his “casa cooperativa”, where the door was closed behind us and a girl who looked like Rihanna told us all about the cigars on offer. This could have been interesting had the door not been guarded by Rihanna's fella, had Pól not been shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other, and had I not been crying on the concrete floor sobbing, “please don't take my money, I beg you!” Fortunately (if there is a fortunate part of any of this) I only had $25 in my pocket, so they took that as a “donation” toward the ration card and let us go, back onto the street where we peed ourselves, cried a little more, and then did what any normal couple does after a traumatic experience: had an argument about it.

It was hard to pull the day back from that. We were still trying to get by on our normal budget, and we'd just spent it all on breakfast and a (no doubt fake) ration card for Jorge and his (no doubt real) family. The thing about Cuba is that they have two currencies. The national peso (Moneda Nacional), and the convertible peso (CUC). What we had just given Jorge was 25CUC, or 625MN, or what we learned later was an average salary for a Cuban not working in tourism (and earning tips in CUC), and no doubt far more than the value of a ration card. The other thing about Cuba is that rum is cheap. So as the sun set over the Malecón, we bought an 8CUC bottle of Havana Club, a 1.50CUC bottle of Rola Cola, told the shop assistant to politely fuck off when he asked for 11.50CUC for the two items, and watched the sun go down surrounded by people who were either nonplussed by our presence (hurrah!) generally wanted a chat (tolerable!) or seemed like they wanted a chat but ended up just asking for our watches, or our shoes (that really happened!).

Before arriving in Cuba, I’d read about “peso places”, where you can use the national currency and get cheap food, but for a pair of vegetarians, and precious ones at that (especially Pól), this seemed like less and less of an option and so as we ate our way through Havana, we also ate our way through our budget for our entire stay in Cuba. After four nights we’d spent around €600, and failed to do a lot of the things we’d wanted to do because they were either closed, or the taxi journey there was prohibitively expensive. We did see the Museo de la Revolución (Museum of the Revolution), which was great. Shabby and slightly overpriced, the museum told the story of the failed coup of 1953, Castro's imprisonment and exile in Mexico, the beginnings of his friendship with Che Guevara, the planning and execution of The Revolution, and finally the work carried out during the first decade of the new government. Having visited Santiago de Chile so recently, I made a comparison between Pinochet and Castro, observing (I thought somewhat profoundly), that while a seizure of power from the (military) right is called a coup, a seizure of power from the left is called a revolution, and wondered if they weren't just the same thing under different names? To which Pól patted my head and asked me to remember that Allende (in Chile) had been democratically elected, whereas Batista (in Cuba) had been a dictator, himself having seized power in a (once again US-backed) military coup. Reading about and observing the photos of Fidel, Raul, Che and their comrades, I understood how they must have felt when they ousted the neocolonialists and brought independence to the island for the first time ever. The hope and pride of that period in Cuban history was present in every display cabinet, which were full of photos of a handsome Guevara declaring Revolution or Death, and later in the information given about the reforms carried out in the 60s (a massive campaign brought literacy up to 99.7%, where it has stayed). But as we stepped outside, into a Cuba where Che Guevara had been dead for 50 years and his face turned into a cartoon, devoid of meaning for most who wear it, and the Castro brothers had reached an age where you wouldn't trust them to make their own shopping list, never mind know what's best for or run a country, it seemed to us like the ideals they’d fought for 60 years before had been forgotten. The dual currency has created a two-class system, and poverty exists next to incredible (and incredibly apathetic) wealth, an image as incongruous to the idea of true socialism as it is natural to capitalism. A massive cause of this poverty is due to the US embargo, which has prevented trade with Cuba since 1960. To say “thanks a lot for keeping our country on the edge of starvation,” the Cubans have erected a bunch of Cuban flags in front of the US special interests building in Havana in order to block out the electronic billboard which transmitted daily messages to the people of Cuba. We went to see these flags and pay our respects to such a genius idea, but there are only the flag poles left, as (happily) Obama reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2015.

The Malecón: where babies are relieved of their candy, and foreigners of their cash, with equal ease.

The biggest tragedy was leaving our expensive Peruvian chocolate behind in Casa Marta.

As we had time to get out of Havana, we took a bus south-east for a few hours to a town called Trinidad, which is on every tourist's itinerary and therefore packed full of shops selling Che Guevara T-shirts and bars selling tiny cocktails at normal-sized prices. Instead of 40CUC (as we’d paid in Havana) we were paying 25CUC a night, which felt like a saving in the way that switching from Dom Perignon to Veuve Clicquot feels like a saving: it doesn't. One way to keep costs down in Cuba is to eat dinner with the family that runs your casa particular. It's also a good way to hang out with Cubans, have some craic (I hope Pól will forgive me that awkward use), and hear what real people think of life on the island. We saw this happening through open doors and windows of other casa particulares: cosy groups around dining tables, people chatting over empty plates (cus they’d finished, not cus there’s so little food). Unfortunately, in our Trinidadian house the papa of the family informed us that vegetarian food was not within their (sorry, his wife - he doesn't set foot in the kitchen)'s capabilities: that they would rather feed us ten lobsters than have to look up a recipe of a dish without meat, which seemed a little absurd but as we didn't want to force the issue, or eat ten lobsters, we left the Getting To Know Real Cuba for another day.

Trinidad is (thankfully) much smaller than Havana. The guidebook describes the town as stuck in the 1850s, I imagine because of the horse and carts which are just as common as cars, and the fact that the drainage system in some streets looks Victorian. However, unless the average 1850s fare was overpriced cocktails and the average man on the street was an American woman in wedge heels struggling on the cobbles, I think the Lonely Planet’s claim that Trinidad is stuck in the past is slightly stretched. We took a “walking tour”, also from the guidebook, where we followed a map around the “less wealthy yet equally picturesque” parts of town. We were two of about twenty people clutching the same edition of the LP, open on the same page, camera (phone)s in hand. You see a lot of tourists taking photos of the locals in Cuba. In Havana we saw a pair of skinny blonde girls pointing their enormous SLR at a man so old he could barely protest; he merely raised his eyes sadly at them as they waved a thank you at him and shuffled off, giggling. It made us feel intensely uncomfortable. There are Cubans who exploit the tourists’ addiction to taking photos, and we saw packs of women wearing traditional dresses and Nike trainers accosting (mostly) men as they came into the main square, grabbing them by the arm and yelling “photo?” at them until they finally gave in, had their photo taken with one of the women, then let them pick through the coins and notes they produced from their pockets. It was equally uncomfortable to watch.

Back in Trinidad the touts were mainly trying to sell you their shit mojitos “happy hour! All drinks one fisty,” or else offer you a taxi ride every ten metres. You could walk down the street screaming “I don't want a taxi, leave me alone!” at the top of your lungs and every time you paused to take breath, some hopeful fuckwit would appear from nowhere and yell “taxi?” in your ear. We took the bus to the beach, where (when the rain finally stopped) we got in a good couple of hours of awkward salt-water frollicking and lounging on sunbeds which, miraculously, no-one tried to take money from us for the pleasure of using. It may have been our one free experience in Cuba. Trinidad also served us the best food we ate during our entire stay. During a rare internet-working moment, we managed to google a couple of veggie-friendly restaurants and had a couple of dinners (on separate nights, though we were so hungry for good food we could have easily dined twice) that didn't look like they’d been cooked by someone earning three Chupa Chups a day. Since 2011, private restaurants have been allowed in Cuba and this has dramatically improved the number and quality of eateries all over the island and means vegetarians aren't limited to picking pork out of plates of beans, at least not every night.

From Trinidad we took a shared taxi to Viñales, a place my parents had visited the year before and which my mum highly recommended. The taxi was a big old US thing, a Chevy or something like that and there were nine of us in total, all fitting comfortably. During the drive we met a German guy whose volume and self confidence was perhaps a touch on the side of too much, but we were happy to have someone to chat with other than each other, and ended up sharing a casa with him. Even though he bellowed at waiters and insulted taxi drivers, he entertained us massively during our last few days in Cuba.

Viñales is a small town in the middle of some of the most impressive countryside I've ever seen. I read in the guidebook (and then had the German dude explain to me) that the whole area used to be elevated above a cave system before it collapsed, leaving giant hunks of stone called “mogotes”, which look like giant stone loaves of bread. Along with two other Germans, we rented horses and did a four-hour route around the mogotes, which - given how terrified of horses I thought I was - was surprisingly wonderfully enjoyable.

We forfeited our chance of eating in that casa too as we did the horse tour (everyone does the horse tour) with a different company to the one they promoted and their initial enthusiasm and friendliness, “go on, take the tour tomorrow, why wait? Better to take it early, before you’ve had a chance to compare prices,” turned to sulky indifference towards us and we thought it best not to prevent them from cooking their ten lobsters.

We spent our last night back in Havana and our last CUC on four daiquiris in el Floridita, the bar Hemmingway used to prop up and where his statue still does. As the Germans ate dinner we insisted we weren't hungry, so determined were we not to spend any more money beyond the 30CUC we’d saved for the taxi ride to the airport. By the time we left Cuba we’d spent around 300% of our budget and arriving in Cancun, taking a $3 bus to town and eating $2 tacos for dinner was deliciously welcome.

I’m sad my experience of Cuba worked out the way it did as I was so excited to go. I know that, had things gone another way, I could have come away having loved every minute and been desperate to go back. The way it stands, I feel bad for saying so many times, and agreeing with people who say, it’ll be good to visit Cuba “before it changes” (a phrase you hear spoken by tourists in Cuba more often than “how much for the Che Guevara money belt?”) because I really believe Cuba needs to change. There are qualified teachers working in bars because the money is so much better. Important jobs are not being done because the government won't pay what the tourists will. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm pretty sure it's a problem, and to imply that my enjoyment of a country is more important than that country moving into a new phase of its history in which it may be able to feed its people without the use of ration cards is beyond my ability.