La Habana, Cuba

When we checked in at the airport we had to buy a Cuban tourist visa for US$30 each. We boarded a small Inter Caribbean Beechcraft 200 plane from Providenciales to La Habana. The pilot had to take on extra fuel as rough weather was expected along the route. We all had to be weighed along with our bags and one poor lady discovered when we arrived in the rain at La Habana airport that her bags had to be left behind because the plane was overweight. Our uncovered bags, co-pilot, ground crew and passengers spent about half an hour in the rain on the tarmac as the lady, a Cuban, with an American passport tried to sort out how she could get her bags back.

A sculpture in a space where old buildings had been.

Once inside the terminal it was chaos. There were only two immigration officers and x ray machines for the hundreds of arriving passengers so it took a long time to process everyone. Everyone was asked if they had a second passport. We think this was because they do not recognise the dual nationality passports held by Cuban born visitors. If you are born Cuban you are Cuban for life.

The harbour

Once outside we were able to join a very short queue to change our Euros to Cuban Convertible Pesos, CUCs. American dollars are not wanted and a 10% extra charge is added to exchange them even though the peso is linked to the dollar at one-to-one. The locals use Moneda Nacional (MN) pesos while all others use CUC which is 25 times the value of the MN. Tourists will pay 25 times more for everything they buy in Cuba. This makes it an expensive place to visit.

The old cars lined up ready for hire

We caught a modern, Hyundai Sonata, yellow government taxi from outside the terminal driven by an ex-pharmacist who spoke excellent English. He said he started driving taxis because it paid better than working at his profession. He rents the car from the government and is his own boss. The route from the airport is a fixed tariff at $30 CUC=US$30 and drivers get a license to work that route. He said he has a son who is academic so will encourage him into a profession while his oldest son who is not, is also a taxi driver.

Our casa

We arrived at our Casa Particular which is similar to a home stay in NZ. We had already ordered dinner in our request to the family. Rafael carried our bags up the first flight of steep stone steps and then up a second flight of narrow spiral steel steps to his apartment. His wife Mary served us our dinner of steak and onions, boiled green bananas that tasted like potato, fried then smashed banana (called tostones), and a rice and brown bean mix. There was a salad of cucumbers and avocado followed by delicious fresh mango juice. John had a Cuban coffee and I had tea. An ex guest from the UK sends Rafael a parcel of different kinds of fruit tea every year so he can serve them to his guests. He received a second box of tea while we were there so he is hoping to have more tea drinkers than coffee drinkers.

Some places have the ground floor propped up while other just crumble to the ground through neglect

About ten years ago Rafael gave up his engineering job in a government factory to run the home stay. Mary got more money than him working at the National Mines office as a technician so she continues to work there.  17 year old Jenifer and 20 year old Elizabeth and boyfriend, live independently below them with Mary's father. They own their apartment and have spent several years extending and renovating it as they get money.

The beauty of the old buildings

Currently they rent two rooms to tourists. Our room he called the apartment. It had its own entrance with a kitchen and its own bathroom. The fridge was full of boxes of juice, bottles of water and cans of beer operating on an honesty system. There was a separate lounge with armchairs and a sofa. The bedroom had an old fashioned noisy air conditioner and a huge old TV mounted up high. It was more than we needed and pretty comfortable. All home stays must have hot water in order to get a license to operate. Previously the landlord had to pay a high monthly tax to the government whether they had guests or not but since Fidels' brother Raul took over the tax has been reduced to a more manageable level.

Hotels in the new part of Havana

Rafael's place is popular for young Chinese men who want to cook for themselves. They fly onto Cancun, Mexico and then go into USA from there as they want to settle there illegally. Rafael has learnt a bit of Mandarin so he can communicate with them better.

This man makes a living taking photos the old fashioned way

We loaded the Google offline translator to his phone so he could use it for his guests. Elizabeth has an app she can use to load things that are blocked by the government so she was grateful to get the translator from us. She is able to use Facebook, Twitter and download movies for free from a site she has been able to access. She is so happy to be able to do the things other teens do with the internet.

Breakfast was enormous. We had a huge plate of mango, tropical pink guavas, and papaya followed by freshly whizzed up mango juice. Rafael scrambled eggs with onions and we had real butter on our buns. This came to be the standard breakfast in all the casas we stayed at, and we wondered if they had all been taught to do it this way. Every family still uses La Libreta, a ration book. Everyone is entitled to eggs, rice, bread and a few other things which are subsidised by the government. Of course they can buy things from other places as well. Sometimes there are large queues outside the government shops for supplies as some months things are not available.

The far end of our street was being dug up and the old water pipes were being replaced with polythene ones. They took away the rubble and refilled the holes with concrete and it looked like they would reseal the top section at a later date. Our street had very few cars so people would hang out on their doorsteps and children would play on the road. Sometimes we would hear people talking and listening to music until 5 am. Lots of socialising happens on the street.

All down the street are little hole in the wall shops. They sell all sorts of things. Some sell ice cream, ice lollies, small pizzas, hats, cakes, rum, and water. Often they just fit in the doorway to someone's house or in the stairwell.

About 10 plane loads of tourists are pouring into Cuba each day as well as cruise ships. The day before we arrived was the first day that American cruise ships could visit Cuba. Since Obama came to visit, a concession for special groups was approved and American visitors can now visit Cuba since being locked out because of the trade blockage imposed by JF Kennedy in 1962. There were lots of brand new Chinese made buses ferrying tourists to all the tourist sites.

We walked about the city everyday and saw several buildings being renovated and also noticed a sign by the tourism department about the renovations. It looks like they are getting ready for a boom in tourism.

We caught the hop on hop off bus one day to look at the three different parts of La Habana. We couldn't hear the commentary from the English speaking guide because the sound system was pretty useless but it was interesting nevertheless.

Rafael preparing breakfast

We really enjoyed long chats with Rafael and his family whenever they were around and learnt a lot about their lives and his future plans to expand his casa to have more rooms to rent.

Internet card seller sitting in the shade

We were told to buy a black market card to access the internet so headed off to the park where we found the sellers. The seats were full of people shouting above their neighbours to talk to family and friends online. Normally the cards cost $2 CUC for an hour but the black marketeers make a $1 CUC on each one. The legal option to get a card is to queue at the company office in the long lines. In our two week stay we never managed to connect to the internet at all. Sometimes the connection would be for 20 seconds and at other times I could not get the page to log in. In the end we gave up on it as it was so frustrating. You could always tell where people were able to connect because they would be sitting on steps in clusters with their phones and netbooks.

Elizabeth, Mary and boyfriend unpacking teas.

One night we went to a show featuring some of the people from the Buena Vista Social Club and Afro-Cuban All Stars. They enjoy playing music from the 1950's. The place was packed out with two shows at different ends of the venue. You could have a meal before or just nibbles and drinks. The electricity went out about 5 times during the evening so they gave everyone an extra free drink. The power box seemed to get overloaded. It was a fun night with a surprising number of Cubans in the audience.

John managed to find a website for the Viazul buses that travel between the Cuban cities. He booked all the bus routes first and then I found the casas. It is possible to take taxis or hire a car. We did meet a couple who hired a car and they found the roads quite slow to travel because of the potholes as they ventured off the main routes. They said lots of places had no signs so that was also difficult. We also met an English couple who hired an old American car and driver. They said it was terrible as the car filled with fumes and when it rained they got wet as it leaked. We met them trying to buy bus tickets for the rest of their time.

The buses were fine. They had toilets on board but none of them worked. The aircon worked and they were in reasonable condition having been bought from China. On one route the drivers did their shopping stopping at junctions and buying goodies and meat from the local farmers.There are a lot of black market dealings. When we stopped for a break it was at places run by the government tourism department. You could buy cigars, tubes of pringles, nestle's products, packets of ground coffee, and all kinds of rum as well as some food to eat.

A lot of people stand on the side of the road waving money about to get anyone going past to pick them up. It is common to find people under the over bridges where it is shady as the temperatures are in the high 20's or early 30's and very muggy. There are all kinds of local transport. Horses and gigs clip clip through the towns, concertina buses called camel buses race through the big cities, and coconut taxis and bicycle taxis go short distances and take a few people.

Coconut taxi

We visited La Habana 3 times because of the way the buses travelled using the city as the hub and as we were flying out from there we had our last few nights there. We left all our old clothes and left over food for Rafael's family and the girls were excited to try the canned pink salmon we had in our supplies. Poor Jenifer could not eat the noodles and snack bars because of her celiac disease. We read there could be shortages so we decided to stock up just in case but ended up eating huge breakfasts and evening meals so skipped lunches but still managed to put on weight!