In Cuba

Hey everyone!

We have been in Havana, Cuba for three days now. The weather is perfect, but we are not sure if our experiences so far could be described as that... interesting is probably a better word....

We got really lucky and were bumped up to first class on our flight to Cuba because we were two of the last people to board, and the airline had overbooked the plane. We were treated like queens: huge leather seats and tons of leg room, plus snacks, drinks, an edible meal (rare on planes!) with china plates, cloth napkins and silverware!

However, once we arrived in Cuba, we were no longer given the royal treatment. We had to buy a special Cuban visa before we entered Cuba, which cost $20US. We bought it in the Ecuador airport from our airline (a Latin American airline no one will have heard of). First, when we arrived in Cuba, we had to go through questioning by the Cuban customs officers so they could stamp the visa and let us enter the country. Tova was immediately rejected because her visa was a fake. However, I was questioned in rapid Spanish about every detail of my life for over fifteen minutes. The officer was suspicious of every answer I gave and was really starting to scare me. Finally, my visa was approved. However, I was soon pulled back into the holding area where Tova was being detained because the officer realized that my visa was fake too! We both had to buy new visas and were finally allowed to enter the country.

We didn't have a place to stay in Havana because the only places we could book over the internet were expensive hotels, so we ended up staying in the house of a friend of the taxi driver who picked us up from the airport. We are staying with a family, but we have our own room and bathroom. We haven't met the father or the son yet, but the mother, Maria, is always around, hanging out gossiping with all the neighbours in tiny, tight clothes and blasting salsa so loud you can hear it down the street. We couldn't believe it when she told us she is a scientist for the Cuban government! But our room is fine. We even have a television. However, we have no way of changing the channel, even though we seem to have a satelite cable selection. Someone else, somehwere else, changes the channels for us (we haven't asked Maira about it yet). We can see this person go to the channel selection screen and see all the options he or she has to choose from, but he or she always chooses cheesy Mexican soap operas (which are hilarious to watch), or horrible movies that we have never heard of dubbed into Spanish.

Our first impressions of Havana were a little surprizing. We could never have imagined how run-down everything is. The streets are lined with huge colonial buildings, but they haven't been repaired in over fifty years, so they are falling apart. All the streets need repair. There are lots of signs promoting the communist regime and Castro, with repeated slogans about Cuban solidarity etc... Also, there are very few restaurants, and almost no shops. The first afternoon, we went out for a walk through the city and met two Cuban girls, Akemi and Yanet. We started talking and ended up going for mojitos together. They gave us a lot of advice about how to do things in Havana like locals so we could save money.

That night we went out to one of the local restaruants the girls had suggested. The first one wouldn't serve us (they said they were "out of food" and were really rude about it), but we eventually found a place. It wasn't a restaurant, but more like someone's kitchen, and we ate out in the street. Our neighbourhood (because we live in a residential area and not where all the fancy hotels are), is not well lit at night and some streets are absolutely pitch black, plus most of the streets (including the one we live on) don't have street signs.

Yesterday we went to the Cuban Art Museum and the Museum of the Cuban Revolution. The first was incredible, both the art itself and the modern, impecably maintained building. The art was extremely nationalistic and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were often featured in the works. The Museum of the Revolution was extremely detailed and interesting, and rather obviously anti-American and anti-Capitalism.

In the evening, we decided to go to Chinatown for dinner. It was so strange to see a Chinatown in Havana, Cuba, but there weren't any Chinese people and they played more reggaeton and salsa in the streets than Chinese music. In the night we went to the "Casa de la Musica" to see a salsa show. The show itself wasn't particularily good, but we met a guy named Miguel, who is a promoter for the place, and we ended up hanging out with him all night. We are going to the beach with him on Saturday, to the beach where all the Cubans, not the tourists, go and we are even going to take the Cuban public transport there (which we have seen on the streets: it is kind of like huge trucks filled with people). We are also going to do some day excursions out of Havana, and might even return to Trinidad, where we went last February.

Alice and Tova