Cuba is a large tropical island situated between Florida and Jamaica. It is a communist country, and because it has no diplomatic relations with the US, there are very few American tourists – the majority I met were European or Canadian. Like most Latin American countries, there appeared to be the few rich and the rest poor. I saw nobody starving, begging or ill on the street, as they have social security and free medical health here. Cuba’s literacy rate is one of the highest in the world, and all education is free from kindergarten to university. There is very little crime as penalties are severe; a police officer told me that if he caught the woman who robbed me, she would serve 15 years in jail, and he said he had an 80% chance of catching her.
There are two economies in Cuba, and two currencies to support them. For example, you use CUCs (which are about equal to one dollar) to pay for a tourist taxi, which has a meter and costs about $8 to get from one side of Havana to the other. The locals use CUPs (the national currency) when taking a local taxi; they cost about 40c per person and stop to pick up and drop off passengers as they go along the main routes in and out of the city. Tourists can take these taxis, but at their own risk, and don’t expect the driver to speak any English. Once I got the hang of them, I used to catch the local taxis, but mainly because I used to love travelling in the old American cars from the 50s.
If you know where you are going, and you don’t mind getting crushed, you can always take a local bus, which costs less than 2c per trip. If you eat in a tourist restaurant, you pay using CUCs, which usually works out at about $10 a meal. If you eat from one of the street stalls, you pay using CUPs, and can buy for example a freshly fried piece of fish in a burger bun with chilli sauce for about 20c. I found it such good value, that one day, I ate four of them for breakfast and then skipped lunch!
The cars are amazing: a mixture of battered or renovated 50-year-old American cars, 20-year-old Russian cars, and a few modern German cars. I even saw an old Russian motorbike ride past me on my last day. The intercity coaches are made in China and are very modern and comfortable. There are hundreds of them taking tourists all over the island. A six-hour journey costs about $25. There are some places where tourists are forced to pay a higher price, such as at the cinemas. However, if you don’t dress like a tourist and can speak Spanish, you can get away with paying the lower price (less than $2). Even though there were no American shops or products in Havana, there were plenty of both old and new Hollywood movies playing in the cinemas, which seemed strange to me because most Hollywood movies I know are propaganda for the ‘American way of life’.
Another highlight for me was trekking a couple of hours up the mountain inland from the city of Trinidad to visit a waterfall. Once there, I was able to dive off the top of the cliffs because the water was 9 m deep in the middle. I then swam into a cave behind the waterfall. It reminded me of where the dragon lived in the movie, Dragon Heart, with the voice of Sean Connery.
At this point, you may be wondering how a seasoned traveller like me managed to get robbed. To cut a long story short, I was chatting in Spanish with a local woman on the terrace near my room. When I wasn’t looking, she must have spiked my drink because the next thing I remember was waking up the next morning. She had taken the room keys from my pocket, entered my room and got away with my laptop, iPad, camera, and over $1,000 in various foreign currencies, even though these items were well hidden in various places inside my room. She took my toilet bag as well, which was very annoying because toiletries are very difficult to come by in Cuba. For example, it took me over a week to buy replacement sun cream, and when I did, a tiny tube cost me $15. I wasn’t as bothered about losing my insured items as I was about losing all of my holiday photos. You may ask, why did I have so much cash on me? There is a 10% surcharge on changing US dollars in Cuba, and I made the mistake of bringing US$1,000 into the country, so it would have cost me an extra $100 to change them on top of the normal charges. Therefore, I decided to keep them and used my VISA card to withdraw CUCs from a bank as and when I needed them.
In every other country that I visited in Latin America, the hotels and backpackers had free Wi-Fi for internet access, and it was quite fast. In Cuba, however, the only way I found for tourists to use the internet was in the business centres of the four or five-star hotels; it cost up to $10 an hour, was as slow as a dial-up connection, and all social sites including Facebook and Skype were blocked.Even though Cubans are all after your money, they are not generally out to rob you; most try to offer you a win-win deal with their product or service. For example, I was introduced to a Spanish teacher by one of the language schools. We came to a private arrangement where we spoke a mixture of Spanish and English for several hours a day while he acted as my tourist guide, we always sat down for a formal Spanish lesson for one hour a day, and all I paid for this was $10 a day. I thought it sounded a bit cheap until he told me that when he worked for the language school, he only earned about $10 a week. We got on so well, that we ended up going to the city of Trinidad for the weekend, where he showed me around town and introduced me to some locals he knew there.
The big hotels charge over $100 a night, and all the staff speak English. I stayed in one of these for only one night when in the tourist area of Varadero – just to know what it was like – and I might as well have been in a hotel in Florida, or the Gold Coast in Queensland. There was no Cuban ambience, and the hotel food catered totally to the tastes of the European tourists. A much better experience can be had by staying in the ‘casa particulares’, which exist in virtually every street of the main cities. These are houses where a family rent out one or more of their spare bedrooms for between $20 and $30 a night – if you share a room, you only pay half of that amount. For an extra few dollars, they will cook you an authentic Cuban dinner, or make you a cooked breakfast with fresh tropical fruit to follow. One or two backpackers’ hostels have recently appeared on the scene, but a shared room can still often be better value. Another good deal worth looking out for in Cuba is that you can pay about $15 for a one-hour full-body massage.
So, in conclusion, I am more than glad that I visited Cuba. Even though I was drugged and robbed, I spent some lovely time travelling around with a couple of female backpackers from Belgium, and then later another couple of girls from Sweden. I improved my Spanish enormously, became very good friends with my Spanish teacher and his fiancée. Their crazy dream is to spend their honeymoon in Australia, which is surely impossible unless the political situation changes dramatically in Cuba. There are not many ways for Cubans to travel abroad, unless for example, you are a diplomat, a famous musician, a singer, or an athlete competing overseas.
Depending on the political path that Cuba chooses, overseas travel may one day be possible for my friends. If not, I will have to return to visit them in the not-too-distant future, and see more of this beautiful tropical island with its amazing cars, and rum cocktails; and next time, I must remember to work on my salsa dancing before I go!
