Cuba Libre & Tourist Extravagance

Nobody can imagine how far individuals could go in doing tourism; we did quite that after visiting Cuba. Cuba is a museum for “alternative tourists” that do not mind” or “are expecting to ” seeing the disaster of a communist planed system whilst having a mojito or a piña colada somewhere between “la floridita” ( favourite Hemmingway daiquiri place) and “la bodeguita del medio” ( favourite Hemmingway mojito place). The country beaches are incredible, exciting places for diving such as Maria la Gorda or Cayo Levisa close to Cayo Paraiso where again Hemingway had his personal fishing resort.

The country is a prison for cubans, who are condemned to live in misery with no choice. So people - within the legalconstrains- do their best to steal from tourists any money they can. Examples of this were a guy in Havana asking us for euros to pray to his “Afro-American saints” or, the women at the City Hall Museum asking us either for euros or for us to exchange them into local currency. Another anecdote from Trinidad, was these two guys who appear to be extreme catholics and one night we were little pist one of them attempted to sell us an outragous image of “ Saint Terese of Jesus” (despite his devotion and after telling us that a Spanish offered him already 5000 €). Marta sent him to hell, and Joan recognised he is not a mainstream catholic to the guy.

That the country resembles a prison there is little doubt when the news papers ( e.g., Granma) is literally "three pages" and one is fully devoted to sports, whilst the front page talked about a meeting between Belarusian and Cuban authorities. Everyone that wants something has to rely on tourism, such as the guy running our B&B in Havana who literally asked us to send him ( to his "private address"), all the music we could find from an old fashion Spanish band "Olé Olé" . Another curios anecdote was a female singer in the famous “Rincon de la Trova” in Trinidad who got to know us and after paying a couple of drinks, started asking us for dresses and money, in exchange when she sang a song she mentioned her “ Catalan friends”, in front of a group of “Ralph Lauret” type Spanish. That’s was a moment to remember.

Some say that Cubans are nice people, as if they would be a "special ethnic group", but we think they are simply as everyone else, just that they live in total fear of exclusion or reclusion. Waiters are probably a bit less nice than elsewhere else given that as we were told, they don’t keep the tips, all go to a cancer fund roughly. Interesting experience was being stopped whilst driving in the sole motorway that crosses the country . Poeple try to sell you anything or get into you car to drive them somewhere and in the meantime they kep begging you or they might even steal anything they find handy. The best one was a guy who we picked up for car stop, and told us in a total brain washing response that "the commandant(Fidel)would improve the roads, and that he was very fortunate to be able to where he was: working for free in a local schol in Cienfuegos". Food is totally seasonal, we happened to be able to eat lobster and prawns but there was no salad at all, meat was scarce as well among other things. It was like going back one hundred years, where fridges would not exist and people would confine their menus to the uncertainty of local agriculture.

On a different order of things we spend some time trying to find the Catalan Centre with no success, the only Catalan remaining are the Bacardi building and some surnames such as Canals, Balaguer and Vinyals among other.We discovered the secret of Cuban cocktails: not to add too much rum in the drink, may be use agostura if you have any. And we enjoyed Havana very much walking all the way east and west the Malecon, and listening to music in the Jazz Café or having supper in the Paladar la Guarida where Fresa & Chocolate was filmed. Nice rest, rich experience but lets leave current Cuba for Cubans (if they want it to stay as it is), may be if it changes will be one of the places to be besides London and Barcelona.