Category Archives: Personal News

I’m safely back home with a load of photos to process, so this is just about my last post on Cuba. There’s probably one more to come on the technicalities of photography there, but I thought it would be good to round off my series of general impressions and “socio-economic observations”, if that’s not too pretentious a description of them! 🙂

1. The people are very friendly, and are very happy to help if they can, especially if there’s a tip in the offing. However, as is often the case in planned economies there’s no real concept of customer service and little or no incentive to improve, or find real solutions to problems. One example was the fact that I had no internet service at two hotels, not because of any technical issue, but because they’d run out of the scratch cards with passwords, and would not restock for a week. Another was arriving at the Tobacco Museum at 11.00 to find that despite a headline “every 15 minutes” schedule, they were doing no tours between 10.15 and 12.00!
2. Between the limited stock and the customer service issues, getting breakfast at a Cuban hotel a bit like a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Wrestle a magic glass from the keeper of the glasses, and you can ascend to the level of juice drinker. Seek the hidden coffee cup, and you may conquer the coffee machine, but only if it is replete with both dark and white liquids. They really should invest in a bit more crockery!
3. Cuban drivers seem to have very poor lane control, and regard driving on the right as as sort of grand guiding principle rather than a tactical necessity. It’s really scary to be bombing (relative term) up the motorway and see a group of cyclists coming the wrong way on the same carriageway, but the bus driver didn’t appear to bat an eyelid.
4. Lane control and the tap water aside, Cuba feels very safe. You can wander around freely, carrying an expensive camera, and at no time do you feel under any significant threat of direct crime or assault. There are no gangs hanging around on street corners. You may get pestered in some places, and if you left your wallet somewhere it might not be there when you came back, but it doesn’t feel like you’re at any risk of having a bag snatched or a pocket picked.
5. There are lots of birds of prey circling everywhere, so clearly not too many chemicals in the food chain. This is a good thing, but may explain the patchy success of Cuban agriculture.
6. There is an obsessive iconography of Che Guevara, which has displaced almost all other pictures and writing visible to the tourist. Che’s picture stares at you from every hoarding with a revolutionary slogan (that’s pretty much the only type), and from almost every T-shirt. Where they are selling postcards, there will be a rack of poor-quality colour cards of the views and famous buildings, and a rack of black and white 1950s images, about 95% of which are of Che. Pictures of even Fidel or Raoul Castro are few and far between. The only reading material in English on the island is biographies of Che Guevara, or the odd book of Fidel’s speeches.
7. In Spanish the choice isn’t much wider! Havana must be the only airport where there are no newspapers or magazines for sale, just books about Che or Fidel, and a few other bits of communist propaganda.
8. The music is almost uniformly excellent. The food is almost uniformly adequate but unexciting. There are exceptions (downwards) in both cases 🙁
9. Writing a travel blog is a great idea, but only in a country where you can get on the internet!

And a few photographic statistics: 2074 shutter operations, 42GB of memory cards filled, about 970 images retained for further processing, and I hope to get around 100 which are good enough to stick on the web and bore people with at dinner! You have been warned. 🙂

Back to Havana, so I’ve managed to catch up a bit. However, even this took visits to two hotels to find one with working internet service! I hope you enjoy the mega update.

This will probably be my last update until I’m back home, but I will finish off the blog with a few miscellaneous observations, and hopefully another image you’ll like.

Two observations from the last few days:

Cuba has two currencies: the Convertible Peso, used by tourists and businesses which interact with tourists or trading partners, and the National Peso, used by Cuban Nationals for everyday activity. The buying power of the convertible Peso is dramatically higher than the other (there’s a 24:1 exchange rate, and some things can only be bought with convertible Pesos). Someone getting a reasonable number of tourist tips, like an old man with an interesting face in the square in Trinidad, can easily be getting significantly greater buying power than someone in a good, prestigious job solidly in the local currency sector. I don’t know whether the planned economy has a way of balancing out this anomaly, but it does seem problematic.

In Britain, hotel chambermaid is not regarded as a skilled job, with great linguistic or literacy demands. But every day in Cuba I have returned to my hotel room to find a delightful little greeting: the towels arranged into an attractive sculpture on the bed, and a hand-written note wishing me a pleasant stay or onward journey, as appropriate. The latter have invariably been written in clear, correct English, while most people you come into daily contact with have at most a few words of spoken English. This suggests that chambermaids in the big Cuban hotels must be better qualified than you might expect.

I wonder how this all works?

Shot of the day for Monday. Everyone else in the party was shooting over this little fella’s head at the cathedral, but I happened to glance down. Bingo!

It’s about 50 miles from Cienfuegos to Trinidad, along the coast, which takes over 2 hours on a very bumpy road. However the drive is worth it. Trinidad is a very pretty town: different architecture again – based on two storey terraced houses and cobbled streets, with the houses all painted wonderful pastel colours. The Hotel Cuevas in Trinidad is lovely – a very Caribbean style arrangement of individual chalets at the top of the hill outside the town.

Trinidad is more overtly tourist focused than the other places we’ve been, with almost every other house on a larger street or square turned into a little gallery or coffee bar, and a lot of the more colourful older people very much geared up to “a pose for a peso”. The downside is that the pestering is worse than elsewhere, except maybe around the Capitolio in Havana.

I do now have one cigar, forced on me by an itinerant vendor. I didn’t want the cigar, and he didn’t want a bar of soap in exchange, so honours are even! However, it’s a good prop to go with the hat (see previous post), so I’m now working even harder on my “Che Guevara” persona. You have been warned.