¡Cuba, quiero bailar la salsa!

First few weeks of August, 2006

(Apologies for the slightly weird indenting on this entry. Blogger has gone haywire with it. I have no idea why, and I don't know how to put it right. But anyway, here goes...)

"You dance to the music like nobody does.
The first time I saw you, I knew it was love..."
(Cuba, The Gibson Brothers)

The fun started when I got to the airport in Cancun, and saw the aircraft on which Aviacion de Cubana proposed to fly myself and another hundred or so people from Mexico to Havana. It was an old Soviet Yakovlev YAK-42, and as soon as you boarded it was obvious that the aircraft had seen better days. However, I had only myself to blame. I had deliberately booked the flight with Cuba's national airline for the experience of flying with them, when there was a perfectly acceptable identical flight with Mexicana for only US$20 more.

Sure enough, as soon as we had boarded and settled in, we were informed of unspecified "problemas tecnicas" and had to get off again. The wait in the departure lounge stretched into hours, with little information forthcoming from the airline. A few of the more belligerent members of the passenger body regularly attempted to wring information out of the nonchalant airline employees, and passed any info on to other passengers. It was during this wait that I got to know Ana Paula and Ana Claudia, two Brazilian students of architecture who were going to Havana for a few days. Speaking Portuguese, the Anas were in a better position than I to understand any information that crept out in Spanish, so it was good to have them around!

Eventually we were all bused back to Cancun town centre, and put up in a hotel by the airline. Then, obscenely early the next morning, we were all bused back to the airport for a whole lot more of "hurry up and wait". The only problem at this point seemed to be that the airline couldn't provide a hot snack en route, but otherwise we could fly. A vote was taken, and the passenger body overwhelmingly decided to forgo their warm soggy sandwich in order to get off the ground.

The scene inside the aircraft was bizarre. The seating was unassigned, but the cabin crew made people move around in order to balance the weight in the aircraft as apparently the plane could not take off unless this balance was achieved. Then the normal rules regarding tray tables, seat belts, seats being upright and hand baggage being stowed for take-off and landing didn't seem to matter. There was hand luggage lying around everywhere during take-off, with people reclining in their seats for a snooze with no seat belt on! So either Aviacion de Cubana are a bunch of slackers, or the rest of the airline industry is applying unnecessary rules to us all every time we fly....

The best part, however, was the " rock 'n' roll dry-ice show" in the cabin during take off. Now it is normal to see a little water vapour enter the cabin along with the cold air from the air conditioning when a plane takes off in a humid location. However, when the captain announced that there would be "a little water vapour" entering the cabin during take off, and that it was "perfectly normal and would disappear soon after we were airborne", he did nothing to prepare passengers for what ensued. Clouds of chilled water vapour filled the entire cabin from floor level up to about half a metre off the floor, making it impossible to see below your knees for several minutes!

So eventually we arrived in Havana and I found myself a casa particular right across from the steps of La Universidad de Habana, where I was to take Spanish lessons. A casa particular is a private home that has been officially authorised to accept paying guests, with the owners passing on a large part of what they receive to the government in the form of a heavy tax. This keeps accommodation prices pretty high compared to the rest of Latin America, and this seemed to be the theme for most things in Cuba. Whether or not these high prices can be blamed in part on the American trade emargo is a matter for debate, but I am sure that it doesn't help. I have to say that it is quite odd to see that a small, poor, politically-introspective country like Cuba is still such a worry to their mighty Yankee neighbour. I wonder what moves Washington will try to make when Fidel pops his army boots...

Governmental control of retail is administered partly through the dual currency system. Cuba has both convertible pesos,(CUC), and local pesos or monedad nacional, (MN). Most working Cubans are paid in MN, although a few who deal with visitors have direct access to CUC. Visitors exchanging money will receive mostly CUC, but can also purchase MN. American dollars, only two years ago the hard currency used freely within Cuba, are no longer legal tender and I didn't touch one the entire time I was there.

Items are priced in one currency or the other, depending on what the item is and who the likely consumer is. Most things that a visitor is likely to buy are sold for CUC, things produced for consumption by locals are sold in MN. So as a visitor you mostly use CUCs, but you can also use MN for certain items, such as ice cream, pizza, sandwiches or fruit bought on the street. For example you can purchase the equivalent of a nice "Walls" type ice cream in a shop or restaurant, aimed at visitors, for about 2 pesos CUC which is roughly equivalent to US$2. Or, you could buy a locally-produced ice cream cone from a little hole-in-the-wall outlet aimed at locals for 1 peso MN, about equivalent to $0.04.

Anyway, I intended to spend a couple of weeks in Havana, getting to know the city and culture whilst taking Spanish lessons to add to the start I had made with the audio course on my ipod. But first I spent a couple of days hanging out with the Anas before they went back to Mexico, and one night found myself in Havana's Casa De La Musica, a big nightclub which also has live music. So there was whitey, not a sala/merengue/latin-moves-of-any-kind bone in his body, in a dance club with two Brazilian girls and surrounded by gyrating Cubans. It was very much a case of ¨Cuba, quiero bailer la salsa, (pero descraciamante no puedo...!)¨. Hey, I tried! It was a fun night though, despite my white-boy handicap.

When I started the course at the university, it was obvious to me that the course was not what I was looking for. The class contained about ten people, and consisted mostly of us writing passages and then reading them out in class. Since I really needed to work on my comprehension of spoken Spanish, I decided that one-on-one tuition would be better for me. Fortunately I had not yet paid for the course(!), and so was able to drop out and find a private tutor. At the university I had met German Lisa, and so started hanging out with her. She stayed on in the course, and what she subsequently told me about the classes confirmed for me that I had been right in leaving...

The private tutor I found was an interesting case. She was called Ania, and taught several foreign students in her home, most of whom also lodged with her. Lessons at her place, conducted entirely in Spanish, were always an interesting experience. Her family, her neighbours, and other students would constantly wander in and out, with Ania constantly nagging her husband, talking on the phone and making me rocket-fuel coffee. I guess I learned stuff, although I continually had to ask her to slow down when she spoke, (verbal comprehension has always been the most difficult part of learning a foreign language for me, written and spoken grammar is relatively easy). Ania was very excitable, and apparently found it hard to remember to comply with my request...

So with my Spanish slowly improving, I set about getting to know Havana. It is a fascinating pace, with beautiful crumbling architecture, more museums than you could shake a mojito mixer at, friendly genuine people, friendly ungenuine people, dirt, smells, unusual sights and music oozing out of every pore. I liked it a lot, and in the second week moved from the university area to a more central location to be closer to where things were happening. My new hosts were Señora Cary and her family, who were really lovely and very keen to converse with me to help my Spanish along. Of course it was very interesting to live with a Cuban family, and to see how daily life is for them.

I spent half a day at Havana's aquarium, looking at all sorts of sad aquatic specimens in even sadder circumstances. There were many marine creatures in enclosures clearly too small for them, and the place was not sufficiently supervised. At one point I had to use my rudimentary Spanish to stop some small children throwing big stones at the poor turtles, (meaning that I have officially become the kind of grumpy middle-aged man who would have stopped me throwing stones at the same turtles when I was that age). There were no aquarium staff or, it seemed, responsible parents to do the job. The place confirmed for me that I will always prefer to go to where the animals are to see them, rather than have them brought to me. The visit was lifted, however, by the dolphin show! Now whether we humans just think dolphins are always happy because they seem to smile, or in fact performing dolphins are happy because they keep getting fed fish for just larking about, I don't know. But they were excellent!

It was really easy to fall into conversation with strangers in the street. People would just come up and start talking, in Spanish or English, and be full of interest about where I was from, how long I had been there, etc. Sometime the encounter would end with them asking me for money for a drink or something, but usually it just ended with a handshake and the Cuban taking off about their business. You couldn't shut out one without shutting out the other, so I just accepted the whole thing. At one point when I was having lunch in a restaurant, two dodgy-looking muchachas joined me uninvited at my table and asked me to buy them coffee. I ended up doing that; it was easier than trying to fend off their hustle. They said that that they were nurses, but I suspect that they were members of the oldest profession. I made my excuses and left...

For Latin America, Cuba seems to be a very safe place if you are a tourist. The police presence is very marked, and they seem literally to be on every other street corner, 24 hours a day. This is great when you are walking home at night, especially as the feel of the area I was staying in would have set alarm bells ringing in any other country. However, it might be argued that the police presence is not so reassuring if you disagree with the Cuban government, and perhaps would like to indulge in a little political fly-posting or graffiti. The
only graffiti is pro-Fidel, and since I was there over his 80th birthday and during his illness, much of the graffiti seemed to reflect people's desire for him to live for a further 80 years.

Given the Cult Of Fidel that the regime has fostered, it will be interesting to see how the authorities deal with breaking the news of his eventual death and the period immediately following. I thought that I might be there to see that, but they tell us that he is still alive. The subject of Fidel's real condition is one thing that most Cubans are not too keen to discuss. When, during one class, I suggested to the normally garrulous Ania that Fidel might already be dead, she simply answered "Esta enfermo" and clearly didn't want to discuss the matter further. It can be risky to contradict the official line.

While staying in Señora Cary's casa I met Jade, a Kiwi who had taken the other guest room. She was also travelling in various places around the world for a year, but unlike me she was going south to north through the American continent. We spent a few days hanging out, visiting the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and bars such as La Bodeguita del Medio where, (as they are keen to remind you), Hemmingway quaffed
mojitos. Consequently the mojitos there were expensive at 4 CUC, (about US$4), but they were very good. Jade was half Maori and so was very good at sticking her tongue out, haka-style...

So after a couple of weeks in the capital I took off for a few days in Trinidad, a very picturesque town on the other side of the island from Havana. Trinidad´s popularity as a tourist destination has led to an irritating level of street hawking of everything from restaurants to cigars, and the number of times I heard ¨psst, amigo¨ as I walked along really became irritating. However, Trinidad really came into it's own at night, with a huge outdoor dance in the square with live music and DJs, marred only by some pretty frequent power outages.

It was in Trinidad, whilst I was strolling around the rooftop of a museum in the town, that one of my molars shattered on a particularly tough Cuban mint. It didn't hurt, but it was going to require some professional attention. Whilst considering using the reputedly excellent Cuban health service, I found out that it is available to Cubans only, and that foreigners must go to private clinics. As I was going to be in Miami shortly anyway, I decided to use the US dental system as it was more of a known quantity...

So I left Cuba bound for Mexico again, this time incident-free on a very nice new plane that Aviacion de Cubana had apparently borrowed from some South American airline! I can't say that I was too upset about that fact....