Clan Piper went to Cuba for Christmas this past year, along with a group of friends. We stayed at an all-inclusive resort in Varadero, with a day trip to Havana. Had a good time.
Feel free to ask a question.
Thanks for starting the thread!
Why did you decide to go?
Was it difficult to get there?
Was it expensive?
Did you get out into the countryside at all?
Were there limits on Internet access?
How was the food and drink?
Did you see any sign of oppressive governance?
Any noticeable propaganda, anti-U.S. or otherwise?
What were your impressions of Havana?
What was your favorite part of the trip?
What was your least?
Would you recommend that others go?
Where are my cigars? 
Seriously, was the presence of classic American cars on the roads as prevalent as in the tourist brochures, etc? I’ve heard that many of them are held together with “spit and baling wire,” but even looking from the sidewalk, how did their condition seem to you?
Some friends were having a destination wedding and invited us. And hey, Caribbean in winter! While temps here are hovering around -25 C!
Nope. A Canadian airline, Transat, flies to Veradero pretty much every day, leaving from a different Canadian city on a weekly rotation: Toronto on Monday, Montreal on Tuesday, etc. it was a direct flight - lay-overs in the US would be against the embargo, I think.
yes - airfare plus all included resort.
not really. Veradero is a peninsula and we toured around on it a bit, and a day trip to Havana, but mainly stayed at the hotel. It was a very small, select sample of what Cuba has. I certainly wouldn’t think I’ve become an expert in all things Cuban.
Internet? Qué?
Plentiful, but the food was often rather humdrum. Attempts at North American food, like burgers, didn’t come off well. Seafood was great, as was fruit and vege. The hotel put on a fantastic meal for Christmas Eve.
Not in the sense of armed guards everywhere or the populace being dragged away, no. But I was not impressed by the economic model, which I think is keeping them back, although it does provide good education and health care. Lots of beggars in the streets of Havana, which seems to contradict the communist ethos.
At the airport, I was reading the french-language version of Granma, the paper of the Cuban Communist Party. It exactly matched my stereotype of what a communist paper would be: articles extolling the virtues of the workers, praising the beneficent wisdom of the Castros, criticising the imperialist Yanquis, and so on. And this was a few days after Obama and Castro announced talks! The front page was covered with stories about the five martys who had finally been released by the US, and the articles about the talks were buried inside. The clear impression I got was that they were trying to say that the US had buckled under the steely pressure of the Cuban government. Inside, they also had the complete text of Obama’s and Castro’s statements. Obama’s took up a couple of columns. Castro’s was a full broadside.
I can’t read Spanish, so written propaganda might have passed me by, but I did notice a sign at a baseball field that said “Socialismo o meurta!”
Didn’t see any major wall murals.
A badly tarnished jewel, allowed to decay shamefully. I can see how it could once have been one of the most beautiful cities of the Caribbean, but it would take huge amounts of money to bring it back. Buildings are decaying and falling down.
Hanging out with family and friends.
Resorts can be too much of a good thing. Normally when I go to a foreign country I like to move around a lot and see different parts of it.
Sure! It was an interesting experience.
What kind of seafood, and how was it prepared? Did you eat any street food, and if so, what was it? What did you drink (if you drink)? Did you shop in Havana (or anywhere away from the resort)? If so, what were the prices like, and what did you buy?
Just go to Calgary and buy some. It’s not like they’re embargoed or anything. 
First off, they are not nearly as prevalent as the tourist articles seem to make them. By far the majority of cars on the road are modern cars.
Some of the older cars are used for tourism. They’ve been well maintained for appearances. But there were also a lot of old heaps, being used for basic transport, and not shiny or impressive.
Our tour guide said that even the best looking ones are essentially Frankenstein cars: spare parts and engines salvaged from other cars.
Prawns, scallops, mussels, and a variety of fish, grilled at the hotel restaurant, all fresh.
nope. Don’t remember seeing any street food vendors.
Beer, mainly, with the occasional glass of wine. Rum cocktails at the hotel bar before supper.
went to on major touristy mall in Havana, plus a cigar shop. The tour took us there, with the clear expectation we were to buy stuff. I got a nice Cuban shirt for 30 pesos (CUC pesos, so 30$ US). Bought some other touristy things as well, and seemed fairly cheap. Bought a Cuban flag for 30 pesos, and the purchase seemed a bit under the counter, as if they didn’t normally sell Cuban flags to tourists. The sales lady bundled it into a plastic bag literally under the counter and handed it to me quietly, unlike other sales, which were always accompanied by chatter and big smiles.
They took us to a cigar shop, but I don’t smoke so didn’t buy anything. No way to tell if the prices were high or not.
Tipping is pervasive. It’s a big part of the economy, as a tip of one or two CUC pesos is expected for most services.
In Veradero, went to a couple of street markets. There wasn’t a lot of variety of manufactured goods, but a lot of leather work and hand-made crafts: wood carvings, paintings, clothing. The Cub bought a baseball bat, glove with his name burnt into it, an several balls. Also bought some toy airplanes made out of Coke tins and a toy camera made from Red Bull tins.
Had no trouble buying Coke and other US brand soft drinks. I don’t smoke, but saw lots of US brand cigarettes for sale.
CDs were popular.
Have you been elsewhere in the Caribbean? How would you compare it with Cuba? Yes, I know that every island has its own character but also shares some things with its neighbors.
You mentioned reading a newspaper in French. A mostly propaganda paper yes, but still a newspaper. What languages are used in media publishing down there? E.g. can you go downtown and get a newspaper in pretty much any language? Do they specialize in the languages typically spoken by tourists? Languages associated with Communist or formerly Communist countries (e.g. Russian, Chinese, Romanian, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.)?
Were there any signs of friendship, cooperation, or contact with other Communist countries? E.g. were there obvious North Korean guest workers, tourists from the PRC, or Learn the Language of your Vietnamese Communist Comrades lessons?
First time in the Caribbean, so no basis for comparison.
No idea. We were there for sun and fun, so didn’t try to buy any local papers.
Nothing that I saw, no. All the people we met working were Cubans.
The tourists came largely from other Spanish-speaking countries, Britain and France, and Canada. There were a sprinkling if Russians, but they were new, capitalist, Russians, as far as I could tell.
If anything, the impression I got from the little touring that we did was that they saw the Revolution as indigenous, and part of their history of struggling against domination by other countries, first the Spanish, then the Batista regime supported by the US.
Many thanks, NP. Fascinating report.
Was the tap water safe to drink? Was electrical service continuous?
Water: at the hotel, yes, but when we went elsewhere we drank bottled water.
Electricity: was continuous at the hotel. No idea what it was like for your average Cuban.
When you did Havana, by the way, that cause way was breath taking with the breaking waves, did the bus tour go by the swiss embassy ? The states has a diplomat that works out of the embassy, and the Cuban gov. in its infinite wisdom decides to give the finger, by errecting a shit load of flag poles right outside the embassy, all that money wasted, while the rest of the old city is going bad was tragic.
First time I went to Veradero, the bus from the airport passed a baseball field with a set of bleachers, but these were actually facing out onto the street, rather than the field, had to scratch my head a few minutes, before remembering about may day.
Even with a shit pot of money, alot of those buildings are simply gone, the most they could realistically do is to save enough for a facade over a modern building.
Actually it sounds like we went on the same tour of Havana, was the tour guide a young woman, who was constantly gushing about Havana, black hair and glasses, kind of sexy nerdish.
How was the bug situation? Did you have a constant battle with the local mosquitos and other flying insects?
Did you ever get tempted to go see the local law courts? Or did Mrs Piper kibosh that idea? 
Did you go see any real life Cuban Bands?
Nope, didn’t see that. Our tour did take us through the embassy district, and there are certainly some nice buildings there.
We did go to the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. My God, it was souless. (That may have been a feature, not a bug. 
) Just a broad expanse of concrete, all focussed on a concrete reviewing stand, where apparently Fidel used to appear on May Day and other important days and give long harangues on the issue of the day to the crowd which filled the Plaza. Long as in four-hour. Can’t imagine sitting there in the hot Cuban sun listing to a four hour speech.
Our tour guide was a bit nostalgic, and said that demonstrations like that seem to have gone out of fashion.
As well, just down the street was a concrete bunker like building, which was apparently the location of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, i.e. the seat of government. They built that building after the revolution instead of using the lovely and impressive Capitol building at the heart of Havana, apparently because the Capitol building looks too much like the US Capitol and is therefore imperialist.
All of which made me think of P.J. O’Rourke’s dictum: “Commies love concrete.”
Yes. I heard that a number of them fall down every year.
One of the reasons for the decay is that after the revolution, the government expropriated buildings from the landlords, and then gave the apartments in the buildings to the tenants to own, a form of private property that is allowed because it is individual, not for profit. The owners of the apartments collectively own the building. However, they don’t have the equivalent of a condo law, so to make any improvements to the building as a whole requires unanimous consent of all the owners of the apartments. One owner can veto any improvements, and there is no condo board that can levy fees to make improvements. So the building as a whole decays. Our tour guide said that if you go inside, the apartments are usually very well-maintained by the owners. Seemed to me to be an illustration that private ownership has a definite advantage, contrary to the ruling ideology, and that collective ownership needs to be backed up by a law that enables self-government by the owners, with binding decisions based on voting.
Not at all. We took some mosquito repellant with us, because we were advised you couldn’t buy it there, but we didn’t need it. We left it in the hotel room when we left, for the cleaning staff.
Did you miss the part about going there for “fun and sun”?
There were a lot of bands, at the hotel and at a restaurant we went to in Havana. The craze for recorded techno-pop has hit Cuba big, as far as I could tell, but the live bands were better, to my taste. Some were lively, dance music, others were more relaxed that made me think of lying in a hammock on a beach, but all good.
I’m sure it was filtered through the tourist experience, and if we had more time to get out we could have seen a broader spectrum.
Getting back to this question:
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Did you see any sign of oppressive governance?
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One of the points that I heard from more than one tourist guide was that after the Revolution, the government expropriated most of the church buildings, so there are very few churches left in Cuba. I don’t know what the general approach to freedom of religion is there, but that was one point that struck me.
It happens that my sister, a minister, just got back from a church-sponsored tour there. Although it’s true they were looking for churches and congregations, they did find a flourishing religious life, in many smaller and possibly converted buildings as well as a few large, old churches. The church is the people, not the building, anyway.
I know this was a vacation trip, but is there anything you were prevented or discouraged from seeing? Or any people you were not free to talk with, or who seemed to feel themselves not free to talk with you?
True, but I did hear some tourists at the hotel inquiring about going to the one local church for Christmas Eve, and the tourist rep they were speaking to was discouraging them from doing so, because it was not important.
No, but we were doing all the touristy things that bring in [del]US $[/del] Cuban CUC pesos, so it wouldn’t arise. If we tried to stray off the tourist path, I don’t know. I didn’t try to start any political discussions with staff at the hotel because (a) “fun and sun” and (b) I wouldn’t have been comfortable doing that with them.
Your trip sounds a lot like my honeymoon in Jamaica. The resort was very nice, but you had to drive past mile after mile of impoverished shanty towns to get there, and my overall impression of the country was fairly depressing. We went on some tours, which of course ended with us being shuffled past booths selling tourist-oriented crappola. I really have no interest in going back there.
Did you get to talk with any of the locals? Did they tell you what it was like
to live in Cuba or what they thought the future might be like with the USA
re-establishing relations with their country?