Cuba - Day 3 - Ridin' Dirty

There is so much I want to write about that it is becoming hard to keep up – I’ve taken to jotting notes all day so I can remember what to write.  Every day we get a little bit better at "doing Cuba". We get places faster, negotiate better, and figure out where to go and what to see.  Each day we walk with more confidence and speak more with locals, and each day just keeps getting better.

Today, we woke up after about 9 glorious hours of sleep – it seems that people in Cuba do not generally start moving before 9.  We have to ask nicely if we want breakfast before that.  I love my dog but damn in it is nice to sleep past 6:30!  I probably don’t need to comment on sleep and shower today since I already posted pictures of our room, but both were awesome.  We had an amazing breakfast brought to our room - eggs, toast, tons of fruit and coffee – that is pretty much the standard breakfast around here. 

We had an added bonus this morning – butter! Which has not been standard fare with bread.  At 9:30 we went outside to wait for our guide to show and he was already there.  Have I mentioned that everyone here is prompt?

Our guide, Yasiel, picked us up in a well maintained '51. Chevy Bel Air convertible - turquoise and white - it was a sweet ride.  

Yasiel spoke almost no English, which initially was a deal breaker for us, but turned out to make for a most entertaining day.  If you can believe it, Damon & my combined high school Spanish, with a little help from Google translator, got us through the day with a lot of head scratching and laughing not to mention some horrific pronunciations.

Today’s blog can be broken into two sections – the stuff we saw, and the stuff we learned.  I’ll start with the stuff we saw.  Yasiel, as it turned out, was actually a tour operator and had a standard set of places he took tourists, which was perfect.  I’m probably forgetting a few things, but the main places we hit were:

1) Revolution Square – we had already seen the monument, but this was our first stop and we were able to take some better pictures from across the street.  Plus I got to fake drive the car.

2) Havana Park.  Now this park has the potential to be beautiful with gorgeous trees that are draped with some vine that I haven’t seen in the US.  Plus there is a river that runs through it.  The problem is that, sadly, there is garbage everywhere.  You cannot take two steps, at least near the entrance of the park, without stepping on trash.  But the other problem is a little bit worse.  As it turns out, the park is regularly used for Santeria worship.  Now I’m not going to try to understand the Santeria religion, or its practices, but apparently it does involve some level of sacrifice.  So, there are piles of bloody chicken feathers everywhere as chickens are sacrificed in the woods and on the river on a regular basis.  Yes, pretty much everywhere you see chicken feathers and little skulls.  It is a strange thing.

 3) We drove through all of the neighborhoods surrounding Havana – Mirimar, Vedado, I think one called Playa.  In Mirimar, we stopped at the Hemingway Marina where there are yachts galore.  Yasiel laughed when we asked if they belong to the Cubans.  He told us “caro” (expensive) - everything is too expensive for Cubans.  Los barcos all come from somewhere else.

4) Fusterland.  How to describe Fusterland… Imagine if Dr. Seuss built a house and then tiled every square inch of it in colorful designs, while he was tripping on acid.  Then he moved around the neighborhood and did the same thing.  I asked Damon if the artist was a genius or a lunatic, and he said, looking around, that's it was probably a fine line.  Apparently the artist lives somewhere on the property.  Oh, and he has two public toilets with a lady sitting out front with a key and won’t let you into the toilet until you give her money.  When in Cuba, ALWAYS have small change or you end up paying 1 CUC every time you have to go.  You can imagine that I monitored my water and was pretty well dehydrated our entire trip.

5)      Two Forts.  We went to one of the forts guarding the harbor.  Actually, we later learned that what appears to be one giant fort is actually two forts.  One is called Castillo de Los Tres Reyes Del Morro and the other is Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabana.  The Castillo was extremely run down – after all, these forts are probably at least 500 years old… but they are also open to the public for no charge.  People can just walk wherever they want at their own risk.  Now don’t take this risk thing lightly.  If you think the streets and sidewalks in Havana are bad, try a 500 year old fort guarding the ocean.  There are no guardrails or walkways – it is very easy to fall off a wall into the ocean or off a wall to a different level of the castle, or fall into a hole (they were everywhere) or into an unguarded stairway, or fall down a crumbling stairway…  But hey, medical care is free here!  And again, sadly, garbage everywhere.  At the Fortaleza, we saw at least half a dozen feral dogs running around in the garbage that surrounded the fort wall.

6)      We drove the full length of the Malecon (think lake shore drive) where the waves - seaweed and all - were crashing over the sea well into the road.  Super fun in a convertible.  Yasiel pointed out all of the famous hotels, like the Nacionale – apparently super expensive and not that great;

we saw all of the embassies including the US

and Russia. 

I point out Russia because it was the strangest building I’ve ever seen.  We never did get to walk the Malecon due to the waves, but we did stand and watch the waves for a while.

7)      We went to a famous artist block (Hamel’s Alley) where an artist covered every inch of a two block area with art.  Some guy grabbed us and gave us a tour and explained the meaning behind all of the art – I think a lot of it had to do with Santeria again – a lot of red

 and weirdly, a lot of bathtubs built into the art. 

We met up with a few Americans and shared mojitos.

I believe the artist is fairly famous, but again, I just saw a lot of bathtubs, but no chickens!

While the sites were all interesting in their own right, this trip was about education – at least that is what our Visa said… so we wanted to learn about people.  Yasiel was very chatty to the extent we could all understand each other.  We spent quite a bit of time driving on major roads at about 10 mph while Yasiel was completely turned around trying to talk to us. 

So here is what we learned.  At least this is what I think we learned.  My best guess is that Yasiel was in his mid to late 20’s.  He told us that his mom and dad are a nurse and a policeman.  Both of those are government jobs and thus they make about 15 CUC & 20 CUC per MONTH respectively.  Cubans do get a food stipend (apparently only enough for about half a month of food), a place to leave, healthcare and education.  As you can imagine, that is just not much to do anything.  As a driver in the tourism industry, Yasiel makes 25 CUC per DAY.  I’m guessing (and hoping) that does not include tips, which I hope he can keep. 

At one point when we were driving, we were pulled over by the police.  For no apparent reason.  Yasiel got out and was talking to the policeman for a while.  I was watching in the mirror and it appeared to not be a huge deal.  When he eventually came back, we could basically make out from Yasiel that the police pull over tour drivers regularly for bribes since they make so much more money.  The bribes could be big or small depending on whether the tour or taxi driver has a legitimate license; and the police call the companies to confirm they are operating with a valid license.  It seems to just be a fact of life that they deal with.  Kind of pissed me off.  I never did get a warm fuzzy from the police and I did not get them impression that they are around to help tourists in distress. 

We talked a lot about restaurants - most Cubans cannot afford to eat in the same restaurants as tourists because they just don't make enough money.  Yasiel works 7 days a week and 365 days a year - they do not appear to have any national holidays.  Yasiel’s goal is to make enough money to get to Miami and then to Mississippi where he has an aunt.  We invited him to lunch but he said he had to work to keep making money.  We kept asking where a typical Cuban would eat and he said not in the city!

Communicating with Yasiel all day was definitely challenging, but we used the Google app a lot – we did have some interesting moments when things were clearly lost in translation.  We asked Yasiel if he minded that we asked him so many questions and after about 10 tries in the translator (we actually had to pull over for this one), he said that he preferred people like us so he didn’t feel like he was robbing us.  I’m guessing a better translation would be that we were getting our money’s worth.

If there is one thing that we picked up, which we heard much more later in the trip, it is that the average Cuban just wants to get out and they do whatever they can to make enough money to give them the opportunity, if it ever presents itself, to get out.  There was a common hand signal that we saw which was, take your right hand/arm and make a forward arc with it while letting out a slight whistle – that seemed to be the lingo for a flight to get the heck out of Dodge.

We were dropped off around 1 or 2, and when we got back to our Casa, we wanted to find some cheap food – we had been blowing through money and given the limitations on getting more money, I was starting to get a little bit worried.  Our casa was in a predominantly Cuban area (albeit a nicer area than the first night) and people were selling stuff out of their driveways on almost every block.  We wandered up and down a few blocks until we were in front of a hospital where several houses had food set up in their driveways across the street.  We were the only non-Cubans, but being in the swing of things as we were, we ordered, in Spanish, and had correct CUC ready to go (prices were all in CUP). 

This is no joke - we literally got a pizza (a thick pita sized piece of delicious bread with a thin layer of tomato sauce and a little cheese), a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of guava juice for 1 CUC.  Yes, all of that for about one dollar. Then we went next door and got two ice cream cones for a total of forty cents.  This is where the local Cubans eat and given our depleting finances, we thought we had hit the jackpot of cheap food!    Across the street from our Casa we found a house selling churros out of their driveway (Damon is obsessed with churros).  We figured it must be good because there was a line of school kids waiting.  $.25 for a large bag of churros!  We are learning that wherever you see a line, there is probably some good food there. 

We wandered around our neighborhood for a few more hours logging a few more miles.  We walked to the famous Lennon Park - apparently Cubans really like the Beatles. 

Again, we must have seen a dozen dogs just roaming around in the park, not to mention the many wandering the neighborhood.  We walked to the Malecon and just watched the waves break onto the street for a few minutes, and then we walked into a building that Yasiel had told us was one if their nicer shopping malls. 

It was sort of an indoor/outdoor thing several stories high with a circular ramp that went to the top.  We made it to the second floor but the stores were mostly empty and there was garbage piled all over so we left.  After a few hours of walking, we headed toward home to grab dinner.

On the way home, we made a reservation at a Paladar to have dinner and then came back to our Casa exhausted.  I don’t think I’ve described a Paladar yet.  Until recently, in addition to controlling all hotels in Cuba, the government also controlled all restaurants.  Several years ago, the government started to grant licenses to Cubans to operate private restaurants out of their homes.  This grew and you can’t always tell what is a Paladar and what is a government owned restaurant as some of these Paladars are really nice and fairly large.  We tried to ask and only dine in Paladars, again, to get the money to the people.

We realized that the hostess spoke perfect English and we talked to her for more education (hello US government).  Her story – she earned a language degree in college and spoke fluent Spanish, English, Italian and French.  When Paladars became a thing, she worked with the owner of the house (a huge Colonial) to build an outdoor restaurant on the ground floor.  She said it had been a fantastic Italian restaurant.  She owned the restaurant outright, but after a few years, the government taxes were too stiff and she was forced to sell, but she still worked in the new restaurant.  She also mentioned that she had a room for rent in her house if we knew anyone looking.  Everyone is always out to earn money in any way they can – she even had a business card with the address to hand out.  And by the way, we had beef, per our non-English speaking waiter’s recommendation (which turned out to be lamb shank), sides, dessert and a bottle of wine all for 40 CUC.  Including tip.

Some things that I'm still obsessed with three days in.  The dogs and cats that are everywhere.  I'd say we easily saw 100 feral dogs while we toured today.  They are absolutely everywhere.  I may have mentioned that many are female and have clearly had babies recently. It is sad to see but also just seems to be how things are.  The garbage is another thing that I’m having a hard time getting used to.  We don't know if it is because there is nowhere to put it or if people don't care - but that, too, is so sad because there is no open space without garbage.  

The disrepair.  This is a hard one to get across.  In the neighborhood we are in now, Vedado, the houses are all what I would consider mansions.  They are these enormous beautifully detailed and ornate houses.  In their prime, it had to be spectacular.  Some houses are restored beautifully, some are in the process of being restored, some are just partially restored - where there is literally a line halfway across the house where the paint just stops, and are some just left to wither away.  While yes, it is sad to see these amazing houses in such disrepair, there is something really cool about it.  Maybe it is hope that they have so much potential one day???  You can see the changes happening and hopefully as more and more foreign money is let in, people will invest in and repair these houses.  Damon has not stopped talking about how we are going to buy one and move to Cuba to run a Casa.  a few examples of the houses in our neighborhood:

And my biggest obsession, of course, would be the toilet facilities. Public facilities are few and far between unless you are at a restaurant, even then, expect to pay for a lady to glower at you when you walk in if you don't pay her immediately and to maybe give you two squares of single ply toilet paper.  And most places have no toilet seats, but I’m pretty used to that now.  

But beyond anything else, what people hear about but cannot fully grasp, is the cars.  I was expecting to see a few old cars.  But they are just everywhere.  It is absolutely amazing to see.  Bright colors, hard tops, convertibles, some in excellent shape, some in horrible shape - but they are everywhere!  Three days in and I'm still in awe of everything and just love to look around.  A few more cars for your viewing pleasure:

We got home and were heading up to our room and we finally bumped into the host of our Casa (Debra).  Unbeknownst to us, until now we had only met the housekeeper who spoke no English.  Our host and her brother-in-law spent about an hour talking with us in perfect English on the front porch.  We learned about how after the revolution, these huge houses were taken from the rich and distributed to everyone - apparently, wherever you were living at the time, you became owner of that house.  Eventually the government allowed people to start selling houses, so some people traded houses and bought houses and some had money to restore.  

Our casa is owned/run by an extended family and they all live in the main part of the house.  They have about 5 or 6 rooms that they rent out – the rooms are accessed from a completely different stairway, and each individual room has its own door & lock – much like a hotel.  This family spent several years restoring the house and it is beautiful – at least the parts we were able to see.  Debra’s parents are or were diplomats so she is well traveled and lived in NY for a few years.  Relative to many Cubans, she had a good life, but she confirmed that basically Cubans do whatever it takes to earn money - mostly from tourists - but they scrimp and save and keep working their way up - at least the ones who want to.  The family also has two awesome dogs - a golden retriever name Leo who only wanted love and to stick his nose everywhere, and a little dog named Stuart - actually named for Stuart Little.  We are truly loving this experience and can't wait to see what tomorrow brings.

More on wifi later, but our Casa let us "steal" their wifi while someone else was on it, so I did get a handful of texts out and then had withdrawal symptoms when it was taken away.  Scary how addicted we are to phones and wifi.  I vowed not to use it for the rest of the trip - truly liberating.  Zoom in on the picture on the wall if it is hard to read...