So Cuba, then: I suppose I should write about it before time and Glastonbury conspire to wrench it from my memory…
As we emerged from a José Martí airport where power cuts had been intermittently plunging the baggage hall into darkness while we waited for our rucksack to arrive, we found a torrential tropical storm. As we hovered uncertainly under the shelter by the automatic doors, a boxy yellow and black Lada panataxi pulled up at the kerb, and the driver gestured at us to scurry across and jump in. It was the first of many taxis we would take over the next 10 days; the first of many slightly awkward attempts at communication in my long forgotten GCSE Spanish. As we pulled away, I turned instinctively to pull on a seat beat that wasn’t there. This was not to be the last time I would make that mistake.
Half way to Havana the rain stopped suddenly, giving way to the kind of glorious sunshine, deep blue skies, and sweltering heat that were to be a fixture of the rest of the trip.
As I looked out at the fields and the farm buildings with pro-Fidel propaganda scrawled on the walls, and the crazy cars and drivers also out on the roads, swerving to avoid the potholes and pools of rain water, I decided that I liked the place already.
Our hotel was on the edge of old Havana, so after quickly checking in, dumping our bags in the room and taking the lift up to the top floor restaurant for a quick peek at the city out there, we started to explore the streets. Beneath crumbling buildings, the streets were filled with locals sitting around passing the time of day, baseball-mad kids playing improvised games with whatever equipment they had to hand, and the local jineteros trying to hustle us with their offers of cheap cigars and “salsa festivals”. [It actually wasn’t until our last day in Havana that I would find out why so many locals were trying to offload their cigars–these, so we learnt from the guide at the Real Fabrica de Tabacos Partagás, were the unsaleable ones; the three cigars a day that every employee was permitted to take home from the reject pile for their own personal consumption. I’d imagine that a fair few of those rejects end up being sold to unwitting tourists for significantly more than they’re actually worth…]
But thankfully most of those who would seek to hassle us on the street were happy enough with a simple ¡No, Gracias! And you struggle to begrudge the Cubans their attempts to part you from your precious hard currency, such is the paucity of the average Cuban’s salary, and the smiling charm with which they go about it. For example, the barmaid at Ambos Mundos (the erstwhile residence of Hemingway) who accidentally “forgot” to return the other 10 CUC of my change for our mojitos, apologised so sweetly and produced the note before I’d even got half way through my quizzical “Quanto questan las m….” that you’d almost think that the mistake was genuine. And that taxi driver from the airport might have, with an innocent shrug, flicked off his meter the instant he cut the engine, wiping the price away, but even though I knew exactly how much it had got up to, I still gave him what I hoped was a decent tip anyway. And the pizzas that arrived for our first meal in Havana might not have resembled the ones we ordered, while the prices were all rounded up from the ones on the menu, but we ate them, and paid the bill, and enjoyed it anyway.
Well, ¿Es Cuba, no?
After an evening drinking cans of Cristal beer out by the water while the sun went down, and an early night, our first full day in Havana began with us fending off yet another tout.
Did we want to go to the Salsa Festival, he asked? Did we know the Buena Vista Social Club? I ended up having to tell him that no, I didn’t like salsa music just so that we could escape, but this was really a problem of my own making, because in my attempts to converse in Spanish I’d inadvertently told him that we’d arrived “hier”. It was only several hours later, after we’d visited the fascinating Museo de la Revolución, that the slow realisation dawned as to why this had made him so confused, even repeating it back to me a couple of times with a very puzzled voice. That, of course, would be the French word for “yesterday”, and what I should have said was ayer. Well thanks brain: it’s not as if I need you to expose my poor grasp of Spanish to make me look like a bumbling, idiot tourist: I have my exposed pale British legs for that.