Havana
Our time in Havana was short, but quite full. We sailed into Havana harbor on a bright, clear morning after sailing overnight from Ft Lauderdale.
Although it’s only about 100 miles, we took it slow. We were told in the morning that the port authorities had changed our docking time, so that we wouldn’t be allowed to dock until 10:00. With having to have the ship cleared, this meant that we wouldn’t be getting off until after 10:30. This caused them to have to scramble and redo the tours they had planned. There had originally been an 8-hour tour and a 4-hour tour. Instead they just combined both of them into one 6-hour tour, which was basically the 4-hour tour with two hours for lunch.
The first place we visited was Finca Vigia, Ernest Hemingway’s home. The house has been left just as it was when he died. The grounds mostly have as well, except that the swimming pool is empty (I’m sure it could tell some tales), and they took out the tennis court to make a place to display his boat, Pilar.
Then we went to lunch at a privately owned restaurant called La Bonita.
It’s in a neighborhood that was a wealthy part of town before the Revolution. Now the old mansions are mainly embassies, and a few have been turned into restaurants. We sat in the courtyard and sipped mojitos and listened to a jazz trio while eating our lunch.
Van and I had a “Ropa vieja” type dish of shredded braised beef with peppers and onions served with rice and black beans and vegetables.
After lunch they took us on a tour of the city. We saw several different neighborhoods. There’s not as much equality as there would have been in the old days. Today people are able to have private businesses, like the restaurant we ate at, which allows them to buy better houses in nicer neighborhoods. And there are still some very poor areas, which have suffered from the lack of money coming into the country. But everywhere we went things were clean and maintained as well as they could. The people were well dressed and seemed well fed and happy.
Of course we stopped at Plaza de la Revolución. At the center is the monument is to José Martí, who, while considered to be the father of the Cuban revolution, isn’t well known in the US. It’s a 350 foot tall tower of gray marble with a large statue of Marti on top. Besides that there’s not really much in the Plaza itself. It’s mostly open space for crowds to gather to hear speeches. There are iconic portraits of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos on the walls of the government ministries surrounding the square.
There were lots of the old American cars there. They operate as taxis and give rides to the tourists, anything from around the block to a whole city tour. The ones that do that are very well maintained and painted in bright colors. There are other vintage American cars that are just used by the locals. They are usually not in the same shape, with dull paint and patched bodies, since their owners don’t have the income from tourist dollars to spend on them. There are also lots of Russian and Chinese made cars on the streets. They are much, much cheaper than German or Japanese cars, but they aren’t as well liked since they don’t last very long.
Our trip is on a “Cultural Exchange” visa. In order to fulfill its terms they have planned a number of cultural activities into our program. On our tour of Havana we visited a community art project called Muraleando. It started 16 years ago with a group doing murals on walls. Over the years they have taken an abandoned building that had been used as an informal trash dump and made it into an art center with studio space, gallery space, music and dance classrooms and a small community theater space. It’s all been self-funded by selling art. We saw some amazing artworks and the music students played for us. It was a lot of fun.
That night we took the excursion to see the show at the Tropicana nightclub. That was totally amazing, but it was a very late night, at least for us. We got back to the ship about 1:00 am. More about it in the next post.
My Global Wanderings 