Day 0 - Preparation and Travel

In May 2007 I visited Cuba with a friend for almost three weeks; this is the record of what I experienced there. I thought it best to start off with a preamble explaining my approach to this (what I can only imagine is going to be a lengthy) undertaking.

What I read on the tinterweb before going to Cuba fell into three categories:

  1. The political - Usually quoting a human rights report or something by Amnesty International, these sites track the ongoing political climate in Cuba and its dealings with the rest of the world. Opinion pieces were abound on how the author thought the country was faring.
  2. The evangelical - It seemed that Cuba made a large quotient of people fall in love with it, as such, the blogs and articles came off as gushing monologues about the terminally friendly people or the unspoiled countryside or the lack of road vehicles.
  3. The minimal - I only read a few accounts before spotting the tell tale signs of there being little to no actual useful information contained within. These sites divulge minimal information about Cuba either on the whole or in part and boil down to how many t-shirts their husband packed.

This series of posts is going to attempt to be none of those things; I only aim for an interesting, frank and unyielding account; sexual and opinionated content (sometimes inextricably conjoined) will be present. I'm not going to explain every term, only the ones which I couldn't find or found inadequately described elsewhere.

And until I can come up with a snappy category name, "Cuba 2K7" will remain.

My friend (Matt, or M if I'm feeling particularly thrifty in my keypresses) suggested we go to Cuba in the new year after he had been previously with his aunt; I had no other plans for a major holiday so I agreed wholeheartedly. It took a few months for the New Year rush of work to die down in our respective jobs, but by the beginning of April we had booked our flights and things were set.

Our trip took us from London Gatwick (LGW) to Holguin Frank Pais on the 28th April and returning from Havana (HAV) to LGW on the 15th of May, it was a lengthy trip but left plenty of time to travel, what would be almost, the entire length of the country. I knew next to nothing about Cuba, only vague whispers of Fidel Castro and his tiff with the US and a glancing mention in "The Good Shepherd" about the Bay of Pigs invasion so I picked up the Dorling Kindersly guide to Cuba and also a decent scale map. I'll say now that by the end of the holiday I referred to the DK guide as the "pop-up guide to Cuba" and ended up not touching the large map once. Matt had an older copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Cuba which was immeasurably more useful (that became the "adult guide to Cuba") and it certainly would have been a very different holiday without the LP book.

All the other information I gleaned from conversations with Matt: about the Casa Paticulares, the money system (neither the pop-up nor the adult guide had up-to-date currency information) and other tidbits. I had little in the way of summer clothing and with promised 30 degrees Celsius weather, it was time for a wardrobe that would last me two and half weeks of heat. A double sided proposition, it meant that when I got back from Cuba my "original" wardrobe would be ready to wear so washing could be done at my leisure; unfortunately it also meant my finances would be strained even further than with the holiday alone.

Having never done a backpacking holiday before, to say I was apprehensive would be an understatement. We had no set address for the first night we were in Cuba which meant we were, quite literally, flying blind. Assurances from M fell on muted ears as I scurried to gather up as comprehensive a list of hotels and Casas as I could. I drafted out detailed holiday notes for my work colleagues who were only now aware that I would be miles from a computer (let alone an internet connection) for a number of days if not the entire holiday. Time seemed to warp and distend as the flight came closer and as my nervousness increased. Come the evening of the 27th of April however, I had a packed rucksack, my trusty camera, a taxi booked and a whole lot of butterflies.

Travelling from Sheffield to London Gatwick is not an easy journey as any UK citizen can probably imagine; it involves either driving down through London, getting a train or getting an internal flight from somewhere closer (in the case of Sheffield this would be Manchester). The flight departed at 1300 which meant ideally Matt and I would be at the airport for 1000, if not earlier. Opting for the train, we needed to catch a pre-dawn, 0505 out of Sheffield to Gatwick; this meant getting a taxi from our houses to the train station at around 0430. I'd gone through my check-list of things to do a number of times before event attempting sleep: timed security lights, closed windows and curtains, reset heating, unplugged appliances and numerous vital item checks; this meant all I had to do in the morning was get up, shower, have some light breakfast and head out.

I managed a grand total of about 4 hours sleep that night which is more than Matt got when he had to travel to Manchester to fix a faulty server at 11 in the evening. Everything is cold at 0330 in the morning, I shivered from adrenaline as much as the cold but the morning routine was going fine, I'd even allotted time to sit and have a cup of tea before the taxi arrived. And arrive it did, a full ten minutes before 0430 which meant my fruit based breakfast was packed and my tea hastily (and stupidly in retrospect) left on the side. Turning off the lights, locking the door and shouldering my bag I clambered into the black-cab taxi and picked up the awaiting Matt; adorned with a similar rucksack but wearing a sleepless expression.

The train station is blissfully quiet that early in the morning and our train was one of the first out. Typical passengers were business men with their morning dose of caffeine or a panoply of sleeping patrons; we joined the latter with little question. The journey to Gatwick is, of course, not that easy: the 3 hour train to London St Pancras is only the first step, you are then required to use the subway to get to London Victoria and then make it to Gatwick airport by train from there. I am no stranger to subway systems and London's is only slightly obtuse (when compared to the godly Tokyo subway system) and reasonably frequent. Apart from looking dazed and confused with our huge rucksacks, we found ourselves sitting in Victoria station eating a Cornish Pasty in no time.

In all, the journey to Gatwick was problem free and couldn't have gone smoother: we found ourselves at LGW at 0900 now waiting for the check-in desk for Cuba to open. Gatwick airport is constantly under construction, missing ceiling tiles, ducting exposed and just ripe for a flashlight zombie escape (should the need arise) so finding a place to rest for a spell was taxing. Airports are prime people watching areas and the queues near the security desks had some of the best you could wish for, from a Nigerian who used brute force to overcome the cabin baggage size restriction to avoiding glances from people you might just know (and might just not want to talk to).

At around 1000 we headed down to find the ticket desk open and a line snaking back across the bustling check-in area. Slotting in at the back of the line we ended up behind two girls in their early twenties who seemed to have thick American accents. Listening in on their conversation didn't enlighten either myself or Matt as to where they were going in Cuba so I chalked them up to being Canadian and continued to idly fiddle with the cord on my rucksack. Unfortunately the two delectable females were in the wrong queue and were quickly ushered over to the American Airlines desk, robbing us of our best view all morning. Some bad line choosing by me meant we were the last people to check-in and having spent so much time in the queue, this all meant it was now time to face the wrath of the security desks.

I do not have the best record with airport security desks; I like to make it a habit of being searched at least once (usually by burly guards twice my width), frequently in the country where I'm a foreigner and can't speak the language very well. We had already been commanded to abandon all fluids before entering the queue and further down we were asked to remove our shoes as well revealing my less-than-sexy striped socks. As comfortable as they were, they didn't entirely go with the rest of my travelling attire. By some kind of freak chance, I was spared being searched by the prizefighter security guards, or having my bag searched, or having my shoes drug-tested; it was almost as though they didn't care, and I'd worn my best all-black ninja gear especially for them as well. Take-off was delayed for twenty minutes or so for some enigmatic reason, just enough time for Matt and I to visit the bathroom and bid farewell to the UK.

We were flying Cubana airways which, initially, sounded like a good plan: what could be better than flying with the country's own airline? If you do ever find yourself flying Cubana, I urge you not to read up on them online, it will not fill you with confidence, only unyielding terror. I am a good flyer: I understand the principles and once you're in the air, there's nothing you as a person can really do but wait things out. Reading up on Cubana however makes you realise just how futile things like asking you to put your seatbelt on really are. All of this of course was not helped by the gung-ho attitude of the flight staff who served our meals with both speed and vigour and cleared them away with equal abandon.

And then there were the passengers... A thickly set Spanish speaker in front and to the right of us had boarded the plane with a full one litre bottle of Bell's whiskey (which I can only assume had 30% proof or above given its duty free origin) and through the course of the first few hours of the nine hour flight, proceeded to imbibe nearly two thirds of the bottle. A third of the way in he was jovial and conversing in rapid Spanish with the people in his nearby vicinity, two thirds of the way down however and he fell asleep in his seat. The position he used was as if you were sitting normally in your seat then just tilted your head forwards until it touched the seat in front of you; and there he slept for a good hour before rising like a colossus and headed back towards the toilets. I would have called that sleeping position the most amusing I'd seen until I heard that he had done exactly the same thing but in the toilets and had left the door unlocked.

While he was inevitably the star of the flight, others played sterling supporting roles such as the flight attendants who decided to swap numbers with a group of passengers who all got out and turned on their mobile phones. The rational part of my brain told me that all wiring within a plane is shielded and mobile phones aren't really all that dangerous to the pressurised metal tube; the irrational side of my brain wanted to grab the handsets and jump on them until they had chirruped their last. Or the flight attendant who was ostensibly collecting rubbish from the passengers but didn't linger long enough to allow any of it to reach the clear polythene bag she carried.

I wiled away the time on the flight by drifting in and out of sleep followed by watching the delightfully antiquated movies being shown. These started with Snow Dogs, followed by Cinderella with Hillary Duff and was topped off by Charlie's Angels 2 with most of the violence stripped out. I slept through most of Snow Dogs but subjected myself to the lava-lamp-esque Cinderella, I like to believe that by that point my brain had switched off and was just accepting the non-interactive entertainment, that or I have some kind of deep and dark Hillary Duff attraction... Watching these movies was fine, unfortunately actually listening to them was an exercise in pain as the tinny, uncomfortable earphones provided to us either put out too little or too much noise, making following dialogue tricky and explosions like a burst white noise.

All in all (and I will be saying this for a great many events in Cuba), the flight out was interesting and an experience. The entire flight was just shy of nine and a half hours and we landed at Holguin at around 1700 local time. My first taste of Cuba was a socialist message on a wall flanking the runway stating simply "Socialismo o Muerte", Socialism or Death. On his previous journey Matt had flown into Havana and mentioned that customs and baggage reclamation would be a major hassle in the realm of at least a couple of hours. With that in mind we both sauntered our way to the front of the plane and were the first to head out into a near impenetrable wall of heat; this was wet, immense heat the like of which I only remembered from my youth and going to Florida.

Undaunted, we were the first off the plane to hit customs where they got to scrutinise our tourist visas. For those not in "the know", on the visa you have to state where you will be staying for the first three days of your visit; with no fixed address, we had pencilled in the name of a hotel plucked from the Lonely Planet guide and hoped it wouldn't be checked up on too stringently. In my mind, I knew that the hotel was our best bet if we couldn't find a Casa in Holguin so I reasoned our visas may not be entirely incorrect. With nary a blink the customs officer stamped my visa and welcomed me to Cuba. Both of us stunned at this efficiency, the best was yet to come when our bags were close to the first to hit the ancient baggage carousel, both still frosty from the flight over. With no queue at the currency exchange desk, we both handed over our wad of British Money and got back a ridiculous sum of Cuban Convertible Pesos (CUC's for short). With little more to achieve at the petite airport (Holguin Airport seems to be a single building the size of your average school gymnasium) we caught the attention of an imperious looking taxi driver and were soon hurtling towards Holguin.

Matt had been practising his Spanish far more vigorously than I, so was eager to try it out on the taxi driver. Small talk about money and whether taxi driving was all he did aside, we managed to get him to take us to a Casa within Holguin, no searching around with hefty backpacks for us. All of this was achieved while we sped down increasingly undulating roads with Spanish rap blaring out of the speakers like some kind of mobile propaganda machine.

Welcome to Cuba.

We stopped in Holguin in some unidentifiable street where the taxi driver queried one house before reversing a short distance and trying another. The casa he had brought us to was up a set of steps and contained a definite room with a definite pair of beds and it was definitely available for the night. This was all I needed to nod my head in agreement, we thanked the taxi driver in the form of a tip (a very valid and welcome form of thanks I was to find) and finally dropped our bags in the room. We moved to enjoy the patio with a bottle of beer presented to us by the stoically quiet casa matron.

After the cervaza and some welcome bottled water, we were waved in the direction of the centre of Holguin (thanks once again to Matt's mastery of basic Spanish) and headed out to forage. I'll leave the description of Holguin for the next post; suffice to say we found a suitably air-conditioned and tourist-centric cafe where we consumed some greasy pizza before I headed back to the casa and Matt decided it was time to try out some dance moves. I'm unaware of exactly when I fell asleep but it was shortly after writing off the air conditioner which made the plug socket spark when I switched it on; and this, I was to find, was one of the better wired houses.

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