With no death dreams that night I woke up refreshed and ready for the 9am breakfast in which the flies from yesterday had informed their kin which made it very tedious trying to eat. Showering and getting dressed, Matt was suffering from lack of sleep (possibly still catching up with him from Trinidad) so we hung about in the microclimate of the room while we planned out the day. Finding out that there was actually very little interesting to do in Havana, we decided to head towards the Plaza Vieja which, according to the Lonely Planet guide, had some neat curios hidden away.
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Waking up late I busied myself by packing in readiness to leave Trinidad tomorrow as well as shaving. With the morning slipping away and not knowing when he had returned to the casa, I woke Matt up at half past nine for breakfast then we set about trying to organise transport to Havana; something Matt was reluctant to do given how good a time he was having. We found the bus station thanks to a perky, English speaking tour operator but after much debate, decided on a taxi from our Casa at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon giving plenty of time to bid farewell at the beach. With no accommodation booked for Havana (the domineering lady from Holguin had ceased her phone-calls at Sancti Spiritus) we unsuccessfully tried to convince the tour operator to organise us some, pro-bono of course.
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The good thing about having a fully working and modern air-conditioning unit in the bedroom of our casa was the micro-climate it created. The bedroom could be a cool and calming zone, while even venturing into the en-suite bathroom meant you were faced with a not insignificant wall of heat. The bad thing was when the unit was right above your bed. This meant when I slept with the air-con on I had to press myself against the wall so that the cool air missed me as it was being blown out; regardless, I spent a lot of the night fumbling in the dark trying to turn the unit onto a lower setting which usually resulted in me turning it onto timer mode or switching it onto high-power.
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After a good nights sleep I woke up around 7am, showered and tidied the room before having breakfast. Our casa, like a lot of buildings within a Cuban city, is very vertical; while only two rooms wide, our casa was four stories high including the balcony and a cornucopia of side corridors and hidden rooms folding in on themselves. Our breakfast was on the first floor kitchen which housed an immense sink and cooker along with sturdy, tiled surfaces. Once breakfast was finished and Matt had showered, we were introduced to a man called Alfredo who looked like his skin had been spray-waxed directly onto his skeleton; angular without being dessicated. Alfredo spoke a wide variety of basic English and informed us that he could organise a trip outside of Santiago for us.
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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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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