5. 9. – Cuba – Havana
We landed in Havana around twelve and right from the start it was clear that things with Fidel wouldn't be easy. We queued up for passport control and besides the plane ticket and the passport they were interested in a paid hotel reservation in Havana. Which of course we didn't have, and that was one hell of a problem. They left us standing there on our own and last in the hall (by the way, at Havana airport both the traffic and the terminal building are like a train station in some district town :-) .
After a while a bloke came over, he had a notebook in his hand and spoke English. It turned out he had a list of hotels we had to pick from and book for at least two nights!L Prices ranged from 70 to 150 and were only in dollars!
In the end we found one for $35/pers and in the historic centre on top of that, so we'll take it That bloke wanted it paid right away! When I objected what kind of speciality it is to pay for a hotel at the airport, he replied with an ironic smile: "Welcome to Cuba!" and he was right.
Another shock: at the personal luggage check they ran the daypack through the X-ray and then made me unload everything onto the table! I had a bag of exposed films in there, about 25 of them, and the customs woman was mighty surprised by it. She called a colleague over and he asked me in English whether I couldn't give her one! I said they were used and they let me through. In the next hall a TV was on and in it, wonder of wonders, Pat & Mat! It's definitely not the last encounter with a Czech trace in Cuba. People here were divided into smugglers, who walked with bundles of 5 TVs, three computers, five VCRs and two chandeliers (for example) into the queue on the right, and normal people in the queue on the left.
We got into the queue on the left and filled in some form (the third one already, I think!). Then we went up front to ask whether I had to wait in that awful queue. You don't have to, but show me the tags for your backpacks. About ten seconds earlier I'd tossed mine, crumpled up, into the bin :-(.
So get into the queue on the right! When I saw how everyone there was pulling out their last sock (and some of them had like 20 pairs!) onto the table and the customs officers were rummaging through it, I had a fit of rage. I cursed Fidel, Cuba and communism and in the end myself for throwing that tag away. We waited until they'd gone through all those fifty TVs and loads of bags of rags and then it was our turn. They let Martin through, he had his tag, but from me she actually wanted me to dump out my backpack!
I angrily grabbed it by the bottom and from a good height dumped everything onto the table, so that it rolled all over the room.
The obsidian ball bounced with a terrible racket across the tiles halfway through the room, from where some customs officer brought it back to me with a smile.
Along with all the unfolded mess, an insane stink of dirty, wet, sweaty socks and briefs rolled out of the backpack. It hit the customs woman right in the nose, at which I laughed devilishly. She poked through it a bit in disgust and said I could stuff it all back in.
We were the last ones there, so I folded everything super carefully into neat little piles, sorted it into plastic bags, threw the useless stuff into her bin and generally gave her a nice hard time. At the end, now calmed down, I even thanked her in Spanish. Unfortunately I never got round to looking up how to ask her in Spanish how she liked my stinky socks, so I did it at least in Czech. No response.
In the outer hall crowds of taxi drivers of course pounced on us, we proudly fended off their attacks by ignoring them and headed for information to find out where the bus goes from.
There's no bus to the airport at all, welcome to Cuba:-)
The winner was the taxi driver who spoke English best, had a small car and knew where our hotel was. He drove us there for $20 according to the meter (awful!!) and we got loads of information out of him. Cuba is extra safe, because out of 11 mil. inhabitants 6 mil. are cops. That's why you can hitchhike (but for money) and sleep outside (for free). Every day it rains for an hour in the afternoon, because it's hurricane season. Never at night, supposedly (that's the only thing that didn't turn out to be true).
Everything in Cuba is paid for in dollars, there are special prices for tourists (matching prices in the USA) – one American at the airport said the same. A meal in a state pub costs $25/pers, in a private one just $15! Our hotel is the cheapest, then you can also sleep in a Casa particular (private house) for "only" $25/room
He dropped us off right in front of the hotel, which really is right in the centre of old Havana. Old means colonial buildings from the beginning of the century that nobody has even touched in exactly 40 years of Castro's regime. No plaster, blackened, crumbling cornices and balconies and so on.
The hotel is decent inside, reception speaks a human language, a bellboy took us up to the room, a room with a bathroom, toilet, aircon and a stereo TV with satellite. As I found out later, satellite is banned for Cubans; even if someone got hold of one, the cops would take it off him (and him as well). Internet can only be obtained in Cuba with a special permit, for special reasons. In the city library the net is publicly available (theoretically probably even for Cubans), but for $5/hr, which is exactly half of an average Cuban salary!
We're staying on the fifth floor, where there's also a bar on the roof (beer and coke for $1). We just chucked our packs in there and rushed off to have a look at the city. Havana is a real experience! Cuban girls with gorgeous little figures stroll with a gazelle's step among the half-collapsed buildings, in sexy outfits with no bras, bare bellies, miniskirts or stretchy overalls showing absolutely every curve of their bodies, meanwhile little boys, barefoot and in nothing but shorts, play football in the mud, the only things they have to dodge are American road cruisers from 1949 – 1959 (in unbelievable condition!), Ladas and East German MZs (mostly with a sidecar. You also see rickshaws pretty often – a bike with a twin seat and a sunshade at the back. The only ones with newer cars here are the cops (Peugeot 106) and the taxi drivers (Daewoo, Kia).
We got to the main square by the Capitol and there the street cigar sellers grabbed us straight away. Well, not that they sell them on the street, that's not allowed, but they dragged us into a dark dirty flat and unpacked loads of boxes of cigars from a bag, brands Cohiba, Monte Christo no. 1 and no. 4. Originally they wanted about $100 a box, in the end we bought 5 boxes for $137. All originally wrapped with the accompanying papers. In Prague one cigar costs up to 800 CZK, so maybe we'll get some of our costs back. If only, otherwise I'll be out grazing in the fields all next year. The dealers spoke a human language and claimed that one of them works in the factory and that's why they have them. In the state shops one box of Cohibas costs $250!
We asked them about cheap grub, so they took us to a private pub round the corner. The whole time we had to walk 10 m behind them, that's how scared they are of the cops. And they've got a reason, there really are as many of them here as flies on a cowpat. And we haven't even spotted the secret ones yet!
In the pub we did have a lovely chat with the owner (in Spanish!), but the fish (chicken) with rice ended up costing $29!!L We really can't afford a thousand-crown meal again!
On the way from the pub I stopped by the cigar guys' place, like an idiot I'd left my umbrella there.
Cubans like being photographed, so I take advantage of it. The best victims are little black kids and beautiful long-legged Cuban girls.
The mix of skin colours is interesting. I don't know why, but I was convinced that all Cubans are black as boots. (I probably saw ones like that back in Bohemia.) In reality about half of them are black, the rest are all the shades between white (not many) and brown.
After the night at the airport we were completely knackered, so we went back to the hotel and crashed for about two hours.
Rested, we set off on a walk again. About every ten steps we have to face questions like: "Where are you from, my friend" or amigo, amigo. The next sentence offers cigars or accommodation. At first it was interesting, after an hour we're already rude to them.
The other Cubans are nice and smiling, and on a pleasant walk we got all the way to the local gas power plant (about 1 km from the main square!!!).
Since we were planning to get hold of two motorbikes, or one with a sidecar, when one Cuban dude struck up a conversation with us, we laid it on him straight away. He said he'd arrange it, that I should go home with him, he'd change and then we'd go for it. At his place he sat us down in a dirty, never-painted room on a hundred-year-old sofa with springs sticking out of it and went off to take a shower.
Then he took us pretty far to some mates of his, who immediately offered us food and accommodation for $. On the way a fair few girls (most of them) also noticed us pretty visibly, which becomes the rule for Cuba.
While Ramon talked about motorbikes, I went down to the sea and photographed the lighthouse in the evening light and, in the other direction, the skyscrapers of downtown Havana. We arranged the bike for the morning and went to the hotel. Then I stayed up watching a solid film about a tough girl who becomes a model, falls in love with a make-up artist, then catches AIDS through dope and so on.
6. 9. Havana
In the morning Ramon came saying he's got a great bike with a sidecar for us for $20/day, he just needs $5 for petrol and he'll bring it in an hour. That was the last time we saw him :-(. Then some mates of his just let us know that we're not allowed to ride a private motorbike in Cuba, only a rented one, which costs an awful $45/day.
Oh well, no big deal, we'll each take a small daypack (in Cuba the temperature never drops below 29 C) and we'll hitchhike. Sweet. We'll leave the big packs in the hotel storage for $1/day and that's that.
We naively waited for Ramon until 11:00, then left him a message that we'd come back at two and set off to sniff out something cheap to eat.
We dragged ourselves all the way to places that are meant more for people than for tourists, and there they had rolls with smoked meat, one for 10 CZK. Finally a bright moment, we'll live on rolls with salami for 14 days.
Before that we'd only found a shop on the square, where they had about 20 items, but all of them more expensive than in the USA. All we bought was two waters for $1.50.
It was insanely muggy, so we dragged ourselves back and forth, I bought postcards and stamps ($5 for 4 of them!L) and at two we shuffled back to the hotel. Ramon of course didn't show up, so we just sent word through his mates that he's dead meat and said a final goodbye to our $5.
After the afternoon rain we set off to look for the net, which we did manage to find, but it was already closed. It started raining again, which drove us under the arcades. Another Cuban dude spoke to us, so I told him straight away that we don't want cigars or a casa particular. He was horrified, really genuinely, and swore he only wanted to practise his English. So we got talking to him, he seemed pretty intelligent and on top of that it was already raining even under the arcades, so we ducked into a bar.
At the bar sat one dangerously beautiful Cuban girl in a miniskirt and a little spaghetti-strap top, mahogany in white. Unfortunately, there was a free seat right next to her, so I sat down there. She struck up a conversation with me immediately, she spoke English (at the start it always looks like they speak it well), said she studies economics in Havana, she's 23 and so on.
Gradually I had to switch to my pitiful Spanish, which turned out to be better than her English. I got loads of interesting information about Cuba out of her: her mother, a teacher, earns $8/month, half of that in pesos, nobody is allowed to go to a town other than the one in their ID card without a permit, if she found herself alone in a house with a foreigner they'd lock her up straight away, on TV they've only got two channels (sport and Fidel), satellite is a criminal offence, food is on ration coupons (0.5 kg of bread, 1.5 kg of rice and 0.5 kg of meat per person per day - roughly).
All four of us had a Hemingway drink (mint, sugar, Cuban rum, soda), which I quite liked, right up until the moment I found out the price ($3).
The beautiful young lady was now sitting pretty close and during the conversation kept gently touching me with her hands. I was slightly losing my breath, but I was brave.
The whole time she was trying to talk me into one excellent bit of business, which convinced me she's not a prostitute, like those two who'd been marching behind us all afternoon.
The deal was about swapping dollars for so-called Pessos convertible, which is Fidel's version of the USD, exchangeable in Cuba one to one with the dollar. Then there's also Pessos Cubanos, worth 1$ = 20 PS. We'd already run into those.
In the end she talked us into it and we went, together with our original buddy, called „The Young One“ and another one, called „The Little One“, to a bar in Chinatown, the dirtier part of Havana separated by the classic Chinese gate (like in SF).
The bar looked pretty decent and American. Miss Beautiful dragged me into an underground bar in the same place (it looked like a gambling den hidden from the police!) and there I (after an hour-long consultation beforehand with Martin, the Young One (who swore he didn't want anything to do with it, that his father had forbidden him to do business with tourists) and the Little One) swapped 20$ with Miss Beautiful for 40 pessos convertible, which was supposed to halve the prices in Cuba for us.
The whole theory was backed up by the fact that the bar is owned by people doing business with Florida, so they need real dollars and they can't exchange them at the bank. We figured we'd try it with a twenty and add more tomorrow if it worked.
During the exchange down in the bar it turned out I didn't have 20$ in small notes, so we went upstairs to break it. To break the money they wanted to see my passport or her ID. Then they filled in a whole form, the whole thing took maybe a quarter of an hour.
We finished our second beer, Miss Beautiful took a couple of cigars for the road (1$), we paid 10$ and cleared off. Out on the street we agreed that they'd go take a shower and change and in an hour we'd meet in front of the hotel and go to the bar on the 5th floor, where the beer is cheaper. It looked like we might be able to squeeze some useful info out of them.
We never saw them again in our lives. And like idiots we even waited for them downstairs at the reception, because they wouldn't have been let into the hotel on their own!
The bellboy confirmed our suspicion that those two twenties were worth 2$, which made it clear they weren't coming. So we got conned twice in one day. Well, 20$ is annoying, but for them it's two months' income, so we're taking it as aid to developing countries.
7. 9. Habana – Florida!
Before leaving Havana we had a few things to sort out. In the morning we did our laundry and repacked everything, because the temperature in Cuba never drops below 29°C, so 2 T-shirts and two pairs of shorts are enough for the road. Since I have a tiny sleeping bag, everything fitted into my small daypack. Martin took his half-empty big one. The rest of our stuff (90 %) we left in the hotel storage room for 1$ a day.
Now travelling light, we set off for the Internet, but at 5$/hour we didn't fancy it.
Then I dropped some postcards off at the post office, we bought water and rolls and went to see the Museum of the Cuban Revolution. A big colonial building full of photos and artefacts from the revolution (the machine they used to sew Fidel's uniform, Fidel's crowbar which he used to steal the money for the revolution and also a life-size statue of Fidel hiding in the bushes with a rifle :-)).
The guide only in Spanish, the captions abridged, but in English. The thing I enjoyed most about the whole museum was when I took a nap on a marble bench on the terrace. Another 3$ down the drain 😊.
On the way from the museum we came across a market, so we bought bananas (1 CZK each) and papayas (1$ each). We sat down in Central Park, stuffed ourselves with bananas and papaya and waited for some beauty to walk past so we could grill her about how to get a bus out of the city to the motorway to hitchhike. We caught the girls and they advised us to take a taxi. That cost 6$, so even though we'd love to ride in one of those huge American cars at some point, that's too much.
Aside: In all our time in Cuba (we've been here 5 days now) we haven't seen a single glazed window anywhere!! Even in the air-conditioned hotel they only had wooden shutters, which are normal thick boards attached parallel to each other that you can rotate. They have those everywhere.
End of aside.
After the taxi we also tried to talk a rickshaw guy into it, but when he saw how far we wanted to go, that we're both nearly two metres tall and have backpacks on top of that, he preferred to tell us which metrobus goes there. The metrobus, that's a local speciality. You take a regular tractor unit – a truck – and as a trailer you hook up a shed bent in three places, into which 300 Cubans are crammed under pressure. You wait for it in two queues, the first one is about 10 m long and those are the rich Cubans. For 2 PC (4 CZK) they get to sit. The other queue is up to 300 m long and that's for standing room. The metrobus then travels at rickshaw speed, everything rattles, bangs and jolts, the tractor unit makes a racket and belches smoke, but it goes.
On the bus we had a hell of a laugh with the Cuban women, who were laughing at us because we didn't know what to do and kept holding that half a papaya in our hand. We wanted to give it to somebody, but oddly enough nobody wanted it.
As we were bouncing along in the metrobus with the local folk, it started to dawn on us that setting off hitchhiking out of a big city at six in the evening probably isn't ideal. Luckily that worry didn't come true.
We wanted to check we were going the right way, so we pulled out the map and asked those women who kept laughing at us. And like maybe 100 times already on our trip, it turned out they're completely thick! Luckily a pretty tall black guy started talking to us straight away in English and promised to tell us when we were at the motorway to Santiago de Cuba, our future destination.
The outskirts of Havana are already a proper banana village, we got off right under the motorway bridge. The black guy was about 210 cm, which is quite a rarity here, he was our age and he was a basketball player, whom the city pays 100 PC (200 CZK) a month. That's what he lives on, as he said, it's no picnic. On top of that he's currently suspended for assaulting the coach and the referee. He spoke English well.
On the bridge he explained to us how hitchhiking works in Cuba. You just stand on the shoulder (there were about 8 other people standing there with us) and wait, you do nothing. After a while a car stops (usually a truck) and you give the driver a dollar, two or more. Then you ride as far as you want. Pleasant news about how easy and widespread hitching is, unpleasant news about the money.
This road we were standing on was only a feeder onto the autopista towards Santiago, so when a truck stopped, the basketball player explained to the driver where to drop us off and gave him our 2 $. For that we gave him 5 PC for the bus back, because he'd gone past his stop because of us.
The first ride for 1$ over about 2 km scared us quite a bit, because it's 850 km to Santiago.
The first ride was a truck, a roof over half the flatbed, iron seats under the roof and a barrel of diesel as the fuel tank, the rest of the bed just for standing. About 6 other locals rode with us.
Everybody got off with us and we walked over to the next motorway. There were already loads of people there, spread out over about 1 km, altogether definitely 60 of them. That boosted our hopes about the success rate of hitchhiking in Cuba.
After about ten minutes a truck pulled up next to us (before that we'd been laughing our heads off at the possibilities of riding in a Lada, a Volga, a Jawa or a ZIL, or maybe a 40-year-old American car)
The driver immediately shouted at us that he wanted 2 $, we pretended not to understand and climbed onto the bed. He climbed up after us and collected 4 $.
The truck was clearly built for transporting people, 4 benches (2 along the sides, 2 metal ones in the middle), a sheet-metal roof, holes for air on the sides and one armchair up front for a VIP. The whole truck was definitely 45 years old, when it set off you couldn't see a thing for 100 m behind us because of the smoke. Anyway, it managed to get going pretty fast, I reckon up to 80 km/h.
At the end of the queue of hitchhikers, where the biggest cluster of people was standing in front of some booth, it stopped again and crammed another 25 Cubans with cardboard boxes in with us, which turned it into cattle transport. We'd planned to go about 50 km beyond Havana, but since it cost those 4 $, we decided to ride the 100 km the driver had promised us (in Spanish).
After nine!! hours of riding on a wet hard wooden bench, surrounded on all sides by sweaty smoking farting sleeping Cubans, without the slightest chance to move, trying to fall asleep with our heads on our knees, in the howling wind and rain around us, but happy as anything that we were rolling across Cuba with the local folk, we couldn't take it any more and on the third attempt we managed to get off somewhere in the middle of some town.
We immediately headed out of town, to find a patch of grass, flop down there and sleep. My backside, bruised from the jolting trucks, will hurt for another three days, but we'd covered a substantial part of the way to Santiago.
We found some unfinished shelter and lay down in the grass under it. I slept great, only the sun woke me up, Martin was bothered by mosquitoes. We hit the sack at four in the morning.
8.9. Wednesday – Florida !
Right after waking up we became the centre of attention for the locals walking past, a few of them even stopped for a chat. The most active one sat down with us and nattered away. We asked him for water, he shot off immediately and came back in a while with a pot of water he'd begged from the house next door, and we brushed our teeth with it.
Then he escorted us to the centre, on the way he grabbed us a cab, represented here by a real actual carriage pulled by a mare!
The ride into the centre cost 20 PC = 1$ = 1/10 of the average income! The local, Barbaros, paid it without a word. From several clues we gradually concluded that he's secret police.
In town at a petrol station we had a pizza (hideous as hell) in an air-conditioned! little shop for 1,5$ each. Then we (still accompanied by Barbaros) found the market and again bought bananas for 1 CZK each and oranges for about the same.
In the town of Florida (about 60 thousand inhabitants) there's a cigar factory, so we wanted to have a look at it. It's a big garage sort of thing, 60 x 60 m, where the employees sit in about ten rows of ten people, smoking and rolling cigars by hand at the tables. It's terribly dark in there and it smells of tobacco. They wouldn't let us inside at all (Fidel has banned that for foreigners and when I pulled out my camera a guard came sprinting over straight away shouting „no foto, no foto!
Then Barbaros showed us the two local parks (a small one and a big one), we sat down in the small one and ate some fruit.
In Cuba there's basically nothing at all to do, it's hot and muggy, plus there's nothing to eat here, so we just trudge around wrecked the whole time looking for shade. Lots of kids were larking about in the park, apparently they don't have school until the afternoon, the others have it in the morning. The little girls (and the young women too) wear a uniform here, a white blouse and an ochre miniskirt. (usually shorts underneath). Wherever we go in Cuba, somebody's offering us something. In Havana it was at least cigars, accommodation, money changing and girls, but here in Florida (or should it be „in the Florida“?) all they offer us is girls. Barbaros started it, then every single girl (really every single one) we meet winks at us, waves and shouts at us and even blokes and little boys shamelessly offer us their girlfriends (maybe even their daughters) right in front of their eyes, and those girls wink at us while they do it.
From the park we walked to Barbaros's place, where we met his wife (horrendous), his mother-in-law and father-in-law, I took a photo of some girl with a kid in her arms and a young lad climbed a palm tree in the garden and knocked down a few coconuts for us.
The milk from them is sweet, but disgusting. The coconut was still in its jam-like stage, even more disgusting.
After the night in the truck we were dying to sleep, so we started saying goodbye, saying we were off to sleep in the park. They offered us a bed at their place, so we gratefully crawled into it.
Unfortunately a fan was droning behind my head (when I laboriously pulled it out of the socket, the mother-in-law came and plugged it back in), flies were crawling all over me and so I didn't fall asleep at all. Martin probably did.
After about an hour of „sleeping“ we said goodbye and set off for the centre. Barbaros came with us, surprisingly. He said he isn't working today, but in the evening he's going to Havana on business. Probably to file a report.
We ended up at the petrol station again and had another hideous pizza, this time with beer as well and one for Barbaros too. Before that we'd exchanged 20$ for pessos for him at the normal rate, he needed dollars for shoes.
We ended up in the park again, before that we walked down the main street with the shops (hopelessly empty), where I also bought this diary.
In the park Barbaros introduced us to a few of his girl mates, one (28) was hitting on Martin, the other one (23) they were offering me as a wife. Both of them dressed insanely sexy (stretchy T-shirt-cum-bra, stretchy shorts) like most young Cuban girls. Martin and I agreed that in our celibate state such provocation should really be banned.
Another young lady who said hello to Barbaros (about 14) went straight for us, kissed us both and started cheerfully telling us something. We were absolutely gobsmacked!
Then we started writing our diaries, which finally put B. off, he said goodbye and claimed he was going for a shave and would be back at six and let us sleep at his place.
We sat in the park, wrote our diaries and watched the girls walking by and winking at us. One (I'd have put her at about 13) sat down on the bench opposite and kept eyeing us. Then about four black guys sat down around her, kept yelling „my friend, my friend“ at us and offering her to us. They pissed me off by then, so I told them I was definitely not interested in a niño (child) and they could piss off. That put the guys off and seriously offended the girl. She sat down a bit further away and kept glancing at us.
Martin gave me grief for offending her, saying she didn't deserve it and that I haven't got an ounce of tact and so on.
In a while three schoolgirls walked past again, and the prettiest one (she even had lovely boobs already) came tripping straight over to us, kissed us again and sat down for a chat. That's really unheard of. I can't imagine a fourteen-year-old girl back home spotting two foreigners, running up to them completely unfazed, kissing them and striking up a conversation!
When she left, the offended one a few metres away shouted something like who's the child here, when we're chatting with a fourteen-year-old. By then I felt sorry for her, so I called her over to sort of apologise. She ran over delighted and sat down with us. She claimed she was 17 and went to pre-university school. She had gorgeous long thick black hair, a long skinny little body that hadn't got its womanly shapes yet and miniature little breasts. Wearing, how else, the stretchy set – bra, shorts.
So we chatted there with her, she knew maybe one word of human speech (even though they all have it at school here for 2 years :-) ) and it was pretty good fun.
Another one in the line of pests who keep bugging us offered us accommodation for $20 in human speech (again I had to swap my pencil, it's non-stop). We turned him down saying we're sleeping at a mate's place who's coming for us at six.
At half six he came again, saying the place even has a shower just round the corner and the owner is called such and such and we'd find him at the petrol station where he works on the black market :-).
At seven he came a third time, said our mate probably wasn't coming any more (we thought so too), brought the owner along and said the price was only $15 for us. That broke us and off we went. They loaded Martin's rucksack onto a bike and we headed towards the block of flats, Miss Janisel with us. The accommodation was a room in a nicely furnished flat on the 5th floor of a panel block, with the option of a hot dinner.
We sat down with Miss Skinny on the bed and over a map told her about our journey through Mexico, the trip up Popocatépetl (unsuccessful) and so on. Her eyes were popping out of her head. It's unbelievable that we can already keep up a three-hour conversation in Spanish! (a bit supported by dictionaries) Then we ordered chicken for dinner for $2.40 (what a bargain) and the owner called in one more young lady so we wouldn't be an odd number! Unfortunately she was considerably fatter, coarser, cheekier and had a voice like an old bloke. She wanted to point out Czechoslovakia on the map of Mexico.
Unfortunately she managed to arrive before dinner, so in the end we paid for dinner for 4.
After dinner I headed for the shower and when I came back, the girls were going through our rucksacks, folding and ironing our stuff and confiscating every scrap of food that looked like we might want to throw it out (e.g. a bag of massacred Mexican biscuits). The fat one („Fatty“) begged a tin of sardines off Martin and looked as if she'd been given a house at least.
As soon as I came out of the shower they pounced on me with antiperspirant, perfume and an ironed T-shirt and started waiting on me with it. After the previous experience with marriage offers I got properly scared about how this was going to end!L
Miss „Skinny“ even brought Martin his ironed clothes right into the shower !!L
We wanted to get out of the dangerous room, so we said we'd go dancing somewhere. We set off to the local disco, on the way we bought a few beers because apparently they don't sell any at the disco. Fatty tried to direct the whole thing, even the number of beers, which we cut down nicely.
The disco was on a roofed, barred terrace of a house in the centre, rusty tin roof, plastic chairs, concrete floor and a ring of slightly flickering coloured bulbs on the ceiling. The music was played off a cassette player in a booth by a pretty useless DJ who kept blabbing something stupid about Indians hanging in the trees (that's just our code name for something we understand absolutely nothing of, so Spanish-speaking countries are, for us, packed with hanging Indians).
At the start the disco was pretty empty, around ten it started filling up. They played roughly the same English hits as in Europe (maybe a bit older, dunno), now and then interspersed with a Puerto Rican or local hit. The locals, men and women, have of course an amazing talent for moving, plus loads of absolutely gorgeous girls turned up (mainly black girls), so there was plenty to look at. Martin was having quite a good time with Skinny, whereas Fatty pestering me was really getting on my nerves!
Luckily I found out that practically all the girls were eyeing us up, so I didn't hang about and went off with one gorgeous slim one. She was over the moon about it (what a novelty!😊) right up until the moment Skinny came for me and started brutally dragging me back by the hand, saying there was already one waiting for me there so I couldn't dance with another. That really pissed me off! Then Fatty (well, to be fair to her, she wasn't fat at all, she just wasn't super slim like the others and I'm (probably given my own build) more into the skinny ones) told me that the one I'd picked was terribly bad, whereas she was good😁.
BTW, Skinny is practically white, Fatty is a mulatto, to me the most beautiful girls in Cuba are the completely black slim ones.
I started feeling not exactly great from the local beers, plus it annoyed me how they were pushing something on me that I didn't want (even though she tried and wiggled her bum in front of me for dear life), so we decided to go home. The girls followed us as if it went without saying. On the way they stopped in a shop and bought themselves drinks and sweets and somehow took it for granted that we'd pay for it. We were pretty reluctant, but when they came up with the story that it was for the little kids in the house, they talked us into it. I wanted to pay in pesos, the owner wanted dollars. I started explaining to him in the simplest terms that just as dollars are used in the USA and marks in Germany, in Cuba they use pesos. Laughing, he finished by saying that in Bohemia they use crowns, so I should pay in crowns then. That cracked me up and I gave him the three dollars.
When we got in front of the block of flats, things were getting pretty hairy. The girls acted like they'd obviously be coming upstairs with us and we had no idea how to get out of it. Plus that long-term celibacy…
In the end the decision was made easier by the fact that one is cheeky and fat and the other one looks thirteen. We gave them $5 for a taxi. They probably lived 20 steps away on foot anyway, but at least we got rid of them elegantly.
All night I felt absolutely awful, I had a fever, I was alternately hot and cold, I felt like throwing up, I dreamed about a glass cylinder full of a green-yellow liquid that's inside my body and splashes out at the slightest movement, and then about some miniature red squares that are all around me and in the morning I'll have to collect them and build a structure out of them around myself, in short a great night full of passion. Martin slept like a log.
Thursday 9. 9. Florida – Camagüey
In the morning I wanted to have a shower, but nothing doing. Yesterday a tiny trickle of water came out of the shower, today nothing at all. At least a bit from the tap to clean my teeth.
I nearly had a stroke when I came back to the room and there was Fatty, making our beds, tidying our things into our rucksacks and finally lying down on the made bed to keep us company, like. Unbelievable. She even wanted to wash my socks!!
I felt so rough (and would for a long time yet) that I just decided to ignore her, I sat down on a chair (a plastic one for a change) and pretended to be writing my diary. But I couldn't keep the thread.
When Martin had shaved, we packed up our bits and pieces and cleared off, even though the owner (actually a pretty likeable young bloke) told us we could easily stay until four.
We dragged ourselves to the market (again under fire from the shouts of cabbies, rickshaw guys and other pests) and bought bananas. We couldn't swallow anything else anyway.
At the market we ran into Skinny, who looked terribly sad when Martin told her we'd be back here in 10 days. (In 10 days our plane leaves from Havana 😉). Then she quickly walked off.
We dragged ourselves to the park, I fell asleep on a bench, Martin went to find out when our train to Camagüey, which is the next town on the way to Santiago, was leaving.
When he came back, together we faced the onslaught of young ladies, pests and brats, at about two we went to try whether they'd let us into the cigar factory. They didn't. At half two we got to the station, the train was supposed to leave at four. We sat down on a bench and waited. And waited. And waited.
The only excitement was when some brat nicked my cap, which was lying next to me, and legged it. I was so dazed that I only reacted when Martin sprinted off after him. In a while he came back without the cap (I was guarding the bags) and on top of that a lens was missing from his glasses, which had fallen off. The whole station helped him look for it, in the end somebody found it on the tracks!
I didn't even have the strength to be angry, I just kept wondering where I'd buy a new cap. Without it I'm dead in the sun instantly.
About a quarter of an hour later a young, likeable, sweaty black guy came along, accompanied by a crowd of admirers, and he was carrying my cap in his hand! With a happy smile he handed it over to us and wouldn't even take the dollar I offered him for it! For that he earned the admiration not only of us but of the entire station. The cap had already been adjusted to a little brat's head. (BTW, I'd already left one somewhere in Guatemala 🤷♂️).
And then we waited, and waited and waited. At about five I went to ask a second time what was going on. (the first time the lady behind the counter, black and beautiful, only said something about hanging Indians).
This time I gathered that the train to Camagüey was of course going, it was just slightly delayed. About 3.5 hours. And so we waited and waited again.
At about seven the lady called us over and sold us the tickets. The price honestly made us laugh and cheered us up. 1.10 PC for a train ride of 58 km!😉 Finally a price that matches local incomes. The train from here to Havana costs 9 PC. Meanwhile the train from Havana (special price for foreigners) was $8 for 100 km. Here the prices are the same for everyone.
The train arrived at half seven, it was just as disgustingly filthy as the Czech ones, but it had more comfortable seats.
After an hour and a half of creaking, screeching, banging, starting off and waiting we arrived in Camagüey. At the station we had some unidentifiable meat with rice in a pub for 25 crowns (the first meal today!), and the whole time we were eating, pests kept bugging us about whether we wanted (as usual) accommodation and girls. The chairs were plastic again, these ones made of a special plastic, so you had to sit on two stacked inside each other, otherwise a leg would snap or the seat would give way😊.
None of the pests appealed to us, so we headed off into town. After about fifty steps one of the pests did appeal to us, so we let him take us to a nearby flat and, thanks to the water not running, talked the night down to $10 instead of 15. I immediately collapsed fully clothed onto a freshly made bed and didn't come round until morning.
Friday 10. 9. Camagüey
We're staying with two nice old white grannies and one crooked senile old man. On top of that they've got two beautiful Alsatians here and seven adorable black twenty-day-old puppies.
For lunch they cooked us rice, tough but tasty meat, fried banana slices (that's normal here) and coffee.
On top of that Martin drank a whole jug of orange juice, I thought it was made from dodgy water, so I drank the nasty bought stuff from a bottle, idiot that I am.
I'm feeling better already, we're lazing around in bed, now and then I run off to the loo with the runs. Sensitive readers should skip the following sentence: clear orange juice is running out of me, because yesterday I only ate an orange and a litre of water, the orange pulp stayed untouched, it's just floating in that water.
We lolled about in bed until three, Martin was asleep and I was writing the diary. I've finally caught up again, because nothing happens in Cuba. Firstly it's boiling hot, secondly it's boiling hot, thirdly we're fed up to the back teeth with travelling (otherwise Cuba is super interesting) and on top of that we've got no guidebook, so we don't know where to head.
Today we forced ourselves into an hour-long stroll along the main street, which in the end anyway wound up with us sitting around in the park. Apart from utterly picked-clean shops, an unbelievable number of cyclists and pests of the „my friend, my friend“ type (funny thing, in Tunisia and in Turkey they yelled „My friend“ at us too, and here as well) we didn't see anything interesting. In the shops all they sell is stuff made of stainless sheet metal (ladle, oil can, tin) and then substitute castings from some sort of aluminium and lead alloy (a bike saddle, for example! J). At the chemist's they had about five kinds of medicine, so we had a laugh that they must be pretty broad-spectrum.
Then it rained, so we took shelter. After the rain we went back home. So in Camagüey absolutely, utterly nothing happened.
For dinner there was rice with meat and fried banana for a change, but this time the meat was lovely and soft and even I drank the juice.
The puppies fed along with us, a couple of them got lost on the way and started sucking my big toe. The old ladies set them on the right track.
We turned in around eleven, but we didn't feel like sleeping at all, so we blathered on in sprawling debates and cackled away until half past three in the morning. At about three (another pencil gone, I'm going mad!!). So anyway, at about three in the morning somebody started hammering on the door (they've got a solid iron knocker here!) and ringing the bell like crazy. The dogs went berserk, the whole house was up. For a while we thought it was the cops, but it wasn't.
Then I had to go to the loo again (by now with orange marmalade, not juice J) and the bitch – the mother, who I had to walk past – didn't like that one bit. Even though during the day she lets you scratch her and drag her puppies around, at night she went at me like, well, a dog. Granny had to get up and calm her down.
Saturday 11 September Camagüey – Las Tunas
Breakfast is ordered for nine in the morning, the other meals and the accommodation we paid for yesterday. The grannies wanted $3 per person for food, which for meat, bananas, orange juice etc. is a fair price…
I slept pretty badly, I'm still not fit. I dragged myself out just before ten, broken and wrecked, as if I'd been hauling cement all night. For breakfast there were two fried eggs, coffee, milk, juice, mango, bread, banana, so again brilliant.
After breakfast we did our laundry and now we're sort of waiting for a sign from above, and then we'll clear off. The best thing about our trip around Cuba is that we absolutely couldn't care less when and where we'll be. No plan, no worries. Same as with the hitchhiking. We simply got off wherever we felt like it.
After breakfast it floored me again, I fell asleep and the digesting tired me out quite a bit.
Then Martin just woke me up (another pencil goneL), saying we're going somewhere. Then he went off to cash a cheque at the exchange office we came across yesterday.
I remember a funny episode from yesterday's walk. The town's main street has such busy traffic that yesterday we couldn't get across at all. That doesn't sound odd, but the traffic is made up of – bikes! They go whizzing along in several lanes, a lot of them carrying two or three passengers, a car, a motorbike or a horse-drawn cart is a rare sight.
Martin came back from the exchange office furious, they had him sign the cheque and then informed him that the Saturday fee is 4%, that is $4!!L
We said goodbye to the grannies, the dogs and the puppies and cleared off.
BTW, the German shepherd, father of the puppies, is a Cuban national champion, they showed us a photo from a competition where he jumps over a 3.30 m obstacle, which is the 3rd best performance in Cuba. It looked unbelievable, but that fifty-kilo dog really did sail over the top edge of a wooden obstacle.
We set off at cosmic speed (2 m/min.) to the station, on the map we randomly picked a destination (Dormitorio), the smallest dot shown on the map. The train supposedly leaves at 4 (so it's enough if we turn up at 7) and costs 5 PC (10 CZK). So we had plenty of time and headed back into the centre. Martin needs a notebook.
I remember that under the commies all sorts of things were hard to get back home. But that I'd one day spend 2 hours combing through the third biggest city in Cuba just to get hold of a stupid school exercise book (any at all!), that would never have occurred to me. Everywhere we were told it probably couldn't be got, but that we should try over there and over there. In the end I gave up, sat down in the shade and waited for M. He turned up about a quarter of an hour later, triumphantly clutching a black notebook in his hand. He looked like he'd just scored a nuclear submarine with a fountain in exchange for three bananas J.
On the way to the station we bumped into the bloke from our granny landlady's place, he showed us where the market is. We wanted bananas and oranges (when we were chucking them around the classroom in primary school I had no idea I'd one day be frantically hunting for them in Cuba). They had neither bananas nor oranges. Because we'd bought a chocolate bar beforehand and because it started raining, I finally began to feel better.
At the station they sent us from window to window, in the end they dragged us off to a special building and there they wanted our passports and $11!! Considering the locals pay 5 PC and it's just a lousy train ticket, that was a bit much. We didn't even take the passports out, told them to get lost and headed off hitching.
We walked across the whole town and found the bus terminal. Well, bus… Buses practically don't exist here, when you need something to transport people in Cuba, take a 40 – 50 year old truck, muck the manure out of it (at least a bit), add a tin roof, 4 tin benches underneath it and you can start earning money in domestic bus transport. (Domestic of course, how could you run international services on an island?J)
One truckbus had just left the terminal, so we went to try our luck on the road. The only ones stopping for us were taxi drivers and pests. It looked like the locals had no idea what a raised thumb means.
We gave up and went back to the terminal. BTW, as for city transport, besides bikes and rickshaws there's horse transport here, both personal (carriages) and mass (hay wagons!J).
At the terminal another taxi driver pestered us and just couldn't grasp that we „rich“ tourists wanted to travel with the locals in a truckbus. (they grandly call it a „camión“J)
Shaking his head in disbelief he shuffled off to his 30 year old Moskvich…
Now I've spotted another local way of mass people transport – a tractor with a packed hay wagon behind it full of standing, balancing Cubans. Horror!
So when the time came, we climbed into the „camión“ with another 20 Cubans and set off towards Las Tunas (100 km). The ticket cost 12 PC (24 CZK) and the adventure began.
From the very start the ancient engine had no pull, it seemed to have only one gear, and that was fourth. Outside town it picked up another horde of Cubans, which cost us a chunk of space and I (the biggest one on the flatbed) had to squeeze in under the spare wheel sticking out from the cab roof. Again we had that good feeling of travelling together with Fidel's people, this time the speed didn't exceed that of a moderately chubby cyclist. (One of them even had to brake because of us on a hill!J)
We didn't care, we've got to survive about 9 more days in Cuba anyway, but the Cubans soon started grumbling. After about 3 km it conked out completely. The driver calmly climbed out, rummaged around in the engine for 10 min., then started it up (this truck even has a starter motor!) and got it going again. It ran just as badly as before the repair.
When it conked out for the second time, a few people got off and climbed onto another truck. In a while we overtook them, because the driver hung a jerrycan of diesel on the flatbed under the roof and ran a hose into the engine.
Those two litres of diesel in the little can soon ran out, but a colleague stopped for him and lent him a bigger can. That one was on the cab roof, almost right above my head, and every 30 km or so it had to be refilled (30 l!!).
It was already dark when we got to just before Las Tunas (we only found that out in the morning) and got off. We walked off somewhere into the bushes in the fields, unrolled our sleeping bags and turned in.
Once again there was a night full of passion. All around the sleeping bag swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, some of them so sneaky they don't even buzz L and others buzz so much you could go insane.
Inside the sleeping bag sauna temperatures, so in a while you're soaked through with sweat.
All night we alternated furious mosquito-slapping with furious sweating, always right on the edge of madness. We definitely didn't get much sleep.
Sunday 12 September Almost Las Tunas – Las Tunas
In the morning the mosquitoes disappeared, but the locals turned up instead. They'd actually been walking past all night, but they couldn't see us through the bushes.
The first ones came and discovered us at seven. There were about three of them and they were saying something about hanging Indians. In the end M. got out of them that it's „no problema“ and they invited us to their place. Then we fell asleep again. At about half past seven another batch came. One silent Cuban and one revolting fat pushy Cuban woman. She immediately sat down (almost lay down) on Martin's sleeping bag and asked him if he was married.
Then she hauled us out of the sleeping bags, saying she was inviting us to their house. She led us (on the way we passed a woman with a pig on a lead!J) to a pigsty with walls and roof made of palm leaves, 2 x 2 m in size. She dragged us inside so we could have a look. There was a bed inside!!! They live there!!L To show us they're civilised she wanted to lend us a comb. Then she combed her own hair. Apart from the bed, the comb, a metal chair and 2 jugs of stinking water there was nothing else in their house.
He sat quietly in the corner, but she was so disgustingly pushy that we soon cleared off. We walked to the village square, bought a roll with salami and sat down in a terrace bar. Now we're drying out our totally soaked sleeping bags here (sweat on the inside, dew on the outside) and writing our diaries.
An old bloke begged a still-working pencil off me (to be honest, it didn't write any more…) and was as happy with it as a little kid!
We finished drying, I begged some water for brushing my teeth into a 0.5 l bottle, we scoffed Fidel's revenge (chicken with rice, they have it everywhere), this time it only cost 18 PC for both of us! and I photographed all the types of mass people transport.
When sitting around stopped being fun, we set off towards the centre of Las Tunas. Because it was hot and on the little square in front of the pub there stood a half-full hay wagon with friendly Cubans shouting at us from it, we jumped in. That made it full (6 people) and we could set off.
We got to the pedestrian zone in the centre (even though cars drive along it here) and it's full of people. Because there's a carnival on!J Finally something's happening! Crowds of people everywhere, music, food and drink and (unfortunately?) gorgeous Cuban girls too. As usual all those beautiful dark eyes turned in our direction. It's pretty pleasant being the centre of attention of all that beauty, but also pretty dangerous. After nearly three months of abstinence, faithfulness is getting to be an ever trickier concept. Because all those local girls don't look at us just for our beautiful eyes J and white skin, but mainly they can smell dollars L. Luckily we haven't got any, and that's that.
One of the black guys in the hay wagon (pulled by a bearded bloke who looked like Mejla Elias) told nothing but funny stories about hanging Indians with pickaxes and was a right laugh. He claimed he's a boxer, so „Boxer“. That's why we asked him for advice in town and he ended up sticking with us. He showed us the market (we bought oranges) and took us into the middle of the carnival. We stood around there, enjoying the sight of dancing Cuban girls (especially 4 black girls!) and above all the fact that they always dance hardest when they notice us looking. It may sound big-headed, but go and see Cuba for yourself, that's just how it is here. Ten marriage proposals a day, you can have absolutely any girl in the whole town, her boyfriend will offer her to you himself!
We asked around about a room, because we liked it here. A girl in a little hat turned up with naked kids and offered us a place for $15, hot water, A/C, TV and all that. So just to be sure I asked whether we'd have to pour buckets over ourselves again, like in Camagüey and at the grannies', which she laughed at heartily.
Then we caught a carriage and went to have a look at it. A carriage costs from 2 PS (4 crowns) up to 10, depending on the size and the distance. Sweet. The mares are all small and skinny, but they trot along nicely. Hardly any cars, the cops ride Jawa 350s.
The little house is lovely, a room with A/C and its own bathroom, where I finally literally scraped the sweat and dirt off myself from the previous night in the wet grass and mud. Even my hair, greasy and stuck together, I finally managed to washJ
what a beautiful day today turned out to be, Cuba, I suddenly like you so much!
For dinner there were totally great plain schnitzels, a nice bean risotto, banana chips (we found out you need a special banana for them), orange juice and avocado, which by now, experienced as we are, we didn't even touch. We stuffed ourselves rotten!
The "Hat Lady" turned out to be quite funny and likeable, we chatted with her the whole time before dinner, she even offered to do our laundry. This time we weren't shy and loaded her up properly. It does make a difference to have your washing done by a woman, after all. Unfortunately it followed from that that she had dinner with us.
After dinner she went home to shower and change, so we could then head off to that carnival.
She came back and we nearly threw up. Although before she'd been dressed beautifully sexy, now she showed up in a horrible grey apron and scarily made up. Dark eye shadow and dark lipstick on a mulatta's face, that's not the real deal. The funniest thing was that the moment we set off towards the centre, she grabbed Martin by the hand!J Here they simply think that a tourist arriving in town immediately needs a woman to put him up, do his washing, bathe him, comb his hair, take him dancing and finally relieve him of his surplus sexual energy. That's just how it works here, only for us it's quite a problem to surgically remove that last phase.
Another pencil L. As we walked towards the centre I kept getting fits of laughter at how Martin was up to his ears in trouble again. On the way the Hat Lady also picked up her nine-year-old daughter (the son was already asleep) and the girl laughed like mad at our hands-and-feet Spanish. Martin's acting performances in particular reaped storms of laughter from both of them all evening.
The whole time the Hat Lady was inconspicuously milking money out of us. A lemonade for the daughter here, a beer for her there, now I need dollars for a different, better beer, but somehow I forgot to give you back those pesos, and with the beers I can buy cigarettes too, right?L
I get that on a salary of $10 a month it's a unique chance to make something on the side, but why on earth did she pick exactly two Czechs with bare arses who don't want her in bed anywayL! Because there's nobody else here…
First we went to the fair, where the little one rode on pathetic tin boats – a merry-go-round (ø about 2.5 m), then we got to the dancing centre, where, unlike in the afternoon, only a few people were dancing and on top of that no pretty girls. Apparently the crowd only shows up at ten.
The Boxer, who rode with us all the way to the house in the afternoon and then asked for 10 PC, whereupon I explained to him that a Czech student is just as poor as a Cuban boxer and that I'm not giving him anything. He left with a promise that we'd meet in the evening at the carnival. Which unfortunately came off. Martin disappeared somewhere to dance and a gang of drunk Cubans descended on me, led by the Boxer, and they desperately wanted to be friends. Mainly beer. I was holding a bottle of big lemonade and claimed that Cuban beer makes me terribly sick and that's why I don't drink it. Which is true.
The most revolting, most sozzled one, when he saw I don't understand (don't want) Spanish, started on me in German! His German was substantially harder to understand than a quarrel between two ants in the grass, but I did get Freundschaft.
I was rescued (thank God) by the little girl, who dragged me away by the hand, over to Martin and the Hat Lady. We got to another disco (also represented by nothing but a sound system under a tree J) and there we danced for a while and then sat at a little table.
When the music stopped playing for lack of interest, we set off back to the main centre.
There it was already going wild. Crowds and crowds of dancing Cubans on the road in front of the park, now and then torn apart by a slowly passing truck.
Just as I'd seen a few gorgeous black girls there in the afternoon, now there was no special beauty around. True, I had a great view over the tiny Cubans, but that only meant the Boxer and co. found me again and the dreadful hand-shaking and the annoying drunken Spanish started all over. They kept pushing that they'd get me some chica and couldn't grasp that I want to pick a dance partner out of the crowd myself.
It was a lovely carnival, Cubans really know how to shake it (Cuban girls especially, and from a tender age at that), but when the Boxer's pestering grew beyond a bearable level, I interrupted Martin's merry dancing and we pushed our way out of the crowd.
Independently of each other, the little girl and the Hat Lady both showed us the arena where bullfights take place in December. All day they've also been luring us to come on 17 September, saying there'll be a super huge carnival here with the best Cuban bands taking part. Today's one is only a Carnaval infantil, i.e. for the brats.
We considered it for a while, but when at night we did the final tally of today's costs, we decided to start living the life of hermits. The moment we find ourselves in anybody's company, we become milk cows whether we like it or not. They simply don't get that we're not Yanks who don't mind some $20.
We got into a carriage which, as usual, we paid for again. We were already looking forward to bed (last night had left its mark on us), but no such luck. We're not milked enough yet, we stopped in front of the local pub for the well-off. Air conditioning, American biscuits, pizza, Fidel's Revenge and other dishes, the Hat Lady talked about it with a fire in her eyes, for a Cuban such a selection is an unbelievable miracle.
we'd had enough by then, we only swallowed one beer for her and two packs of biscuits for the little one. When she was eating them, I quite envied her. Little chocolate biscuits for almost a dollar I wouldn't buy for myself. And she'd already had two packs of sweets in her bag before that.
In the end we walked home from there on foot, we rated today as quite interesting and worthwhile, I'm writing my sceptical version into the diary only after adding up the final costs, so it's pretty distorted. In reality we quite enjoyed it. I mainly liked the carnival in the afternoon, Martin enjoyed the evening enormously from the moment when, by the merry-go-rounds, he explained to the Hat Lady that he can't and doesn't want to have anything with her, after that he was completely happy to be rid of that burden.
When we got to the house, we exchanged addresses (supposedly I'd send her some photos) and she left without a word or any hint of anything. We slept wonderfully, no heat, no mosquitoes, no sagging bed like everywhere before.
Monday 13. 9. Las Tunas - La Boca
We got up at eleven, washed our socks and crawled out of the room. In a while there was lunch, bean risotto for a change, identical steaks (6 of them again), plus spaghetti with sauce, bread, butter, mango, juice, simply food for ten people. (Since morning the Hat Lady had been hanging around the house again!!.) That's the tactic, they bring in stuff for ten, we pay for ten and then they'll have something to eat for a week. The Cuban nation has an amazing milking talent, they do it with complete elegance.
Over lunch we had a debate on the theme of how we can never really make friends with anyone in Cuba, the way we managed so brilliantly in Mexico, because a Cuban can't look at us any other way than through a dollar bill. A pretty sad economic situation for a nation that was evidently once rich. Judging by the gorgeous (once) colonial buildings and the American road cruisers from the fifties, Cuba has known good times. I wonder whether it'll ever know them again…
Now we're getting ready to go to the sea in the north, of course they pushed a car with a driver for hire on us, they don't get that we want to go by truck-bus.
We said goodbye in the house (the elderly, slightly plump landlady offered Martin her cheek for a kiss, as is the custom here, and he shook her right hand in a manly fashion, ostentatiously ignoring the cheek! That made me laugh quite a lot) and set off to catch a horse-taxi-haycart to the truck-bus station.
One to Puerto Padre was just leaving, but it was already too full. One nice lady selflessly! (for the first time in Cuba!!!) advised us that we have to get seat reservations and she also helped us get them. Then she even offered us sweets!
Before the next truck-bus in our direction arrived, I walked to the nearby market for oranges and bananas. There some pest bugged me insanely again, he kept wanting a banana off me and kept touching me, which I can't stand. On the way, of course, three hundred shouting pests.
The journey by truck-bus was quite entertaining again, for Cubans we're a real rarity in this means of transp. and they like us. Once again we fought the battle of not looking at those beautiful girls who were watching us
In Puerto Padre a slightly plump lady again pointed us to a bus that was just leaving and heading straight to the sea to La Boca. We hopped into it and the fare cost about half of nothing and you threw it into a tin box. We had no coins, they didn't want notes and lo and behold, one Cuban handed me 1 peso and wanted nothing for it! And today we'd been claiming with certainty that no Cuban will ever give us anything for free!
La Boca is again a heap of poor unplastered low houses, but this time on the shore of the gorgeously clean azure Caribbean, palms on the shore, white sand and above all, no crowds of tourists.
Right from the bus stop you could see an island with beaches, about 100 metres from the shore, and the ferry had just arrived. One pest still managed to bug us, offering accommodation for $30, but we still caught the ferry. It cost 1.2 PC, that gimp of a fare collector took about $0.60 out of my palm, which is 12 PC! That annoyed me again.
On the other shore I wanted to go straight to the beach, but Martin got talking with another pest about a room. He took us to a little house at the other end of the island, where there was a nice white owner who wanted $20. We talked him down to $15, then we also talked down his cook friend, so food was ordered for $6 and not for $10 and so things were looking better. Our mood was lousy, it improved (significantly) only after a swim in the amazing sea. The beach ten steps from the house, nobody anywhere, transparent warm water where even I, a shiverer, can vegetate for an hour if I like, and that was almost eight in the evening.
After the swim we had a shower and sat down at the table by a heap of magazines. In a while the landlord, Alberto, came, poured us Cuban white rum straight away into proper glasses and got talking with us. He's a chemical engineer, an intelligent man with refined manners, about 50, and drinking with him goes pretty well. When his mate brought dinner as well, the situation was perfect. Rice with omelette and banana chips tasted excellent, then Alberto added out of his own stock Hemingway's favourite fish \"Mandy\", which was excellent. The whole evening ran beautifully over rum, Alberto praised our Spanish and let us write an entry in his guest book.
He hadn't had any Czechs here yet. We also got his card, so he'd have more Czechs here.
Long after the last drop of rum was drunk we were still chatting away, in the background the TV showed pictures of some communist speeches (including Fidel's), Alberto was waiting for a series. The speeches were running, just to be sure, on all (two) Cuban channels and I didn't even last until the end of them. At one point I went to the room to get something and suddenly there was this magical glow from the bed, it sucked me in completely and I didn't wake up until morning.
Martin sat with Alberto until half past twelve practising Spanish.
Tuesday 14. 9. La Boca
I woke up pretty early, so I washed, devoured an orange, leafed through all the magazines Alberto has here and then I wanted to set off on a photographic walk. But then our personal cook came and brought breakfast. This time he didn't really excel, just bread and an egg omelette, coffee with milk.
Martin talked me into not ordering another meal until six in the evening!, he said something about lobsters and $3/person. After breakfast I set off around the island, Martin stayed home.
The island is pretty big (if it isn't a peninsula) and, as is usual in Cuba, full of contrasts.
Azure blue sea, white sand, palm trees, a tree growing straight out of the sea and a filthy pig grazing on the beach! Goats a bit further off.
Gorgeous coastline, like out of a travel agency ad, but lined with wooden half-collapsed shacks. In the middle of the island a gigantic unfinished concrete monstrosity, it was probably meant to be a hotel. We've got plenty of monuments to communism like that back in Czechia too.
I walked along the beaches with their (concrete) sunshades and got all the way to a settlement with a few rows of prefab houses. In front of one building a pile of people were sitting and waiting for something. I don't know whether they were staring at me because of my swimming trunks or simply because I'm white. Either way it makes me nervous. On the way back I bought a drink, again they only take dollars.
At the house we changed into our swimming trunks and jumped straight back into the sea. Because we're close to the sea on the mainland side, a fair current started just a little way from the shore. We always let ourselves be carried one way and then came back through the shallows in the eddy. A nice little circuit. We messed about in there for maybe 4 hours straight again without getting out! Even my cold-prone carcass can enjoy the water here for several hours without turning blue! Amazing. The sea here is beautifully clear all the way down, white sand and above all – no people!! Today I swam naked for maybe an hour, because it's just bliss.
After a reading break on the terrace in front of the house we set off for a more distant beach, where there was no current, no waves and no people (dangerous Cuban girls), so it was boring there.
We went back to the house again and Alberto had just arrived. Poor guy had to go to Puerto Padre to report our presence to the authorities. Yesterday he carefully copied out our passports, filled in a stack of papers and receipts and now he had to go into town on top of that.
For the legal right to rent out a room he pays $216 a month!!!, which means he has to have it occupied 11 days a month, just for this flat-rate tax. On top of that they take another 10 % of his income, so actually more. According to the guest book we're only the second visitors here in September, and we even talked him down to $15. I have absolutely no idea how it can pay off for him. He didn't want to hear a word about not filling in the papers.
Now he's buzzing around us with a broom and a bucket, before that he washed our dishes and he even brought us salad from town. Somebody's simply looking after us like family again. Brilliant.
The fateful attraction got the better of me again and I collapsed into bed. A corpse in an instant.
After about an hour I came round and I look over at the next bed – a corpse. Gravity got Martin too.
I dreamt that I'd already been in Prague for two days and hadn't called anyone. Then it hit me that I'm not in Prague, but only in SF.
I left Martin to his own dreams (we dream about home more and more, now we even dream out loud during the day). I only found more shacks, pigs grazing everywhere (that's not a mistake, they really do graze, eat grass and dig in the ground), the locals mostly holed up inside. When I did meet somebody, they answered my greeting with surprise, but nobody bothered me.
On the beach by the only open stall I was approached by that pest who was pushing some accommodation on us yesterday. He was asking where we ended up staying, I brushed him off in Czech.
Dinner was already waiting on the kitchen table, this time it was brought by the cook's wife, probably. She wasn't pretty enough to be dangerous, plus she was pretty standoffish. But dinner, octopus stew, rice and fried bananas, was absolutely great. There was more of it than we could eat, so we gave a third to Alberto. At first he refused, but once it was left over, he wolfed it down.
In the octopus stew there was, firstly, excellent meat from the body, then chopped tentacles of all sizes and thicknesses and then loads of tiny little eyes from 2 mm to 7 mm across, in which we later discovered suckers. The whole thing was terribly good, you just mustn't examine it too closely. Some particularly thin and twisted tentacles I had to leave. Luckily it was done with garlic, which I like, and the rice here is traditionally excellent.
After dinner M. nipped out for more lemonade and then we jumped into the sea together, watched the sunset and after about an hour I walked those ten steps back to the house (by then in the dark).
Now we're watching the communist news here, interrupted by the interrupted power supply.
It's interesting how identical the course of the news here is compared to the communist news back in Czechia. At the start a jingle (music similar to ours) and alternating images: a combine harvester, cheering children, a worker, Fidel, children at school, a smoking factory, a cosmonaut. Doesn't that remind you of something?
Well and the news itself is a classic. Parliament – Fidel speaks, everybody claps. Then they vote, without exception everybody in favour. Next item – cut to history, footage from the revolution, young Fidel. Then footage from today's school – everybody gets free education these days. Except they've got nothing to eat and after three years of English (compulsory) at school nobody, NOBODY in Cuba understands even YES, NO!!
And to finish, a twenty-minute speech by a young promising comrade, full of words like: revolution, victory, counter-revolution, imperialism, capital, etc…. Then rows of numbers, percentages, achievements, sheer propaganda. Makes you want to puke. That young successful communist is the foreign minister, he's slagging off the USA and he's been rambling for an hour already!! Same thing on the other channel.
We gave up and went to sleep.
Wednesday 15 September La Boca – 78 km before Santiago (Kontra maestro)
In the morning they brought breakfast, for a change the same as yesterday.
A morning dip is refreshing, so we duly refreshed ourselves and had a shower on top. We said goodbye to Alberto, paid up what we owed him for the room and the rum and set off towards Santiago.
Since we got up early, we were standing at the ferry before nine. This time the ferry was a small boat and it came immediately. Unfortunately, whereas last time the ferry cost 1 PC, now they wanted $1. Definitely more discrimination against tourists, a Cuban wouldn't have a dollar for the ferry.
On the other side it's no longer called La Boca, but El Socucho. From there we needed a bus to Puerto Padre. We waited for it for over two hours, it was already starting to be a disgusting heat and the mosquitoes were eating us alive. In the end a truckbus came.
In Puerto Padre a truckbus to Las Tunas left almost without any waiting, but it had such cunningly designed benches that basically the next row was sitting on our laps. Their bench was higher and we had our legs under it. Horrible. On top of that somebody in there stank appallingly and the sun was beating straight onto our backs. Our bench was only good for half a backside, which is already totally bruised anyway. In Las Tunas I had to take an Ibuprofen, it made me feel sick.
We thought (naively) that from Las Tunas something would go straight to Santiago, so we asked about Santiago at the terminal. Nothing. Until somebody told us we had to go to the big terminal on the other side of town.
Since the last means of transport we hadn't tried yet is a rickshaw, we hopped into the first rickshaw driver's seats and off we rolled through town.
A bus to Santiago does leave from the second terminal, but at 10:30 at night and for us it costs about $9. Considering that the trucks had cost us a total of 3.60 PC (about 7 crowns) since the morning, we reject this bus and take another rickshaw back to the first terminal.
Totally famished we walked into the station pub, which was completely empty and the chairs were dusty, as if nobody had been in there for ages. They had no menu, apparently it's hanging outside on a board. I went out to have a look and picked macaroni for $3.
They brought a plate of chopped-up piping, a bit of sauce on top and a tiny bit of minced meat. We gobbled it down like hungry dogs and thought about how 120 crowns could be eaten away better, but that we're in Cuba after all. The waitress (they've got five of them here!!) brought the bill, which said 12! Well that surprised me and I asked, 12 of what? She was surprised that I was surprised and said pessos kubanos! So the meal cost 6 crowns and the lemonade another 6 crowns. Well, for six crowns it was excellent… We had another lemonade to celebrate.
At the terminal we bought our reservations like old hands (0.20 crowns) and waited for a truck to Holguín.
So we're standing in the queue, well, the huddle, for the truckbus and suddenly I look and this very young, almost blonde girl next to me has something wrapped in a piece of bedsheet and she's holding it in her arms. Dear God, surely she isn't squeezing into that rattletrap with a baby?
The shock came up on top, when she really did sit down next to us with the baby and started breastfeeding it. That still wouldn't be so bad, but when she unwrapped the baby from the sheet for a moment, it turned out it was at most a few days old!!! It was still all shrivelled and red, they don't even show a baby like that when there's a birth in a film! She was accompanied by her husband and a daughter of maybe four, the poor woman still had a big belly under her dress, it hadn't had time to go down after the birth… This little family is obviously going home from the maternity hospital!!! What kind of country is it that forces people to do things like this? Bloody socialism, people have nothing to eat, all the girls are willing to prostitute themselves with foreigners just for the slimmest chance of marrying their way out (Fidel will let them do that..), people travel packed onto the beds of falling-apart 50-year-old trucks like cattle, a white person gets pestered by 50 – 100 people a day, just so they can get at least half a dollar. Horrible. The whole way I watched the sleeping newborn on that girl's breast and another, older one being breastfed by a black woman at the other end of the truck bed and it made me sad.
The truck bounces and jolts so much that even a grown person's spine has a hard time with it. What does that do to the spine of a one-week-old baby?
After about half an hour of the journey it also started raining. Most truckbuses do have a metal roof (on some of them you ride standing on the bed of a dump truck) but the rain gets in through the side openings anyway.
Martin and I immediately got up and let the girl with the baby have our drier spots. I climbed onto the flat bit above the cab and Martin took her place. We admired the bravery with which the poor woman was putting up with it all. In a little while they got off.
On the flat bit above the cab I settled in comfortably and enjoyed travelling lying down.
In Holguín we got hungry again, so we piled into the station restaurant. The lady behind the counter was terribly surprised that we wanted to eat right there, but the risotto looked good, so we had it. It was pretty good, especially for those 6 crowns. Then we had a roll with smoked meat, visited the repulsive local toilets and a truckbus to Bayamo had already pulled in.
We stood in a queue of about a hundred people and by the time half of them had disappeared inside, I'd have bet my left leg it was definitely full. We were standing last in the queue and we still fitted in! Inside it was like a proper cattle truck. People sat in four rows, packed so tight that they had to hold their shoulders at an angle, and on top of that two more rows of standing people miraculously balanced between them.
We were standing on the boarding platform and another 5 people who miraculously squeezed in forced us to stand completely at an angle. There was nowhere to move our legs, so it bent us over the people sitting down. Two poor souls were flapping along behind the truck, hanging on the outside, holding on just by the bars. Right after we got on, our backpacks were taken over by a nice old black lady, who looked after them carefully the whole way. She also asked us where we were from (about 30 pests had asked us that today already, but she was the first one we answered) and when we told her, from behind us came: \"Jak se máte?\" I'd been expecting from the start that it had to happen! A young Cuban guy who worked in a factory in Gottwaldov from 1983 to 87! His name is Miguel, his Czech was pretty rough at first, but gradually it came back to him. He said they're a bunch of followers of the Seventh-Day Church or something and that they're just coming back from a congress. Some of them were mentally handicapped, others just believers. One apathetic old man and a screeching, demented, sexless creature got off after a while, so the old lady sat us down in their place. Everybody was so nice to us, they pried through Miguel about what and how (faith, wife, kids, school and so on) and in the end we were supposed to sing for them. I didn't really feel like it, 60 Cubans hanging off a truck listening to my singing isn't a pretty thought, but Martin immediately launched into \"Život je jen náhoda\". The clapping and the success right after the first verse (thankfully) encouraged him and he sang \"Na Okoři cesta\" without me. He had these solos for the Cuban truck-bus. Luckily it was already dark, so you couldn't see how embarrassed I was about his loud but appalling singing
Then the Cubans sang for us in return, so the journey passed nicely. It had been dark for ages and on top of that it started to rain. This time we had a seat by the window (if you can call a hole in the sheet metal that) and so the rain came down on our backs. To keep the backpack from getting soaked through the hole in the roof one of the Christian women lent me a piece of plastic sheeting, and after a while Martin pulled out a tarp. About five Cubans held it up so that we and the old lady could hide underneath, but we got wet anyway.
In Bayamo we got off and said goodbye to Miguel, who had already arranged a ride to Santiago in a private car for us beforehand.
We stayed at the station with one fanatical woman and her kid, one mental case and a fairly intelligent chick (we rated her beauty at the level of \"moderately dangerous\").
After about half an hour a genuinely slightly barmy white guy turned up and crammed us into a huge American car from 1955. It had a beautiful red leather interior (the remains of one), inside it was as big as a living room (all 7 of us + a kid fitted in) and above all it was incredibly comfortable. It went like the devil, manual gear shift under the steering wheel.
Unfortunately I got a bad ticket, rear right by the window, which hadn't been there for a couple of decades. The ride was a bit like on a motorbike. The guy drove us all the way to a little town 70 km before Santiago and even arranged a bed for us in a hotel and now hold on to something – for 26 PC a night!!!! For a night in a room with a shower we each paid 25 crowns! If it had been like this from the start, like today (food for 5 crowns, hotel for 25 crowns), travelling around Cuba would have been a doddle.
it was quite a big hotel, called Kolonial and it clearly remembered substantially better times. On the first floor it had a nice foyer with little tables, high ceilings, a colonial building.
We chucked our stuff into the room, shut ourselves in there and roared with joy at how we'd once again managed to brilliantly snag the Cuban price.
Damn, I've run out of diary again!
We're always pleased when we get something for the same price as the Cubans, but usually the price for tourists is the same alright – only in dollars, so 20 times higher.
I remember two more incidents from today's travelling. In Las Tunas, even before the mum with the newborn, I saw an about hundred-year-old granny getting on (well, getting on, that's a strong word), she could barely walk on her own and they simply had to lift her up onto the truck bed! It seemed pretty horrific to me, but compared to the newborn it's not all that terrible.
The second incident happened in Holguín, where an elderly gentleman was getting on, up at the top his hand somehow slipped and he threw his heavy back down into the crowd waiting under the truck-bus. It caught him, and on top of that the old man was dangling from his bag, which had got hooked up top. He immediately shoved himself back up, the whole thing wasn't even all that funny…
Most truck-buses have an excellent signal for the driver so he knows where to stop. It's an iron bar hanging on a chain right at the very end of the bed and you just bang it against the bed. Some of them have it electric, on a button!
Once we'd unpacked (which for us means pulling out the toilet paper and standing the backpack in the corner, because we've got two T-shirts, two pairs of pants and two pairs of socks with us), we set off to have a look around the town.
We were looking for some food, after today's experience we had our eye on something hot, say for 5 PC. First we saw the ubiquitous little glass cases on legs where bits of pork sunbathe all day with the pork lying right next to them, and we gave that a miss. We were pestered a bit by a one-legged beggar, pretty young, but we escaped from him into a bar. They had nice wooden stools upholstered with cowhide that springs nicely (what a relief after the metal benches in the truck-buses!)
They didn't have any food, so at least we had some Cuban rum, which we'd taken a liking to at Alberto's. They brought it along with coffee, which is sweet, so we drank that too. Then we had another round and ordered one for the one-legged guy as well, who'd pushed in after us, but the waitress brutally threw him out. We had to explain it to her three times before she got that we were ordering rum for that one-legged simple-minded beggar who's hanging about by the entrance, staring sadly inside and letting out inarticulate screeches reminiscent of a braking digger.
We asked around where you can get something to eat and then ran past One-Leg, who of course wanted to be friends (unlike us!).
We did find the pub, but closed. So in the end we had to settle for a roll with meat that had been merrily sunbathing in the sun all day. But when you have meat anywhere here, it comes from the market anyway, where it lies all day on a filthy table in the sun until somebody buys it. And probably for several days, at that. To disinfect the meat we went back to the bar and washed it down with another four rums. We ordered one for the guitarist too, who came over to play for us.
They served that excellent Cuban white rum in little coffee cups and for those nine rums and two coffees we paid about 30 crowns! That's how I like you, Cuba – food for 6 crowns, hotel for 50 crowns, get yourself hammered on quality rum for three fivers and treat half the village on top of it.
On the way to the hotel I gave One-Leg a peso, at reception I begged a second towel, savoured the bliss of a clean body (the hot water didn't run, but what do you want for fifty)
Slept great.
Thursday 16 September
78 km before Santiago (Contramaestre) - Santiago - La Palma
In the morning we walked straight to the terminal and set off for Santiago without breakfast. Because time is pressing now (hurray, we'd been looking forward to that) we're giving Santiago just one day and heading back in the evening.
Santiago was one big mistake. Hot as a pig, absolutely nothing, but nothing to see and of course expensive. First we spent an hour looking for the internet, which took us through the whole boring centre made up of one-storey hovels and three parks, then they annoyed us at the bank, because first they didn't believe Martin's signature and then they wanted a 3.5% fee. That's unheard of, everywhere else in the world they cash traveller's cheques for free. We went to two more banks and in the end changed it for 2.5%, but she still robbed us of half a dollar. Welcome to Cuba!
We sat in front of the museum for over an hour, fending off hordes of pests (casa particular seems to be the local greeting for foreigners) and writing our diaries. I gave my matches to one old boy with a cigar and one woman with her shopping flat-out begged an empty pop bottle off us!! A plastic one!!
In the end I got talking to two Brits and we had a good old moan to each other about the Cuban pests and the price discrimination against tourists in Cuba. They were pretty amused by our way of travelling by truck, they'd come from Havana in a rental car. I opened with: \"You look like you speak English!?\" and he goes \"I should hope so, I'm English\"
Now I've remembered another incident from yesterday's truck. When we were leaving Holguín, after about 3 km the truck-bus stopped, a few people jumped out (us too) and everyone was talking about money and secrets. A guy climbed out of the cab and collected another 10 PC from everybody, even though they'd already paid him 3 PC at the terminal (we miraculously dodged those 3 PC, but not the ten). One Cuban didn't like this untaxed surcharge, so he carried on on foot to general laughter and cheering
The continuation of the sad story from Santiago. There are three interesting things in Santiago. Gran Piedra mountain, where Fidel once fought something out, 1950 m above sea level, 24 km from the centre. Then some holy statue or whatever, 40 km from the centre. And the third is a nice castle, 8 km from the centre. The price of an unlicensed taxi is about 1-2$ per kilometre! There's one bus a day, at 7:00 in the morning (to the mountain). So Santiago definitively got on our nerves, we decided to buy fruit and water and get out towards Havana. At least we'll have the feeling we're heading home. For the last week we haven't been thinking about anything else anyway. Plus we'll (hopefully) make the carnival in Las Tunas.
We were walking through a narrow little street in the centre where they had beautiful statuettes and groups of figures carved out of wood. I asked about a bigger one (30 cm). The usual trick, price 50 pesos. When I asked whether pesos cubanos, then apparently no, 50 dolares.
When I went past the second time, on the way back, I had another look at them, this time smaller ones at a different stall. It was a small black pregnant woman and a skinny black man, both naked, nicely done. That was too much for me and I talked it down from $12 apiece to $18 for the pair. Now I've got one more worry – not to break them.
We were still missing that fruit, so we asked a guy in the street where the market was. A passing old man heard it and said he'd take us there, that it's over there. Then he led us through the entire town, maybe 5 km over scorching asphalt in direct sun, with those packs on our backs, until our gratitude gradually turned into rage. When we finally got to the market, we ditched the old boy quickly (the whole time he'd been dragging a sack of something on his back!). He headed our way once more after that, but then thought better of it.
at the market we bought excellent bananas (about 1.10 crowns each), one pineapple for 30 crowns (which later proved to be unripe) and above all an amazing mango, about two kilos. They only had tiny oranges and mainly we had quite enough weight already. We hadn't eaten all day (we're experts at that by now, especially in Cuba) so we ran (well, in that heat crawled) to a nearby park, devoured a few bananas and split the mango in half. Since up to now we'd only known mango sliced up, we had no idea there's a whopping great stone in the middle. That's why it wouldn't really cut in half, but we managed. Then we spooned it out and smacked our lips like crazy.
Once we'd gathered our strength in the park and fought off a few attacks from pests, we set off on another crusade across baking Santiago. Cuba has socialism and that's why the laws of nature don't apply here. So although Santiago is on the only bit of high ground on the island, it has the highest temperatures.
When, on the verge of death, we swam (in our own sweat) to the terminal we'd arrived at in the morning, they informed us that it doesn't go from there but from a different terminal, over there and over there. Of course, why should the bus to Bayamo leave from the same terminal it arrives at, right? Welcome to Cuba!
Before we found something resembling a second terminal, about two hundred and thirty pests managed to pester us. In a weak moment we let one of them in on the fact that we wanted to go to Bayamo and they passed the information around by word of mouth, so about a hundred pests offered us a taxi to Bayamo, from 30 down to 5 dollars. On top of that the drivers of the horse carts kept whistling and hissing at us (a local custom, somebody's forever whistling at us like at dogs).
We kept looking for a truck to Bayamo and everyone unanimously claimed it doesn't go until tomorrow and we should take a taxi. A lie!
In the end they sent us off to some corner, which was complete rubbish, a narrow little street with no cars, full of people living there and kids running around. I was having another one of my rage fits and I wanted to smack somebody (mind you, only wanted to, I've never actually done it!!). So when I was walking past a bunch of brats and one of them chucked a decent-sized rock at me, I blew up, marched furiously towards them and swore at them really filthily and threatened to wring their necks. In Czech. They understood me perfectly well and legged it.
We went back to the crossroads that looked most like a terminal and arranged with one rickshaw guy that he'd get us a car for $5. He said in 20 minutes.
We sat down in the hall and I cooled off a bit. Then we headed beyond the crossroads, towards Bayamo, where loads of people were already hitching. I flopped down there in the grass, in the shade under a boulder, chatted with one beautiful young lady (she was going our way too) and calmly waited, lying there, for a truck to stop at the road (50 m from me) and pick people up. The young lady was handling it the same way. Santiago is actually pretty chilled after all.
Across the crossroads there was a fairly interesting communist monument. A huge statue of a hero on a horse (some Mayos or whatever, surprisingly it wasn't Fidel) and right next to it a load of enormous rusty iron ingots jutting into the sky, the tallest one as big as a tower block. That rust expresses the state of their glorious revolution exactly. Hunger, poverty, dirt and rust. Opposite there was also Fidel painted on a billboard, standing in the bushes gazing into the distance. A billboard in Cuba means somebody hand-paints something colourful onto sheets of tin and then rivets it onto a building.
Another interesting phenomenon I observed while lying in the grass was Santiago's version of the Havana metrobus for 300 people. You take an old articulated Ikarus, throw out the engine and the guts, weld it onto a truck trailer and drag it along with a truck. True, it then sits at a slant, but the Cuban people, thrilled by the revolution, can surely put up with anything. It looks roughly like this.
After about an hour and a half we got on a truckbus which, wonder of wonders, was heading for the centre of Santiago. According to the young lady conductor it would turn around at the terminal and go to La Palma, which is halfway to Bayamo.
And so it was. That was our third time today at that inner terminal.
We got to La Palma so late that it was a case of hotel and sleep.
Unfortunately we didn't manage to get off at the square and rode all the way to the terminal, about 2 km away. After yesterday's experience with the $1 hotel we headed back to try the hotel on the square. It was full. Apparently we should go to the terminal!!! and hire a taxi to the Mirador hotel, another 2.5 km from the terminal.
Cuba is really starting to get on my nerves, but once we'd had a meat pizza and a sweet ring doughnut I felt better again. Plus the whole lot cost fifteen crowns.
We found a black-market taxi driver and that Cuban swine wanted five dollars for those 2.5 km. We'd rather walk, then. In the end he loaded us into his 30-year-old Moskvich for $2.
Hotel Mirador is a few bungalows in a park, the miracle of equal prices for tourists didn't happen, they wanted $15 off us. At least there was aircon, but no soap and no bog roll.
Friday 17 September, La Palma – Las Tunas
In the morning we needed to get back to La Palma to catch a truckbus to Bayamo there.
The old girl at reception called us a taxi which never, ever came. So we set off on foot in that blazing heat and hitched along the way.
Surprisingly a van stopped for us pretty soon and took us on the flatbed. That's the first time in Cuba somebody's been willing to help us for free! After ten days!
There were already two lads and one beautiful black girl on the back, and she chatted with us in English. She was mad about my washed-out socks drying on my backpack. I've only got one thick pair with me, so I didn't give them to her.
They dropped us about 20 km before Bayamo, in the middle of nowhere. We hadn't eaten anything since morning, but an orange in the backpack saved us. Not for the first time.
After about a quarter of an hour a smaller truckbus stopped for us and took us to Bayamo for 1 peso. The journey from Santiago to Bayamo (about 90 km) took 22 hours!
In Bayamo we stood (or rather sat) through a decent queue for seat tickets, but after 1.5 hours we were already sitting in a truckbus to Holguín. Two young girls settled in opposite us, one of whom had absolutely gorgeous breasts, tucked braless into a short T-shirt. Somehow I wasn't able to look anywhere else the whole way.
The girls got the wrong idea (no wonder) and wanted to get to know us (unlike us…). Roll on home, Cuba is a dangerous place.
In Holguín we popped into the familiar snack bar, the old lady remembered us and brought us risotto again. The girls waited for us a while longer, then gave up and went home.
We sat down outside and waited for the truckbus to Las Tunas. About 15 other people waiting along with us. After about an hour it occurred to us to ask what was what and a bloke said nothing would probably be going today, that we should try a taxi. But apparently we shouldn't pay more than $3 for it. The taxi driver (black, not so much in colour as in trade) wanted about $40. When I snapped at him, asking why it's $3 for a Cuban and $40 for us, he waffled something about problems with the police. In Cuba it's forbidden to carry foreigners in a private car.
So we went hitching, it was already getting dark and the carnival in Las Tunas, with the best Cuban bands taking part, was getting into full swing.
Loads of cars stopped for us, the cheapest wanted $10. You're getting nothing from us, you greedy gits. In the end an Avia truck took us on the flatbed, saying they weren't going all the way to Las Tunas but in that direction. They dropped us after 1 km, surprisingly wanted nothing and drove off. It was a crossroads outside town, where about 50 other people were waiting with us to hitch to Tunas. All off to the carnival, presumably.
When the conductor spotted us among the crowd of Cubans he sent us up front into the cab. Just as I'd felt discriminated against before (because Cubans aren't allowed to pick us up hitching), now I felt bad towards them again. Luckily the cab was already full, so we went back to the flatbed.
The bad luck with Cuban trucks is that the roofs are made for titchy Cubans. True, standing up we can breathe better, but on the other hand we have to stand bent right over.
After about an hour of the journey a seat became free, so the Cubans immediately kindly herded us into it. Whenever they see we're using their transport or eating their food (i.e. nothing special for tourists for dollars…) they're terribly nice and kind to us.
Right after we sat down a bunch of dolled-up gorgeous Cuban girls got on, and the one with the biggest bust ended up standing right in front of me. The crowd gradually pushed her so close (breasts against my head, thighs against my knees) that I started getting pretty hot.
The Cuban sitting next to me noticed and immediately offered her to me. He said we should just grab her arse, that it's normal…
We got off at the terminal in Las Tunas and headed for the centre. The carnival procession was already in full flow, loads of dancing couples were going by (practically naked girls, as usual) and punchy music.
We needed to get rid of our backpacks, so we let some lowlife drag us to a \"casa particular\". Two were full (the town is packed with krauts, all of them wrapped around local beauties. No wonder, compared with any local girl the average German woman is a floor rag), so we ditched him, I dug out the card from the old lady from last time and we set off by rickshaw for our destination.
The poor guy slogged a terrible distance with us in the dark and then asked (wonder of wonders!) for 4 pesos! (8 crowns). That's the very first Cuban (after ten days) who isn't trying to rip us off!! He got twenty as a reward, because he even waited until we'd showered and took us back to the centre for the carnival.
This time we didn't want to get tangled up with local lowlifes (e.g. the Boxer) or local girls (e.g. Hat Thirtysomething) in any way. We bought some local treats (a bread roll with chopped pork off a whole piglet lying next to it – yum, roast bananas and so on) and above all a bottle of white Cuban rum. Kitted out like this we sat down on a bench by the main crowd-drag, watched the girls (and there were plenty of them, and what girls!) and killed the rum at cosmic speed.
When we were about halfway through, the old geezer sitting next to us started chatting with us. At first we ignored him (just like his ugly granddaughter (about 20), who was gawping dumbly at Martin like at a holy picture), but in the end he got us by starting to speak decent Russian!! The first Cuban who speaks Russian!
He wanted nothing, he just talked with us about women while we watched them undisturbed and it was lovely.
Once we looked round a bit too long at one gorgeous black girl in a super-short clingy little minidress and we were in trouble. From then on \"the Little One\" started walking past us more and more often and closer and closer, smiling at us the whole time, and we managed to ignore her less and less. In the end she walked along the bench behind us, so we got a good look at her black knickers (that skirt of hers was really short).
The old man finally couldn't take it any more and called her over to us, and of course she sat straight down with us. She spoke a bit of English and right at the start she made a fundamental mistake. She gave away her age. Her little body and her moves were gorgeous, like a grown woman, but she was, brace yourselves, 14. I'd never have guessed in my life.
Since there are two of us, she quickly rustled up a friend. At first we tactfully turned down two of them, in the end we let one sit with us. She was another extra special piece. Skinny as anything, beautiful hair and eyes, she looked about 16. It immediately slipped out of her that she's 23 and has, wait for it, an eight-year-old son!! She gave birth at fourteen… In a while the rum was finished, the conversation was going brilliantly. With the old man we spoke Russian, Czech between ourselves, English to \"the Little One\" and Spanish to \"Titch\".
The Little One, who'd caught us, had the right to choose. She picked Martin (she simply sat down pretty tight next to him), which put me out quite a bit. That's the third time Martin got preference! The old man immediately explained it to me in detail. Martin looks far more exotic to Cuban girls (blue eyes, really short hair), whereas apparently I look like white Cubans. Thanks a lot. Plus in Cuba, and that's the main problem, long hair isn't in fashion, apparently only crazy artists and singers have it. And I haven't had time for a barber for about five months, so my slightly wavy bob (in Cuba mostly dirty, greasy and tangled) is growing down to my shoulders. Well, that doesn't cheer me up either.
When we'd finished the rum we demanded cigars, so that the Cuban atmosphere would be complete (Cuban rum, Cuban carnival, Cuban girls and a Cuban cigar!!). Unfortunately there were none anywhere.
The Little One was dragging us off to dance somewhere with terrific determination, until in the end she managed it. We took two rickshaws to the second entertainment centre, about 2 km away. A different band was playing there and there were crowds of people again. We messed about and danced, the girls here really have a talent for movement and sex appeal drips off them already at fourteen. The old man obviously wasn't with us any more, but before that he'd been trying to convince us that nowhere else, but in Cuba, fourteen is the most suitable age. Luckily we didn't believe him, and besides, giving in to Cuban temptations two days before going home is stupid, so we somehow hinted as much to the girls. The Little One asked for a dollar each for food and that was that. Titch did look at me with sad disappointed eyes and demanded a kiss, but we managed it. We got on a rickshaw and had ourselves taken back to the house. As we found out in the morning, we got in at half past five!! We thought it was about two. A bottle of Cuban rum simply distorts time.
Saturday 18 September, Las Tunas – Camagüey
The room we slept in has its windows boarded up because of the aircon, so you've got absolutely no idea what time it is. We were planning to get up early, find the best connection towards Havana and set off.
The rum and the party let us wake up at half eleven. The old lady reassured us that there's a bus to Havana at four for $7. Sweet.
We set off towards the terminal (after a meagre drunkard's breakfast) to get our tickets. A rickshaw was already waiting for us in front of the house, no idea why. On the way to the station his chain fell off about 30 times, every time we had to get out with our packs in that heat and wait till he put it back on. On top of that, unlike the others he had no roof, so the sun beat straight down on our hungover heads. Torture. After yesterday's experience, when a rickshaw guy asked 4 pesos for perfect service, we expected this one wouldn't ask for anything, since in the end he only got us about half the way. He asked for seven. O.K., he's a piece of work, but whatever. Martin hands him 20 pesos so he can give us change. The mangy cripple wanted 7 dollars!!! That's 140 pesos, for not getting us anywhere!! That really got to me, the thief, I tore him a new one, we left him those 20 PC and walked off on foot towards the terminal. The worst of it is that the rickshaw guy was probably the son of the landlady granny who was cheerfully cracking jokes with us yesterday.
At the terminal they wanted 54 $ per person for a ticket to Havana!! And meanwhile the train costs 14 pesos for a Cuban. Again I called them thieves, this is really too much. We went back by rickshaw for our packs and headed straight for the truck-bus terminal. Hustlers were offering us all sorts of taxis, but all of it expensive.
Next to the truck-bus terminal is the railway station, we went to ask about the train. Classic communist attitude. First the broad combs her hair, adjusts her clip, ignores us and finally asks in a peeved voice what it is we supposedly want. Then she sent us to the next window. Same thing, being ignored, then he mumbled something in Spanish. When we didn't understand, he repeated it louder. That's a classic, those morons think we understand louder Spanish, so they just repeat it.
In the end we blew them off without finding out a thing.
Some railway employees were also offering us something, they were talking about a train to Camagüey, but on Cuba we don't trust anybody anymore, so we went to the truck-bus. Then it turned out they were offering us a ride on a freight train, which really did leave a moment later! Shame…
We climbed into the truck-bus and pretty comfortably covered those 110 km in 3 hours.
From Camagüey there's no truck-bus going towards Havana today, so tough luck. Luckily a bus will go, the broad told us it leaves at 2:40 in the morning and costs 33$. Sweet. Except we have all of 30$ between us, it's Saturday evening and we're in Cuba. ATMs don't exist and the banks and exchange offices are closed for cheques!
At the bus window we met a young German guy travelling here on his own!
We set off towards the centre to try the local Grandhotel. On the way a rickshaw guy talked us into a ride there. First we ignored him at 2$ and walked, then he came down to a dollar.
At the Grandhotel they did speak a human language, but they don't change cheques. We went round three more hotels in town, nothing. They referred us to the Camagüey hotel outside town. We bought rolls with pork again and ran into the German once more. He pulled out his guidebook and told us where the hotel was. 5 km out of town. Well, plenty of time, let's walk. About 1 km before our goal we met a decent cabbie who took us there on a hay cart for 5 pesos. Otherwise everyone wanted 5$. Thieves! 5$ is half a month's wages in Cuba!
In the huge luxury hotel Camagüey another shock. \"Yes, we take cheques, 6% fee\" in Czech: \"What?!!! You've gotta be taking the p…, right?!!!\" \"All right then, 4%…\" Cubans will simply rob you even at the reception of five-star hotels!!
The cab took us back to the bus terminal, on the way he picked up people who all desperately wanted to be our friends and kept shaking our hands. They simply thought we'd pay for their ride. I'm really getting sick of them, I had a feeling that somebody was going to cop it today…
The most annoying one, let's call him \"Catcher\", set off with us to the terminal. He kept trying to force his help on us, his grandmother works at the terminal etc. (we know that one from Guatemala) and he wouldn't be shaken off.
Out of the broad at the terminal, who two hours ago had told me the bus goes at 2:30, it now came out that it goes at 7:00 in the morning! The stupid cow had told me earlier about the bus to Santiago, i.e. completely the other way. That's unheard of. First stress like hell, what are we going to do without money in the middle of the jungle, when the day after tomorrow our plane leaves early in the morning from Havana, 527 km away, and now this on top of it.
We set off into town (to try the train once more), Catcher with us. On the way he was arranging some scam with a cabbie, who then caught up with us and wanted 2$. We said no. He caught up with us again, all right, 1$ then. We climbed into an ancient, nicely upholstered, sprung carriage and set off. Catcher still with us, even though the cabbie chased him off with the whip.
Halfway there they stopped, saying they want the money now. Supposedly because of the cops in front of the station. I pulled out a dollar and handed it to the cabbie. They started demanding another ten pesos!! At that point I stood up in the carriage, roared a whole load of threats at them in English, Martin added a threat about the cops, they both pulled their tails in, started apologizing and off we went.
In front of the station I told Catcher we thank him for his help and that we don't need him anymore, adiós.
We went into the station (that's the station where two days ago we made a scene about the passports and the price discrimination against tourists!) and dug around about the train to Havana. In the queue at the window stood a pretty blonde girl with a Slavic face, we struck up a conversation with her. Austrian from Vienna, she and her boyfriend need to get to Havana. The train was supposed to go at eight, now they claim ten. Tickets are only sold when the train arrives.
So we went for a beer in the pub next door, followed by a gang of hustlers. There we sit over our beer, having a great time swapping Cuban experiences, and then Catcher showed up. He started pestering us again, alternately us and the Austrians. We ignored him in rare unison. In the end he started wanting money, saying he'd helped us so terribly much. Yes, he'd helped the cabbie rob us. Martin politely explained to him that we hadn't wanted anything from him and mainly that we have no money because we're students. In response Catcher started swearing at us pretty foully in English. That's enough, the cup overflowed. Even though I've never in my life physically attacked anybody, I shot up out of my chair so hard it flew off, grabbed Catcher by the throat with both hands and carried him out backwards in front of the pub. On the way I explained to him that he should never call anybody motherfucker again
Outside he was taken off me by a couple of attendants or whatever, he was so scared he didn't put up any resistance and let himself be led away. As for me, the barman took me in hand and with a hand on my shoulder politely calmed me down.
Poor Catcher was unlucky, he copped it for all the hustlers, thieves and con men who'd been pestering us in Cuba. About 50 - 100 pieces a day.
Then I went back to the table and completely undisturbed (what a miracle) we carried on with our conversation.
Every now and then somebody would come up to us, dressed as a railway employee, claiming he had tickets for us for the train at ten and that they cost 19.50$ each. About four of them took turns.
At half past ten the train really did arrive and one of those ticket guys really did bring tickets. Since Cubans are suspicious, whether they're from the railway or not, we said we'd pay for the tickets once we were sitting in the train.
He led us to the right carriage, into which, however, the conductress wouldn't let us, because the passport number didn't match the number on the ticket. In Cuba tickets are only sold against ID. So obviously a total scam. The con man babbled something about an error, we didn't even say anything to him. We never saw a single one of them again.
I went to ask at the window when the next train goes and about tickets. The train goes at midnight and the tickets at midnight.
At 11:45 the Austrian and I came up to the window. The young lady turned round, saying she'd said midnight! \"You boys are a bit stupid, aren't you?\" said her eyes.
So we came at midnight and by then she knew the train was about 2 hours late.
We settled down on a concrete platform on the traffic island and decided simply to wait. We're used to it by now, after all, the whole 12 days in Cuba we've actually just been waiting for something. That's just the socialist lot in life.
Around half past four in the morning we decided to take a taxi. Split four ways, that 100$ is bearable. We couldn't find anybody under 140$. On top of that there's the risk that if the cops nab us, they'll lock up the Cuban, they won't touch us, but we'll be somewhere in the middle of nowhere and we'll miss the plane. And there's nothing to say that a 50-year-old American car or a 30-year-old Moskvitch will manage those 500 km…
We already had our packs on our shoulders (all 4 of us), figuring we'd rather go for that bus, when another railway employee caught us (this time probably a real oneJ), took us into an office (the Cubans probably didn't like us, there were about 200 of them waiting for that train! Only we're paying exactly twenty times their ticket price.)
The tickets were sold to us by a man who spoke a bit of Czech. So that's the second one.
So we spent the whole night on a dirty concrete platform at a stinking Cuban station, half asleep, half awake on our backpacks. The train arrived at half past five in the morning, meaning we'd waited nine hours for it!!!L Of course it was totally filthy both outside and inside, our grubby trains are a dinner table compared to that. Those 527 km to Havana took another 22 hours, twice we even reversed several km! All together it thus took us 20 hours to cover 527 km. And on top of that it cost 1600 Kc!!L That's Cuba, American prices but socialist service.
We got to Havana luckily in time to calmly pick up our packs at the hotel and find a room with a shower for an hour at two grannies' place (the classic scenario, we sat down in the park and waited until somebody offered us the right thingJ).
The grannies even took us to the bus towards the airport and on top of that explained to the driver where to kick us out. Cubans shoving their way onto a bus are absolutely ruthless, woman or no woman, only fists and elbows work. One guy dropped his bag and by the time he picked it up he was all trampled.
Since we were riding the Metrobus, the driver up in the tractor unit had quite a job getting our attention at the right stop, plus it was ten at night, so dark.
We waited about an hour for the next bus, but whatever, we've got plenty of time. One young lady took us under her wing, saying she'd show us the airport. When the bus finally arrived, there were 3 times as many people on the platform as could be crammed into the bus with the best will in the world. Since I'm not as much of an animal as the Cubans, I was left last on the island. All the Cubans fitted in. If anybody thinks they've experienced a packed bus or metro in Bohemia, they're completely off the mark! Here people were sitting on each other's laps, hanging from the bars above those sitting down, nobody could even breathe. I did manage to get on, but the pack on my back stayed outside. I was standing only on my tiptoes and the Cubans were squeezing me like a press. At the next stop the driver couldn't get the doors closed at all, so I rode in the open doorway, which meant mud was splattering over me. I had to change out of my white trousers at the airport afterwards.
The only positive thing (and a big one) about this trip to the airport was that whereas last time we shelled out 20$ (800Kc) for a taxi, this trip on two buses for 2 people cost all of 1.80 Kc!!J
From the last stop we still had to walk about 2 km, and the Cuban woman went a big part of that with us.
At the airport in Havana they don't have left luggage, which really annoyed Martin. I went to buy drinks with my last Cuban peanuts and the morons don't take pesos anywhere in the entire airport! Only dollars. Not even my favourite speech in Spanish helped, that in Germany they pay with marks, in the USA with dollars and in Cuba with pesos.
So I found an exchange office to change it for dollars. First the broad counted up the takings of 45,000$!!! and then kindly attended to me. \"We don't sell dollars here, you have to go into town for that\"
Lady, you've got to be kidding me, there's an exchange office right here at the airport and I'm supposed to ride 28 km into town to a bureau de change when my plane leaves in a minute, right? When a guy in the queue saw me fuming, he pulled some dollars out of his pocket and changed it for me. Then I went back for that lousy lemonade. Buying a lemonade in half an hour, that can only happen in Cuba. Oh well, we fly in 6 hours, that's the last time you Cubans get me..
Boy, was I ever wrong. The padded seats at the new Havana airport are great for sleeping. At four in the morning we headed off to check in. On the way to LA we have a stopover in Mexico City, but it's a transit, and surely you can't need a visa for that. Our visas are already used up, you see.
The guy at check-in claimed that we need visas even for a transit through Mexico. So I changed tactics and told him we'd only used one entry and the second one was still free. The second stamp is on a different page of the passport, after all. Luckily that satisfied him and he issued our boarding passes. Before that he'd been going on about the embassy in town, which opens at nine, and we take off at six! Staying in Cuba one single day longer is the last thing we want right now!
After check-in we waited at our Gate 8 for them to bring the plane over. Relief at last, we're going home, in a little while there'll be civilization.
At the time of the scheduled departure, the crackly loudspeaker announced something about Indians hanging in the trees around the airport. The people around us started cursing, getting up and packing their things. A terrible hunch! Oh no, please! The young lady sitting next to us saw how confused we were and explained. Our flight, scheduled for 6.00 in the morning, would leave at 16.00 in the afternoon. That's pretty great, considering our connecting flight from Mexico City to Los Angeles leaves at 11.00 a.m. L
Of course there was nobody at the information desk, this is socialism after all. By the look of it, we're never going to get rid of this Cuba. We really had no idea what to do, luckily an English-speaking Mexican took us under his wing and when someone from Air Cubana finally showed up, he translated what they said. The flight is delayed because of a hurricane, now they'll take us to a hotel, we'll get breakfast and everyone can make a 3-minute call home to say what's going on. Nothing about connecting flights.
We walked the whole airport and didn't find anybody who could tell us responsibly who was responsible for our tickets out of Mexico (it was 6 in the morning).
We decided to ride to the hotel and sort it out there. Nobody knew what was what, but in the end we found the buses that took us to the hotel. Surprisingly, they were new air-conditioned Mercedes, which you practically never see in Cuba.
They took us to a five-star hotel, the best in Havana, a huge complex by the sea, a thousand rooms, pools and so on.
Reception was total chaos, we waited for them to assign us a card (instead of a key) and then went to the switchboard to make the call with it. The only way to change the tickets seemed to be to call Jorge in Mexico, who had sold them to us, and get him to change them before the plane left. We called there several times, but basically with no result. Nobody from Cubana Air was to be found in the hotel, so there was nothing more to be done. So we at least went for breakfast, and a truly royal one it was. A shame our enjoyment of breakfast was spoiled by that heavy brick in the stomach, that we'd have to pay for those tickets out of Mexico all over again, which is a good 15,000 CZK. That would honestly kill me.
After breakfast we went up to the room, just as five-star as the breakfast. Then Martin called Mexico again, as from the start with the help of the obliging Mexican.
Then we gave up and at least went to use the time to get a Mexican visa. Luckily the Mexican embassy was close by, and even though we got there half an hour after closing time (12–13), they let us in and issued the visas while we waited. While in Prague the visa cost $28, here it turned out they didn't want $28 (which annoyed us quite a bit for roughly 2 hours in Mexico), but 28 Cuban play-money pesos, that is 56 CZK J
Then we caught the first car willing to take us back to the hotel (an old Moskvitch, a musician inside, he'd been to Bohemia twice!) and returned to the hotel. The bus was leaving at half past two, so we rushed downstairs for lunch and had: me: 2 beef and 3 turkey steaks, seafood risotto and loads of fruit, Martin as usual loaded up on sea creatures. It was five-star excellent, we just had far too little time for it.
After the meal I went to call Mexico again, one last try about those tickets. Nothing. At least I called home for about half a minute.
When we checked out, the receptionist tapped the room number into the computer and then her eyes almost fell out onto the keyboard. Nevertheless she informed me in a calm voice that we'd have to pay a little extra (she subtracted the 6 free minutes for the phone and then told me we owed 77.50 extra). What, dollars??? Yes, dollars. We'd run up $108 and we were only allowed 6 minutes. Hold on, I'll be right back. I went outside to Martin and we decided to ignore them. Of course they came for me in a little while, I spoke to someone representing Cubana Air and quite firmly explained to him that we hadn't spent that $108 chatting with grandma, that we'd only been trying to change our reservations, which was Cubana Air's duty, and they hadn't done a thing. They asked once more whether I was going to pay it, I said no way, and that was the end of it.
We took the bus to the airport, checked in again and I finally managed to nab someone from Cubana Air.
At last a decent conversation, he said they'd take care of our tickets, as well as our accommodation and food in Mexico City. He'd send a message to Mexico and somebody would be waiting for us there. That finally calmed us down and released a whole day's worth of stress. The flight was fine, check-in in Mexico too, even though we're smuggling 5 boxes of the finest Cuban cigars. Except nobody from Cubana Air was waiting for us (so we found their office and in it an old fat Indian woman who didn't speak English. So we explained in Spanish what it was about and she explained back that the reservation for tomorrow morning's tickets was already arranged, but since the hurricane wasn't their fault we weren't entitled to a hotel or food.
Oh no you don't, you're giving us a nice hotel. We'll sit here until we squeeze something out of you. The old girl said someone who speaks English would come along shortly. An hour later a different woman came and told us the same thing in English. We're not entitled to a hotel. That made me mad.
\"Every airline in the world takes care of its customers in case of a delay! This isn't the first time I've travelled! Her: \"Not all of them, Japanese Air doesn't either.\" Me: \"Well that's great, so that's two out of several thousand. She had no more arguments, picked herself up and went home. We explained to the old Indian woman that if she didn't give us a hotel, we'd sleep in their office. It was already nine in the evening, still better to sleep here on the carpet than on a bench in the airport hall. The old girl said the responsible person would come in about an hour.
For the responsible person I got my press card and camera ready, to show how Cubana Air takes care of its customers. It wasn't even necessary. The responsible old boy came, he already knew what it was about, he just wrote out a voucher and sent a flunky to the hotel with us. On parting we even thanked them, saying you don't often see service this bad. In the USA we later found out that we really weren't entitled to a hotel J
The hotel was right at the airport, five-star luxury again, this time we enjoyed it. A proper bath in a marble bathroom, each of us a huge bed to himself, a TV the size of a pig, all the bathroom stuff including perfume and shaving gear, about ten towels and so on. The only thing was it was too late for the pool and they charged $17 an hour for Internet.
In the morning we hopped on the plane without any trouble and with two stopovers flew to civilization, to Los Angeles, California. From there we easily got to the Greyhound terminal again and took the same bus as last time to San Francisco. And now we're fine. Breakfast on the boat, laundry, shower, Internet, just like at home….
