Cuba

The evening after my friend left Vinales, a restaurant rejected my 100CUC note. They took everything else I had rather than break it. I was frustrated, but not surprised. It had been hard enough to find people to break a 50CUC note. I tried a few more places before someone pointed out that it wasn’t even Cuban money. It was a 100 Quetzales note, left over from Guatemala. When I returned to my casa particular to get more money, I found that all the cash I assumed was CUC was actually unusable currency. How had I managed to spend 350CUC (US$350) in four days? I ran the numbers through my head and stopped when I reached 230CUC in the middle of the third day. It was true. I had used it all. The next morning I tracked down some ATMs, tried a couple of cards in both banks and came up with nothing. I then took all five of my cards from St George and Westpac in to the branch and found that all were rejected. Nor would they change my remaining Australian dollars. I’d done my research and knew that US cards weren’t accepted, but Australian cards should be fine. I connected to the internet to get in touch with my bank to see what was wrong and found an article from Westpac stating that they followed US policy regarding money laundering etc, so cards could not be used in a few countries including Cuba. Being owned by Westpac, St George would have the same policy. Western Union, then, but according to their website they only had branches as far west as Havana. My panic began in earnest. I owed 30CUC to my

In my limited understanding of socialism, everyone is meant to be equal. Everyone pulls their weight and the government ensures that everyone is housed and fed. With that in mind, I couldn’t understand why people mobbed the tourists getting off the bus in Vinales, pushing their casa particular as the best. Or why doctors only get paid 40CUC (US$40) per month but the driver of the vintage car charged 50CUC for an hour drive. Did this money all go to the government? Through numerous discussions with locals, I pieced together a rough view of how their lives work financially. The government takes most of what each person produces or earns—somewhere in the order of 90%--and lets them do them do what they like with the rest. One person wrote out the microeconomics of an average household for me. A family with two children, where Dad is an electrician and Mum is a nurse, has an income of about 50CUC per month. Utilities come to about 35CUC and a basic diet of beans and rice comes to about 17CUC, which leaves them short by 2CUC. When I suggested that cancelling the internet was the obvious solution, he pointed out that 15CUC was still not going to buy much in the way of vegetables and meat for 4 people for a month. So both parents end up taking additional jobs, usually in some form of tourism, which takes them up to, say, 110CUC. It’s still a very basic standard of living. This still doesn’t answer questions of house ownership or how people choose / are assigned careers or whether to live in the city or the country, but my trip to Cuba was cut short as

Even the most hardened non-smoker can’t help but take an interest in cigars whilst visiting Cuba. I arrived in Viñales, a rural town at the western end of the island in the early afternoon and my casa particular host arranged for her brother-in-law to give me a walking tour of the area the same afternoon. He took me through some spectacular scenery to a coffee plantation, a cave and to pick mangos fresh off the tree, but the highlight was the tobacco farm. My guide handed me over to the owner of the farm, who showed me the shed where the leaves were dried before taking me to a shaded table where he explained the process of making cigars. Each leaf on the tobacco plant has different properties, providing flavour, smell or combustibility. He then showed me how to roll a cigar, magically transforming a bunch of leaves into the famous tubular shape, and explained the drying process which takes a further month or so. I assumed I’d be able to confirm the details online, but haven’t had any success, so if anyone can find a reference to this online, please let me know. Taking out a couple of cigars he’d prepared earlier, he showed me how to cut the end off, then dipped it in honey. He assured me that the leaves, and hence the cigar, was nicotine free, and bade me suck on the cigar while he lit it. I struggled to do that without inhaling the smoke, but in the end, I was puffing ungracefully on a genuine Cuban cigar. He explained that you could tell a quality cigar by how long the ash stayed in place, and after mine had

Havana had me feeling completely lost for the first time since visiting Hong Kong in 1995, where I couldn’t navigate myself out of the maze of clothes, electronics and luggage stores. Despite booking a casa particular before arriving in Cuba and exchanging multiple emails with the booking agency, my host seemed to have no idea I was coming. This turned out to be because he couldn’t match the way I said my name with the spelling he’d been given (I pronounce Murray as in Mario without the 'o', but Spanish speakers read it as moo-rah-y). His accent was really thick, which made any kind of conversation difficult. I was on my own. I hadn’t eaten properly since lunch 24 hours before, and Cuban tap water isn’t safe to drink, so finding food and water were priorities. I also had a whole set of wet clothes from a tour I did in Mexico the day before. Finally, I needed to catch a friend before she left for Vinales, which meant getting internet access. My mind was foggy from the humid heat as I ventured outside to begin my search. The many people standing around in the park at the end of my street looking at their phones and tablets marked it as a wi-fi hotspot, but I knew I would need a card to be able to log in. The first person I asked spoke so fast that I had to ask him to repeat a few times before I understood that I could buy a card from a hotel down the road. Because my tour in Cancun hadn’t finished until 10pm the night before, I hadn’t been alert enough to download a map of