We were sitting on the runway at Cancun airport, at the very back of the plane, with our knees pressed up against the seats in front of us, when thick white smoke started billowing up from the air vents in the floor. Not since the 1992 Kaikohe Blue Light Disco had I seen anything like it. I was starting to wonder whether the ancient Russian plane would actually get us to Cuba in one piece. According to the flight attendant this was perfectly normal and despite the inauspicious start, we touched down in Havana an hour later, unscathed.
Cuba is a puzzle that is difficult to make any sense of prior to arriving. Locals have very limited access to the internet, organised tourism has been restricted to resort enclaves, guidebooks tend to be out of date and the internet has a huge amount of conflicting information, all of which makes it difficult to plan for.
The first issue was money. Bear with me. Cuba has two currencies. The Cuban peso (reserved for local use) and the Cuban Convertible peso (CUC), which is for tourists and is pegged against the US dollar. There are 26 local pesos to one CUC. In addition, US-based credit and debit cards are not accepted and I had read that exchanging US dollars was either impossible or subject to high fees. We took a small amount of Mexican pesos and hoped we would be able to find an ATM that would accept our cards.
At Havana airport we joined the queue for the currency exchange (Cadeca) and then I spotted an ATM. It would not accept Mastercard but did take Visa. We were in business.
We’d opted to stay in Cuba’s equivalent to B&Bs – Casa Particulares – which are rooms for rent in private houses. Again, we weren’t sure what to expect. I’d found Casa Antigua online and liked the sound of it. After passing through the outer suburbs, architecturally stalled in the prosperous 50s and predominantly Art Deco, we pulled up outside a grand but slightly dishevelled two-storey mansion. The owner, Horacio, cigarette in hand and donning a white beard straight out of the Castro style guide, welcomed us and showed us to our room.
On the second floor, divided from the main house by a roof terrace filled with potted plants, we found our room via a dining area where we would eat breakfast (comprising yellow rolls with jam and butter, coffee, guava juice and microwaved eggs. Horacio's obvious pride in his nuked concoctions reminded us of when the Jetsons-inspired machine arrived in our kitchens and every meal begged the question "Do you think we could cook this in the microwave?!"). With its high stud, the room was large and filled with dark antique furniture. We also had and a perfectly preserved en suite decorated in 1950s style with pink and black tiles. What a relief. Casa Particulares are like a box of chocolates. And, for fear of insulting our host, I wasn’t sure I would be capable of walking away from one if it wasn’t what we wanted.
Horacio’s father had owned two radio stations in Havana prior to the revolution. Horacio and his wife Marta live in the family home, and while we were there their daughter and her Chinese-Cuban husband were visiting from Argentina with their newborn baby boy. Chinese immigrated to Cuba in the 1800s to cut sugar cane and were treated like slaves. Political allies since the revolution, there is a strong Chinese community in Cuba and Havana's Barrio Chino is one of the oldest and largest Chinese neighborhoods in Latin America.
Horacio was a mine of information and explained that most of the cool old American cars are actually collectivos, essentially shared cabs that ply a standard route in and out of the city. You simply wave one down, give the driver your destination, and jump out when you arrive. Most have been customised with extra seats so everyone crams in as the vehicle fills up. Ours was a big old white car driven by a guy who looked like Leon with a handlebar moustache. We shared the vehicle with a collection of locals – a big black guy sat up front next to the driver and a thin elderly white woman with glasses and a slick grey bob was slotted between them.
From what I saw, racial divisions don’t appear to exist in Cuba – black, white and Asian intermingle and the overriding identity seems to be Cuban. It is also probably the only place I’ve visited where there is a complete absence of pretentiousness. No doubt the lack of money and class divisions has something to do with it.
As we neared the historic centre the dilapidated buildings got older and grander. The city throbs with energy – every building overflows with people, washing hangs from the balconies, residents lean over the railings chatting to their neighbours, men play animated games of dominoes in the street and music resonates from every window. At the centre of town sits El Capitolio, the former seat of government. According to Horacio, Capitolio is an exact replica of the US Capitol building, exact that is, except for the fact that the Cuban's built their version a metre wider and a metre taller than the one that stands in Washington (Wikipedia begs to differ).
We headed to the roof terrace of Hotel Ambos Mundos, where they happened to have two-for-one Mojitos. On the blue-and-white tiled bar stood a row of highballs, dosed with sugar and mint, prepped and ready for the addition of ice, rum and soda.
Like many bars in Havana, Ambos Mundos was one of Hemingway’s haunts – he lived in the hotel for a while and it is where he is said to have written For Whom The Bell Tolls. Each of his favoured watering holes is a short stumble from the last. It seems that Hemingway took the Spanish concept of ruta de tapas and soaked it in rum.
We ended the night at Floridita where an oddball old man who clearly worshipped the famous author sat drinking daiquiris and gazing adoringly into his bronze eyes.
Without design, we’d replicated Hemingway’s path of inebriation in its entirety. Though I’m not sure if his nights ended with the highjack of a red-and-white 1955 Desoto convertible followed by a chauffer-driven ride along the Malecon at sunset listening to Usher.
Back at Casa Antigua, Matt settled down with Horacio and a bottle of 30-year-old tequila procured at Cancun airport.
The next day, we took our hangovers into town and visited one of Havana’s cigar factories. The multi-storied building was built in 1845 and before the revolution they only made one brand of cigars there – Partagas. These days they make all the Cuban brands, including Cohiba and Montecristo. Cuba is synonymous with cigars – Colombus observed natives smoking cigars when the island was first colonised.
Our lovely guide, Dulce, took us through the vast wooden building, starting with the grading area. This is where the leaves are graded, the ones with the best colour selected for the outer casing. She told us there are four types of leaves: one for combustion, one for smell, one for flavour and one for binding. The composition varies from brand to brand.
Next was the cigar-making school where students learn to roll cigars for nine months before they are unleashed on the factory floor. In the main rolling hall, the workers make the cigars by shaping the leaves into cylinders, packing them into moulds, putting them in a press and then expertly adding the outer leaf. Each worker makes a different brand for a set period and then they switch to a new one. At the front of the room is a desk and microphone – in the morning the newspaper is read, and in the afternoon it’s the history of Cuba.
Quite a few of the workers discreetly flashed us handfuls of cigars wrapped in paper inscribed “10CUC”, hoping for an under-the-table buyer. One of our casa owners told us that experienced doctors and pilots make around 800 pesos a month (that’s about 32CUC), so a sly tenner in hand for the cigar roller is probably equivalent to a fortnight’s wages.
After the tour and the obligatory capitalist credit card spanking on cigars, we settled down at the bar with a bunch of randoms. There were the young doctors: three Brits who were spending the week in Havana. Two of them were travelling around the Americas for the six-weeks between exams and qualifying, and the third – who was already working at a hospital in Essex (no doubt dealing with the local epidemic of boob-jobs gone wrong and vajazzle addiction) – had taken annual leave to come out and meet up with them. There was “Merv the perv” as Matt liked calling him. I settled simply for “Canadian”. Merv is a 40-something-year-old pilot for Air Canada and visits Cuba fairly regularly to soak up the atmosphere and smoke cigars. And finally, there was Natalia, a Lebanese-Russian who had just quit her job as creative director for Russian Airlines to move to the Maldives. The descendant of a saint, Natalia was unsure about organised religion but a dedicated follower of The Secret.
After a couple of excellent cortaditos (espresso cut with milk) the Cuba Libres and conversation started flowing and lunch was forgotten until it became dinner at sunset on the rooftop of Ambos Mundos. The Brits were in heaven with their £10 lobsters. Then darkness fell and the details become a bit sketchy. We think Dodge must have tried to stand up and realised the Cuba Libres had taken effect. He uttered his default homing call: “Francey, it’s time to go”.
Downstairs I realised Matt had no shoes on (we can only speculate that his jandals had broken – again – and in a rage he had decided to abandon them on the rooftop), we had no money left (plans to find an ATM had gone the way of lunch) and Matt was struggling to coordinate his limbs. Propping him up while trying to find the US$5 I knew I had somewhere in the recesses of my bag, I looked up to see a policeman approaching. There was no hope of disguising Matt’s state but instead of arresting us he hailed us a cab.
