My trip to Cuba

I was recently in Cuba for a friend's wedding, and I had a very good time there - I also learned a lot about the country, and I want to relate some of those lessons to others since accurate info about Cuba seems to be hard to come by.

In the past, I've had the pleasure of working with a fellow who is originally from Cuba, and who now works and lives in the USA. Since I was going down there for this wedding and since it's rather difficult to get from the USA to Cuba, I brought along some gifts for my friend's family (a pair of rollerblades and a bunch of Computer Science textbooks). The plan was that I would rent a car, meet with his nephew in Havana, go to the family's hometown for a visit, and then return to the resort I was staying at.

Four months before we went down, we emailed the resort to ask about car rental - we followed up a couple of times, but never received any emails in return. I also asked my travel agent, who assured me that getting a car shouldn't be a problem once I got there, and that they probably had automatics too - it became painfully obvious that she had no idea what she was talking about when we got there and they had only 2 cars, both of which were standards and both of which were rented for the entire time we were there. After a bit of stress, we split a taxi with another couple who was also going to Havana, and we had to modify our plans since we would no longer be able to visit the family's hometown (it's a bit of a distance from Havana).

We met up with my friend's nephew Luis (not his real name) at the Hotel Nacional in Cuba, and the first task that we set out to do was to draw some money off of one of my credit cards (a Visa). For those that are unfamiliar, Cuba has two currencies - one is the Convertible Peso (CUC), which is artificially pegged to the US Dollar at an exchange rate of 1.08 USD == 1.00 CUC. The second currency is the Real Peso (CUP), and it has an exchange rate of around 25 CUP == 1 CUC. The vast majority of tourists never see CUPs, and they do all of their transactions in CUC. Because our resort had no way to get money off of a credit card, and because we were short on money, we needed to get some in order to pay for the taxi we had taken to Havana. It turned out to be quite an adventure.

First, we went to a Cashier's counter on the main floor of the Hotel Nacional - even though they had a Visa sticker on their window, they said that they were only able to convert cash to cash and could not take money off of a credit card. They recommended that we go to a money exchanged which was downstairs. We went there, and were informed that they needed a passport to take money out of the credit card - this was a problem, because everyone (including the hotel) had told us not to lose our passport, and to put them in the safe and not take them out until we left. Nobody bothered to tell us that foreigners needed passports to take money out, so we had a bit of a problem. We were told that there was an automated machine upstairs, and we went up there to try it out. I put in my Visa, and it asked me for a PIN number - at this point I was baffled, because as far as I knew my Visa didn't have a pin number. I tried a few possible candidates, and then gave up - my wife also tried hers, with the same effect. We then decided to go back downstairs and see if we could sweet-talk the person behind the counter into giving us money without a passport - the guard stopped us at the door and told us that it was almost lunch, that there was at least a 45 minute line now, and that we'd have to come back after 1:00.

Great.

Luis told us about a bank which wasn't far away which would probably overlook the passport requirement, so we got into the taxi with the other couple and went there - we got there at 12:04, and discovered that most banks in Cuba close at noon on the last business day of the month (it was Friday, November 30th). The guard refused to let us in, so we went looking elsewhere. We went to another credit card place only to discover that they just tested if the cards worked and were unable to actually take money off of them (odd, but whatever) - we then went to another machine which was OFFLINE and another bank which was closed for lunch (the guard recommended we try again at 1:00). We decided to cut our losses for now, go and get lunch, and try again to find something in Old Havana. For those keeping score, we had tried 7 different places by this point, all with no luck - I was really loving Cuba at this point.

We had lunch at a restaurant called La Zaragozana, which claims to be the oldest restaurant in Havana - the food was quite good, and Luis took some time to explain what life was like in the real Cuba (not the sanitized version that tourists get from the resorts). I'll relate what I learned here.

Luis is a university student, and he explained to us that, although university was paid for by the state, there were many incidental costs such as clothing, food (apparently what is served in residence is almost inedible) and transportation (and sometimes rent) which were not paid for. In addition to this, students were forbidden from getting part-time jobs to cover these expenses - it is illegal in Cuba. He also explained how renting of living space was illegal in Cuba as well - there are a very few state-owned rental properties, and rents are high and waiting lists long. Under the communist system, it is illegal to be a landlord and to rent out property, so people find creative ways around it - you will find a person and live with them, rent is paid under the table, and if the police come knocking then you are a relative who is just there for a few days. People are also forbidden from buying or selling cars now - people are allowed to possess cars which their parents possessed (remember all those pictures of 1950's cars in Cuba?), and until about 15 years ago new cars could be purchased after waiting on a long list, but after the USSR collapsed all private purchase of cars was rendered illegal. Property can also not be bought or sold - families own properties, and the way that you get your own property is that your family gives you a piece of their property as your own. Now, put all of these together, and you get:

• You want to go to university, but you can't earn money to pay for it by working - this means that you either have to already have money, or your family needs to support you
• You can't rent an apartment, so you have to either live in state-provided residence (I hope you got on the list right when you were born, or you won't get in) or commute from your home (good luck to anyone going to university more than a short distance from home)
• You can't buy a car to drive to university from your home - you'd better hope that either your family has a car, or that you have a nearby friend that you can get a ride from
• Once you graduate university, you still can't buy or rent, so you have to commute to your job from the same place
• You can't take a job in a new city, since you can't buy property or cars

Kinda crazy, isn't it?

One of the other absurdities that Luis described for us was the salaries which are earned by Cubans - he said that, after he graduated university, he had a salary of about 20 CUP a day to look forward to (that's less than $1 USD), with a total monthly take-home approaching 20 CUC (remember, 25 CUP == 1 CUC). After 25 years of faithful service, his salary will balloon to 30 CUP a day (wow, what a payoff) and he will be taking home about 35 CUC a month. This had been corroborated by another fellow we had spoken to earlier in the week who was trained as a History and English professor at Havana University, and who was driving a taxi that some of my friends went to Havana in -- he said that he was now driving a taxi because, as a professor he would earn 20 CUC a month, and as a taxi driver he would earn 25 CUC a night on a bad night. This leads to two major perturbations in Cuban society:

1. Everyone (and I mean everyone) is either acting as a taxi to earn money (I found out that my friend in the USA had actually sold taxi rides in the evenings), selling things on the side to tourists, or somehow working multiple jobs or participating in the black market to make ends meet (everyone)
2. The people with the highest education and the greatest skills are in poverty, and those who work as gardeners, housekeepers, waiters, and taxi drivers are the richest of the rich - not what one would expect in most of the rest of the world

Luis also described how Cubans are treated as second-class citizens in their own country - they are not allowed to stay in tourist resorts (even if they have the money to pay for it) or even to go near some tourist areas, they are not allowed to go to certain hospitals which specialize in treatment of foreigners, and the set of artificial barriers gives the Cuban people a strong inferiority complex (I've heard the term apartheid used - it's scarily accurate). Police and military enforce these separations, and several times while on the beach at the resort I saw the police intercept people walking along the beach and tell them to go elsewhere. He also described how the Cuban newspapers will try to make life in Cuba seem good by comparison to the rest of the world - they publish excerpts about disasters, wars, scandals and diseases in an attempt to make the Cubans believe that they are better off than everyone else - most people don't buy it, but there are always some naive ones. He told us how he feels that, when Fidel Castro dies, major changes will have to happen - the people are reaching a boiling point, and they are rapidly losing patience with the heavy burden that the state puts upon them. Despite their best efforts, news and information about life outside of Cuba leaks into the country from many places, and people are starting to realize that there are other choices available to them. Cuba is a beautiful country - I really hope that they are able to make a peaceful transition away from the communist system, but the track record of other countries makes me nervous (there are 30 or so examples of countries that transitioned away from communism in and around the collapse of the USSR, and basically none of them were pleasant). Luis, like many others in his position, is hoping to find a way to leave the country before that happens, however the Cuban laws again make it very difficult for him to leave, and he has several hoops (and years) to go through before that can be a possibility.

After learning about these things at lunch, we started our quest for a bank again - we finally found one, and we were able to convince the guy behind the counter to give us $200 CUC so that we could pay for our taxi and our food (VICTORY! yay!). We then started to wander around the old city, and saw many sights such as Pigeon Square (pigeons endlessly circle around this square, it's an amusing thing to watch) and a very old church (350 years or so). We went to the market and picked up a painting for my aunt, a bag for Luis to carry the rollerblades and books in, and a wooden sculpture for my wife's mom - we then dropped Luis off at his residence (and rapidly turned around when I realized I had forgotten to give him the tools and spare parts for the rollerblades) and headed back to the resort, Potemkin village that it was.

The day before we left, I managed to injure my knee in the pool (later diagnosed as a medial tendon strain) - that made walking very difficult, and I'm still recovering from it. Our flight also got delayed by over 4 hours, so we got to sit in the airport for much longer than we originally thought - I spent the time reading, drinking tea and pondering the storm that we expected to land in. Now I'm sitting here, back in Canada, and thankful for the many things that I sometimes take for granted.