Cuba — a Country Where the Cars Are Super Old
Our plane lands first thing in the morning. Can’t say I had the best flight tbh. In-flight meal was some dead flavourless cod with a side of gouda, a dead cheese. So, I’m already in a foul mood. Plane lands. I am told internet access in Cuba is a myth. Note: This was the thing that like broke the camel’s back. How can you tell a man in big big 2017 who has paid for his flights that he won’t have internet access. Especially when stunting on ’em WAS his primary motivation for traveling abroad to begin with.
The following piece will examine the things I managed to get up to now that stunting was no longer possible.
Cuba has two currencies. One is the CUP (which actual Cubans use), the other is the CUC. The CUC is connected to the dollar and is used by tourists. Conversion rate is pretty straightforward: 1 CUC gets you $1. But it’s a closed currency, which means that it never leaves the country. When you first fly into Cuba, your first priority is to secure some CUCs. Therein lies Cuba story, I think; its duality, oppositeness, contradictions. I think it’s difficult to tell Cuba’s story because there are, just like its currencies, two.
Everything is centrally planned. The roads are long and grid-like. Some are named after famous people, but most have numbers for names. The pace of the place is slow. Cars are old. People work hard for the little that they have. Nothing is ever thrown out. People repair things. Saw people repairing everything from umbrellas to shoes. There’s just not a lot to go around, and people have to be inventive. It just so happened I suppose that the people who needed to work hardest and be most inventive were black. The blackest neighbourhoods were the poorest and most central, and the white folk, well, were in less poor neighbourhoods. Places like Nuevo Vedado.
We arrived there on a hot day. Quickly jumped on a taxi and headed to our airbnb. It was in an area called Nuevo Vedad, a middle class area of some distance from central Havana. If I had to describe it, I’d probably say that it was the closest thing in Havana to an urban sprawl. The house was so nice. We both had our own room, en-suite bathrooms. It had a decent size kitchen, mod cons, etc. And if our airbnb had these things, I am guessing that our neighbours had then too. So, question is, how does everyone in this area live so nice when government is paying them a dutty $40 a month salary. Answer: remittances.
Every year Cubans abroad send back around $700 million. That’s a lot of money. Considering that the average household makes less than $100 dollars a month, this is a lot. And so, if you've got family abroad, you've basically hit the jackpot. The period following the Cuban Revolution saw some 500,000 professionals and business owners leave Cuba to settle in Miami. They, along with others, are now sending money back home to their kinfolk. And they’re doing pretty well. The way society was set up back then, and today, meant that the most successful that left were white, and now that wealth is being shared with their own. In conclusion, white people in Cuba, just like everywhere…stay caking.
Education is free. People read, a lot. TV is filled with educational content about science, humanities and social sciences. Education is valued highly yes, but I found it difficult to reconcile this with the fact that the best paying jobs were often low skilled jobs in central Havana. We met so many doctors most of whom had decided to go into other types of work; driving taxis, being a receptionist at a tourist hotel, being a local guide. Being a doctor supposedly isn't worth it. Yes, it has a prestige associated with it, but if you’re earning little more than $40 a month, sooner or later you’ll decide to do something else. And something else, is often working in tourism.
Taxis would regularly have the American flag on their dashboard. When asked, they’d respond with how their relative is in the US and how they too want to join them. American culture was consumed a lot. Took us a few days to discover that there’s a man down the road who you can pay $1 in exchange for any American TV show. People were oddly into the Bee Gees.
Most people just assumed that we were Cubans. But to the trained eye, and by trained eye, I mean the people that work in the tourist areas, they could pick us out in a hot second. After trying to sell the usual concert tickets, cigars, tours…they’d get onto what you think you wanted to hear all along. No, not coke. The assumption was made about G and I as soon as they saw us: and that assumption was that we, two young black men, were only in Cuba for the sex tourism. Lost count. And it wasn't just sellers in the old city either, I’m talking about the guy who runs the local chippy, a dude who you happened to sit next to in the Internet park. It wasn't clear though if Havana was a genuine sex tourism destination, or if they just assumed we were young and black, that we’d be into it.
Elsewhere, life was slow. No one seemed to be in a hurry. People sit outside their houses for hours, joking, laughing into the early hours of the morning. European-style blocks dominated the midtown area. Havana was in essence a European city, from its inception in 16th century to Cuba’s independence in 1898. The oldest part of the city, Habana Veija, looks very much what it did 150 years ago. Colonial style buildings, narrow roads not built for cars. Sometimes you’d walk past buildings and wonder how they’re still up. People still live in them. Imagine we’re walking around this area and we clock: we’re a country where high streets aren't a thing. There aren't shops to speak off. A place where everyone drinks one type of coke, eats one type of cheese.
Housed in this part of the city is the Casa de Africa, a museum of African stuff. I say stuff, because I’m not sure how many of the artifacts in it were actually African or legitimate. The way all these pieces from all over Africa supposedly looked indistinguishable from each other is a joke. There was a lot of that “Africa is home to us all” spiel floating about, and it seemed that Africa was some magical monolith to a lot of the staff working there.
Not too far, maybe a few blocks over is the mosque. It’s a modest mosque, ngl. But it had so many different types of Muslims. The service was in Arabic and Spanish. Got told that Cuba gives some 50,000 developing world students scholarships to study in its universities. This mosque was a home, a community centre and a place of worship for those students. My Spanish was busted (it still is) but we got talking to a few of the Chad students in the mosque who promised us Somalis! And within about 20 minutes, we had met our first Somali. Guy was so exceptionally cool that within about 10 minutes of knowing us, he managed to get us invites to the Djibouti Independence day celebrations that was being hosted by the embassy. The following Tuesday, we were rubbing shoulders with actual diplomats. They were really boring. Except this one South African General who was definitely on crack. He may or may not have suggested Africa’s economic failure can be explained by how angry our ancestors are with the way we buried them.
Look, you've probably seen my tweets about how terrible the food in Cuba was, -it was-, and how long we had to walk to the closest Internet park, -20 minutes-, but Cuba was honestly one of the best experiences of my life. I learned a ton about a ton because fundamentally, that’s what traveling is about. It’s not about having the best food (read: food you’re used to) or sleeping in the most comfortable bed. It’s about expanding your outlook and vision. It’s about meeting a grown man called Hyman and not even flinching when he introduces himself. It’s about learning to haggle taxi prices based off how safe the car looks. “This car? Wouldn't pay a penny over $3 mate”. It’s about being half way across the world and connecting with someone from back home.
And Cuba did just that.
