Articles > Cuba: Know Before you Go

Cubana or Virgin?
For a night out on the town, no contest – but when it comes to flights the extra £100 to fly Virgin is arguably travel’s most worthwhile investment. Mainly because Cubana is so awful and seemingly content to be so. Flight delays – any time up to 10 hours – are pretty standard; the ‘food’ is so sparse and foul (with one drink allowed) that even if taste does lose out to hunger in a moment of despair, they’ve nothing extra on board anyway; no in-flight movies, only banal Cuban travelogues. What’s more, Cubana’s London-Havana isn’t even direct. It stops in Holguin for the most boring hour of your life.
Note: The flight lasts ten hours. Cuba is four hours behind the UK. A good time to go is November-March; best of all, is late November-December 13th, before the crowds and the High Season prices kick in.

Cuba’s C21st Attitude to Tourists: Some Bad Aspects
In the 90’s, Fidel needed tourism badly. Probably the only recourse left to him anyway, its timely injection of money and jobs into the Cuban economy was a life-saver. But it came at a price he didn’t like: a booming ‘black economy’ privately transacted with tourists in the wildest spirits of capitalism and in any currency but Cuban. Everyone was eagerly renting out their homes to sleep in, their dining rooms to eat in and either themselves, or somebody they knew, to sleep with. Anything to collar the cash in a society of huge unemployment and pitifully low wages.

Today’s Castro is a different animal. Financially in bed with his new best friends, China and Venezuela - to Cuba’s advantage - he doesn’t feel the need to indulge tourists any more. Quite the opposite, in fact. He now reckons that Cuba’s place as a holiday destination is so securely established in the market that he can get away with doing pretty much what he likes, even if he does annoy visitors.

Nor is Castro any longer prepared to turn a blind eye to that capitalist ‘black economy’ with all its ‘unrevolutionary’ goings-on. Private renters and restaurants are either being closed down or very heavily taxed by the State - which now wants the lion’s share of tourism’s income for itself, not individuals. The papers are full of stories about people being arrested for what was, and still is, Cuba’s national sport, ‘misappropriating’ State property.

He’s also on the case of Cuba’s acquired reputation for instant sex. Suspected hookers – in streets, bars and beaches – are being rounded up and jailed. With police and informers everywhere, the Revolution is back with a vengeance. Cuba, sadly, is more Stasi than fun these days. Take, therefore, good note of what follows.

Visas
Simplicity itself, this end. Your travel adviser sends you two short little entry/exit forms to fill in: cost £15, no photos necessary. On arrival, though, your entry form must be presented word perfect, with no crossings out allowed. And expect to stand in line about one hour to get through utterly joyless immigration booths. Totalitarian State Bureaucracy is in full swing.

Money
This is a nightmare, but you don’t realise it straightaway. Things start off well enough. Their new currency – the Cuban Convertible Peso, written CUCS and pronounced ‘Kewks’- is pegged at parity with the Euro for our convenience (and nose -thumbing the US$ in the process). So that’s easy. And whether it’s at the airport, inside a bank or at a top hotel, the exchange rate is fixed. It’s more or less the same deal everywhere. And that is where the good news ends.

1. Use a credit card and you find that Papa Castro – outrageously – has just added an 11% tax to your bill. Withdraw cash with a pin number and you’ll get 11% less. Who would want to use a credit card for anything in Cuba under such larcenous conditions?

2. Only a certain few banks take travellers cheques, so they’d be a potential hassle to convert.

3. That just leaves cash. But not US$ - because there’s an 18% surcharge to Fidel on that particular currency. And not just any old cash: notes must be pristine with no tears at all or they just won’t take them in Cuba and your money’s dead. One bank wouldn’t even change £50 notes. But that, mercifully, is unusual.

4. So, for Cuba, it comes down to cash – simultaneously the most effective and least desirable way of travelling with money.

Bills Inflates, Tips Demanded, Scams A-Gogo
Whether Cubans were always a rapacious lot I don’t know but, brutalised by the regime, they’re certainly that way now.

Example One: You sit down outside a café and don’t bother to request the drinks menu because you’re only having two beers anyway. The waiter bills you 3 CUCS, you drink up and move on. However, in that café, beers actually only cost 1 CUC each, so the waiter’s craftily trousered 33% of your bill for himself. Multiply that over a day and he’s doing OK for himself. If you ask to see the price list, he’ll tell you there isn’t one; it’s being re-printed at the moment! If you say that two beers here only cost you 2 CUCS yesterday, he’ll silently and uncomplainingly rectify your bill to the right amount. Doesn’t want any fuss, does he? After all, he’s going to lose some; but most he’ll win and without anybody noticing. So the moral of the story is: in Cuban cafes and restaurants always see the price list before ordering and get it back again later to double-check your bill. Run that simple test for yourself over a day: I predict plenty of ‘mistakes’.

Example Two: When you pick up your hire car, the man in the office will suggest, none too lightly, that a 10CUC tip to him is the norm around here. No, it’s not; nor is it anywhere I’ve been. Neither is making you pay the first 20CUCS of any mechanical breakdown! Nor is their insistence that they sell you a full tank of petrol and you return the car not full, but as empty as you like. (In practice no-one does, of course, so that’s a few free litres for the staff – significant in a country where siphoning petrol from each others’ cars is so commonplace that I met one guy who’d re-positioned his filler cap inside the boot!).

And watch out for this scam: there’s a 50CUCS fine if you lose your copy of the contract – so make sure he remembers to give it to you. If he ‘forgets’ to do so, hiding it away as you drive off, that’s a guaranteed-by-contract 50 CUCS in the bag for him when you return without it. He of course does have your contract, so his paperwork’s going to come the correct full circle – with no mention of a 50CUC penalty as there’s no visible need to impose it. Oh, and every time you park anywhere in Cuba, an ‘attendant’ will pop up, expecting a 1 CUC tip upon your return for having ‘minded’ your car for you.

People react differently to being continually hit upon. Sure, it’s disillusioning and tedious, but you’re going to have to come to terms with this happening to you every day in Cuba. Eventually, it becomes funny – almost an entertainment in itself to play ‘spot the scam’. Whatever you do, don’t do what a friend of mine did. Piqued beyond belief by being ripped off by Cubans and damned if he was going to return his hire-car to the airport with a single drop of petrol in it for them, he bloody-mindedly drove round and round a roundabout just outside the airport to use up fuel. He ran out, had to push the car to the airport and all but missed his flight home!

Food and Drink
Apart from the odd oasis in Havana, Cuba is still a gastronomic desert. Cuisine is seen as some sort of bourgeois deviation. No danger of that though in the near-monopoly enjoyed by the state-run restaurants of Cuba. Expect many items on the menu not to be available and dishes to arrive under-spiced and over-cooked. In a country in love with pork but unable to work out bacon yet, you will also find yourself having to eat – faute de mieux – a wearyingly large number of Cuba’s No.1, omnipresent icon: The Ham and Cheese Sandwich.

Private houses (‘Casas Particular’), regardless of whether you’re staying with them, are still the best option for dinner at 8CUCS a head for a good three-course meal, where you choose the main course (eg smoked pork, chicken, lobster or grilled fish) typically surrounded by dishes of rice, plantain, black bean soup, salad and fruit. Don’t, whatever else you do in Cuba, miss out on two absolute restaurant gems in Havana: Los Nardos (dirt cheap for big, well-crafted portions served in the marvellous dark wood, candle-lit ambience of a Spanish grandee’s house) and La Guarida (very small, very cheffy and very a la mode for its arty past and run-down setting). Try Los Nardos first, as it seems to be open all day and you’re likely to return to it time and again. Remember, too, that foodie cognoscenti already know these places: book well ahead.

Regarding wine, select the youngest vintages of wines with the least distance to travel and thus the shortest exposure to ignorant or insouciant Cuban wine storage. In 2005, that meant drinking Chilean wines no older than 2004. Anything else is more than likely to be oxidised.

And The Welcome Aspects
1. All the rhythmic music, near-pornographic dancing, crumbling grand architecture and stately old American cars are still there, going strong.

2. Cigars (never bought from street vendors, only from government shops) are still great value for the ultimate range and well-humidored. Havana Club Gran Reserva Rum (aged 15yr.), although pricey at 85CUCS a bottle, is probably the best rum in the world. It’s almost impossible to find outside of Cuba and your mates will think it’s cognac.

3. It’s still possible to lodge and eat in Private Houses for around 20-35CUCS per room night with breakfast often included in the deal. But think carefully before going down the ‘Casa Particular’ road. It is an option only suited to a minority of tourists - independent travellers, prepared to rough it and able to speak Spanish.

4. It’s still possible to cavort with Cuban girls – but any street assignations must be made very quickly and very discreetly – and expect to pay around 30-50CUCS for around two hours of their company. Avoid girls up from Santiago: they are notorious for being the worst of the worst. Check too that your ‘Casa Particular’ will allow you to bring girls into the house. Many do not these days, for fear of a fine and losing their licence if discovered doing so; but enough still will, if you shop around. Hotel policy is not to permit girls going up to the rooms, but 20CUCS to the doorman normally takes care of that.

5. Overall, Cuba is still a relatively inexpensive destination – the cheapest island in the Caribbean, with a character unique and totally different from the rest. After four visits there, I think I know. Enjoy the good bits.

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