Barb and Baden’s Excellent Cuban Adventure – Final
Final Thoughts
I’m writing this final chapter of our Excellent Cuban in our hotel room in Varadero and I’ve had some time to think about the past week that we’ve spent in Cuba. I’ve got to say that our experience in Cuba wasn’t what I expected it to be and in many ways feel some disappointment in those experiences.
For the most part, our stay in Cuba is really only defined by the time that we stayed in Havana. While we stayed in the resort in Varadero for more days I’m going to exclude most of my comments about Cuba from the Varadero stay as realistically, while we enjoyed ourselves here, the resort is not really indicative of Cuba in any meaningful way. While at the resort in Varadero, we really could have been at any beach resort in any Spanish-speaking country and not notice too much difference. This isn’t taking away from any of the positive aspects of our stay here at the Sandals Royal Hicacos as we’ve really enjoyed staying here. The food was quite good, the staff was really friendly and just about everything about the resort was well done. Without a doubt we would recommend this resort in Cuba for a vacation.
Barb and I were comparing notes last night about the Havana part of our Cuban trip. For the most part we seemed to have a similar perspective about it. One of the factors that defined our impression of Havana has to do with a unique factor of Cuba that does not exist in any other country that I am aware of. I’m referring to the dual currency that Cuba has in place.
The currency in Cuba is the Cuban Peso but there are two different kinds of Peso. Essentially everything that you will pay for as a tourist will be paid for in a “convertible” peso which is always labelled as CUC. Most restaurants that we went to only had prices in CUC and we only saw one store that had dual pricing for the local and tourists. In general, the local peso pricing was about 1/10th of the CUC pricing. On the surface this might imply that the locals are paying 1/10th of what we are as tourists but I suspect that local Cuban is making far less that 1/10th the average salary so the net result is that most things that we might find to be relatively affordable (even in CUC pricing) is far beyond the reach of most Cubans to purchase.
The fact that most Cubans can never afford many of the things that tourists can easily purchase lends itself to one of the most significant issues that you come across when going to restaurants or stores: you rarely see local Cubans eating or shopping at these stores and restaurants as they cannot afford to do so. Unlike any other place that we have travelled to where it is common to interact with the locals at stores and restaurants this never really happened to us in Havana. In many ways it was like being at a resort where the only locals that you are interacting with are those who work in service jobs but never as a customer.
The issue about why virtually all of the meals that we had in Havana we really bad is a bit harder to explain. In fact I don’t really understand it at all. If I were to speculate about this I would say that there doesn’t seem to be any system in place in Cuba where there are training programs for chefs or that because of the lack of available food products had diminished the standard for cooking over the years. Whatever the reason is, it’s really unfortunate as this one factor made such a big impact on our overall impression of Havana.
The photos from our trip to Cuba can be seen on my photo website here.
And finally…
The main question that we have been asking ourselves over the past few days is will we come back to Cuba again? The answer to this is not as simple yes or no. One of the motivators that drove us to come to Cuba now (and Havana in particular) was that we wanted to see the country before any changes occur to it with respect to the relationship with the U.S. Having had a chance to see a bit of the country as it is, I think that I might want to come back to Cuba again but maybe after there had been an opportunity for the country to have a large amount of money infused for upgrades and repairs to the aging infrastructure. Whether these potential changes have a positive impact on the day to day lives of regular Cubans is left to be seen but it would be truly unfortunate if economic changes were to occur to the country and no benefit were to be seen by the people.
These potential changes notwithstanding, I think that Barb and I may not return to Havana for many years, if at all. Whether we return to Cuba to a resort in Varadero is equally unclear.
As far as our next travel plans go, we have several destinations under discussion but we still have plans for a major expedition to Antarctica in the winter 2011 time frame. Of course this leaves all of 2010 unaccounted for and I’m hoping to announce what our plans will be in the next few months as they become more certain.
Until then.
Baden
