cuba

[Brad the Impala]

I was in Cuba late last year, apologies, been meaning to write a report, but issues at work and with family have consumed my time.

I can confirm everything that Paperboy says, and would add that a new, every night, gay venue opened a year ago called Humboldt, in Humboldt street, and just around the corner from Las Vegas and Mix that have been mentioned. Similar format, rent boys, gay guys, drag queens, even some really muscled guys who wouldn't have been out of place in Tawan. The owner of Humboldt also runs a gay guest house, but not in the Verdado area. The opening night of this bar was attended by Castro's niece, a real sign of the changes in attitudes in Cuba. They have come a long way in a short time. https://www.facebook.com/Humboldt52/?fref=ts

They had also just started a regular Saturday night gay event called Cafe Cantante which takes place in the large bar underneath the National Theatre. Great night out, starts midnight and runs to 0500 or so, and a great mix of Cuban guys of every colour and type. Quite thai style in that the best thing to do is get a table and a bottle, or two or three. They even had a male go go show one night, and if I could remember how to add photos, I will.

Don't miss the gay beach, about half an hour out of Havana. I have never seen so many large erections on a beach, waving within loose fitting trunks, in my life!

If you can speak spanish, you will have even more fun! Local English is frequently basic at best.

[zetor67]

hola, sorry to say that the humbold bar is closed, and also carlos house. i hope they will open again soon, so good memories of both places! i heared of i new bar caleed :mixxto

[paperboy]

yes i can confirm its closed. The owner was arrested for having drugs on the premisses.

[Brad the Impala]

Thanks for update, on Casa Carlos and Humboldt. I met the owner and he seemed a straight up sort of guy, so I'm surprised. Were the drugs on the premises at the club or the hotel?

[paperboy]

hey

from my friends they all said the same, PLANTED
did not pay the police enough lol
i was there in 2014 when the police came in (chief) to get the money
amazing
was like being in Thailand
so it happens every where.
the boys on the stree all told me he did not pay enough
unlike Las vegas, ahahhahaha

[Marsilius]

My own impressions - based in a business trip to Cuba in late 2014 - were rather different from those of the O.P. I detailed them at the time in a letter to friends, from which this is an extract... [Restrictions of space on this board mean that this has had to be spread over two posts.]


Anyway, I thought that you'd enjoy hearing my impressions of the place. The first thing to say is that it certainly is a very interesting country. As you will soon learn, I wouldn't exactly say that I had an enjoyable time there, but it certainly was an enlightening one.

Let me say, first of all, that holidaymakers who visit Cuba and stay at a beach resort, from which they don't set foot outside, probably have a very pleasant time. Cuban beaches are very nice, the weather is hot by European standards (more of that later!) and I'm told that the food in those places is pretty good. However, as I'm about to explain, if you go to Havana, in particular, things are very different indeed.

The first thing that really strikes you about Cuba is how almost nobody speaks English. If you travel the world a reasonable amount, you soon get used to idea that almost all people - even peasants in remote villages in Asia or Africa - can come up with a little bit of English as a second language. That's definitely not the case in Cuba, however. You find that out pretty quickly. At the immigration desk they jabber at you in Spanish and, when they find out that you can't speak it, they just jabber at you some more but a bit more loudly! You'd think that, bring as keen as they are to get foreigners (and, more especially, their money) into Cuba, it would have occurred to them to put some English speakers on the immigration desks. Not at all! What's even worse is that they are far more likely than other countries to want to know what you're bringing into the country and why. As you know, I've been to plenty of places around the world, but this is the first time ever that I've been required to empty out my hand luggage contents for inspection at Immigration. I later learned that they're worried that you might be bringing in cell phones or other communications technology to give to Cuban friends (and that's a definite no-no because all communication, both internal and external, is strictly controlled by the Cuban government). Of course, as they don't speak English while they're rifling through your possessions, you've no idea what they're doing or what they're looking for! The basic problem causing communication problems is that, in order to stop Cuban people listening to foreign broadcasts (a.k.a "propaganda"), the Cuban government doesn't allow English to be taught at secondary school level. It's only taught to university students who can then be carefully monitored thereafter. And those people don't tend to become immigration officers! Once past Immigration, the taxi drivers don't speak English either, of course, but thankfully I'd been forewarned and so had a piece of paper ready with my destination written on it.

So, what's the place like? Well, in the first place, it is, as you'd expect, very hot. I'm used to heat in South East Asia, of course, where temperatures are very similar. But whereas the heat in Asia is quite humid, in Cuba it is not only hot but dry and, as a result, feels very fierce. On my first afternoon there I underestimated it and, after only two or three hours, I was very severely burned. Thank goodness I'd taken some aloe vera after-sun balm with me and that did a lot to alleviate the damage, but my skin was nevertheless peeling off for the rest of my stay and beyond.

Apart from the fierce sun, Havana is - and maybe this will surprise you - an incredibly depressing place to visit. That's because you can see that, with its many lovely old colonial era buildings, it ought to be a very beautiful place: but in fact nothing has been done to maintain those buildings ever since the communist government took over in the 1950s. Many are falling down and virtually derelict. In street after street, you'll see strikingly beautiful facades and then, looking through the windows from another angle, you will see that that's all they actually are, because the structures inside have completely collapsed. Paint, where there is any, is peeling off the walls of buildings everywhere. Roads aren't maintained at all and are uneven and full of potholes. Everything is uncared for and very dirty. Apparently, it's only in the past three or four years that people have been allowed to buy or sell property - so only in that time has there been any incentive to keep the standard of the place where you live up to scratch and to try to maintain its value by carrying out any more than the most basic maintenance work. Much of Havana is, in fact, the nearest place to a giant slum that I've ever encountered anywhere in the world. The only way that something could be done to improve it would be if it were taken on by some supra-national body like the U.N. that would then have to pump billions into doing it all up. Even then, it would be a project that would take many decades to complete.

One of the things that you see depicted most often in postcards of Cuba is old cars. Because of the US commercial boycott of the island since the late 1950s, virtually no cars have been imported into Cuba since then. As a result, the place is full of old 1950s and earlier cars and the vast majority of vehicles running on Havana streets are actually about 65 years old or older. Some of them are strikingly well maintained - at least on the outside - and are used to give tourists expensive rides "in style" around Havana city centre. But most of them are, as you'd expect, in a very poor state because it hasn't been possible to import spare parts either. I lost count of the number of times that I'd flag down a taxi to find after I'd climbed inside that the inner chassis had rusted completely away. There'd be no inner door - so no door handles or handles to wind the windows up or down. In order to close the door, you have to grab the edge of the window frame and then yank it shut! Many of the driver's controls are out of action or non-existent too. Speedometers may not work at all, and on one trip, coming back from the beach in a violent tropical thunderstorm, I found that I was in a car with no windscreen wipers. The driver just had to peer through the torrent of water cascading down the windscreen. That was an interesting and memorable experience, I can tell you!

Because the country is not only cut off from much of the rest of the world but is also so poor, very little food is imported - and certainly hardly any food of the sort of quality we expect in the west. As a result, shopping becomes a weird experience. You go into a shop - even a large one - and you'll find a couple of cans on one shelf, two or three packets on another, and lots of shelves with absolutely nothing on them at all. Shop windows tell it all: many of them have nothing in them or maybe just a few boxes covered with plain silver foil to make it look as though there's something inside them, but goodness knows what it might be. When shops do have goods, the quality is appalling. I'll never forget seeing people eagerly buying bananas that were rotting and completely black all over and must have passed their sell-by date a couple of weeks before.

Having previously sampled Caribbean food and found it to be generally quite spicy, I was very surprised to find that, as a result of everything being poor quality, Cuban food is incredibly bland. Having rapidly got very fed up of the limited choice and lack of flavour, one night I thought I'd find a Chinese restaurant (the Chinese, being fellow communists, are one of Cuba's few allies and have invested in a few businesses there). I had sweet and sour pork, but when I bit into the ball it was virtually all dough, with the tiniest bit of old and tasteless meat hidden away somewhere in the middle of it all. Not only that, but the cost of the pork, plain rice and a cola was about £25 - that's about US$40 and about twice what I'd expect to pay even in the UK! The basic underlying problem in that case is that Cuba uses two currencies and has two parallel sets of prices for any goods on sale. For the same meal, a Cuban national, using the currency that's only available to its own citizens, might have paid about US$1. But foreigners have to use a special and different currency and everything is priced far, far higher in that one - and even, as in the case if the Chinese meal, higher priced than in most western countries. Moreover, that foreigners-only currency cannot be exchanged anywhere else in the world, so you need to spend all you have of it before you leave Cuba because it becomes entirely worthless as soon as you leave the place.

Spending the currency though - unless you have endless expensive (but crap quality) meals - is quite hard to do, as there is hardly any anything to spend it on! Evenings in Cuba are quiet, to say the least, and most nights I just stayed at my home base and read a book. It's not that I felt unsafe: Cuba actually has one of the lowest crime rates going. That's because offences (and, I'm told, especially offences against foreigners) are punished very severely indeed and, given what the rest of Cuba is like, I'd imagine that their gaols are very, very bad places. But, in any case, there is just no reason for a foreigner to go out onto the streets at night at all. Local bars are as dreary as the shops (and only Spanish-speaking in any case) and the few higher quality ones are tourist traps that are priced out of all reality.


[Continued in next post]

[Marsilius]

[Continued from previous post]


Another "interesting" feature of Cuban life is, of course, the secret police. You have to remember that it's a one-party state and any dissent is immediately cracked down on. I already mentioned that English is discouraged because it might allow Cubans to learn about the outside world. Similarly, the Internet might as well not exist - for it is only allowed if you need it for your job or if you are a foreigner willing to pay $10/hour to queue for hours in order to get access to an incredibly slow dial-up connection (no broadband at all) in a public hotel. Phone calls are monitored by the police as well, to ensure that no one is plotting anything that the state wouldn't like. Anyway, back to the police... As I was in Cuba on business, I needed to spend quite a bit of time with native Cubans. The trouble is that that gets the police very suspicious of what conversations might be going on between you. I lost track of the number of times that I'd be walking in the street with a Cuban, when he'd say something like "Let's walk a bit faster, there's a policeman watching us" or something similar. On one occasion, I was actually stopped when walking with and talking to two Cuban guys. The policeman ignored me (which is the norm with foreigners) but asked each Cuban what they were doing talking to me. He radioed his findings in to HQ. He then asked the two guys for their ID cards and, when one didn't have it on him, he was handcuffed, a police car was summoned and he was taken off for questioning at the police station. Apparently, when I stayed put but kept quiet, I did the right thing. In that sort of situation some foreigners are apparently so intimidated that they move off and leave their Cuban companions in the lurch. Wrong: that makes you look suspicious and as though you really were up to no good. Other foreigners try to argue their way out of the situation. Wrong, again: that just makes the incident worse and can actually get you arrested. So, just by chance, it seems I happened to behave in the right way!

Of course, the secret police is just the most obvious manifestation of the fact that Cuba is a communist police state, but really the whole country is a living condemnation of communism in practice. OK, there's lots wrong with capitalism, as we all know, but at least it pushes up living standards. Let's make up a silly example. Communism says why waste money/effort on pointless things associated with capitalist businesses like advertising and marketing; let's produce just one type of detergent, say, instead of 10 rival products, then we won't need to waste money on ridiculous advertising and promotion, keeping the product cheaper, plus everyone will end up using the same product and so that will help make society "equal". But if you do that, there's never any incentive to improve the product because it's not in competition with any others. In fact, there's no incentive for producers (that's the government, in any case) to make anything better or more efficient. Hence societies like Cuba stagnate into lethargy and one of the great drivers of progress - competition - is thrown out of the window.

Given that I've just spent the past three pages ranting about the failings of life in Cuba, you'd imagine, wouldn't you, that I'd have nothing very good to say about the place - but there you'd be wrong! The good thing is the people. They are really lovely, very welcoming and kind to visitors who are strangers in their country. It's quite amazing in the circumstances, but although they have very little or nothing in the way of decent possessions, it doesn't seem to bother them that much. You might think it is because they've been brainwashed and simply because they don't know anything about the outside world. But that actually isn't so. Goodness knows how, but they do realise that they are way behind the rest of the world in overall progress and, when you talk to them on their own, they're pretty unhappy about it. I was told plenty of stories about corruption among government officials and, while I have no idea if they're true, the important thing, of course, is that the people who told them to me do believe them.

It's a good job that there is a redeeming feature or two of Cuban life because it's pretty likely that I'll be going back there at some point in the coming year to do some more work. But at least, I guess, I'll be prepared for the worst next time!

[Khor tose]

Thanks Marsilius,

I always suspect there is much more to a country than "were the boys are and how many were there."

[a447]

Well, so much for my planned future trip to Cuba!

Oh, well.......

Thanks for a very comprehensive and informative report, marsilius.

[FarangRuMak]

Well, so much for my planned future trip to Cuba!

Oh, well.......

Thanks for a very comprehensive and informative report, marsilius.

My thoughts exactly until I saw Paperboy's reply.
Yep, one picture is worth a thousand words.