I think for the most part I’ve stayed true to that notion, but I’m starting to soften a bit. It started after Mexico City. My final post from CDMX was ostensibly about large scale art and architecture, but that was just a fig leaf. Truthfully, I just wanted to share some random cool shit that hadn’t found a home in any of the other posts, and I shoehorned them into an ill-fitting rubric to make it so.

I don’t think that fooled anyone, certainly not me, so I’m throwing off my fig leaf (with apologies for the image) and just admitting that everywhere we go there will be random cool shit that doesn’t have a home and isn’t part of some larger sociocultural framework. So the last post from each stop will likely be a Sightseeing in... post, wrapping up all the bits worth sharing that didn’t fit elsewhere.

I’m also open to branding these as Random Cool Shit in…. Please vote in the Comments.

Art

Cuba has an incredibly vibrant arts scene. We found it richest in graphics and painting, weakest in handicrafts. Other than some truly beautiful crochet and embroidery, most of the handicrafts tended towards the touristy. A notable exception was the ceramics studio we found in Trinidad.

Taller Experimental de Grafica

At least so far, everywhere we’ve been has had an especially active graphics scene. I think it’s because the tools are pretty available, the materials aren’t particularly expensive, and the finished product can be sold at an accessible price. Whatever the reason, Cuba was no exception. The highlight for us was Taller Experimental de Grafica, a huge shared studio space featuring the work of dozens of artists. Dorothy and I each picked out a piece.

La Fábrica de Arte Cubano

The Cuban Art Factory is a one-stop-shop for everything hip and happening in Habana. I was too distracted to take a lot of pictures, so I’ll just have to explain.

The Art Factory is a strange hybrid, halfway between an art gallery and a nightclub. There are multiple small restaurants and bars scattered about both indoors and out, several shops selling prints, books, jewelry, and such (like a museum gift shop), multiple gallery spaces, a theater, a dance floor, a live band performance space, and a high-end restaurant.

The rooftop restaurant.

The frippery notwithstanding, the Factory is first and foremost an art gallery. There are gallery spaces on all three floors, both large and small, and everywhere you might go that isn’t an art gallery is gallery adjacent. You may come for the nightclub bits, but you’ll never forget you’re in a gallery.

And it’s a very good art gallery. This is not your local yogurt shop that lets the guy who paints landscapes use its walls. This is the real deal. When we visited, the main galleries were taken up by a massive show, a collaboration between Enrique Rottenberg, an artist whose medium is photography (it seems wrong to call him a photographer) and a painter (whose name I can’t seem to find). Rottenberg provided the large-scale digital prints and the painter went to town on them. It was exhilarating, and would have fit in any major gallery in any major global city. Where art is concerned, Cuba is no one’s little brother.

The Art Factory operates on an interesting model I haven’t seen used elsewhere. There’s a cover to get in (250 CUP, or about $1.50 US) which gets you a paper card. If you spend money anywhere inside, it gets added to your card, so you don’t have to cash out every time you get a drink or a snack. When you leave you cash your card out. If you lose your card they charge you 5,000 CUP, about $30 US, so that discourages trying to cheat. It’s a clever model, and I think it would be easy to implement elsewhere.

Honestly, I think the entire thing, not just the billing model, should be adapted and recreated. If you just airlifted the whole building anywhere else in the world, it would be an amazing resource wherever you set it down. It wasn’t merely cool for Cuba, it was just plain cool.

Catedral de San Cristobal de la Habana

Plaza de la Catedral, unsurprisingly, hosts the Catedral de San Cristobal de la Habana, a great Baroque beast that was completed in 1777. While there’s plenty of age-appropriate architectural filigrees inside, the predominant style of the religious art is a surprise. I’m used to seeing paintings, and I’m used to seeing sculptures or effigies of saints and such. What I’m not used to seeing is dioramas, with a strong narrative sense created by staging statues in front of paintings.

The Catedral seems to have had several updates in the intervening centuries, so it’s not at all clear when the current artworks were created and installed. They seem very modern, but who knows? Whatever their era, they are supremely weird and wonderful.

Museums

We visited two art museums in Habana. The first was the Museo de Artes Decorativas, which is housed in a restored Colonial. Based on the name, we expected contemporary crafts: ceramics, wood, furniture, and the like. We got the content right, but not the era. It was all European artifacts purchased with sugar money. Or, as one of the architects who worked on Museo Anahuacalli in CDMX put it (not referring specifically to this collection): “a servile veneration of European stupidity.”

Personally, I’m not particularly interested in Colonial-era European hoohah. But beyond my disinterest in the subject matter, I was confused by the Cuban government’s interest. On the one hand, good for them for preserving all of their past. Successful revolutions have a habit of tearing down the bourgeois artifacts of the Ancien Régime, and the Cubans avoided that. On the other hand, though, this particular thing seemed like an odd choice for preservation and celebration. Maybe it would make sense if it had been presented with an overlay of “This is how the wealthy wasted the value they extracted from the land and the workers.” But it was presented straight up as “This shit’s cool, no?” Neither the first nor last time I’ll be baffled on this trip. It’s keeping me young.

The second museum we visited was the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, which features art from throughout Cuba’s history, from the 17th century to modern times. About half the museum is contemporary, from the 1930s on, and we made it through a little more than half of that section. What was clear even from that fraction of the museum is that thinking of Cuba as isolated is just wrong. Cuban artists have been engaged in a dialogue with the global artistic community all along, up through what the Cuban Art Factory is doing today.

LP Art

The Prado is a wide promenade running from the Malecón at one end to the Capitolio building at the other. Local artists set up pop-up shops along the Prado, and we found someone there making mandalas by using acrylic paint on old LPs. Not only were they beautiful in their own right, they seemed quintessentially Cuban to me, riding the line connecting scavenging and art.

On The Street

Callejon de Hamel

Callejon de Hamel is a unique spot. The entire alley (callejon) is an art installation that’s the brainchild of artist Salvador Gonzáles Escalona. Starting in 1990 and over decades, he added murals and sculptures until the entire alley was completely covered in his work.

Today, the Callejon functions as an arts and community center, and is one of Habana’s core spaces keeping traditional Yoruban Santeria alive. We got a guided tour from one of their docents, who was able to explain the meaning of much of the art. But appreciating it doesn’t require knowing which piece celebrates Chango and which celebrates Yemaya. It’s all just swell.

Barrio Chino

Plaza Vieja

Literally Old Square, it dates back to 1559, when it was called, unsurprisingly, Plaza Nueva. The buildings around the Plaza are some of the best restored buildings in Habana Vieja.

The Most Random Of Shit

Vistas

No deep meaning, just some beautiful views of Habana.

The Paseo del Prado is a new hotel in Habana, right on the Malecón. It’s pretty fancy, and you can’t even get up to the rooftop bar/restaurant without a reservation. Of course, our local friend Jenn took care of that, and we met her and some of her friends for drinks and snacks one night on the rooftop, which had spectacular views.

The beautiful Rio Almendares, which runs from the Malecón through the middle of Habana, and about 30 miles inland. This view is from a bridge connecting the Miramar and Vedado neighborhoods. Cuba is nothing if not lush.

Amor Verdadero (Guajira-Son), 1997

Classic old school Afro-Cuban son. This album was recorded in the same sessions that produced Buena Vista Social Club, with many of the same musicians.

This is old masters showing the kids how it’s done, swinging like tomorrow might not come after all.

Cuando Te Vea, 1958

Tito Puente, El Maestro, the OG. This album was a massive hit, and was the soundtrack to all your parent’s Cuba Libre-fueled key parties. And that’s why you’re supposed to stay in your room when you’re told.

This track features my favorite trumpet solo of all time, riding on top of that slinky, syncopated clave base.

*Fact check: Tito was an American-born Puerto Rican, but he was still a prime mover in Afro-Cuban jazz.

Esta China, 1980

The band that launched Youssou N’Dour into stardom. I love this track because I always think of Afro-Cuban music as unidirectional, the influences moving from Africa to Cuba. If nothing else, this track proves that things moved in the other direction, too.

I don’t know that the woozy horns are Cuban (they sound more drunken Mariachi to me), but the percussion could have been lifted straight off a classic Tito Puente track.

If those three songs don’t make you want to a) hear more Afro-Cuban jazz, and b) shake your groove thing, there’s no help for you. I mean, I guess we can still be friends…

Maybe.

Anyway, that’s what I had in my head when we talked about going to Cuba. I wasn’t planning on going out every night, but music tourism was absolutely top of mind. Thankfully, we were able to enjoy music from traditional to modern, in venues from bars to concert halls.

The first music we saw was at El Rintintin in Trinidad, which I covered here. That kind of classic sound really sings to me, and I found it again in Habana Vieja. The house band at restaurant/bar La Vitrola right on Plaza Vieja scratched the itch. Not Tito Puente, but that ship has sailed.

Our next concert was concert hall, not bar. It was staged in a beautiful Colonial church, and featured a group of maybe 9-10 musicians doing an overview of Cuban music from roughly the last 100 years. The entire program was excellent, but my personal favorite was a piece by composer/pianist Frank Fernandez, who was in attendance, called Bellas Artes. I can’t find any version of that to share, but here’s another piece by Fernandez that at least gets you close.

The very next night we saw some of the musicians who were in the concert perform as a jazz quartet at a local restaurant/bar. The Ernesto Oliva Band featured Ernesto on piano with a bassist and two percussionists. It was modern jazz built on a foundation of classic Cuban rhythm (although with a hint of 70s Airto).

Finally, we saw Frank Delgado, a beloved Cuban folksinger. His songs were not only catchy, they were obviously well-known, as the audience sang along with almost every number. He’s known primarily for two things: incisive songs that capture the contradictions at the heart of the Cuban experience, and pissing the Cuban government off. I have a hunch those two things might be related.

Attending the concert was kind of weird. Imagine seeing Dylan in a small house, if the US government has worked over decades to suppress his music, you’d never heard his songs before, and you didn’t speak English. So… cool but baffling?

I expected Cuban music to be a highlight of our visit, and I wasn’t disappointed. The range of music on offer was incredibly broad, with so many different approaches to honoring and updating a deep and rich heritage. I hope you follow up on some of this, and join me in the joyous rabbit hole of Cuban music.

The Internet

Cuba opened up to a largely uncensored internet in 2015, with private wifi becoming available in 2019. They’re still not keen on pornography, terrorism, and, curiously, satanism, but they don’t appear to limit access to news sites or prohibit the downloading of files. It’s now possible to rent a casa particular through airbnb that includes wifi. But that doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Having a wifi router in Cuba, in either a rental or your own home, is a big deal. Not everyone can get one, as there has to be a spare, dedicated phone line in your unit, and it has to be up to ETECSA (the state-owned telecom) standards for data. If you don’t meet those requirements now, it can be a long wait to have ETECSA upgrade your line. Our local friend Jenn told us it took her four years to get an upgraded line installed.

And there’s no such thing as broadband, as the connectivity is through standard copper phone lines. What’s provided is just the pipe, not the data. It’s as if Comcast provided the cable modem and Charter provided the data plan that was available through that modem. It’s just that in Cuba, both of those providers are ETECSA.

If your apartment doesn’t have a wifi router, there are public wifi hotspots. Parks and government buildings tend to have public wifi. That’s why you often see large groups hanging out in the same location in public, all of them head down on their phones. Cuban cell phone plans, provided by, natch, ETECSA, also come with some cellular data. I don’t know how much, but I do know not a lot. Locals seem to use cellular data as an emergency.

I can vouch for that. We use Google Voice, which is VOIP, so we don’t need an actual cellular service. Instead, we use a global data service, Airalo. Except Airalo doesn’t operate in Cuba. The only service we found that does is Gigsky, and the cost difference is dramatic.

With Airalo, we get 20 gigabytes of data that we can use over a six month period for $89. We don’t use anything like 20 gigs of roaming data in six months, so that works out to a very affordable $15/month each to have essentially unfettered global roaming data, which is probably cheaper than your cell plan. The Airalo plan only covers 89 countries, so there will be times when we have to pick up a more expensive plan to close the gap. This is one of those times.

Gigsky’s plan is $24 for 200 megabytes of data over two weeks. That is not a lot of data, and a lot of it gets used just by your phone doing phone things when you turn cellular data on. It’s taken me three $24 data packs to figure out how to use it. Basically like taking a camp shower: turn the water on to get wet. Turn the water off. Soap. Turn the water on. Rinse. Turn the water back off and thank your lucky stars you got a fucking shower. Ingrate.

For the phone, that looks like: turn off Cellular Data globally, for the phone. Turn off Cellular Data for every app on your phone. When you need to look something up using cellular data, turn it on for that app only, then turn it on for your phone. Look up what you need to, and then shut off Cellular Data for both phone and app right away, before your phone does something stupid behind your back.

Our other fix has been to shift to Maps.Me for local mapping, rather than Apple Maps or Google Maps. Maps.Me lets you download full country maps to your phone, so you don’t need to be connected when you’re wandering around. Mapping is probably 90% of what we use while we’re outside (Wikipedia is the other 10%), so that’s pretty much eliminated the need for cellular data.

So if wifi is only the pipe and cellular data is, at best, an emergency method, how do you get data? ETECSA sells it. By the hour. How do you buy hourly ETECSA data? At an official government ETECSA office. Hourly data can be purchased as cards with passcodes, or loaded onto a permanent account. And it’s not very expensive: $25 CUP, about 15¢, per hour.

The permanent account sounds easiest, and our host said we could open one at an ETECSA office. Except we couldn’t. We could never figure out why. Whenever we asked about opening an account, we were just told No. Sometimes with a sad head shake, sometimes without. But always No. We don’t know if they’re not permitted for foreigners or they were just somehow unavailable whenever we asked. And we’ll never know.

The cards come in two denominations: one hour and five hour. But you’re only permitted to purchase three cards at a time, whatever the denomination, so five hours is best. If they have any five hour cards at the ETECSA office. Or one hour cards. They frequently seem to have neither. But the three card limitation is per passport, so Dorothy and I have started going together, to double up.

We’d gone to our closest ETECSA office to be told they didn’t have any cards. Tomorrow? Sad head shake. But we were directed to an office about a 15 minute taxi ride away, and jumped at the opportunity. After waiting in line, because waiting in line, I got three five hour cards. And Dorothy got… two. We appeared to have gotten the last five hour cards and hightailed it out of there before the locals noticed that we’d emptied the vault.

One of the oddities of this whole system, by the way, is the manner in which connectivity is managed. We’re used to bandwidth constraints, but I think that between the slow backbone to Venezuela and the copper to the router, there isn’t enough bandwidth to carve up for meaningful measurement. Which leaves time. But weirdly, once I’ve authenticated a single client to the wifi router, any other client that logs into that router picks up the internet connection. You’d think, since they’re metering time, that it would be device-by-device. Maybe it’s a technical limitation of their router environment, and maybe it’s that multiple clients will still be sharing the same constrained bandwidth, so who cares. Either way, it’s actually nice that we can both hop online to check email and such at the same time.

How long did it take us to figure out how to (more or less) reliably get internet access? About two weeks into our four week stay. But we’re pros now, and everything works fine. Or as fine as it actually works.

Currency

As complicated as the Internet is, it’s a cakewalk compared to Cuban currency.

Until 2021, Cuba had two currencies: the Cuban Peso (CUP) and the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC). The CUC was introduced in 1994 after the collapse of the Soviet Union (the Cuban Peso had previously been pegged to the ruble), and was pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. The official exchange rate for the CUP was 25 to the US dollar. While there are many reasons for and impacts of the dual currency system, one of its effects was to create a two-tiered economy. Workers were paid in CUP, whereas foreigners used CUC, putting the value of hard currency beyond the reach of most Cubanos. Businesses with a foreign clientele thus had access to the much higher value CUC.

Curiously, the elimination of the CUC didn’t change things. The two-tiered economy still exists, it’s just enforced by prices. There are goods and services priced for the local economy, and goods and services priced for the tourist economy and those with access to the hard currency associated with the tourist economy.

Taxis are out of reach of most locals, as are most bars and restaurants, although there is cheaper street food that’s pitched towards local consumption. For the higher priced services, prices are expressed in USD or Euros, although CUP can be used (at not the most generous exchange rate). Higher end restaurants will often have menus with prices in USD, and taxis will often quote fares in USD. You can’t use USD for any official business, but it’s coin of the realm in the real world.

Making matters even more complicated, as if that was possible, is the existence of the MLC: Moneda Libremente Convertible (Freely Convertible Currency), introduced in 2019. The MLC is a payment method that uses a special credit card that can be loaded with any currency, and then used to pay for goods and services with shops that accept the MLC card. Which appears to be next to nobody.  We’ve only seen one store so far that we couldn’t purchase from because we didn’t have an MLC card. It’s not at all obvious what problem the MLC is meant to address.

Hard currency is in high demand, so while the official CUP-USD exchange rate is still 24:1, the street exchange rate is about 180:1. We’ve exchanged through our host at 170:1, which seems like a perfectly reasonable premium for not having to wander about the streets hoping not to get scammed. While the disparity between official and street exchange rates would seem to create an irresistible arbitrage opportunity, the CUP can’t be exchanged outside of Cuba, and you can’t take more than 5,000 CUP (about $30 at street rates) out of the country.

In addition, the existence of the unofficial foreign currency market has forced the Cuban government to compete. The government now exchanges most foreign currencies at about four times the “official” rate, which isn’t confusing at all. The current official unofficial rate is 120:1, which closes the gap but still leaves an attractive arbitrage opportunity, mitigated in part by the 8% fee the Cuban government charges to exchange USD. All other currencies have a 2% fee. Every dollar exchanged into the unofficial rate and back out at the official rate (which is the only way to turn CUP into USD – the unofficial market has no interest in selling its USD) would yield about a 30% return.

Honestly, I think the only thing that discourages exchange rate arbitrage tourism is the per transaction restriction of about $300 USD and the long bank lines. You could come to Cuba for a 30% return on your dollars, but that’s all you’d be doing while here. Still, I’d wager that some folks come here with that as their primary goal, regardless.

The Economy

Because only some people have access to the hard currency economy (airbnb hosts, taxi drivers, restaurateurs…), inequality is seeping into the Cuban economy. Obviously, nothing at all like the gap in the US, but it exists, and it’s a relatively new feature. It’s not a positive development, and is bound to have more severe negative consequences (e.g. higher crime…) down the road.

What largely counterbalanced the US bloqueo was the economic support of the USSR. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, that all went to shit, ushering in what was known as The Special Period. That special period involved belt tightening and rationing, at both the individual and government levels. Sadly, those conditions are largely the same today as in the 90s. The US embargo has handicapped Cuba’s ability to recover from the loss of their primary patron and trading partner.

The Cuban government turned to tourism as a source of hard currency and economic growth. Tourism is now Cuba’s largest sector, representing 10% of Cuba’s GDP (meaning that the pandemic and the hurricane that followed it hurt Cuba even more than most countries). There’s no small irony in a socialist/communist haven focusing on tourism for survival. Attracting tourists requires providing the basic necessities that the Cuban government has had trouble providing to its citizens. As much as there’s a general understanding that tourism is a huge benefit to the economy, there’s also a great deal of frustration that tourists are prioritized over citizens. It’s tough to live with a five egg/month ration, when every day you pass tourist restaurants serving omelets for breakfast. For more than you can afford.

Other than the bloqueo itself, the other major economic distortion is emigration. The US has created a fast track path for Cubans (as well as Haitians, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans) that eases the immigration process. The net effect of this policy is extractive, and is no different than the US building a mining facility in Cuba to extract some valuable resource. It’s just that the valuable resources are people and intellectual capital, and it doesn’t require getting one’s hands dirty with mines and such. It can be done very effectively and cleanly from a distance.

What happens is that young people are educated in the excellent and free Cuban educational system. When they have their degrees, they then take the knowledge and skills the Cuban government has provided them to the US, where their entry is facilitated and they can make more money. This both wastes the investment the Cuban government has made in these people’s education and brain drains Cuba, depriving the economy of the benefit of their knowledge and abilities.

Amplifying the physical brain drain is the virtual brain drain. Professionals who stay in Cuba are moving into the service economy, for access to hard currency. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers are waiting tables and driving taxis, because it pays better. It’s a perfectly rational decision, but it just adds to the factors hollowing Cuba out.

The bloqueo is strangling the Cuban economy, and has created the conditions under which the best and the brightest want to leave. This is a vicious cycle, in which poor economic conditions induce emigration, and emigration worsens economic conditions. Both ends of this fuckery circle jerk are fueled by intentional US policies.

We’d made arrangements with our host to exchange $400 USD to Cuban Pesos (CUP), and she’d left $100 of that waiting for us, so we didn’t have to be without any local currency until we connected the next day. Which was sweet, since the whole local currency thing is complicated. That bonus cash is how we got breakfast our first morning in Habana.

Our apartment…

The Apartment

The apartment itself is, dare I say it, the nicest apartment we’ve had so for. OK, out of four, but still. We’re starting to appreciate little things. There are nightstands on both sides of the bed. We still needed to pick up a few extra hangers, but there were more hangers here than we’ve found so far. We have two little comfortable sofas (our last apartment, in CDMX, only had dining chairs for seating). We have our first full size refrigerator since we started. Which is bittersweet, since there’s very little to put in it. There’s adequate drawer storage in both living area and bedroom, so it was easy to move in. The bed didn’t come with a hair shirt (the bed in CDMX was so hard we actually bought a mattress pad). There are multiple lights in the living room, so we can control whether we have mood lighting or confession lighting. Which is, I suppose, a mood.

It also doesn’t hurt that the apartment is pretty cute.

The Neighborhood

The neighborhood we’re in is called Vedado, which is a pretty urban area in Habana. We’re a short cab ride to the historic center, Habana Vieja, but we’re less than a ten minute walk to the ocean and the Malecón. Which is as lovely as the pictures you’ve seen suggest.

One surprise about the Malecón, and the city itself, is how little street vending there is. If this were Mexico, the Malecón would be pavéd with carts peddling hand food. There are a few small carts with some packaged snacks and hand bagged popcorn, but no one, anywhere in the city, has the equivalent of taco carts. Instead, people have converted the doors and windows of their apartments into little tiendas, behind which they sell whatever products they can find.

We went to a tienda in Habana Vieja to get pizzas (which are, weirdly, the primary street food here). While we were there, we found treasure: a bag of penne pasta, a can of ham (which we thought would be spam once we opened it, but we didn’t care, and turned out to actually be spam when we opened it, and we were happy), and apples, which we have yet to see at any of the mercados.

It’s possible that the Habana government doesn’t like street vendors and ensures there aren’t any, but I suspect it’s primarily the economics of having to create a cart that can be used for cooking and load it up with perishable product that has kept street vending from flourishing.

The Old Cars Are A Real Thing

One of the joys of the Malecón is watching the cars drive by. The pictures you’ve seen are accurate. There are old Chevys and Studebakers (some barely held together, some cherried), Soviet-era Ladas, little two-person tuk-tuks shaped like eggs, pedicabs… What there aren’t are a lot of cars. The streets are actually a little sparse, especially given that Habana is a capital city. It’s also an island, so getting cars here is complicated. And embargo. And gas shortages. It’s kind of calm, until you realize that there aren’t actually enough cars, for either locals or tourists. We’ve walked home several times when a taxi would have been preferable, because we couldn’t find one. Ask me about the 3.5 mile walk home from a bank. Or better, don’t. I’d rather not remember.

I Scream…

As we were in Oaxaca, we’re only a few blocks from a major ice cream venue. I’d love for that to have been clever planning, so we could guarantee it going forward, but it’s just been dumb luck. The Coppelia is a state-run enterprise (two bowls of vanilla, which was the only flavor on the menu, was $20 CUP, about 12¢) that’s also an architectural marvel in its own right.

The Coppelia is on Calle 23, one of the main drags in Vedado. At our end of 23, the sidewalk is an art installation, with a series of square terrazzo tiles featuring both abstract and representational designs. They were created in 1965 for an art show, El Salon de Mayo, which was curated by, among others, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, and Joan Miró. A total of 180 mosaics were created. Many of them have started decaying, like the rest of Habana, but they’re still beautiful, and a reminder that art has long been central to the city’s self image. A total of 180 were created, although we haven’t done an exhaustive inventory. Here are some greatest hits.

Shopping

Part of settling in wherever we land is figuring out the mercados, so we know where to get supplies. I have a whole post on the shopping experience here, which is actually just a dressed up political screed, but the mercado situation here has been problematic. In Mexico, it just meant visiting the local mercados to find the ones best suited to different needs. This one is super close, but has a shitty selection. Only for emergency tomatoes. This one has the best selection, but it’s a taxi ride away. This one is the best balance of selection and distance.

In Habana, the challenge has been finding them at all. Our host pointed us to a few, one we found from a recommendation on the street, and the best ones we’ve just stumbled across. It took us two weeks into a four week stay before we finally felt like we’ve figured it out. Of course, having found the best mercados doesn’t mean they have anything. Cooking here is like that great Onion piece about Taco Bell’s new menu item: Taco Bell’s Five Ingredients Combined In Totally New Way. Some nights, beans and rice, some nights rice and beans. Along with onions, bell peppers, and… maybe something else.

All of this is made more challenging by our complete absence of social capital. Meaning, the knowledge about how things get done and the ability to get them done. To be fair, the US is the only place where we have any social capital, but its absence wasn’t so acutely felt in Mexico. Nor will it be in most other places, I think. That’s because while we lack social capital, we have actual capital. Even though we’re living off just Social Security, we still have more than enough income to be comfortable outside the US. In the absence of social capital, money can solve a lot of problems, even if not as efficiently or cheaply as someone with local knowledge.

But in Cuba we not only lack social capital, our actual money doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t create products in the mercados, or gasoline for taxis. In many cases, there are items that are available but really expensive, and our money can fix that. But much of the time, the goods simply don’t exist on the open market. A non-stick skillet. Eggs. Avocados.

That’s where the social capital becomes so important. You know a guy who knows a guy. You have excess milk which you barter for someone’s excess salt. You have a friend visiting from another country, and you ask them to bring a bottle of olive oil.

We don’t know a guy. So all that’s available to us is what we can find in the shops on our own. It’s both a little grim and a lot instructive. Like those educational programs that make local officials get through a couple of days like poor people, with no cars or money. You come out the other side with a perspective you didn’t have going in.

At Least It’s Not Barthalona

One thing we were warned about was that proficiency in Mexican Spanish wouldn’t help us in Cuba. We were told that it was a distinct dialect, not unlike Southern English in the US. It seemed at first that it was mostly a vocabulary issue. They just use different words.

For example, 500 in Mexico is “cinco cientos.” In Cuba it’s “quiniento.” What’s truly weird is that when I hear “quiniento” and repeat back “cinco cientos” to make sure I heard properly, I get blank stares. Even though the literal meaning of the word “cinco” is five and “cientos” is “hundred.”

We’d attributed most of our troubles understanding Spanish here to the vocabulary issues, until I heard someone very distinctly pronounce the word for school, escuela, as eh-kwela. No s. That’s when I realized it’s not just the vocabulary. It’s also the accent. Just one more way in which Cuba left us feeling ill equipped.

Architecture

The city has a very strange vibe to it, like you were looking at it through a scrim. On the one hand, there are a lot of buildings which have seen brighter days, as there just isn’t enough money in the economy to maintain the infrastructure. On the other hand, you can see, like an echo, the beauty these structures had when built. And that’s across all the eras represented here.

There are grand old Colonial buildings, with elegant, decaying facades and rusted ironwork, breathtaking Deco and Nouveau masterpieces, and sleek mid-Century marvels, with sweeping curves and surprising rectilinear flourishes, slowly being reclaimed by the land. It’s like the post-apocalyptic love child of New Orleans and Miami. “The deadciv left their empty structures behind, after The Collapse. We occupy them, but no longer know how to operate their ancient technologies.”

To be fair, there are also buildings that have been pretty thoroughly maintained and restored, although these seem to be primarily pre-Revolution colonial buildings. Many have been repurposed as hospitals, government buildings, and museums.

Colonial

Deco

Mid-Century

Monumental

Nouveau

The Pitch

As a visitor, sidewalk touts are the least fun thing here. 100% of the time, as soon as someone asks “Where are you from” in English, we know it’s going to end in a request for cash. It’s so disappointing. It starts as a friendly conversation (everyone here seems to have one or more relatives in the US, or at least claims to), pivots to an offer to walk with us and point out local landmarks, and then, when we finally peel ourselves away (if nothing else, Dorothy only has so many steps she can take comfortably until she gets the hip replacement), comes the begging.

I get it. We have more than they do. And we’re trying to spread out what we are able to spend as liberally as possible, in tiendas and restaurants, taxis and mercados. But knowing that every streetside interaction is just a pretext has hardened us in ways we’d prefer to avoid. We are suspicious and closed instead of generous and open.

It’s not like we’ve never encountered beggars before. But the pitch tends to be pretty straightforward: “Will you give me some money?” And we often do. We’re neither hardhearted nor blind to the broader issues that lead to begging. But hiding the pitch under the guise of a friendly interaction makes it worse, not better. Perhaps it’s an approach we’ll see in other places, but so far it’s been uniquely Cuban. It’s dishonest, a little bit creepy, and way too long. And no, I do not want to be led to a bar where I can hear a local band perform Guantanamera. Ever.

Look, Ma! I’m An Anthropologist!

We’re only in Cuba for a month, which is a very short stay for us. We’re blocked from access to the US banking system while here, so we had to mule in whatever cash we’d need. Projecting that amount beyond a month just felt too risky. Running out of money would be… bad.

But that still appears to be a pretty long stay for visitors. Everyone we’ve spoken to is surprised that we’re here for a whole month, as opposed to a week’s vacation, or even less. Despite the brevity of our visit, I feel more like a local here than I did in five months in Mexico. Because all those dollars we imported don’t protect us from the same scarcity that impacts the Cuban people on a daily basis. Their scarcity is our scarcity, too. We are, obviously, buffered from the worst of it, because it’s not our long-term reality. But our day-to-day reality isn’t that far off. Gasoline shortages mean that we walk. Food shortages mean that we scramble to put together a meal. It’s just dressup, because we get to leave after a month, but the sensation is real. This is an economic war zone, with all the privation and resilience that implies, and we’ve never experienced anything like it. It makes me feel less like a tourist and more like the mutant offspring of a political scientist and an anthropologist, decoding the local folkways for an academic journal. Or a blog.

Dorothy said that White Guilt is what happens when your White Privilege won’t fix something. I don’t know that I feel guilty, but I do feel angry. Plain and simple, the shortages here are caused by the US embargo, and it’s hard not to be pretty pissed about our government’s follies. While we’re here, though, the Cuban’s we’ve met have welcomed us with open arms and open hearts, despite the unprecedented level of fuckery the US government has rained down on them. This is a special place.

If we were on a tourist cadence, a week or two and then move on, we could arguably survive on restaurants. But that’s not sustainable over as long as we’d like to travel, and it doesn’t sound pleasant regardless. While we can never truly be locals, the closest approximation comes when we shop in the same mercados and make food out of the same ingredients. Cooking is the great equalizer, and shopping is the common denominator.

This has never been clearer than in Cuba. Cuba’s economy is defined by scarcity, and no amount of white privilege or US dollars can turn that scarcity into abundance. Our local friend Jenn had cautioned us to bring in as much of what we’d need for the month as possible: salt, pepper, toilet paper, olive oil, dried milk, coffee, sugar… We brought in small amounts of some of those things, but not a month’s supply. Because we’re traveling with just about everything we own, we don’t have lots of unused weight allowance in our bags.

Of course, what we thought Jenn meant is that it would be hard to find these things, or expensive. We didn’t actually think it meant they just weren’t available.

Case In Point: A Humble Skillet

One of the things we do whenever we land in a new place is suss out what’s missing from the kit in our apartment and go fill the gaps. We spent over $100 on housewares in Oaxaca, which we left behind. Spread out over the almost four months we were there, it was a perfectly reasonable expense to incur for comfort and ease.

Our casa particular in La Habana is actually lovely, but there were a few missing items: a water jug large enough that we weren’t constantly filtering water, ice trays, and a skillet, as there were only two saucepans for cooking. As it turns out, we’ve yet to find a water jug or ice tray, and have just given up (although the day before we left, of course, we found the neighborhood in the Centro, between Vedado and Habana Vieja, with the housewares stores). I filter water about every other day into a constellation of small containers, and use a pair of our Ikea plastic containers to make ice. But we found a skillet at someone’s garage sale in our first few days. The challenge was that it was pretty roughly cast aluminum, and while it might be ok for sautéing vegetables, the odds of getting a fried egg out of there intact were zero.

The punch line is, those were exactly the same odds as getting eggs. Eggs are available at the government ration store, closed to us, obviously: five eggs/person/month. And while we found private stores that offered the same products as the ration shops for higher prices (rice was $7 CUP/pound/person/month at the ration shop, and $160 CUP/pound at retail), we’ve yet to find eggs that way.

So, the skillet is fine.

But the mercados do not have the abundance of choices we enjoyed in Mexico. While it was possible to have a serious discussion of the different ways that abundance and choice manifested in Mexico vs. the US, there is no comparable discussion to have about Cuba. Lot’s of stuff just isn’t here. Like eggs. And cheese. And gasoline.

If you’ve followed us so far, it’s possible that one of the things you’ve enjoyed is the relative lack of political commentary. Other than a few snarky shots at US exceptionalism. If that’s you, apologies. Please feel free to stop reading.

Because there’s no way to talk about the scarcity of goods in Cuba without acknowledging their very obvious root cause: the US embargo.

The Bloqueo

Whatever your feelings about the morality of the bloqueo, and more on that in a moment, you can’t argue that it’s been effective in its policy goals. Which have been clearly articulated as creating the conditions for regime change. The theory is that if you render the government incapable of meeting its citizen’s needs, by strangling it economically, those citizens will rise up, overthrow their government, and replace it with one we like enough to lift the bloqueo. Except that there’s zero evidence that embargoes ever lead to that result. Rather, they tend to bind people together in opposition to the outside actor and reinforce allegiance to the state that’s under attack. They have the exact opposite effect as intended.

You can see it play out in Putin’s attacks on civilians in Ukraine. Those are meant to demoralize the populace and drive them away from the government that’s brought this on them. Instead, it has created a common enemy and, if anything, drove a hardening of support for a national identity and a government that had been much weaker prior to Russia’s attacks. As a policy, those attacks have had the opposite of their intended effect.

Even more heinous, if possible, is the fact that the US embargo is directed not just at US companies, but any business, no matter where in the world it’s based. If you’re headquartered in Argentina, for example, and you do business with the US in any way, commerce with Cuba will expose you to US sanctions. The US is a much bigger market than Cuba, so multinationals have made the only choice they could. It’s not enough that America’s irrational hatred has caused so much harm to Cuba. Like an infection, the US has forced that hatred onto countries that simply don’t share it.

Unquestionably, the embargo has been a policy failure. It’s been in place for over 60 years, and we’re no closer to regime change than we were. In fact, in talking to locals here, it’s very clear that the bloqueo is considered a much bigger problem than their own government.

But it’s also been a moral failure, and profoundly so. We’re constantly asked on the street where we’re from. We’ve been taken for Canadians and Germans, but no one assumes we’re from Estados Unidos. That info is always a surprise to folks. We’ve met absolutely no hostility over that, more wonder and awe that we’d have gone to the trouble, given how hard the US government makes it for us to get here. And a shockingly consistent request, that when we get back, we please, please, please tell people what it’s like in Cuba. And how much the bloqueo is hurting them.

That pain is real, and severe. It distorts absolutely everything about life here, and is the motive force that drives daily Cuban’s behavior. And let’s be plain: we’re killing people. The bloqueo includes both medicines and the ingredients necessary to fabricate medicines. Most medical procedures that require medication, which is kind of all of them, can’t be performed now. The bloqueo also impacted Cuba’s ability to develop its COVID vaccine. This is morally indefensible. We are killing innocent Cubans as surely as if we’d put a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger ourselves.

The US government would like us to think that we’re just applying a little pressure for a reasonable policy goal (winning Florida?). But we’re not. We’re fucking over an entire nation for… nothing. For a Cold War fantasy.

Neither Hellhole Nor Paradise

Look, I’m not naive. I know that there’s a history of repression in Cuba, and I’m not going to be an apologist for the Cuban government. I’m sure it has much to answer to its citizens for. Unlike the US, where the government’s hands are completely clean. But my picture of daily life under Communism had a distinctly KGB/Stasi air that simply isn’t the case here. No one is listening to conversations and reporting Enemies of the People. No one is going to prison for 25 years for criticizing the government.

Because of Jenn, we’ve had much more contact at the conversational level with Cubans than we had with Mexicans. We’ve asked pointed questions about how things work here: the economy, small businesses, property ownership. We’ve gotten honest answers, including critiques of government policy. No one has raised any concerns about voicing their opinions.

At least in the cities we’ve visited, La Habana and Trinidad, the culture here seems very tolerant. There have been plenty of same sex couples walking around holding hands, as well as lots of mixed race couples. Although at this point in Cuba’s history, every couple is probably mixed race.

There seems to be free and relatively unfettered access to information. We’ve been using the government-provided Internet access, and nothing seems to be blocked. We’re using a VPN for security, but we can use the VPN successfully…

Crime is low, the streets are safe, education is free through university, health care is a right, there’s low infant mortality, the Avatar sequel is playing at the local cinema, and there’s universal literacy. They treat their mentally ill, rather than tossing them on the street to fend for themselves. None of those are things we can say about the US. Except for Avatar, and that’s a pretty weak win. It’s not a perfect Worker’s Paradise, but neither is it the Communist hellhole we conjure up when we’re trying to scare children. What it is instead is a plausible alternative to rapacious capitalism, and as such stands as a mortal threat to rapacious capitalists.

From a governing perspective, Cuba has clearly made a different set of tradeoffs than the US has. They’ve decided that it’s better for everyone to have enough (which they would, absent the bloqueo), and no one to go without, than to accept the kind of inequality that seems sadly endemic to the US.

And you know what? You can disagree with those priorities. Although on the ground they seem pretty rational. But that’s no excuse for trying to destroy their government and punish their people. If those kinds of philosophical differences justified an economic embargo, we’d have to sanction Finland. And just about everywhere else that doesn’t practice capitalism as if they were cosplaying Origin of the Species.

All of which makes me think that the US’s stated rationale for the embargo, regime change, is a fig leaf. We haven’t been blindly pursuing a failed policy for 60+ years. Rather, we’ve been pursuing a brutally efficient, highly successful policy: preventing a successful example of an economic system with fundamentally different values from flourishing right on our shores. Of course, our successful policy has been a humanitarian disaster, but hey! You have to break a few huevos to destroy an entire way of life.

Freedom To… What, Exactly?

Theoretically, with Cuba as with the Soviet bloc, we’re defending our freedoms from the scourge of Communism. But what exactly are the freedoms we cherish so deeply that we’re willing to export them at the point of a gun? So far as I can tell, the only meaningful freedom we have is the freedom to consume.

We have a lot of theoretical freedoms. We have freedom of speech. Until our speech triggers someone and we’re shut down, through either violence or canceling. We have freedom of assembly. Except that we tend to use that freedom to self sort. We have freedom of opportunity. On paper, but no one who’s thinking about it believes we aren’t as caste-driven as India, our national Myth of Upward Mobility notwithstanding. We have freedom of religion. But some religions are clearly better than others, and are favored by the state (and yes, I’m a disgruntled Pastafrian). We are guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Unless we choose to exercise those freedoms in ways other people find offensive, and then we run the risk of summary execution by wackjob.

The only truly unfettered freedom we enjoy is the freedom to consume. We are completely free to spend our money so that our corporate masters are momentarily distracted, and the insatiable maw of capitalism has something to chew. Like our souls.

If that sounds bitter (there’s a reason we’ve chosen to be outside the US right now), consider this: in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks we were, briefly, united as a nation. We had been assaulted, we had an enemy, and we were ready to do whatever was necessary as a nation to both avenge the attack and prevent another. It was our generation’s Pearl Harbor, which took a nation disinterested in fighting Europe’s war and forged us into a fearsome weapon for whom no sacrifice was too much to ask, no burden too great to bear.

In that moment, when the entire nation was prepared to be united in common cause, what sacrifice were we called upon to carry, what shared service were we asked to accept?

Go shopping.

How Many Parties Is Enough?

Surprisingly, this whole experience has provided an understanding of the purpose and benefits of single party rule. I’d considered multi-party democracy as a bedrock, unyielding principle of good government. But do you know what would happen if Cuba permitted multiple political parties? US money would rush in to support the party that most aligned with our priorities, and Cuba would once again become a US vassal. “Oh,” I hear you say, “Cuban laws would prohibit foreign political contributions.” Chump.

We’ve just read a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Cuba, and that history is appalling. We have been fucking with Cuba since there was a United States to fuck with Cuba. The notion that we would let Cuba be Cuba, if they’d just permit free elections, is laughable. In fact, in the law that created the embargo, one of the conditions of lifting it is that multi-party elections be permitted. As high-minded and innocent as that sounds, it would doom Cuba’s socialist way of life. Which is, of course, the entire point.

This Was Supposed To Be About Shopping

But I have to say, the Cuban people seem unbowed by all of this. Frustrated, yes, but resourceful and committed to making the best of things, however grim they might be. I can’t speak to what Cuba was like a few years ago, but in September 2021 the Cuban government legalized MSMEs (micro, small, and medium size enterprises). The landscape now is elbow-to-elbow with small businesses. From people running little tiendas through their windows to permanent garage sales of whatever people can scrounge to sell (we found our skillet and some extra hangers at one of those), small commerce is absolutely everywhere here.

There aren’t actually a lot of traditional stores here, where you walk in, browse the goods, and check out. One pattern is Cage Match Retail, where goods with price labels are displayed behind a grille or fence, usually from someone’s home. You make your selection, pay for your order, and it’s handed through to you.

The other predominant pattern is Garage Sale, where people set their goods up in front of or just inside their homes for shoppers to browse.

As a shopper, it’s created a distinct hunter-gatherer vibe. We found a bottle of vegetable oil at a little tienda, and it felt like we’d found a muskrat in one of our traps. We were positively giddy.

The whole point of this entire adventure is to feel, as much as is possible, like we’re living as locals. And the point of visiting Cuba is much like the impulse to visit the Yanomami: to see an endangered way of life before it disappears from the face of the earth forever. It’s inevitable that Cuba will open up, and that things will change as a result. For the better, hopefully, and not just so that Americans can again treat it like their slutty divorcée neighbor. Despite the distortions caused by the bloqueo, there’s something special here that I think is unique. I’m glad we’re getting to see it before it sinks beneath the waves.

Getting to Cuba was easily one of the worst travel experiences of my life.

Because of cost and schedule, we weren’t flying from Mexico City directly to Havana. Instead, we flew CDMX to Cancun on Volaris, where we were to pick up our luggage, check back in, go back through security, and fly Aeromar to Havana. We had about three hours between landing and departing, so plenty of time to make the transition, even with the added wrinkle of an international flight, and the extra complexity of that flight going to Cuba.

CDMX to Cancun went fine. For some reason I didn’t doublecheck our itinerary when we landed, and was convinced we were flying Aeromexico to Havana, not Aeromar. We landed in Terminal 2, and were told that international Aeromexico flights were out of Terminal 4. Given how much time we had, we waited 20 minutes for a free shuttle, rather than paying for a taxi between terminals.

When we got off at Terminal 4 to find our Aeromexico flight, well, it didn’t exist. That’s when I doublechecked and realized that we were actually flying Aeromar. Which was, you guessed it, in Terminal 2. At this point we weren’t going to wait for another shuttle, given how much time this mistake had already eaten. The cab fare for the five minute ride between two terminals: 1,000 pesos, or about $50 USD. Being stupid is expensive.

So we dash into the terminal, or as much dashing as two old people with four pieces of luggage can muster, and ask the greeters where to find Aeromar’s ticket counter. Now, you have to understand that there’s an ecosystem of people working in the airport who may or may not be there in an official capacity. And no one is wearing uniforms or tags that make it easy to distinguish whether they’re airport employees or the equivalent of racetrack touts. So all we know is that when we walk into the terminal, two seemingly random guys offer to help us. When we tell them we need the Aeromar counter, they shake their heads sadly and tell us that Aeromar is no more, that they are bankrupt.

Both the context and the intel itself make it very hard to wrap our heads around this fact-like information. I ask how to find out what our options are for getting to Cuba, and we’re pointed to an official Information Booth. That seems like a trustworthy way to find out exactly what the fuck is going on, so we head to the booth, and are picked up en route by a woman with a fanny pack who tells us she’s there to help us find our way around, once we get our intel from the Information experts. Nothing shady about that.

The Information Booth lady tells us that, in fact, Aeromar is dead, but that Viva Aerobus flies to Havana. Lady Fanny Pack asks what we were told, and then tells us she can get us to the Viva Aerobus counter. Which we’d passed on the way to the Information Booth, so it’s not like we don’t know how to find it.

When we get there, Lady Fanny Pack manifests someone to help us with booking on Viva Aerobus. This someone also doesn’t have any identifying insignia, and tries to help us standing in front of the Viva Aerobus counter, when behind the counter are three Viva Aerobus employees. The actual VA employees working at the VA counter, wearing VA uniforms, or Lady Fanny Pack’s helpful ghost? Not a tough call.
The nice VA lady we spoke to explained that yes, they had a flight leaving that evening for Havana. However, they didn’t have any seats left, as all the seats had been bought by a travel agency. She gave us the WhatsApp number for Octavio Mendoza and told us to reach out to him for tickets. Nothing shady about that.

She also shared that there was a charter airline that flew to Havana, and they were just a few doors down, with an actual counter and a real employee. We checked there, and yes, they flew to Havana, but one flight per day. If we used them we’d have to fly out the next day. Which meant finding accommodations in Cancun and taxiing back and forth. The fare itself wasn’t bad, but the overnight in Cancun sounded neither easy nor cheap. Time to find out about Octavio.Octavio told us he had seats on the evening flight out at 7:00. At this point, it was about 3:00, so we had plenty of time. He could round trip us for about $250 more than the charter, but we’d at least arrive the same day we’d planned, and we wouldn’t have to manage overnight in Cancun.

The only hitch? Who the fuck exactly is this Octavio guy? Some rando at the other end of a WhatsApp, promising that if we gave him money he’d get us round trip tickets to Havana. And how did he want this money? Cash, please.

That was a hard no. One of the things about visiting Cuba as an American is that there is zero access to the banking system. Credit and debit cards issued by a US institution simply don’t work in Cuba, meaning that you have to enter with as much cash as you need for your stay, because there is literally no way to get more. You can’t withdraw funds at a bank or ATM, and you can’t use a credit card for a purchase. So, while we actually had the cash for the tickets, we were no way going to part with it.
After explaining that we’d have to pay with a credit card, I also pointed out, as politely as possible, that this whole deal was shady as fuck, and that my confidence was very low that giving him my credit card would result in valid tickets to Havana. He directed me back to the Viva Aerobus counter to talk to Robert.

Robert, as it turned out, worked behind the counter, and seemed to be an actual Viva Aerobus employee. Or not. The David Lynch movie we appear to have entered was seriously messing with our ability to tell fact from fiction. Regardless, Robert was expecting us, as Octavio had told him we were on our way. Nothing shady about that.

I asked if we were going to pay him, and Robert said no, we’d pay Octavio, Octavio would release the tickets to VA, and Robert would print them out for us. How, I asked, were we supposed to pay Octavio? At which point, a guy with a credit card reader apparated next to us. Nothing shady about that.
Decision time: Cancun tonight, charter flight tomorrow, or… whatever this was. I figured I could always dispute the charge with Capital One if this didn’t work, and a night in Cancun sounded complicated. So… here we go.

I handed the apparition my credit card, and Robert explained that Octavio would have to issue the tickets and transmit them to Viva Aerobus for Robert to print, and that the whole process would take about ten minutes. Ten minutes between spending $800 and finding out whether we’d been scammed.
While we were waiting I got a message from Capital One asking whether the charge was valid. I decided to wait before replying.

As it turned out, it took less than ten minutes for Robert to hand us our tickets. I’m keeping Capital One in my pocket, though. We may have tickets, but we don’t have boarding passes. The process of getting boarding passes and providing entry documentation doesn’t start until 6:00, so we have a couple of hours to kill yet.

We grab a seat, and I open Viva Aerobus’s web site on my phone. Just a little status check, right? Turns out, my e-ticket just has a reference number from Octavio’s travel agency, not a Viva Aerobus record locater number, so I can’t look us up. OK, I can at least check flight status to make sure the flight exists, even if I can’t validate that we’re booked on it. VA’s web site reports that it has NO FLIGHTS from Cancun to Havana that day. Nothing shady about that.

So I go up the the VA ticket counter, not the kiosk where Robert and Octavio colluded, with our printed e-tickets and ask an agent to please, please, please confirm that they’re real. What I want is for her to look us up in their reservation system and confirm that we’re booked. Instead, she looks at the tickets and says, “Yes, they’re real” and hands them back. Clearly, everyone at the airport is in on the scam.
Now there’s nothing to do but wait until 6:00 and see if we can actually check in. At this point, I’m half of the mind that if this is a scam, Octavio has kind of earned our $800. I mean, the dude was working.
We queue up at 6:00, in a line that shows both our flight number and our destination. We’ll take any positive omens at this point. While we’re in line, some guy, again, no identifying ID, sells us our green Cuban tourist cards. I’d read that the cost was about $25. Mr. Man charged us $100 each. Whatever.
Then another guy asked if we had our Cuban entry questionnaire filled out. Why, no, we didn’t. You’ll surprised to hear that he had no identifying ID, but offered to help. Sure. Why not.

So he gave us the website address, and answered questions as we worked through the multiple page questionnaire, all in a rush, because it had to be done by the time we got to the ticket counter. Turns out, he really was there to help. For free, even. Nice.

We finally get to the head of the line, and the agent can’t find our reservation in her system. Here it comes. Then her supervisor figures out we booked through Octavio and shunts us to a second line. Where we meet a Canadian mother and daughter who had also booked Aeromar to Havana. Misery sure loves company.

When they’re done dealing with their real customers, they start on Octavio’s Orphans. Thankfully we get boarding passes, so it seems the last hurdle is over. It’s about 6:20 at this point, with a scheduled departure at 7:05, so we hustle to the international departure gates. And I finally let Capital One know that the charge was valid.

But was the drama over yet? No. No it was not.

At first, the departure screens don’t even show a Havana flight. After about 10 minutes it comes up on the board, showing an on time departure, but no gate assignment. The ticker at the bottom of the screen says that gates will be assigned no later than an hour before departure, but that’s a lie. It’s less than half an hour to departure, and still no gate assignment. All of this would fall under the category of normal airport fuckery, by the way, if it hadn’t been preceded by the telenovela of the previous 4+ hours.
Finally, the board updated at 6:45. Still showing on time for a 7:05 departure (sure…), but status updated to Go To Gate. Pretty hard to do, since there was still NO GATE assigned. The next five minutes were rough, but we finally got assigned a gate. In the terminal we were already in, no less!

So we run over to the gate, where a very casual crew is loitering in front of Volaris signs, not Viva Aerobus. After about ten more minutes, signs were updated to reflect the VA flight to Havana, and the crew eventually permitted boarding. Our On Time 7:05 flight finally took off at 8:15. Against all odds, we were on our way to Cuba.

With one more (at this point minor) bump in the road. More like a wee au revoir from whichever gods cooked up the day’s entertainment. Because sure, this happens on airplanes. Sudden condensation starts pouring out of the bulkhead for no apparent reason. But at this stage of the journey, you can forgive us for finding it ominous.