Vivacious Cuba

We went to Cuba on what's called a cultural tour with Locally Sourced Cuba, a company that runs a number of small group tours exploring different aspects of the country. The tour we chose is called Vivacious Cuba and it's a ten-day tour for 2 to 15 people.

We met our tour guide, Franklin, in Havana the morning after our arrival and were picked up by a small Chinese-made tour bus. There were 13 people in our group, from Canada, Scotland, Jamaica, France and the USA. Six of the group were Americans, who could join the tour because it qualifies as educational and cultural travel and support for the Cuban people. The company makes it very easy for Americans to travel legally to Cuba. 

Here are a few of our fellow travellers. On the left is the oldest, Violet at 81 and on the right the youngest, Jeremy (probably in his late twenties). In the middle, our friend Paul.
The second photo shows a few of us in the Rum Museum. Paul is talking to Douglas, a man from Scotland and Harry is talking to Cheryl from San Francisco. We found it to be a congenial group.

Harry and I had never been on a tour before and were a bit uncertain about what the experience would be like. On the whole we enjoyed the experience of traveling with a diverse group and being driven by qualified driver. We saw places we might never otherwise have known about and learned a lot from Franklin, our Cuban tour guide who was educated as a lawyer and worked as a prosecutor for five years before changing jobs. Here are a few of the highlights of the trip.

The first leg of our tour took us from Havana via the Bay of Pigs to Cienfuegos, a small French inspired colonial city with a strong cultural and artistic tradition...

These young women were practising jazz dance in a 100 year old mansion converted to a cultural centre. Note the ever-present image of Che on the wall.

Cienfuegos is on the south coast of Cuba and had some fishermen and some fishing boats that made colourful photos.




From Cienfuegos we drove we drove through Santa Anna where we visited the Che Guevara memorial and on to Trinidad, a Unesco Heritage designated town on the southern coast full of colourful houses and a vibrant music scene. This was the vivacious part of the tour with music in the central square, lots of restaurants and the clip-clopping of horses and carts all day long.

This parade was a group of school children marching through the streets beating drums and singing.

Trinidad has its serene side as well. It's really just a small town with guys hanging out on the sidewalk in spite of the tourist traffic.

The next leg of our trip took us to west of Havana to the Viñales valley, home to tobacco growers and farmers.

This area is green and verdant and that was emphasized by the drizzly weather. Here we saw a lovely organic farm where we ate a lunch composed entirely of the farm's produce.

We also went to a park where we could go into a huge limestone cavern with a river running through it. This was a really spectacular place.

While in Viñales our tour leader organized a surprise birthday party for one of our group who was turning 81. The cuban party included orange pop, coke, beer and a birthday cake topped with goopy icing. Violet was very pleased. (That's her in the red sweater.)

Then it was back to Havana for a couple of days in Cuba. We went to the Rum Museum, took a tour of the city in vintage cars, met up with some of our new friends and explored the old part of Havana.

We also visited Callejon Hamel, an alley where artists, musicians and practitioners of Santeria, the African-Cuban melange of religions meet. It was kind of touristy with people asking for tips, but interesting just the same.

So that's our tour in a nutshell. It offered lots of optional activities as well as free time when we could explore on our own and it was a nice balance of organized and unorganized time. But when we took walking tours with the group it felt like we were an unruly summer camp pack day with people trailing along, darting here and there and so we opted to skip a couple of these organized outings.

It was good to be on an organized tour in Cuba because we weren't really sure how to go about planning such a trip ourselves. But I think our preference generally is to do more exploring on our own.