Along the Malecón

One of the reasons I wanted to go to Cuba was to experience the Malecón, a five-mile stretch of seawall fronting the central part of Havana.  I expected it to be a vibrant area full of people strolling along and bands playing music. Not sure where I got this idea from, perhaps from old movies or feelings generated by the music of the Buena Vista Social Club. What we found was quite different from what I had thought.

The first time we took a walk there we started at the old lighthouse and headed west. The sun had set and the light was lovely.  And there were some people lining the wall, many of them with fishing rods. Apparently it's a popular place for people to go to get their dinner.



As the light faded we walked along the wide sidewalk beside the waves, passing a few people walking and groups of teenagers sitting on the wall. There were a few tourists but most of the people seemed to have just drifted out of their homes for an after-dinner walk.  I'm told this is an area where there is a fair bit of prostitution happening as well although we didn't notice anything.

Here are Paul and Wendy walking along the Malecón. You can see the buildings facing the ocean looking quite nice as the sun sets.  And below a building glowing in the dusky light.

But a couple of days later we walked the same stretch in the middle of the afternoon and saw it in quite a different light.You can see that these buildings were once ornate and elegant but most of them are now crumbling and ruined. 

I'm hoping that the rubble in some areas means that there's some remediation happening but it may not be the case.  Obviously they've suffered from decades of neglect and are being damaged by winter storms and hurricanes.

I only hope that some of them can be saved before they crumble away.

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. 

Transportation in Cuba

Transportation in Cuba is unlike anywhere else we have been. Of course there are the '50s cars that everyone loves to see. And they really are everywhere. These ones are parked on a cobbled street in Trinidad. Not sure if there's room for another one to pass here.

Old car aficionados (and there was one on our tour) just go nuts in Cuba. Harry also enjoyed identifying the different models. Most of them have had multiple paint jobs and fix-ups, and some even have Japanese engines in them now.  Some of these are used as taxis and some are owned by Cubans, but it looks like in Havana at least, the majority are  used for tourism.

This car was parked outside of a tobacco farm in the Vinales valley. Notice the pictures of Che and Fidel on their water tank.

This one is parked in Trinidad waiting to be hired for a tour.

Full disclosure: our tour included a drive around Havana in one of these. We got a pink one that sounded and felt like the transmission was about to fall out. 

Here are a couple of people from our tour in a green painted car. Bill took probably hundreds of phots of the cars we encountered.  The photo below is taken from a hotel rooftop in the touristy part of Havana. You can see just how many of these cars are driving around,

Here's the driver of our pink car taking us around the city. But notice on the left there is a bicycle taxi and another taxi (probably a Lada from Russia). These are the non-tourist transportation options in Havana.

But out in the countryside and in the smaller towns the horse and cart is the mode of transit. It could be a four-wheeled wagon....

Or a two-wheeled home-made cart with car wheels....

This wagon has hunks of meat in it. Maybe it's a delivery van.

And this one is a gravel truck. They had the horse back the cart up onto the sidewalk so they could dump the gravel and sand inside the door.

Here are few more bicycles and bicycle taxis.  Most of them appear to be home-made.

This last one shows a horse and cart and an 50s car and a Chinese tour bus, which is the other form of transport that is seen everywhere.  They have a difficult time on the narrow cobblestone streets but they're pretty common.  

Next time I'll tell you about our tour and where we went.