Geneva – Havana
(Originally published at http://www.troysgonewalkabout.com)
I felt an uncharacteristic sense of unease as I left Geneva on the morning flight to Paris Charles de Gaulle in advance of crossing the Atlantic for the second time in two days. For the most part I had enjoyed the previous two weeks on the Caribbean island of Grenada, watching six matches of the Super Eights stage of the 2007 Cricket World Cup with friends from my former cricket team in Sydney. But Grenada, on a par with the oft criticised level of organisation of the tournament across the West Indies in general, hadn’t seemed ready for the sudden influx and exodus of visitors, and it had been difficult for me to get a flight off the tiny island nation soon after the scheduled matches had been completed.
On landing in Paris I switched my mobile phone back on and immediately received a text message.
While airborne over the Atlantic I felt torn. This was my only foreseeable chance to visit Cuba in its present situation while Fidel Castro was still (presumably) alive, where the aura of the 1950’s Communist revolution was still present, and while the embargo with the US was still in effect. But I also wanted to be at home with my family. And then, for the first time in my life, I felt confused as to where ‘home’ really was. It used to be a no-brainer. Home was Tasmania, where I spent the first twenty three years of my life, where my parents had spent their entire lives so far and where my Grandad had just died, almost seventy years after migrating there with his parents from England. But now I noticed a newer, supplementary instinct too. In two and a half months I would be married, and ‘home’ would be wherever Katie and I were together as our own family. That, for the time being at least, was Geneva, the only city we had collectively known since we had got together.
My brooding spirits were lifted somewhat on landing in Havana as the adventure of entering a new country for the first time began.
- “There's no time to lose, I don't care what they say.
There's no time to lose, we could have a holiday.
But there's no time for hesitation, there's no time, no time for waiting.”
Sister Havana by Urge Overkill.
On filing though into the closed-off immigration booths and handing over the loose slip of paper containing my tourist visa (no stamps in my passport, and after departure no remaining official evidence with me that I ever set foot in the country), I heard a buzzer sound and a loud click as the solid wooden door of the booth unlocked and I was able to push it open and walk through to the baggage carousels, before the door closed itself and locked again before the next person behind me was cleared.
Next I headed to the foreign exchange desk. I had deliberately brought Euro in cash rather than Swiss Francs as I thought this would be easier to change into Convertible Pesos, the newer and stronger of the two Cuban currencies and mostly reserved for tourists, and I assume the introduction of which was an attempt to keep US currency out of circulation. Not only did bringing Euro turn out to be unnecessary, but I missed out on using the extraordinary exchange rates throughout Cuba in my favour. For each Euro I changed I got 1.2 Convertible Pesos, but for each Swiss Franc I could have obtained around 1.35. Considering that in Switzerland the exchange rate was about 1.6 Swiss Francs to each Euro, I did a little arithmetic and was left with the crazy realisation that had I brought Swiss Francs, changed it all into Convertible Pesos and then changed the Convertible Pesos back into Euro, I could have returned to Europe with around 1.8 times more money than I’d brought to Cuba. With a sizeable enough sum, I could have travelled and made a risk free profit. Even as I write this it still seems too inconceivable to be true.
I hopped into the back of a fairly modern cab and, while I noticed the no smoking signs on the back window, the driver casually puffed away on a cigarette as we rumbled out along wide and straight avenues in the warm light of late afternoon. The roads were clogged with old American and only slightly more modern Eastern and Western European cars and trucks. I spotted my first few camellos, long truck-trailers shaped with a camel hump that operated throughout Havana as public buses.
Propaganda posters were placed at regular intervals exalting Fidel Castro, the Communist revolution and Cuba’s close relationship with Venezuela, with taglines like ‘¡Vamos Bien!’ (‘Going Well!’). Groups of people congregated around make-shift bus-stops and outside small takeaway bars with barred windows, the buildings of which and concrete paving around them were cracking significantly. In every area of public space boys of all ages were playing street games of baseball, some with real bats, balls and gloves and others with whatever objects they could scrounge - sometimes sticks for bats and plastic bottle caps for balls. The nearer we got to Habana Vieja, Old Havana, the more the streets narrowed and the once-grand buildings became more densely packed and decrepit. In its Spanish colonial heyday Havana was most definitely a fashionable and regal city, but now every single street and building exuded an air of long since faded glory.
Rather than stay in hotels, Ben, Derek, Tony and I were all keen to stay in casa particulares, cheap guest rooms in private homes and apartments of regular Cuban families. Before the trip Ben had tried to book a few casas online according to the rough itinerary we had created for ourselves, and had built up a connection with Leo and Carol, the people behind the website’s co-operative of casas. Instead of Ben booking everything in advance, they had organised a casa for us in Havana just to begin with. After we had all arrived in the country, Leo called our casa each day to make sure we were satisfied and, once we had decided on our next destination, told us the address of the next one he had organised on our behalf. It seemed a little like we were putting our accommodation choices in the hands of the mafia, but the casas Leo organised for us were always very good and he looked after us well.
The taxi dropped me off outside a doorway in the heart of Old Havana in a pothole-ridden narrow alley surrounded by crumbling buildings. After ringing the bell and climbing up three flights of stairs I entered the long outdoor terrace of our first casa, flanked by doorways to the guest bedrooms. The quality of the interior of this place belied its surroundings, and it seemed pretty safe to assume that the family that lived here were better off than most of their neighbours.
Here I was re-united with my three mates, and we exchanged tales of what we had got up to since they had left Grenada three days earlier. Their flights had been not much less time consuming than mine. Managing to leave Grenada a day and a half before me, they had to fly an almost corkscrew route via Puerto Rico, Miami and then Mexico City (with Derek having another leg to Dallas in between), and they had already had the best part of two full days to explore Havana. Their observations thus far and enthusiasm about what they had seen helped put me back in a positive frame of mind as we sat on the terrace eating an ample dinner of roast chicken, boiled potatoes, plantains, rice and black beans. This was pretty typical of what each of our casas served up for us for dinner each night, and we were a little surprised there was no hint of Mexican style spiciness to any of the dishes. Nevertheless, simple but hearty and tasty staples like this are easily my favourite style of food.
After dinner we headed towards the nearby Central railway station to get a taxi. Walking through the alleyways people were crowding outside around small TV sets chanting, singing and dancing with true Latin American passion as they watched their local baseball team Industriales take on Santiago de Cuba in a playoff game. Around the station there were a few vintage cabs waiting, but as soon each driver worked out we were foreigners they became completely disinterested. Finally we found a more modern taxi, as it turned out one of the few licensed by the government to transport non-Cubans, to take us westwards to the more modern district of Vedado.
Right by the towering Habana Libre hotel was the apartment where Kath, a former work colleague of Ben’s in Sydney, was staying with her local boyfriend Eddie. They had already shown my other three companions a good night out the previous night, and tonight Eddie, like the rest of Havana, was glued to the TV. Though I was fast getting tired, I found the baseball coverage fascinating. The stadium, the lighting and the telecast were all of a style decades old, and it was one of the first of many things over the next ten days that gave me the feel of being frozen in time somewhere at or not long after the revolution of the late 1950’s.
Industriales lost the game (and the series), but that didn’t dampen the spirits of the residents of Old Havana. They remained out in the streets until the early hours of the morning, shouting, banging all kinds of kitchen and household items together and generally causing a huge celebratory din. Whether it was their noise that stopped me falling asleep right away or the rather odd looking figurines giving me attitude from across the bedroom I don’t exactly know.
