HOLIDAY IN CUBA

HOLIDAY IN CUBA

BY MARK TAYLOR

I and a group of people - some visually impaired, some sighted – visited Cuba for a holiday in April, 2008. We went with a holiday company called Traveleyes. This is what happened.

As we flew over mountains towards Havana someone said that it was raining. The rainy season isn’t supposed to start until May and I hoped it wasn’t going to rain too much during our nine nights in Cuba.

The flight from Gatwick had taken nine hours. We landed at Havana, Cuba’s capital, at about 5.30 in the afternoon. It wasn’t raining when we landed but it had been.

I love it when you get off the aircraft to feel the soft kiss of tropical air on your skin. Getting our bags didn’t take long and we were introduced to our tour guide. Her name was Raicella (I’m not sure about the spelling). We called her rai for short. She was going to be with us for the next seven days. She really made the holiday great for us. Her English was fantastic. I explained in my best Spanish that I had a severe hearing problem as well as being totally blind, and when I asked her if she could help me practice Spanish by speaking with her she said yes.

There were 19 of us in the group, including Jenny, the Traveleyes holiday leader. Nine of us were blind or visually impaired and the rest were sighted.

Our bus, driven by Orlando, took us to the hotel we would be staying at for the next three nights. On the way Rai chatted to us about Havana and our hotel.

It was called the Ambos Mundos and it had a lot of character. It was a place where Ernest Hemingway, the writer, lived at one time. He wrote his famous novel For Whom The Bell Tolls while living there. One of the upper floors housed the Ernest Hemingway Museum. More about that later.

We were to stay in three hotels: The Ambos Mundos in Havana, another hotel in the city of Trinidad, and one in Varadero. In each of these hotels I shared a room with Irfan. He is a doctor in his twenties and he is a really nice guy. I owe him a lot. More about that later too.

Just before dinner each evening, Jenny would tell us who our partner would be the next day. Just like the Vitalise holidays I have been on in the past, we were paired up with a different person each day in order that we could get to know every sighted person.

The mojito as a famous Cuban drink and at dinner that night I tried it for the first time. It consists of rum (for which Cuba is famous), wine, fresh mint and soda. I liked it so much I had another. I think we turned in relatively early that first night.

The following morning, Thursday, after breakfasting on the roof of the hotel, from where you got a great view of Havana, we exchanged some of our English pounds for convertible Pesos or CUCs as the Cubans Call them, and then we set off to explore parts of Havana on foot. The weather started out a bit cloudy, but even when the sun came out, in my shorts and tea-shirt I didn’t feel uncomfortably hot.

The government doesn’t seem to have the money to maintain the old buildings in Havana and the impression I got was that a lot of them were in quite a dilapidated state. The US embargo on Cuba hasn’t helped the country at all. Lots of the classic American cars that were imported during the 50s, before the Revolution, can still be seen on Havana’s roads. I suppose spare parts for them are hard to come by, so like the houses, some of them look as though they are falling to bits. Those cars take you back to a by-gone era when Americans lived in, and some would say controlled to some extent through their money and influence, the country’s corrupt rulers of pre-revolution Cuba.

We went to Revolution Square, where there are Russian-style buildings and monuments to Communism. The city seemed very lively and vibrant. It seemed as though you could not walk round a corner without coming across musicians playing their instruments and singing.

I think it was in the old square that we came across a priestess. As well as Catholicism, Cubans follow a religion called Santoría. This is a mixture of the Catholic religion and some of the religions the slaves brought with them from Africa. Rai was at pains to tell us that it is not like Voodoo. The priestess was smoking a big cigar and singing. She blessed us all and wished us good health and a long life.

For a few coins, there were girls who would plant a kiss on men’s cheeks. A few minutes after one kissed me, Rai told me that I had a red mark on my cheek. I realized after a moment that this had been left by the girl’s lipstick. I made out to Rai that I did not know how this had happened.

The smell of Havana is unlike that of any city I have ever visited. It was a mixture of hot tar, exhaust fumes, horses, and drains.

Music seemed everywhere. I’m not sure whether it was that afternoon or the following one that Gwen, one of the sighted travelers, and I sat outside a bar, drinking beers, being entertained by a trio of musicians. They sang very lively Cuban songs by a singer whose name I can’t remember.

I felt pretty safe walking around the city. They say you do have to be careful of pick-pockets though.

On Friday morning we visited the Botanical Gardens. We saw and touched lots of different types of palm trees, plants and flowers. Among them was the Cuban national flower known as the Butterfly Flower.

We went on to visit a cigar factory and then a rum factory. The thing that impressed me most about the cigar factory was that the process of making the cigars was all done without any motors or any electric aids. We had a go at winding tobacco through a machine of some kind that shredded it. You just turned a handle and kept on turning it until the process was complete. From time to time as we walked around the factory, a loudspeaker blared out, giving workers information about forthcoming political meetings and organized outings.

The thing that impressed me about the rum factory was the finished product. As the Molasses bubbled away in vats, it gave off an indescribable smell that wasn’t like rum at all.

We got to taste a couple of samples of the rum. It was very nice and very strong. I felt as though if I had too much of it my head would be blown off.

I don’t usually eat lunch, except Sunday lunch, but during my time in Cuba I got into the habit of eating a midday meal. We ate our lunches at nice restaurants, and in many ways the lunches were nicer than the dinners we had in the evenings. Rai told us that to Cubans, lunch was important, and this persuaded me to eat lunch fairly regulary after a couple of days in Cuba. (more tomorrow)