Cuba: Exotic, Beautiful and caught with bitter contradictions
Cuba is an exotic, beautiful island, rich in culture but fraught with stark, bitter contradictions. Americans can travel the 80 very odd miles to Havana directly from Miami or go via Cancun, Mexico.
Picture old Chevies, Fords and Buicks rumbling down narrow cobblestone streets lined with brightly painted colonial style buildings. Think Hemingway, fine rum, mojitos, daiquiris, and hand rolled cigars. Imagine a plaza filled with beautiful, exotically attired women and athletic gentlemen salsa dancing the night away to the rhythms of passionate musicians.
Dream of white sandy beaches gently massaged by warm, azure ocean ripples. Travel on modern, uncongested highways that cut through sugar cane fields, banana and citrus groves, old tobacco plantations and ranches. Visit quaint old towns like Trinidad that seem wonderfully stuck in the early 1900's. Then drool over a lobster dinner larger than the ego of any politician for under $15. This is the Cuba for tourists, international business folks and neuvo riche Cubans.
On the very dark side is desperate poverty; old buildings seem to crumble into giant heaps of rubble in front of you. In spite of billboards spouting revolutionary rhetoric about mythical heroes, Cuba is poor and struggling and some Cubans are much more equal than others. The average worker earns about $20/ month and cannot afford lobster dinners or visit the very best places because they are PRIVATE. There is no unemployment but there are few good jobs.
We drank coffee in a cafe owned and run by a physician. Our tour guide was a lawyer. There is a burgeoning middle class fueled by a voracious black market economy and by private entrepreneurs who pay fees to do business but pay no income tax: there is no IRS in Cuba! Cigar manufacturing and rum distillation are industries owned by the government but run by private business enterprises. Six months ago, for the first time, Cubans were granted the right to buy and sell houses and cars. The embargo, supported by ten United States presidents, and prolonged by thousands of maniacal ex-Cubans profitting handsomely in Florida, excludes many food items. So, along with your lobster, you can slather American butter on your hot bread, sprinkle Tobasco on your beans, rice and ropa viejo, and sip CocaCola. Yet the ultimate irony in the heart of Havana is in an architecturally anonymous elephantine building: the United States "Interest" building. Here, I am told, one can obtain a valid US passport.
You will enjoy Cuba immensely. We did.
