Overall impressions:
- I really enjoyed and was fascinated by exactly two things about Cuba: (1) seeing the old 1950s cars (and riding around in them for very cheap); and (2) seeing the Cuban brand of communism first-hand. By the latter, I mean walking into one grocery store with entire aisles filled with the exact same product, and then walking into a different store where every shelf is empty (as if the store had been looted) and 10 employees are standing around staring at their phones. I’ve been to a number of current or former communist countries (e.g., China, the DPRK, Russia, the former SSRs), and I’ve simply never seen anything quite like the Cuban brand of communism.
- Besides those two things, I just didn’t think Cuba was great. I’d rank Cuba’s reward-to-hassle ratio among the lowest of the 60+ countries to which I’ve traveled. In other words, I felt Cuba has relatively little redeeming quality to make up for all its negatives. If you don’t have the time and money to see the entire world, there are much more interesting places to visit than Cuba.
- Lots of people seem to love Cuba, but I just don’t get the appeal. My only guess is that Cuba is exotic and seems like a different world for Westerners who haven’t traveled much around the third world. But I didn’t find Cuba to be the least bit exotic. For example, walking around Havana and seeing the locals living life (women on the balconies doing laundry shouting out to each other, kids playing baseball in the street, etc.) isn’t much different than walking around a Latino-immigrant neighborhood in a major US city. Nor did I find it particularly fascinating. There are some beautiful buildings, but similar architecture can be found elsewhere in Latin America – and in much less dilapidated shape. Vinales has pretty scenery, but there are tobacco farms in Virginia. So many things that people rave about just turned out to be disappointing (more below). In my opinion, there just isn’t a lot of there there.
The bad and the ugly:
- The People: The vast majority of my interactions with the locals were unpleasant. 5-10% of the people I encountered were nice, friendly people who didn’t want anything from me and just wanted to practice their English, say hello to a tourist, or help me find something. The other 90-95% are up to no good in some fashion – either blatantly aggressive touts or friendly-appearing scammers who seem harmless at first but are “taking the long game” to rope you in. I couldn’t go two minutes without someone trying to hassle me, no matter where I was. The touts and scammers are not the least bit shy, and they don’t give up even if you pretend like they don’t exist. Overall, the touts and scammers in Cuba are as bad as I’ve seen anywhere in the world (up there with the likes of SE Asia, India and Egypt). One of my worst experiences was when my shared taxi driver from Trinidad to Havana tried to blackmail all of us by raising the price CUC$5/person once we got on the highway; the other suckers gave him the money, but it took several lengthy arguments and threatening to call the police for me to get him to back down. Most regular Cubans seemed to be good people, but the ones you’re most likely to encounter as a tourist are totally bankrupt in the moral and ethical departments.
- Overtourism: Cuba is often portrayed as some new frontier (and Americans like to think of it as such), but it’s already heavily touristed and somewhat corporatized. Havana, Vinales and Trinidad are all teeming with tourists – both independent travelers and massive tour groups on big buses (tons of Canadians, and a lot of Europeans). There are also plenty of Americans roaming around in large groups on expensive “licensed” tours. Cuba isn’t, by any means, one of those destinations where you could go several days without running into another tourist.
- Nightlife: I was extremely disappointed with the much-hyped bar/music scene. I’m not a club person, but I like to grab a couple drinks and listen to live music at a bar. There were plenty of places for this, but what seems to happen is that these bars have a band come in to play 2-3 songs and then leave. So, you’re walking around and hear live music, go inside, find a seat, and order a drink; by the time you get your drink, the band is basically done and aggressively passing around the hat for money. The band leaves, and the bar will then put recorded music on for the duration. This was my experience at a number of bars that were written up for having great live music. I truly don’t understand why it was so difficult to just walk into a bar and listen to some live music.
- The Food: Restaurants are overpriced and mediocre, which I was prepared for. Cuban food in the US is great, but it’s tasteless (and drenched in salt and oil) in Cuba. There aren’t a whole lot of options for budget food (assuming you want real food, rather than a loaf of bread). Casas will sell you dinner for $10-12 (a rip off for what you get) and fancy tourist restaurants all have the same generic, boring menu for similar prices. If you do your homework, you can find the identical food at a cheaper restaurant for $4-6. (“Hanoi” in Havana, mentioned in LP, is as good as you’ll get in terms of the value-to-cost ratio.) Even the famous ice cream place (Coppelia), which the Cubans spend hours waiting in line for, tasted like store-bought packaged ice cream at best.
- Water: Buying bottled water was, surprisingly, a major hassle. You can’t just walk into a corner store and buy a bottle of water; sometimes it would be 20+ minutes before I’d see a store that looked like it might sell water, only to walk and find that they’re sold out of water. (At one such store, the clerk had a package of water on the floor, and told me that it was his personal stash and that it wasn’t for sale.) Stores that had water often tried to gouge me on the price. I would stock up on water and hoard it whenever I found a store that actually sold it.
- Activity/Museum Prices: I found the admissions prices, by and large, vastly overpriced by third-world standards. Almost every little attraction was $6-8. And charging $10 to tour a cigar factory is beyond ridiculous; this sort of thing would be free in most places in the world. There is clearly an effort to milk tourists for all they can, figuring they’d pay it at any cost. And in Vinales, both the Museum (which arranges the hiking guides) and my casa both told me that I am required to hire a guide to hike around the tobacco farms and mogotes; this clearly wasn’t true, and nobody stopped me from just going out into the bush myself. There are enough things to do for free to occupy your time without having to drop tons of money on overpriced activities and museums.
- Hospitality: I didn’t experience any sort of special hospitality that many others have raved about. The owners of my casas were nice enough and responsive to basic requests, but it absolutely felt like a bargained-for exchange. The reality is that these families are running a business; a tourist staying with them is a commercial transaction, not an honored guest being welcomed into the family. And they are very interested in “upselling” (i.e., getting you to buy breakfast and dinner from them, or having them arrange activities for you so that they get a kickback), and seem very disappointed if you decline these services.
Some logistical notes/tips:
- Flights: I arrived on Cubana from Mexico City, and departed on BahamasAir through Nassau. I had no problems purchasing either ticket directly from these airlines’ websites with my US credit card. Both airlines were fine, and the flights were uneventful.
- Immigration in Havana: An immigration officer approached me and pulled me aside for secondary screening when I was in the immigration line. (I have no idea why I was flagged, but perhaps the flight crew noticed that I had my large dSLR camera and suspected I was a journalist.) The officer flipped through my passport and noticed lots of stamps, and asked me about all my travels, what I did for a living, why I was in Cuba, where I was planning to stay, etc. After a few minutes, he seemed satisfied that I was an ordinary tourist rather than a journalist. He then had someone quickly search my luggage, and they seemed mainly interested in seeing what books I was carrying. (I just had tour books.) The whole delay took about 10 minutes and they were very polite.
- Re-entering the US: At the Nassau US Immigration Pre-clearance, I declared that I had been to Cuba rather than commit the crime of lying to the government. I was brought into a separate room for secondary screening, and my checked suitcase was pulled off the plane and brought into the room. The agents asked me a few questions, and made it very clear that they didn’t care about travel to Cuba so long as I wasn’t importing contraband goods like cigars and rum. (I was not.) They then conducted a VERY thorough and intense search of my carry-on and suitcase, inspecting each item one-by-one and opening every single bottle, container and bag. (Likely they were looking not just for cigars, but also for illegal drugs and hidden currency.) After they finished searching my luggage, I was free to go – with no consequences for having visited Cuba. The agents were very professional, but the process took about 45 minutes and I almost missed my flight.
- Health Insurance: Nobody made me purchase the mandatory health insurance, asked for proof of insurance, or anything of that sort. I had read in various sources that the Cuban authorities at the airport would make me buy insurance for CUC$3/day, but this was a total non-issue.
- Money: I used EUR to buy CUC. For Americans, it’s much smarter to get EUR rather than pay the 10% penalty for using USD. I changed CUC into CUP as needed from either my casa or a random vendor; I’d usually only change 1 CUC at a time because 24 CUP goes a long way.
- Lodging: I stayed at casas, which I booked with a travel agent / guide named Jorge (
http://www.jorge-cubaholidays.com/about-jorge.html ), who had tons of great reviews on Trip Advisor. I was somewhat disappointed with him, and didn’t think he lived up to his great reviews. I had contacted him 10 days before my arrival (last minute trip), and he said that on short notice and in high season, it would take too much time to contact the best places and see if they were available and that I should just be happy with any decent place. The casas he booked for me were exactly that: mediocre. For example, the two casas in Havana were both more like small mini-hotels with 8-12 rooms and felt totally impersonal; it seemed like Jorge called these places because he knew they’d likely have a room open. If you’re the type of traveler who likes to have your hotels lined up before you arrive, there aren’t very many good options for this in Cuba.
- Viazul buses: A complete headache, and don’t count on getting on one if you didn’t buy your ticket online. Viazul’s website wouldn’t let me book tickets online before my arrival. I posted on LP about this; nobody was sure why, but several LP posters said that they’d never not been able to get on a Viazul bus by just showing up an hour early. My experience was the complete opposite. All 3 bus rides I attempted to take (Havana-Vinales-Trinidad-Havana) were completely sold out. For example, when I was at the Havana station trying to go to Vinales, there were about 20 tourists waiting without tickets for over an hour, and not a single one of us got on the bus. And when I went to the Trinidad station the day before to try to buy a ticket back to Havana, and the clerk gave me the waiting list on which I could write my name; I would have been #32.
I’m happy to answer any questions anyone has about Cuba.