Joanna Lumley
The actress on buying shoes in the unbelievable Cuban heat
Why did you want to visit the Caribbean?
I’ve met lots of people who have been there, mostly to Havana, and they all said, “Oh, the cars, the oldfashioned cars. Hurry, because it’s going to change and you’ll lose that beauty of old Havana.”
Well, I don’t think that Cuba is moving fast enough for old Havana to change for a long time.
I wanted to go somewhere where not too many tourists have visited – Cuba is popular, but I think we went off the beaten track, and very few tourists have been to Haiti as it is still on the Foreign Office list as a country “unwise to visit”.
What did you notice about the poverty of the country?
In Cuba, everyone is poor, but they have a brilliant education system, so everyone is literate and educated.
They train more doctors and dentists than almost anywhere in the world and send them, lease them out, as it were, to African countries. But the average wage is $25 a month. Even doctors only earn 45 dollars.
Did you admire the system? Everyone has roughly the same income, which sounds kind of good, utopian.
This sounds marvellous, there’s no envy, no class system, no snobbery or snootery, but the downside is that anybody who has an idea, like an entrepreneur, can’t get ahead with it. .
Was there any moment that took you out of your comfort zone? It’s very safe. But what was out of my comfort zone was the heat.
I wish you could feel the heat on television. I wish you could have a heat button.
It was baking. I have been in hot places before, but it was so humid. It was unbelievably, drainingly hot. The heat made us want to cry. You couldn’t think how to get cool.
What was the shopping like?
I went to buy some shoes. In a back street there was a door open, and I looked in and they said: ‘Hello, do you want to buy?’
And you go in, and you think: ‘Is this a shop?’ You climb up steep steps into somebody’s house, where they have a rail with a few things hanging up. It’s really extraordinary.
It must be the black market – the shoes I bought came from Italy. What would you say to people visiting the Caribbean?
What you must do is tip lavishly wherever you go, because the people who clean your room and serve you tea, the people in shops, desperately need money.
Five dollars is nothing to us, but to them it’s a fifth of what they get a month.
There is no envy, no class system or snobbery