How to survive post-Castro Cuba

Sixty years on from the revolution, Chris Moss helps visitors make sense of this enigmatic island stranded in time

This month, Cuba celebrated the start of 2019 along with the rest of the world. But Jan 1 also marked the 60th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Over the 25 years I’ve been visiting the island, it’s perhaps the least changed of all Latin American nations. My first visits, in the Nineties, took place during the so-called “special period”, a characteristically Cuban euphemism for the disastrous economic fallout that ensued when the Soviet experiment collapsed.

A return trip just before Christmas allowed me to see Cuba again, post-Fidel, post-Raúl (though he’s in the shadows, rather like O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984). There were perhaps more tourists, though not the rush of Americans some in the media predicted when Obama tried to ease relations. The US of Donald Trump is once again Cuba-baiting and, while liberal-minded American tourists are spottable here and there, and flights continue to operate, numbers are down.

The Old Town – La Habana

Vieja – where renovation is ongoing, continues to look part film set, part bomb site. The old Chevys and Dodges are still running, mixed with knackered Moskvitches, new Ladas and lots of Chinese vehicles. Hotels, eateries and museums continue to look and feel old and amateurish, and are run with varying degrees of inefficiency. Genuinely anglophone Cubans are few and far between. There are more Fidel hoardings than ever, exhorting the masses to keep on struggling and producing – posters of white old men glaring down earnestly over cool young black and mestizo people sums up the ambivalence of this six decades-old political experiment.

It’s intense, intriguing, occasionally infuriating – and made bearable by the kindness of many Cubans, despite their individual circumstances. Cuba is not North Korea with sunshine and salsa, but it remains a single-party state with a centralised economy, strictly limited freedom of expression and movement. And just as it uses two currencies (the CUC, used by tourists, and the CUP, the main legal tender for Cubans), operates shops for dual markets and even runs buses for rich and poorer travellers, it asks of visitors to do what Orwell called “doublethink”: to accept two contradictory realities.

It’s a bit like thinking in code and, for visitors who might be going for the first time in 2019 – perhaps to see what Havana does for its own 500th birthday – here’s my list of lifestyle-cum-survival tips for making at least some sense of the land of Gran Hermano (the Spanish name for that reality TV show everyone used to watch).

PILLARS OF SOCIALISMThe Capitol Building in Havana, left; La Bodeguita del Medio restaurant in theOld Town, below