Try out some Cuban wheels
As this extraordinary Caribbean island gets set to open up to travel once more, local expert Ruaridh Nicoll celebrates its unique culture
Afew weeks ago I arrived in Havana by sea, having crossed the Florida Straits from Key Largo in a friend’s boat. A port authority officer, perched high at the top of the city’s famous Fosca building, came on the radio, asking who we were and where we were from. When told, he welcomed us with a cheerful: “Bienvenidos a Cuba!”
The island is my home which, given it’s one of the last bastions of communism and is daggers drawn with its neighbouring United States, doesn’t come without its challenges. Yet as the dying sun caused Havana’s great buildings to glisten – the Morro castle, the Capitolio, the Hotel Nacional – I felt the old surge of excitement that always rolls over me on the road in from the airport.
I was back in a place where people find a way to live against the odds, and where they enjoy the company of outsiders. A warm place, in every way, where a penned-in human spirit expresses itself in art and music. All in a country raw in landscape and roiled by history.
“Just look at it,” my partner Camila will say when we have fallen under the shadow of a wonderful bit of architecture. “And it’s in the Caribbean!”
The past two years have been rough all along Cuba’s 780-mile length. For the first year of the pandemic, the government kept the virus out effectively, but the loss of tourism was devastating for an already moribund economy. Then, as queues formed for food and medicine, the government opened the airports.
The virus spiked, overwhelming the fabled healthcare system. Cuba’s scientists had, notably, created homegrown vaccines; that at least gave Cubans a moment of pride. More than 80 per cent of the population has now had at least one dose of either Soberana-2 (sovereign) or Abdala (the title of a patriotic poem).
I spent the lockdowns yearning to travel the country’s long crocodile length. One of my favourite things to do is to rent a car and take random backroads. With one turning you can find yourself in the 1870s, pulling over for a farmer driving a speedy carretón (a horse and trap) or ponderous oxen, often named “Comandante” and “General”. (It’s always worth remembering they would prefer a tractor.)
It was unsettling, early in the pan
demic, when the music died in Havana. The government turned off the lights at my favourite trova house, La Casa de la Bombilla Verde, and smothered the drums at Diablo Tun Tun. Havana seemed to retreat as an idea. But now it is back. Venues are reopening, and once again salsa, son, trova and, of course, reggaeton can be heard on the street corners.
Still, shortages continue. Visitors can help. If you have spare antibiotics, bring them. Vitamin tablets, too. Pack coffee and chocolate, both of which will be received with gratitude. And bring euros, in cash. Inflation has taken hold of the peso.
It’s more than five years since Barack Obama offered hope of a detente in the long cold war between the US and Cuba. During that year, Cubans invested, repairing exquisite houses for rent, opening new bars and restaurants. The difficulties of getting materials here
– plus the pandemic – has meant those places are only just coming of age now. They, like the whole country, are worth visiting. The antipathy between Cuba and the US may have resumed but as my boat trip showed, the welcome remains strong.
With quarantine for new arrivals ending today, and a full reopening of international travel from November 15, it’s time to focus on the people and the good times in this most beautiful of islands.