13th of May - Santiago to Baracoa (Pope day)

When our alarm rang at 8 am in Santiago, the 13th of May had already begun back in Portugal for a few hours. On this same date, 93 years before, three children-shepherd named Lúcia, Jacinta and Francisco began the first mass hallucination ever to occur in Portugal: the supposed sighting of the Virgin Mary near the town of Fátima. The Catholic Church, who had recently been ejected off the power seat by the Republican movement in 1910, saw in this event the opportunity to make its grand re-entrance in the Portuguese panorama and immediately considered the occurrence a miracle. Then came Fascism, then came mass pilgrimage, then came the sanctuary with cheesy Catholic souvenirs, then came Mel Gibson and finally, 93 years later, Pope Benedict XVI visited Fátima to reassure humanity that what happened in the middle of nowhere to three malnourished children more than nine decades ago was still of vital importance to civilisation. Therefore we baptised this day as "Pope Day" and, during said day, we would make an effort to remind ourselves how ridiculous religion can be.

Without breakfast we headed once again to Parque Céspedes to decide what would be the next place to visit in Cuba. Our feeling pointed towards Baracoa, a small fishing town surrounded by natural beauty built on the site where Colombo first landed in Cuba 500 years ago. But why do I bother lying, the true reason we chose Baracoa was because, according to Lonely Planet, is the best place in the island to eat. Fish with coconut sauce? That's all we needed to hear.

The problem about reaching Baracoa is that its situated in the very Eastern tip of the island, hidden behind a chain of mountains known as Sierra del Plurial. Being that there is only one coach connecting Santiago to Baracoa and we had already missed it we decided to rent a car. On the outskirts of Santiago we picked up a shiny and modern Seat Cordoba. Compared to the rusty fifty year-old yank tanks that populate Cuban roads this car looked like a space ship coming from an advanced civilisation of outer space. Inside of it we would have no chance to go unnoticed. While Rui and Joana were signing all the documents inside the rent-a-car office I stood outside drinking water. A thin man who was sitting under a tree nearby came over to me and asked very politely if he could keep the plastic bottle. Bottled water is another "luxury" reserved to tourists (I didn't see any in shops dealing Cuban pesos) and even the bottles themselves have value. When we got the car and parked it across the street the man came over, presenting himself simply as Manolito, and offered to help us out. He was the gentlest most polite person we met in Cuba and, knowing we were headed to Baracoa, suggested a few places to stop along the way. Even more helpful than that he offered us his road map. It never ceased to impress me that such people existed alongside the annoying jineteros.

A photo of Manolito's map.

Leaving Santiago by car was an absolute nightmare. In Cuba you either know where you are going or you ask, no point in trying to read signs along the way because they simply do not exist. We left Santiago, missed the motorway and entered the city again from another direction. Then again, at the same junction, missed the motorway again (it was Rui's "gut instinct" to turn left) and ended up in a neighbourhod that barely had roads. Eventually we made it to the motorway. Direction: Guantánamo.

Patriotic propaganda outside Santiago.

We made a detour to see La Gran Piedra, literally, a big rock standing on top of a hill with an amazing view over the Caribbean and Santiago. This place was advised by Manolito. Under the boiling sun we climbed the 452 steps to the top of the Gran Piedra. The view was rewarding with the blue sky and the blue sea kissing in the horizon and Santiago, far away, looking like a busy ant farm. We played cards for a while.

Playing cards on top the Gran Piedra, outside Santiago.

Joana swapped the driver seat with Rui and we descended the hill to find our route back to Guantánamo. Once again, the lack of signalling had us doubting if we were even going  in the right direction. The motorway, la autopista, was a left-over project started by a Cuban-Soviet collaboration and ended abruptly upon the collapse of the Eastern block. Still, it had the minimum conditions to drive and, despite the odd lorry and yank tank, it was almost stripped off traffic. So it was that it was not uncommon to see pedestrians walking along the motorway or even crossing it, sometimes with cattle. At one point an old army-type Jeep driving ahead of us started to slow down and the driver waved at us to give her some space. Rui slowed down and the Jeep simply crossed over to the opposite direction through a gap in the central separator. In our European heads that was illegal but plain awesome.

A few miles ahead we were already pretty sure that our orientation was wrong and decided to do like the Jeep and invert direction in the middle of the motorway. When another gap in the central separator appeared we took our chances and changed direction. There was much rejoicing.
Unfortunately, just a dozen of meters ahead there was a Police checkpoint and we were asked to park. As the policeman approached the car, paranoia broke in. Was changing direction on the motorway really illegal and did he saw us? Was he going to ask for our health insurance?  Was he going to ask for a bribe? A knock on the window. "Los documentos, por favor", Rui handed the rent-a-car contract and his passport. The policeman looked at the documents carefully for a minute, then returned them and told us to keep going. Right, we thought, no harm done. Still, Rocha went out of the car and asked the policman for directions to Guantánamo. He told us to drive some 600 meters then revert direction on the motorway and keep going. Rocha looked at him with an incredulous smile as if confirming that such dangerous manoeuvre was not illegal. Apparently this is normal in Cuba.
I've complied a short video with this episode that you can see below. It shows Rocha returning from his conversation with the Police and telling us that he advised us to change direction. Then Rui decided to leave the scene dramatically by skidding the car away.

On the way to Baracoa the landscape mutated constantly. In the beginning we saw small towns of the country side folk. People here looked even healthier than in the cities. Muscled men carried heavy burdens or travelled on top of bull-carts and large groups of children walked together in white uniforms and red scarves leaving school. Whenever we drove past a village or town our car was followed by everyone's eyes, maybe with curiosity, maybe with fear, maybe with disdain. Whatever the reason, four very white people in a modern fast car was sure to attract attentions. Virtually all these places had schools and health centres and a feeling of community was noticeable. Still, after visiting Havana one could not help to notice a bit of abandonment in these remote and isolated places.

Another thing was omnipresent: government propaganda. In every wall and every milestone you could see murals defending the cause of the Revoution, socialism and patriotism or cultivating the personalities of Castro, Che and Cienfuegos. Despite their location all these murals and writings had a common style thread and were always signed by the CDR, the Comités de Defensa de la Revólucion (the Comitees for the Defense of the Revolution). There was nothing spontaneous about these paintings. After a few miles the propaganda became annoying and invasive, like advertisement in the capitalist world.

When approaching Guantánamo we toyed with the idea of visiting the vicinity of the US Naval base. According to Lonely Planet the locals charge a few CUCs to let you visit a hill where you can see the base from a distance. Our disliking of US imperialism was not strong enough to justify such a detour so we kept  going. The closer we got to a US soldier was picking up the base's radio station on the car and, for a while, we listened to American-style rock'n'roll. As a curious note, the picture of the Cuban flag I used to illustrate this blog (see top of the page) was taken in a petrol station outside Guantánamo. One of many waving Cuban flags you can find in the island, I must add.

Somewhere between Guantánamo and Baracoa, still on the Caribbean side, we were again stopped by the police. This time it was in the middle of nowhere and the policeman walked out from behind a bush before stopping us. He said he wanted to fumigate our car. We thought it was a bribe scheme. We left the car discussing how much we should give. Ten, twenty... maybe fifty CUCs? While we discussed how much we were willing to contribute the policeman grabbed a sort of a leaf-blower machine, turned it on and began filling our car with white smoke. In less then a minute the car disappeared behind a cloud. As it turns out, Cuban police does routine fumigation programmes to eliminate mosquitoes that carry deadly diseases. This also explained the mysterious smoke inside the bus that we saw the day before at the terminal in Santiago.

Entering Guantánamo district.

Our car being fumigated.

As we approached the mountainous side of the Caribbean coast the landscape changed from green farmland to a sandy dry desert. We stopped to empty our bladders and, looking back at the decaying road sided by sand dunes, I could swear we were crossing some desert in Australia or central US. Joana grabbed the wheel again and took to the mountains. Before the darkness of the night set in, grey rain clouds could be seen waiting for us on the other side. The road was curvy and full of ups and downs. Aside from our car, fireflies where the only source of light in the hills. The landscape had changed to a thick forest.

Desert land East of Guantánamo.

Arriving to the remote town of Baracoa in the pitch black night we could see small churches alight with people inside singing and praying. Baracoa was founded by Diego Velázquez and was the first city and the capital of Cuba. It lays next to the sea, in the Bahía del Miel (the bay of honey), with its small hut-like houses mingled with colonial buildings. We settled in a casa particular of colonial architecture, a very popular one as it seems, given its prime recommendation by the Lonely Planet guide. There is nothing lonely about these guides.

We went to a fairly touristy restaurant, recommended by a man who helped us find the casa particular, and we ate swordfish with coconut milk. The culinary promise of Baracoa was true. Afterwards we  had a mojito in the central square in another equally tourist-filled bar. An Australian woman came to us and asked what we where doing in Cuba. "Cuba in two weeks? That's impossible!" she said. At least we could speak Spanish. In the background a band played Cuban music for the delight of blonde middle-aged women. Up on the hill a large hotel could be seen, like a colonial castle overseeing the town. I got the impression that Baracoa was like one of those Algarvian towns sold out to tourism.

Before going to bed we walked to the seafront and got splashed by a wave that broke in the malécon.

Getting splashed in Baracoa's malécon.

It hadn't rained for six months. It rained all night.

12th of May - Santiago de Cuba

Throughout life a person will wake up in the morning to many different types of alarms, often annoying ones. I once had an alarm in which a cold robotic female voice would say "it's seven hours and zero". Another time, as a joke, I used Prodigy's "Smack my bitch up" as morning alarm. My girlfriend at the time was not pleased.

After a 13 hour over-night drive across Cuba in an overly chilled coach the last thing you need is to be abruptly awaken... by reggaeton. Call it a Pavlovian reflex but from that moment on every time I hear reggaeton my brain synapses fire in anger like its the first day of the Gulf War.

In the Santiago Viazul terminal, the passengers left the coach through one door while an employee moved all the luggage to a glassed room. Then, we queued outside the room and waited to collect our belongings in a very orderly and bureaucratic fashion. The last piece of luggage to be handed was our good old friend, the three-person tent. As usual, outside the coach terminal was a mob of loud taxi drivers and jineteros waiting to prey on fair-skinned tourists. Like recently-arrived pop stars we dug through the crowd turning down all offers and made our way to meet a man holding a sheet of paper saying "Casa Margarita".  The man had his yank tank rattling nearby and drove us to the house for the reasonable price of 5 CUC. Margarita was a quiet lady of European looks that didn't interact much with us except to ask if we were staying one or two nights. After a shower and a power nap that felt like 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes we walked out of the flat to explore Santiago. It was 8 in the morning.

Two minutes away from Margarita's house was Parque Cespedes, named after Carlos Manuel Cespedes, the plantation owner who freed his slaves and gave rise to the first war of independence against Spain back in the XIX century. After a few days in Cuba one begins to understand it's revolutionary tradition. It was also in Parque Cespedes that Fidel gave his first speech as Cuban leader back in 1959. We looked for a place to sit in the leafy park while we consulted our Lonely Planet guru guide to plan the day. As we crossed the park an old man with some sort of mental problem came to us asking for money. This was a rather uncomfortable situation as everyone else in the park seemed to be looking at us to see how we were going to behave. We tried to ignore the man politely but the he kept walking slowly next to us, asking for money. Faced with our silence and avoiding eyes, the man eventually walked away. Probably out of embarrassment none of us commented or made future remarks about this episode.

Sitting in Parque Cespedes

Santiago had, unlike Havana, the looks of a well kept small town. The roads were narrow, the buildings were never higher than two or three levels and the people seemed more laid back. It even looked more colourful, like those small towns and villages in Alentejo. Nevertheless, the town is filled with those small noisy motorbikes that seem to produce more decibels than kilometers per hour.

After a while we decided to visit Siboney, a beach to the west of Santiago recommended by the guide. To reach it we were told to get a local bus so we sat in the square waiting for it. At this point I should introduce the Cuban method of queuing. Standing in a queue is, as all of us have figured out except for the British, a very boring thing to do. The Cubans solve this problem by sitting around and when a newcomer arrives asks "el ultimo?" ("who's the last one?"). A hand comes up somewhere amongst the sitting crowd, "soy yo!", the newcomer acknowledges him and sits down. Then another person comes along and does the same. This seems silly but works rather well unless someone forgets who they are standing behind of. I vaguely recall someone telling me that Cubans go ballistic if someone jumps a queue. We respected the system as much as we could. When in Rome be Romanian.

While we were waiting, a man in his thirties came over to talk to us. He started by asking if we were Dutch (?), then told us he had lived in Holland for a few years where he had many jobs, such as being an actor. When we told him we were heading to Siboney he dismissed it saying it was full of tourists. Instead he advised we should go to the Juan Gonzalez beach, East of Santiago, a much less visited site. Also, we could visit the nearby waterfalls which he, in his good Cuban style, described as magnificas.

We walked downhill under the blazing sun towards the train station where the buses to the beach departed from. The next one was leaving at 10:45 am. Inside the bus terminal we sat in the chairs behind an old lady, the last in the queue, and waited for a long time. The terminal was an old, badly illuminated building with wooden chairs, a bar selling almost nothing and the ticket stands where a huge TV showed some South American soap opera in large volume. At one point Joana went to the ticket stand to confirm which bus we had to take and had to yell louder than the TV to make herself understood. Nobody seemed to care about anything. We played cards in the floor to entertain ourselves and sparked great curiosity amongst the younger Cubans. We were the only foreigners in the room. After a while a man from the bus company came over and distributed little bits of paper with hand-written numbers on it, so we had a registration that we where in the queue (?). By the time the bus arrived, some hour or so later, a  large queue had formed behind us, including some teenagers that also seemed to be headed to the beach. A few minutes after the bus arrived we saw smoke coming out of it, first only in the front, then progressively filling up the passenger space. Nobody seemed to care about it but we were worried that the engine had given its final breath. Eventually we boarded the bus.

The waiting payed off as we were able to sit down while most of the people stood up. Rocha, trying to be a European gentleman, gave his seat away to a woman. Rui and I went on to do the same but the people around told us not to, that we had earned the right to sit there. I always thought chivalry was an outdated form of sexism and apparently the Cubans, at least the ones travelling on buses, think the same. The bus made its way to the Cuban countryside that Joana jokingly compared to "Portugal in the 1960's". Public transportation seemed to be a rare sight around Santiago and people moved about in the back of lorries, on top of tractors, on bicycles and on foot. The packed bus dragged itself slowly, even more so when going uphill (we could hear the engine screaming in pain!). At each parada (stop) more people crammed in yelling "permisso! permisso!" and, slowly, the faces standing next to you were replaced by others in an almost organic flow. At one point we heard a high pitched squeal coming from the back of the bus but couldn't really see what was going on. Turned out to be a man carrying a pig in a bag. The trip continued with the odd squeals.

When we left the bus, the man with the pig came out as well and we had our first glimpse of the creature. The poor beast had its legs coming out of one side of the bag and the nose coming out of the other side and was, understandably, in panic. The man carried it around his neck. As the bus drove off I looked around and saw the blue Caribbean sea on the other side of the road. Less than a month earlier I had dipped my feet in the Pacific in a beach just south of San Francisco. Not bad for a small town boy, I thought. Together with the teenagers we walked inland, towards the promised waterfalls. The youngsters, two boys and three girls, helped us to find the way, occasionally giving us a hand to climb a higher rock. Like most Cubans we had seen so far, these teenagers looked healthy and used to physical effort. In comparison we, the develop world folks, looked like a band of slobs.

Since it hadn't rained for six months the waterfalls were nothing but a shy stream of water and the swimming pools were no more than puddles. Still, we managed to swim for a while in one of the ponds that some other time may have been part of a river stream and enjoyed the surrounding wilderness.  Our pale skin probably frightened the Cuban teenagers.
We sat on a large boulder while we dried and planned to head back to the coast and find the beach. Suddenly, coming from the inland woods, a man in shirt and shorts appeared and stood on top of a high boulder above the pool. He looked at us, said hello and dived bravely into the water despite its shallowness. For a moment I feared he had broken his neck or something. He swam for a minute or two, then came out of the water and started talking to us, something that by now was becoming extremely normal. The man was not more than thirty years old, wore old clothes and walked bare-footed with such easiness that suggested he was used to it. A country-side guy, for sure, and a very easy-going one too. He promptly offered to get us some lunch that he could negotiate with the people living nearby. Fried chicken with rice and fried banana and he would bring it over to the beach, for 4 CUC each. We were starving and immediately agreed to that. On our way back to the beach we walked past the first waterfall (there were three in total) and our newly acquired friend, which we later named Mowgli for not remembering his real name, decided to show us his diving skills and asked us to film it. From an even higher boulder he jumped head-first into another pool making an amazing splash and possibly bursting his spleen. We tried to keep up with his fast pace as we walked through the jungle, him talking about other tourists he had met and how his dives were world-famous. He also spoke of some rat-like creatures he hunted in the woods and being a good diving fisherman in the sea, while at the same time picked up white mangoes from the trees to feed us.

Pale-skinned Portuguese, a hideous sight

How to burst a spleen.

The beach took the shape of a small bay, had pebbles rather than sand and was pretty much deserted except for a young couple walking and flirting on the other side of the bay. We laid in the shadow while the jungle man went back to ask his neighbour to kill four chicken, who we had saw running around near the houses just before the beach. The sea was of a stunning blue colour, the kind you see in cheesy Caribbean computer wallpapers and screen-savers, but real. Sequentially we all went into the sea to swim for a few minutes. Afterwards Joana, Rui and Rocha took a nap while I picked up dead sea-urchins from the beach. It's these moments of silence and near solitude that I remember more vividly from Cuba, the Caribbean sea crushing against the pebbles, the warm wind shaking the mango trees and the dark figurines of the young couple courting each other at a distance.
Mowgli returned some time later with the promised food. Four fried chickens (free range and organic for those who care about these things), rice, friend banana, salad and drinks. We offered to share the food but the man refused. He sat nearby flipping through the pictures of the Lonely Planet book, recognising the Cuban cities and places. A genuine man, he was, with his warm and simple manners, sometimes child-like, telling us about fishing with a harpoon and working in the tobacco industry in Pinar del Rio. We agreed on 16 CUC for the whole meal, said our farewells and he went back to the woods.

Rui swimming in the Juan Gonzalez beach

Lunching at Juan Gonzalez beach

After lunch we walked back to the road to wait for a bus. A few minutes later a bus did drive past but completely ignored us. Luckily, a lorry appeared soon after carrying people in the back. I approached the driver and, mistaking the names as usual, asked if he was going to Santa Clara. "Santa Clara??" he replied in shock. I ment Santiago, Santa Clara is 500 km away! For 10 Cuban pesos, something like 0.5 €, he agreed to take the four of us back to Santiago. The back of the lorry was covered and had improvised seats. It was packed with people travelling from the country-side, including the flirting couple from the beach. It was a strangely pleasing sensation to travel in such a genuine Cuban way even if during the first five minutes people did wonder what where those weird looking foreigners doing there. We felt like border-jumpers. Back in Santiago we went back to the house for a rest. It was 4 pm.

Rui and I felt asleep for far too long and Rocha and Joana had to come over to our room to wake us up. I was in such deep sleep that it took more than half an hour after being awake to gain full consciousness and ability to speak. It was the second abrupt awakening of the day.
We had some cheap street food and drinks and sat in a park eating. Rocha, in all his bravery, tried a street cocktail. I had some and it tasted like left-over sauce from a fish stew with lots of chillies. The following day we both got diarrhoea but at the time we felt like proper Cubans. We sat in wood benches in another park and watched the people around as the night set in. A middle aged man with a striking smile came over and started talking to us. He was a jolly man, probably fuelled by some rum, who showed a big interest in us, asked where we came from, our names and started a friendly conversation all of it interspaced with energetic hand-shakes. He spoke fluent French and good English, was learning German and hated the Russian language. In fact he hated it so much that, upon mentioning the Slavic language, he staged emotive spitting gestures to the floor. Licensed in Economics, was divorced and had a son, now living with his wife in Camaguey, he spoke of the beauty of Cuba and its people. The conversation went on, about women (complimenting Joana's beauty and Rocha's luck), taking photographs with us and sharing his rum. His friend came over, a long-legged thin man, who, according to them, had been a widely acclaimed dancer and visited Europe on tour. At one point a man sat nearby, close enough to listen to us but distant enough to not be a part of the conversation. Later, a policeman came over and stood at an equal distance, taking notes. After a while the policeman's eyes crossed those of our friend and we noticed some tension building up. He stood up from the bench, walked around the park and was quickly followed by the policeman. The long-legged friend tried to distract us while this happened and when asked if something was wrong he dismissed it. The policeman and the man spoke for some ten minutes with growing distress in his body language. I followed their actions from a distance while the others continued chatting. Suddenly, the policeman grabbed the man, took him inside a police car and drove off. We didn't see the man again.

Still now we don't know why he was taken away. Was it because he was drunk? Was it because he was talking to us? Was it because he was loud? We stayed in the park and waited to see if he would come back but he didn't. As everything in Cuba, we never got a straight answer for what happened. This man befriended us, offered us his rum, spoke to us for a long time, shook hands with us and suddenly was taken by the police. Is this what a police state is? Is this the fear of being too open that our parents and grandparents tell us about from the days of fascism? Did we see the tip of the authoritarian iceberg?
We walked back home emerged in deep thoughts.

11th of May - from Havana to Santiago de Cuba

During breakfast we informed Ana of our plan to, later that day, make our way to Santiago de Cuba. The two emblematic cities are separated by approximately 900 km of road and there are two viable alternatives to cover this distance: train or coach. Ana discouraged us from taking the train saying it was not safe, that tourists often got robbed whilst sleeping and that it had no air-conditioned. This last con sounded more like a pro, given the absurdly low temperatures that the Cubans set their air-conditioned. On the other hand the coaches were reliable, had air-conditioned (!) and were slightly cheaper. Afterwards she told us of a friend of hers in Santiago that could rent us two rooms.

We left the flat for a morning walk and decided what the plan would be. To us the train sounded like a more romantic way to travel in Cuba and, according to Lonely Planet, there was a reliable regular train service called el Tren Frances (the French Train), departing at 6 pm from Havana to reach Santiago early in the following day. On the other hand, the state-owned coach company, Viazul, used modern Chinese-built vehicles and, due to its elevated prices, seemed to serve only the tourists. Thus, we all agreed that the train would be a more genuine way to travel.

Our first stop outside was an agropecuario. These are small markets scattered around the country where you can buy locally produced fruit, vegetables and meat. To the ears of an eco-friendly Westerner this may sound like a green idea but it merely reflects the lack of a transport infrastructure in Cuba and, of course, the absence of products coming for other countries. Nevertheless, over the years Cubans have prioritised food production in order to become self-sustained. During our time around the island we saw no food deprivation or starving people. If anything, a bourgeois born and bread in the capitalist system like myself could only complain about the limited choice of food, but thats what you get when you are self-sustained. You eat what you produce. In the market we bought carrots, bananas (the smallest I've seen but by far the tastiest) and other fruits. Around the corner from there we bought bread from a local bakery. We found only one type of bread in Cuba, a soft baguette-like bread that, despite being almost tasteless, kept our stomachs full. All our groceries were bought with Cuban pesos to an equivalent of less than 2 €. 

From there we walked once again towards old Havana, got some money from the bank and visited the Chocolate museum. This museum is ironically located in calle Amargura (Bitterness street) and is, in all trueness, a cafe that serves amazing chocolate. We had a cold chocolate and milk drink and watched one of the employees making artistic chocolate figurines. For me, watching melted chocolate flowing up and down with its viscous consistency is an hypnotising experience. 

Rui and Rocha standing outside the Chocolate Museum.

Making chocolate at the Chocolate Museum.

Afterwards we walked back to the flat to pick up our bags. Ana came to us saying she had already arranged for everything with her friend in Santiago and that someone would be waiting for us outside the coach station to take us to the casa particular. Shit, we thought. Earlier on, Rocha tried to comfort Ana by pretending to take her advise on taking the coach rather than the train. He told her we already had coach tickets. So now we had someone waiting for us at the wrong place and at the wrong time on the other side of Cuba. Maybe it was Ana's maternal look that pushed us to lie rather than disregard her advice. Now we couldn't admit that we had lied. Nevertheless we decided to stick with our plan and take the train.

We walked from calle Neptuno to Havana central station carrying our bags, the food and, of course, the three-person tent. The station was, of course, another magnificent building restored to fulfil only the most basic functions. It was 4 pm and the station was crowded with people buzzing about with heavy bags. In a corner some kids (and other not so young men) were playing in an old arcade video-game machine. I remembered some of those games from my childhood. We approached what looked like the ticket stand but the man told us that for the French train the tickets were sold in a separate building, 300 meters away from the station. Rocha and I went there while Joana and Rui looked after the bags.

A man with a serious case of cataracts told us it was too late to buy tickets for the 6 o'clock train. Last tickets were sold at 3. Cuban transports are far from simple to deal with. We brought the bad news to Rui and Joana and together decided that we could still make it to the coach station. If it worked out fine we would actually do what we promised to Ana. Not that we cared that much but it would be nice.

After questioning a few people around the station we were told that the coach station was near the Plaza de la Revolucion (Revolution square) and we could reach it using bus P-15 which we could get just across the road. We waited for a while with other commuters and eventually a packed P-15 showed up. In good Cuban style peopled started to cram themselves by pushing their way inside of the bus. Confused and uncertain of what to do we approached the front door with all our bags. I was holding the two Cuban pesos for the fare but wasn't getting any closer to the door, let alone the driver. A man partially inside the bus noticed our distress and said I could give him the money while we entered through the back door. I gave him the two coins and ran back while Joana and Rui were still looking to enter through the front door. Confusion was beginning to build up. Not being able to see if people were still waiting, the bus driver began to drive away. Joana ran, at the speed anyone can run with the luggage for two weeks on their back, yelling "Stop! Stop!". Rocha and I looked back and saw another P-15 arriving behind, this one with much less bodies in it, so we ran to it. Joana didn't notice and kept screaming at the first bus as it drove off. Rocha and I entered the second bus and Rui was stranded between the two groups, dazzled. Once more, I payed the bus fare and the driver took off before Joana could realise we were gone. All I remember is Rui's confused expression looking up at us as we drove past.

Having the group broken in two, Rocha and I decided to leave in the next stop and walk back hoping that Joana and Rui wouldn't hop on another P-15. Fortunately they were still waiting when we got there. Live together, die alone, Rocha said, remembering the TV show Lost (it was a running joke to relate our trip to Lost).

Arriving at the coach station we sat in the artificially chilled office of Viazul. We were told that we might have a seat but we would have to wait and see. This happened every time we asked for Viazul tickets. And so we rested for a while, playing cards, reading our books and watching Cuban cartoons on TV. Eventually we were allowed to board the coach, paying 51 CUC each. I didn't see it but Rocha said they went straight to the driver's pocket rather than the company's safe. As expected, the coach was occupied mainly by tourists. It was fairly modern and had comfy seats but was, as expected, overly air-conditioned. As we drove past Revolution square leaving Havana I could see the horrible obelisk that stands right behind Jose Marti's statue and, above it, five or six vultures flying in circles. Perhaps this was the graphical representation of a decaying Revolution...

The coach trip lasted for 12 hours. During the first four Rui and I engaged in conversation despite sitting diagonally from each other.  We spoke of history, politics and different realities we had lived. Rui gets particularly excited when making a point the resulting in increased tone of voice. Close to ten in the evening some people asked us to shut up and so we did. 

Predicting cold during the trip I took my sleeping bag with me and used it as a blanket (the rest of our luggage remained in the boot). At some point, while most of the passengers slept, the coach stopped in the middle of nowhere. Drunk of sleepiness some people walked outside to stretch their legs and smoke a cigarette. The middle-aged lady sitting next to Rui addressed me in Spanish and asked me if  I was Iranian. British of origin, she claimed to be living in Cuba for 7 years where she owned an alternative tourism company and gave me her business card. I went back to sleep... 

10th of May - our man in Havana

My brain, thinking it was still living in a Birmingham cul-de-sac, woke me up at around 6 am, Cuban time. I knew the others would soon be awake thanks to this temporary neurological disadaptation. In the meanwhile I stepped out into the balcony to look down at calle Neptuno, now illuminated by the morning sun. Despite the earliness, the street was already quite busy with many people going about in summery clothes and school uniforms. It was a matter of minutes until the first yank tank drove past, then another one and another one.

Most buildings in the street were falling apart despite some poor attempts to fix them here and there. Right under the balcony where I stood was a building decorated with a Cuban flag. We would see many more of these apparently home-made patriotic demonstrations around the island. Half-sleeping, Rui appeared in the balcony and joined me in observing the street. We wondered why were people standing in specific points of the street, waiting for something. After a few minutes we realised they were requesting lifts from passing cars which, although not marked as taxis, seemed to be doing that job.

We sat in the living room waiting for Joana and Rocha to wake up. Ana walked in, now in an opaque dress, and told us to sit down in the sofas and turn on the TV while she prepared the breakfast. In the casas particulares it is common for the owners to prepare meals for their guests, charging extra for it.

Cuban TV was an interesting experience. The news were broadcast by a well presented woman dressed in what was possibly the most 1980's outfit I've seen in a long time, matching the retro studio background. Of course the term retro is wrongfully employed here since it implies a return to something past. This was clearly Cuban present. We tried to detect any form of news censorship or alternative interpretations of the outside world but the broadcast finished just a few minutes after we turned the TV on. After that came a program called Tele-escuela (tele-school) where viewers can learn a wide variety of topics. It reminded me of similar programs in one of the state-owned channels in Portugal. That day the topic was plant biology, las angiospermas. Rui found the word angiospermas somewhat amusing.

After Rocha and Joana came out of their room Ana called us for breakfast. On the table we found natural papaya juice,  sliced melon, guava and watermelon, bread, butter, coffee, milk and eggs. A view of such meal in the early morning can elicit different reactions depending on the culture you come from. For the Portuguese the result is an incontinent smile, followed by compliments to the chef, followed by silence only broken by the sound of chewing and slurping. From our experience, the best meals in Cuba were usually at breakfast.

We left the house with a full-stomach, guide books and cameras and made our way through the streets of Havana. By this point the streets were packed with people waling to and fro, queuing outside shops, others just casually hanging around. A few weeks before Rui, Rocha and I had agreed to grow a beard thinking this would help us to fit in the Cuban streets. As it turns out Cuban men do not use beards, only the occasional moustache. This, plus the backpacks, the cameras and a not-so-dark skin tone exposed us immediately as tourists.

The first thing that Havana greets you with is magnificence. The closer you walk towards Habana Vieja (old Havana) the more impressive the buildings become with their ornamented architecture and spacious city layout. One can tell the city was planned for greatness, attempting to dwarf their European predecessors of Madrid or Barcelona but is now struggling to keep the walls standing. To their credit, there are several buildings surrounded by scaffolds and in apparent restauration but it seem like a drop of water in an ocean of decaying beauty. As in everything that relates to Cuba we can dissertate on what is the real cause of the problem: the embargo, the regime, the relaxed nature of the Caribbean people but, as one Cuban would tells us later on "Cuba's problems belong to the Cubans."

On the streets we were often approached by talkative elderly people. The conversations usually began with a question about where we were from, followed by some sort of story connecting the person to our country (or a nearby place, like... Spain) and would invariably finish in a request for money. Some people were very persistent. Also, at this point we did not know how to deal with them and engaged in long apologetic conversations that would end up with us slowly walking away leaving the person behind  with a frowning expression. In more touristic parts of Havana it was jinetero domain offering taxis, cigars, food, rooms or inviting to "Buenavista Social Club" parties.  Our ability to repel them improved greatly during this day. Also, the Lonely Planet and Wikitravel guides offer a series of suggestions on how to discourage the jineteros. I imagine that if we looked a bit more touristy the hassling would have been much more intense.

We walked past the Capitolio, then into the narrow streets toward Habana Vieja to see the Catedral. Nearby was La Bodeguita del Medio, a bar that Hemingway used to go and now part of the un-official Hemmngway trail. The place was packed with blonde and white-haired, pale-skinned north-european pensioners dressed in extravagant shirts. We naturally walked away from this.

From there we went to the Museum of the Revolution, housed in what used to be a presidential palace. The museum is a somewhat disconnected set of rooms filled with objects that took part on memorable events like the attack on Moncada barracks, where Fidel first attempted a revolution against the Batista regime and almost ended up dead, the Granma trip, the guerilla days in Sierra Maestra, fighting in Santiago de Cuba, Santa Clara and the triumph of the Revolution. The following years are also detailed, with special attention to the invasion on the Bahia de los Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), or a it is known in Cuba, the battle of playa Giron. The tour ends up with a lecture on how Cuban lifestyle improved under Socialism, with free education and health and re-distribution of farm land. The relevance of the objects shown in the museum is sometimes null, like the fork used by Fidel during this or that campaign. On the other hand the alleged original Che beret is in the museum and outside you can see the original Granma yacht. Other highlights of the museum are the creepy Madame Tussaud style wax statue of Che and Camilo Cienfuegos, a section dedicated to ridicule Baptista, Reagan and the Bush dynasty and a bar with over-priced cocktails.

After the museum we walked aimlessly for about an hour and eventually sat down in a park of a secluded square. A young afro-Cuban, carrying grocery bags came over and introduced himself. Unlike the people who had approached us earlier that day, he appeared genuinely interested in the fact that we were outsiders. We spoke for a while and he shared his dream to one day leave Cuba. Surprisingly, despite what we tend to hear in the news, the main problem of leaving the island seems to be the price of the tickets rather than the Castro government. After a while he politely stood up and left, asking us to meet him again so we could buy him a beer and talk, presumably, about the outside world. I kept his name and "address" in my diary (Cubans are very mysterious about giving directions and usually point you to a general location rather than a specific place).

We continued chatting until a few minutes later, another man approached. This one was a much older gentleman, well-mannered too, first standing and eventually asking to sit with us. Initially he asked us many questions, where we were from, what were our jobs, how long had we been in Cuba, what was our travel plan and other probing questions. When he felt a bit safer he started talking about himself. He had fought in Angola for several years when the Cubans supported MPLA against the US-backed UNITA after the country's independence from Portuguese colonialism. Whilst in Angola he had learned Portuguese and recognised it when we were chatting. We spoke for more than an hour with him, first about the wars in Africa, then about Cuba. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution and often spoke of a political conspiracy of the outside world against Cuba. "I know you think of us as terrorists back in Europe", he said. We tried to explain that this was not true, or that at least that it does not represent the general opinion of Europe about Cuba. I thought about George Orwell again, about propaganda and how one can never truly know, specially in this new globalised world, what the truth really is. He returned to his years in Angola and how he had lost contact with the family that took care of him while he was there. He asked us if we could deliver a letter to a Portuguese journalist he met in Havana a few months before that could contact his adoptive family in Benguela, Angola. We agreed to meet a few hours later near the Cathedral where he would bring us the letter and address. He reluctantly gave us his name when we asked for it.
A few hours later he appeared in the arranged location with a hand full of documents. He looked suspicious and asked us to go and chat in the middle of a nearby park. We sat on the grass and chatted for a while, again about Cuba, the Revolution and propaganda. He kept asking us if we were journalists, a thought that made him nervous. On top of that, every time I reached my bag he would ask "Is that a camera? Ate you recording me? I don't want my picture to be taken". Earlier on, when we first met him, he excused himself from being photographed by saying he doesn't like to see himself as an old man. He dictated the address and a letter for the Portuguese journalist, apologising for not writing earlier since he had lost her address (?) and asking her to contact the family in Benguela. Then he dictated the address of the family in Benguela (??) and a letter for them saying he had not forgotten them. He finished by giving his address and name, different from the one he gave us earlier. Why this man had not contacted the journalist in Portugal and the family in Angola himself we can only speculate. Later during our trip more people asked us similar favours suggesting they either don't have the money to send a letter or are afraid of contacting someone outside Cuba. At the moment I write this post we have not yet contacted the journalist.
He walked with us into the narrow streets nearby. It was not always easy to understand the Cuban accent where the last syllables are often omitted but we managed to understand most of what he said. We asked him to show us where we could use Cuban pesos rather than convertibles and so he took us to some street vendors and food-houses inhabited by Cubans only. We bought hamburgers of dubious meat origin and ice creams under the suspicious eyes of the locals, afterwards we parted ways with our Cuban friend and kept exploring the city.
Some parts of Havana are in an even more advanced state of decay. Shops are a rare sight, except for occasional ones that trade in Convertible Pesos. Recently, Raul Castro allowed the use of laptops and mobile phones. We walked past one shop that sold mobile phones and had a queue as long as the street. Even with the Castro regime still standing one can't help to feel it is a period of transition.

After a few hours we decided to return to calle Neptuno. Tired, sweaty and dirty from sitting on the floor and walking in unpaved streets we reached casa Ana ready for a shower and a proper sleep. Before we could indulge in any of that, Ana appeared in the room with a worried expression. Immigration services had called and were looking for us. Ana didn't know why because, according to her, she refused to pick up the phone and get us into trouble. We wondered if this had anything to do with Rui and I not having health insurance. We began to suspect that it was Ana who was in trouble as she later confessed not registering one of the rooms in the log book and, thanks to that, Rui and I had to move to another room in a nearby flat. Maybe it is me and my slow brain who can't keep up with the details of this story but all of it seemed very entangled, confusing and, in true honesty, filled with lies. Best thing was to accept our fate and not to worry, my brain told me.

Although my body was begging for a rest it was still fairly early in Cuba so we moved on to the next task. A German friend of Rocha and Joana had studied in Havana for a few months and stayed in a house of a Cuban family. Our mission was to bring a letter from him to the family. At this point I simply assumed the Cuban postal services are the worst in the world.
The family lived in the outskirts of Havana. To reach this area we jumped into a yank tank working as a taxi. The driver agreed to take us there for 8 CUC. I was sitting next to the driver holding the side door that seemed to be about to fall of at any moment. In the back seat Rocha and Joana analysed the maps while Rui began to doze off. Some 20 minutes later we arrived to the house and were charged 10 CUC instead of 8. We had not yet learned to negotiate.  

This area of Havana reminded of some rich uptown part of Los Angeles with broad streets with lined palm trees. The houses had that typical vanguardist architecture of the first half of the twentieth century, a front and a backyard and were well spaced between them. This was radically different from the cluttered blocs of flats in Central Havana. The elderly couple living inside was very happy to see us even though we had never met before. Their house was once a large mansion, probably belonging to a wealthy family, and was now divided in two in order to house two families. The couple seemed to have a strong bond with their German friend and, since we were representing him, the enthusiasm leaked to us. Joana gave them the letter and they gave us tea. I can't recall most of the conversation we had over tea because my brain was slowly shutting down due to tiredness. Rui was already in the fifth layer of sleep.
At around ten in the evening we left. The husband walked us to the nearest bus station, or as they call it there, the guagua station. The city buses charge in Cuban pesos and the trip back to central Havana cost something like 0.15 CUC. Much cheaper than the 10 CUC we payed before. On entering the bus I gave the money to the driver but, due to sleepiness, threw the coins in the wrong part of the device that spews the tickets. I may have broken the damn thing. The guagua was packed, but not as packed as we would find out the following day. Rui slept the whole time. I stood up and talked to keep myself awake. Joana and Rocha managed to stay awake without any tricks.
Once back in Central Havana we realised we hadn't eaten anything since the dodgy street hamburgers. On the way home we found the Barrio Chino (Chinatown), which will forever stay in my memory for not having a single Chinese in sight. We walked in the restaurant alley and began to harassed by waiters. One of them wanted us to promise her that we would eat there. Then another one came, then another. An old man, very drunk, spoke in unintelligible Spanish until another drunken man came and said "Do not listen to him, I am the boss". I walked away but they kept trying to drag us to their restaurant. This is when I snapped and lost all patience for this kind of situations. Turning back at the first drunkard I said: "No es no! Puedes regressar a tu casa!".  This grammatically incorrect piece of Castillan, meaning "no is no, you can go home now", became a catch phrase for whenever we were approached by anyone with the intention of nagging.
Food in the "chinese" restaurant was rice with beans and other Cuban dishes. Rui bet with Rocha that he would be able to order a carrot cream soup in Cuba before the end of the trip. We also learned that when Cubans turn on the air-conditioned they like it to reach Arctic temperatures.

I thought to myself that if all days in Cuba are as eventful as this one then I probably will collapse before the return trip. I slept very well that night.

9th of May - arrival to Havana (part 2)

The four of us sat silently in the taxi as we drove towards central Havana. The darkness inside the car and its rocky motion was enough to bring our tired bodies into a temporary form of hibernation. I felt like I should start a conversation but instead I laid my head next to the glass window and took a first glance at Cuban life.

The road was nearly free of other cars, except the odd Yank Tanks, those 1950's American cars left behind by fleeing capitalists after the Revolution, the Ladas, can-of-sardines type car made in Russia from the Cold War period and some old-fashioned motorbikes, often with side-cars. The streets were badly illuminated and, for the first time, run-down buildings and broken pavements began to appear. Large groups of people walked slowly near the road, some of them turning occasionally to the traffic trying to fetch a lift. I remember realising that, for the first time in my life, I was outside that cozy little niche known as "the developed world".

The taxi left us in calle Neptuno, between Campanario and Lealtad. The street was dark, sided by decaying tall buildings and, due to two over-loaded rubbish bins nearby, smelt of decomposition. In broken Spanish I asked an elderly couple sitting nearby if they knew were casa Ana was. Our grasp of Spanish (or more correctly, Castillan) improved marginally during our stay in Cuba to the point that we were mistaken by Argentinians. That should say something about the Argentinian accent.

Ana, a middle-aged lady with a rounded body and a remarkably juvenile face, came down the stairs to pick us up. Disturbingly, she was wearing a semi-transparent night gown. Her flat reminded me of the typical Portuguese grandmother house, with many old-fashioned mirrors and little porcelain figurines. A large TV set and a stereo stood in the middle of the living room.

Each room had two beds which we randomly assigned to Joana and Rocha (a couple) and Rui and me (the rest). Ana joked that Rui and I were a couple. That joke wasn't funny even back in Rotterdam.

Despite being sleepy and tired we pulled ourselves together and decided to go out and explore the surroundings. By this point our bodies were getting pretty sticky and the heath was almost unbearable. It would take a couple of days until our organisms adapted to the tropical atmosphere.

My first impression of Havana by night was that of a post-apocalyptic city. Rocha later compared it to post-war Berlin but without the war. Everywhere you could see a broken balcony, a cracked wall, an impressive Art Noveau building turned into a squatter house. In every corner the sound of some nearby party echoed, usually in the form of reggaeton, a hybrid resulting from the clash of reggae and hip hop, born and bread in the ghettos of the US. After a few minutes we reached the square of the Capitolio, an impressive building made to resemble the US Capitol in Washington DC and where the Cuban government used to sit until the Revolution. It is now home for the Academy of Sciences. We had some pizza and beers in a nearby place where, as far as we noticed, we were the only foreigners. When the time to pay came we had our first dilema: using Cuban pesos or convertibles? Innocently I asked the waiter which currency should we use. He chose the convertibles.

We walked in ever-growing tiredness in direction to the sea front eventually reaching the malecon. Large groups of people from all ages were sitting there breathing the refreshing air from the sea. We did the same and relaxed for a few minutes gazing at Havana's nocturnal skyline. On our way there and back we had our first interactions with the so called jineteros. Wikipedia describes them as street "jockeys," who specialize in swindling tourists. While most jineteros speak English and go out of their way to appear friendly, for example, by offering to serve as tour guides or to facilitate the purchase of cheap cigars, many are in fact professional criminals who will not hesitate to use violence in their efforts to acquire tourists' money and other valuables. The part about violence is simply not true. Jineteros are just annoying people and, with time, one learns to repel them in an almost courteous manner. I must have looked like the least Cuban of the group since all of them appeared to target me preferentially.

Back in casa Ana I promptly fell asleep, wearing only underwear, with the window wide open and under the rotating ceiling fan. Bienvenidos a La Habana!

9th of May - arrival to Havana (part 1)

Rodrigo de Triana, a southern Iberian like myself, from Seville, was very likely a tired man that night. He had sailed for months in a small caravel towards the unknown end of the world and, like the amount of vitamin C in his blood, the hope of ever returning home was diminishing rapidly. But then he saw it. "¡Tierra! ¡Tierra!", he screamed. A beautiful and pure New World laid ahead. What thoughts must have crossed this man's mind! The first European to see the American continent. The first European to see the Bahamas.

A hundred and eighty nine thousand and thirty one days later, on the 10th of May 2010, we too saw the Bahamas. Little stripes of land emerging from the dark blue Atlantic. We knew then that Cuba was not far.

As we descended into Havana the land progressively morphed from an anonymous mass to the characteristic Cuban countryside with its red soil, wrinkled roads and extensive green patches of wilderness like nothing I had ever seen in Europe. Several times we looked at each other smiling and asking "Are we really going to Cuba?"

As scheduled, we landed at 8 pm Cuban time. On our way down we had filled and signed all the documents necessary for entry, declaring that we were not carrying illegal materials such as weapons, drugs, global positioning systems, pornography or literature that could cause social unrest. For a moment I feared Orwell's anti-Stalinist views would get me into trouble. Our Tourist Cards were at hand, close to the passports.

When the aircraft door opened we were smothered by a chunk of hot air. Coming from grey Britain, followed by 10 hours of controlled atmosphere, the Cuban air was the first abruptness we experienced. We then went to the passport control area where strict-faced border officers photographed us and confirmed our paperwork. Our address, a casa particular (private house) called casa Ana. A recent change in Cuban tourism laws was that private citizens could rent their spare rooms to tourists if they had the conditions to do so. This still involves the citizen paying a high tax to the government and being closely inspected by the immigration services. During our two weeks in Cuba we only stayed in private houses.

After showing our documents the remaining security checks were quite relaxed. So relaxed that there was no security near the metal detectors at all. One man passed through the detector and made it beep. Because no one was around to check him, he voluntarily went back, removed a few more metallic items from his body and crossed the detector again.

As we left the departure area with our bags, Rui and I realised that no one had asked us about our health insurance. The Cuban Embassy website had made it clear that passengers without an insurance would have to purchase it at entry. Joana and Rocha were covered by their German insurance but Rui and I weren't. We didn't dwell much about this issue and just went ahead. Without insurance.

We crossed the no-return door into a large pavilion of the airport where a crowd of Cubans awaited. I expected a claustrophobic wave of people trying to rent us rooms or take us in their taxis but that didn't happen. Little did I know that this would be the only place in Cuba where such approaches didn't happen.

But before anything else we needed money, which in Cuba is slightly more complex issue than anywhere else. Since the 90's the country has two currencies running side by side: the Cuban peso (CUP) with which Cubans live, get their wages and buy non-luxury items and the peso Convertible (CUC$), a currency created for tourists and luxury items worth 24 times more than the Cuban peso. This double currency means that, at the eyes of a Cuban, a tourist becomes a walking wallet full of the eagerly desired CUCs. From this currency-driven mirage a series of little scams and annoyances were born, like the one where you buy something in CUC and change is given to you in CUP. Fortunately this never happened to us.
Rocha traded 200 € at the airport's Cadeca (Casa de Cambio, the exchange house) and got 220 CUC$. Lonely Planet advised to have some Cuban pesos in the wallet as a way to infiltrate the true Cuban "economy". This means being able to buy street hamburgers of doubtful origin for the equivalent of 5 eurocents, books for 20 cents, bus trips for 5 cents and, as it will be narrated later on, 27 balls of ice cream for less than 2 euros. Thus, Rocha traded 10 CUC$ for Cuban pesos and got 240 CUP in notes of 10. After this exchange he returned to us with a big smile and waving the thick bundle of notes he'd just received. We all thought it was quite entertaining until we realised that it could be interpreted as a chauvinistic gesture. Or even worst, a capitalist gesture! After this episode, whoever was holding the money (we took turns to withdraw cash) was nicknamed "the sugar daddy".
Out on the street we were once again slapped by the wall of tropical heath. We entered a state taxi and made our way to central Havana.

9th of May - Madrid to Havana

As arranged in the previous day, a coach picked us up from the hotel shortly after breakfast and took us back to the airport. Once more we had to queue for check-in and go through security checks (Rui wasn't even wearing a belt anymore). Although there was still some suspicion and disgruntle amongst the Havana-bound passengers the moods were definitely better than the day before. Our flight was schedule to departure at 3:45 pm.

The forced co-existence caused by the cancelled flight meant that we kept bumping into the same people over and over: in the coach, during the hotel check-in, at dinner, at breakfast and now once again, in the airport terminal. Inevitably, we began to mentally register some of our fellow passengers. There was the Polish girl and her summer hat (despite the rainy weather in Madrid), the Spanish girl with a diamond-encrusted tooth, the Cuban girl with a tie made of fake diamonds and her chaperone, the man who wore two hats on top of each other all the time and, of course, the Portuguese scaremonger that loved to spread fake rumours about the flights. At the time we wondered if we would see these people again once we landed in Cuba but the size of the country and our commitment to avoid the tourist track dictated that we would not see any of them again.

Due to the cancellation, the airline (Air Europa) had to spread the stranded passengers amongst other flights bound to the Caribbean. Ours had a double stop, first in Havana and then in Santo Domingo.

After the aircraft took off and the excitement of finally being on our way diluted itself in the boredom of   a 10-hour journey we began looking for alternative sources of entertainment. The choice of movies on board was limited and poor. I tried to watch an American romantic comedy at one point but there is only so much gender cliche one man can take and had to turn it off after 15 minutes. Fortunately we brought several books for this trip. Here is a list of what we had and who brought them.

• The Road to Wigan Pier (George Orwell) - me
• Caim (José Saramago) - Rui
• A Ofensa (Ricardo Menéndez Salmón) - Joana
• Tres historias de amor (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán) - Rui
• Ficciones (Jorge Luis Borges) - me
• Nuclear organization of the genome and the potential for gene regulation (Peter Fraser, Wendy Bickmore) - Rocha
• Narziss and Goldmund (Hermann Hesse) - Rocha
• Lonely Planet's guide to Cuba (Brendan Sainsbury) - Rocha
• AA Spiral Guide Cuba (Andrew Forbes) - me

Of these, the most read during the two weeks was, without any doubt, the Lonely Planet's guide to Cuba followed by Caim, Saramago's grumpy collection of attacks on the bible and Christianity, read by Rui, Joana and Rocha (in this exact order). My main read during the trip was Orwell's digressions on class division and Socialism in 1930's Britain. This book would often haunt or illuminate me during our explorations in Cuba.

And so we went, flying West faster than the speed of Earth's rotation where the borders of today and tomorrow are distorted. At one point, I recorded in my diary, it was 9 pm in Spain, 3 pm in Cuba and we were flying 9000 meters above the Atlantic. In my ear phones Tracy Chapman was singing "Talking about a revolution". A few hours later we landed in Jose Marti International Airport, in Havana.