Yesterday was a very long day but we both slept remarkably well considering, after a shower we went down to breakfast then went to meet Adrian our Rep to confirm details for our trips. We have a three hour walking tour of Havana this morning and a ride around town in an open top classic car this evening. We were met at 10:00 for our walk which was all around the old town. Havana was originally a walled city and where we are staying is right on the edge of what was the original town, despite the fact that where we are staying has a park called Central Park outside the hotel! There are three main squares / parks in Havana and we did them all. This was good because it meant that we walked around most of the city, something we are going to do again over the next couple of days but it was good to get some of the history from a local. Our guide was really good and talked about both the positives and negatives of Socialism, there are definitely some positives especially around education and they still have rationing but the way it was described was that everyone is entitled to a ration each month, this is a set amount of rice, sugar, eggs, oil (for cooking), coffee, salt and other essentials, the cost of this is set by the government and you pick this up from your local government store monthly. You get something like 4lb’s of rice for less than one CUC (less than a US dollar), the idea is that everyone has a basic diet and the food they need to survive. If you want more that this which most people do there is no limit to the amount you can have but you have to buy it at public supermarkets where the price is a lot more than at the government stores. Everyone has ration books and the allowances are different depending on things like age, children under 7 don’t get the coffee allowance, and health, if you have a medical condition you may get something like more chicken or beef. In a way this all sound very sensible although I don’t know if the cost of goods in the public supermarket are out of the reach of most everyday Cubans. Where it seems to go wrong is the government businesses especially the government restaurants versus the private ones. Apparently if you go into a government one it will be more expensive and the food quality will be very poor! Each area of the city has a number of squares and we walked down the main pedestrian area towards Armas or Army Square, it is called this as it is where the forts are and you get a great view of the defences the other side of the river. It was strange walking down the road as you passed a number of shops then all of a sudden there was a school which the classroom pretty much open to the street and although a lot of tourists were looking in through the windows the children didn’t seem to pay any attention at all. The next square we visited was dedicated to having fun, it had been a car park up until the 1980s but they have restored it to its colonial splendour, and dedicated it to outdoor entertainment so you have a collection of musicians and it is also where the children from the local primary school come and play as a lot of the schools don’t have any outside space. The final square we visited was Cathedral square which funnily enough is where the cathedral is, it is a strange square as one side has the Cathedral and opposite is a museum whereas the third side is just a selection of restaurants some completely full and others completely empty, apparently it is how you tell if they are private or not as the empty ones are the government run ones! We went into the cathedral which has a statue to Pope John Paul II who was the first Pope to come and visit Cuba, it is very strange that although Catholicism was not allowed under the communist rule, they seem to recognise that this would be a step too far for the Cuban people so they closed the churches by day and they people had to worship ‘in secret’ at night so the Cathedral continued to be used after Independence in the 50’s. By the time we had walked round the cathedral our walking tour was complete so we asked our guide for a recommendation on where to have lunch rather than taking us back to the hotel, she took us to a roof top restaurant that had fantastic views over the river and the fort the other side as well as the statue of Christ which is the third largest in the world after Rio and somewhere in Bolivia. We had a great lunch of Chicken and Rice and Beef and rice washed down with a few drinks then it was time to head back to the hotel for a bit of a relax before we go out this evening on our classic car tour. It was nice just sitting watching the world go by from the room then all too soon it was time to head back downstairs to meet our guide who was different to the one we had earlier. She was very nice but a bit over the top especially after our guide this morning. We started off by driving around the old town and down to the waterfront then headed to the University area and as the sun started to set we went off to Revolutionary Square which is surrounded by official buildings and in the centre is the monument and statue to Jose Marti and also the wire pictures of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, we will look at these more when we are next in Havana as we are staying that end of town. We then continued driving round various back streets looking at the different buildings and the state of repairs of each of the buildings. It is such a shame that the country is so poor as they have some fantastic buildings but unfortunately the lack of maintenance really shows. We called in at the hotel we are going to when we come back and had a walk round the gardens as they have a waterfall but unfortunately it wasn’t working today so we just had a quick walk round then got back in the car. We drove around the city a bit more then came back to the hotel. To be honest the three hour journey was probably an hour too long but it was nice, the problem was once it was dark it was actually quite hard to see any of the buildings. We did however call in at the African precinct which I had thought we might go and look at when we come back, but I am glad we did it with a local guide as I think it might have been a bit difficult without. The guy that looks after the place was really nice and spoke more English than we do Spanish but without someone doing a translation, we ended up buying his CD which was fairly predictable but as it is supporting the local community then it is probably a good thing. We got back to the hotel about 9pm which in all honestly was probably about an hour later than we needed to be but it was great that we went for a ride in our Pontiac and have seen bits of Havana we probably wouldn’t have seen without the trip. When we got back we went to the bar to have a drink, luckily our lunch was very filling so we didn’t really need anything to eat so after a few beers we went up to bed ready for our walk around Havana on our own tomorrow.
