Hello from Cuba (1) - First Impressions
Tuesday, April 5, 2005, 6:00 pm, Hotel Havana Libre
Thanks to a severe case of the Revenge of Montezuma (or Ricky
Ricardo?..,) I am sitting here in the Hotel Havana Libre and I
finally get around to create updates from my first 4.5 days here
in Cuba. The Internet connection is definitely the slowest I
have ever seen in my entire life, (15 minutes to access my
messages at Yahoo..), but I am giving it a shot anyways.
Friday morning I arrived at the airport in Toronto at 5:30 am
since my husband gave me a ride before work. The plane was
scheduled to leave at 10:30 and several transfers with public
transport would have taken me 2.5 hours anyway, so I decided to
head there early and read a book.
Air Canada was delayed after all (due to a problem with the
water supply on the plane) and we had to wait for a substitute
plane from Winnipeg and finally got off the ground at about
noon. 3.5 hours later we arrived at the airport Jose Marti in
Havana - a reasonably modern airport. However, it took me and
the other travellers almost 2 hours to collect our luggage and
finally hop into a taxi.
On the way in from the airport I noticed that there was a
mixture of industrial developments and agricultural areas, right
up until the centre of the city, which is strange compared to
Toronto, where there is no significant agriculture until way
outside the city. The older gentleman driving the taxi was very
friendly and explained a few basic things to me, e.g. that most
of the area is industrial and agricultural. He also showed the
National Sports Centre to me. Of course you see old cars from
the 50s and earlier as well as beat-up Russian Ladas everywhere.
Old sidecar motorcycles are also a popular way to get around.
I finally arrived at my hotel at about 6 pm where my brand-new
friend Pedro (a connection through a friend in Canada) was
waiting for me. I had told my friend that I wanted to really
spend some time with locals to learn about Cuba, its customs,
its way of life etc.
Pedro is a brown-skinned black man in his late thirties with a
common-law wife and a young daughter. An extremely nice person
and he