This pastry shop and bakery has delicious cakes. It's very unusual and upscale by Cuban standards, and relatively expensive.
Curiously, they serve slices of cakes and pies for either "here" or "to go." They even have a counter with barstools for you to sit down and enjoy your treat.
But they don't have forks, neither metal nor plastic.
When you ask, they helpfully suggest that you buy a coffee, which comes with a tiny spoon for stirring in your sugar.
I've noticed that all waiters here pour a small amount of liquid in the glass for you.
This method doesn't give you the convenience factor of a full pour -- you still have to pour it yourself -- nor the control factor of pouring it all yourself.
I have no idea why they do it this way.
We've been trying government restaurants in our Havana neighborhood. The food is super cheap, but unreliable. Sometimes it's pretty good. Other times, horrible.
Last night's attempt was horrible. (One of the pictures with this post shows the dish we got. You'll know it when you see it.) The restaurant was out of stock on most menu items. Whatever we did order involved an unidentifiable flavorless mass of animal flesh, rice-and-beans (not sure how you fuck up rice and beans) and some mystery side dish.
We couldn't do it.
So we went to check out a privately owned restaurant called 4You, which opened ten days prior.
The decor was brightly lit, cheerful and tasteful (a description you cannot apply to 99.9% of cuban restaurants).
A window at the back of the dining room revealed the tiny kitchen, with three men cooking (actually it was mostly one man cooking and two helping and/or watching).
Everyone in the restaurant took fine dining very seriously. (You can tell how seriously a chef takes his work by how close his face gets to the food he's plating.)
We had an enormous, freshly prepared chicken and rice dish, tricolor fettuchini in a cream sauce, a salad and sautéed vegetables.
It was very good.
The one was the kind of food that should and probably will be phased out over time. The other was the future of Cuban food.
This hotel is at the end of our street. They've got a $6 buffet in the 2nd-floor restaurant and a government WiFi hotspot across the street, which reaches here.
One advantage: bottomless cup of coffee (which is helping me with my chronic caffeine deficiency problem).
The Rolling Stones played in Havana, which is a big deal for Cuba. It's the first such concert ever -- and in fact merely owning a Rolling Stones album or CD was illegal here until recently.
Around a half million people showed up, including us.
It was about an hour and a half walk across Havana to get to the venue. This hike took us through some extremely dilapidated neighborhoods. Havana builders used to obsess with using ancient Roman-style pillars, so it felt like we were walking through an ancient Roman ruin. But people were living in the wrecked buildings.
In the last mile before the concert location, which was Ciudad Deportiva (that sounds to me like "Deportation City," but Amira assures me it means "Sport City") the number of people per square meter continued to grow. And all the buildings across the street from the venue were packed to the rafters -- balconies, porches, and rooftops.
Near the entrance to the venue, something interesting happened (and by interesting I mean terrifying).
Before I describe this part of the story, let me point out that I'm not a big fan of crowds. I normally don't go to concerts, and didn't want to go to this one. But the event was so historic for Cuba, and Amira was so enthusiastic about it, that I agreed to go near it to see before proceeding inside.
Ciudad Deportiva is a huge open field, surrounded by a high fence. They had one entrance that I'm aware of, and military people were frisking (pretending to frisk) people coming into that one narrow entrance (narrow enough so that The Three Stooges couldn't get through it without bumping heads.) Dangerously, the entrance required you to step over a two-foot high cement mini-wall, which you couldn't see because of the dense crowd.
My wild guess is that about 20 people per second were showing up at the periphery of the entrance mob, while the military bouncers were allowing in maybe 3 people per second. So imagine a fence with an entrance, and hundreds of people crammed together in a half circle trying to get in. All the while more people showed up on the periphery of said half circle and, as they did so, the density of people within 30 feet of the entrance grew increasingly high.
We found ourselves in this mob, which continued to get larger and more compressed by the second. Even though we were outside, the air was like the air in a tiny, stuffy room.
As the crowd became more compressed, we found ourselves completely squeezed from all sides by the crowd to the point where it took some effort to physically inhale. Some people started yelling at the soldiers to let people in faster. There were minor altercations and some pushing and shoving but there was literally not an inch of space between all the bodies. We were just one giant mass trying to get in. Some people started freaking out a little.
Kenny was between Amira and me, and Amira was being protected by our new friends, one of whom was an off-duty cop. Kenny was intent on keeping us from being separated, and at some points he reached his gorilla arm over the heads of three or four people to grab my shirt to keep us attached. (Using a colorful Marine Corps phrase, Kenny described the situation as "balls-to-butts.")
It occurred to me that no crowd control was being applied at all. There were no dividing rails or ropes of any kind and therefore no lines to be formed -- no plan other than to let a crowd of any size show up at the entrance, then magnify the bottleneck with security theater.
By the time I was 10 feet from the entrance, I would guess the mob at the gate had grown to about 30,000. A soldier tried to frisk me, but couldn't physically wedge his hands between me and the people surrounding me. While he was still trying, the crowd pushed me, and our cop friend pulled me, and so I managed to get swept (as with a tsunami) past the soldiers and onto the venue grounds inside the fence.
Huge credit goes to Cubans in general, who are easygoing and thick-skinned and not prone to panic.
Once inside, we found a nice place to stand, and the concert started maybe a half hour after we got in.
I guess Cuba isn't a balloon or beach-ball kind of country, so it was inflated condoms that bounced and skimmed over the crowd.
If you want music criticism, I can say that the Stones, well, they're the Stones, and they've still got it.
One of our new friends told us that the sound system was vastly superior to anything ever to exist in Cuba. And the video screens looked amazing (our Mendocino wine guru, John, has a brother who deserves some credit for the quality of the video part of the show, I'm told).
Diehard Stones fans with Rolling Stones t-shirts, signs and other communications media in attendance from Cuba and from all over the world. And there were endless gaggles of teens, tweens, and twenty-somethings who were there just to commingle and party.
It was clear that a huge chunk of us were there for the history including families with children and plenty of grandparents. Just to be at a rock concert in Cuba -- just to be allowed by the Cuban government to assemble for something other than a pro-government rally -- was a massive turning point in post-revolutionary history of Cuba.
As one of our new friends said it so eloquently, "this is an important event for us (Cubans). For 50 years I was forbidden from listening to this music and now this concert is symbolic of new times."
First Obama. Then Jagger. Who's next? Zuckerberg? Everyone here feels like change is coming and that there's no turning back.
Today's missive comes with two life lessons. The first: Never change your plans while staying in Cuba. And second: Never give up.
We had planned to stay a second night in Viñales on Thursday. But after one night, we decided one was enough and to go back to Havana where we thought we'd be able to easily find a place to stay once we got there.
After the two-hour trip to Havana, we asked the driver to take us to the Havana Libré hote, which was the Hilton before the revolution. I guess the "Libré" is a reference to the fact that they didn't have to pay for it. (Kenny calls it the Nacho Libré, and now he's got us saying it.)
Anyway, we love the Nacho Libré because it's a big, open casual space with Internet connectivity, a 24-hour cafeteria and plenty of chairs and tables and couches to sit on.
Amira got to work frantically looking for a place to stay for the night working her connections, AirBnB and other resources. Most of the time she did this standing up by the floor-to-ceiling glass window in the front of the lobby, where the WiFi reception was almost OK.
AirBnB stopped working (see my other post), so Amira had Kevin, as well as Mardi and Maria were dragooned into the project for hours. (Maria literally requested more than a dozen bookings on our behalf.)
Every place was booked solid.
The district where the Nacho Libré is located also has a gazillion hotels, casa paticulares, AirBnBs and rooms to rent. So after a few fruitless hours online, Amira hit the pavement, going place-to-place, and learned the same thing: all booked up. (A few hotels rooms were available, starting at $508 per night and going up from there.)
One sympathetic casa particular owner, who had no vacancy, suggested that his grandmother might help. He called her several times, but her line was busy. So he gave Amira her address.
The grandmother was named Angela, and she said she'd help us find a place. Amira went back to the Nacho Libré, and resumed her search while Angela called every place she could find.
So with Angela calling around and trying to find a place, Maria using the Internet to find us accommodations and Amira trying to book something, we slogged on frantically at the Nacho Libré. (Personally, I had resigned myself to pulling an all-nighter in the Nacho Libré lobby.) This continued until around 9pm, when Amira and I went to the diner for our first meal of the day (espagettes and insalada).
While eating, Amira got an email from Angela, who said she found a place and that it was confirmed. She gave the address.
So we bundled up our stuff, got the only cab willing to take us so short a distance, and then went on a circuitous route all over Havana trying to figure out where the address was.
When we arrived, we were greeted by a wonderful, gregarious woman, also named Angela. We climbed a set of stairs, then another and we were inside the woman's home. In the living room were another set of steep wooden stairs, and up we went.
It turned out that our room was two rooms, plus the entire roof, which has a commanding view (of the Nacho Libré, among other things), a tiled floor and lots white-painted metal patio furniture. In short, it's like the perfect Casa Particular. ($30 a night.) There was a doorway in one of the bedrooms, which gave access to steps up to a second rooftop patio, and also a long circular staircase directly into the kitchen.
It's the best place we stayed so far in Cuba, and much better than the Nacho Libré lobby.
Amira spent most of her time on the first day in Viñales trying to book accommodations out of Viñales. We wanted to take the bus. But in order to do that, we needed tickets and a reservation. And in order to get that, we had to talk to a specific guy, who was on his lunch break (it was around 2pm). There was a massive crowd of tourists waiting for him the whole time he was on his break.
Amira never successfully even saw the guy. So the next morning, when we decided to leave that day, she went to the office at around 11am. And he was already on his lunch break.
We walked out, some guy approached us and asked for a taxi, Amira asked him how much, he said 15 CUCs per person (around $17.24) and she said OK.
Back up a minute. Taxis in Viñales (and I would imagine elsewhere) work like this. A local guy has a few guys working informally for him, and they hustle the tourists for a ride. Then, they offer the acquired passengers to the drivers, who are from out of town. The (let's call them the sales team) gets a cut, the person they work for gets a cut and the driver gets a cut which appears to be negotiated on the fly.
From our perspective, one guy approached us and told us where to go to find the car. A driver and some other dude told us to get in the car -- they were going to take us to our room to get our stuff. So they did.
Our driver was awesome -- friendly, casual, chatty, funny, considerate and a really good driver. He drove an ancient, gigantic station wagon.
The "other dude," who was the leader of the "sales team," was a total prick. While we were packing, he kept rudely tapping on his watch while throwing shade.
He was dishing out shit. But Amira and Kenny weren't taking any.
First, he said we had to pay in advance (this is after our bags were already on the roof and in the trunk). Amira said no. He said "you have to." Amira said: OK, take down our bags. We'll take another car. So he caved.
I was on the left seat behind the driver, Amira was in the middle, and Kenny was on the right. The "dude" rudely ordered Kenny to get in the back seat (a third row behind the back seat) so that he could sit in the coveted Elgan row. Kenny said "no, you get in the back." So he did.
The "dude" told us we had to pick up two more passengers. So we drove around town and picked up three more. Then, when we were just about to leave town, one of the "sales team" road up on a bicycle and said there was one more passenger. So we went to pick up another.
So now there were eight of us in the car: the driver, the three of us and four Euro-tourists (from Italy and Spain).
After the "dude" got out, our driver told us all what an asshole he was and how he has no sense of customer service.
The drive was uneventful.
The toilet paper here is clearly recycled. You can even sometimes read the letters on the newspapers they used.
I blogged previously about our luck, or providence, regarding the sudden ability to book Cuban accommodations on AirBnB from Cuba itself. I credited President Obama, and the general normalization between the US and Cuba.
Well, today, the site is back to the way it was before. A banner says (and I'm paraphrasing with liberties here): "What, are you nuts? You're in fricken' Cuba! What do makes you think you can use AirBnB as you can in the other 190 countries where it operates, you Yankee Imperialist!"
Anyway, I really have no idea what's going on with the use of AirBnB in Cuba.
Welcome to Obama's Cuba. ; )
We've never had trouble getting our laundry done in any of the countries where we've lived. Cuba, however, presents challenges for nomads who prefer clean clothing.
As far as I can tell, there's no such thing as a laundry service, laundromat, dry cleaners or any other business that exists for the cleaning of clothes.
So by the time we reached Viñales, we really needed our laundry done. We rented a room there, and ask the owner of the house if she knew of where we could have our clothes cleaned. She said she could do it (and by "she," she meant her 12-year-old servant). We asked how much. She was vague. At some point, we handed over our bag of dirty clothes. Later that day, we saw them on the line in front of the house.
Today, when we were about to leave, we got our laundry back and she presented us with her price for one load of laundry: $25. (Note that $25 is roughly the average Cuban's monthly salary.)
Amira laughed at this incredible figure, and told the woman that had she known the price in advance she wouldn't have accepted it. So the woman graciously reduced the price to $20, and that's what we paid.
She really took us to the cleaners. (Sorry.)
AirBnB famously entered Cuba as one of the first sharing-economy startups to do business here. But there was a catch: You could book accomodations in Cuba, but only from outside Cuba. Once inside, the service wouldn't allow you to book.
From inside Cuba, you could browse the site as normal. But a banner appeared at the top of the site saying the service was not available in your location. And there was no button for booking.
We've been using AirBnB from inside Cuba, but only by sending the links of the accomodations we wanted to our son, Kevin. And he did the booking from California.
We needed to change our plans today, and Kevin was on his way to Vietnam for vacation. But as part of the whole Obama trip, however, Cuba agreed to allow AirBnB to operate normally, and that normalcy began today (Wednesday, March 23, 2016). So on the very day when booking from within Cuba became possible, we needed to book and did so sucessfully.
Tourists are usually dorks, but these four are seeing Cuba from Harleys. (Couldn't tell where they're from.)
We hired a taxi driver to take us to Viñales. It was an ancient Chevy, poorly maintained, but gave us that quintessential Cuban transportation experience.
The highway to Viñales was three lanes wide in each direction, something I've never seen in Latin America, and the traffic was practically non-existent. The ride took about two hours.
Around an hour and a half in, we blew a tire. We all got out and the driver put on a spare.
We took off again, and took a right turn into the mountains.
It took us a little time, and some asking around, to find the AirBnB place we're renting. Viñales is something of a tourist town, and it seems like most of the houses there were for rent, or offered rooms for rent.
After getting settled, we struck out to discover the downtown, which is also over-run by restaurants, and seem to specialize in small pizzas (we're going to try those later). We stopped at the first restaurant we encountered, and had omelets, coffee, rice and beans and fried plantains. It was all pretty good.
We came home at around midnight a few nights ago to find this fire a half a block from our house. We watched it burn for a few minutes before the fire brigade arrived.
My theory is that someone burned a small pile of trash that got out of hand.
We picked up this box of pastries from a shop in Havana Vieja (after discovering that our favorite Havana bakery, which we enjoyed in 2008, had been closed).
Some random pictures I took while walking around. (Tap on the photo to see more.)
We checked out Cuba's first and only brewpub, called Factoria Plaza Vieja. My hamburger had two giant patties of mystery meat, plus a slice of ham. The beer came in three varieties: light, dark and black. I ordered the black, and it was, well, not good. I also encountered Cuban ketchup! The existence of an establishment like this is a great start.
Amira and I checked out some grocery stores and outdoor produce markets in Havana today.
I believe the food scene in Cuba is improving overall, but the current state of eating food is still pretty grim for the average Cuban.
The "supermarkets" we went to were dark and warm (no air conditioning). You check your purse or bag at the door before shopping. Nearly all the food is highly processed packaged junk food, with limited variety.
In the meat section of one larger-than-average store, the options were hot dogs, canned sardines, frozen chicken and a kind of Cuban spam in a can.
The primacy of hot dogs is conspicuous in Havana. Our apartment comes with breakfast, and hot dogs were the main course every morning.
Kenny bought a hot dog on the street and didn't finish it. He said it didn't taste like a hot dog, or even like meat.
We saw meat for sale in an open air market, where the raw meat was hanging there in the breeze. This is pretty common in many countries we've lived in, including Kenya, Morocco and in some Central American countries.
Several of the grocery stores we checked out also sold home appliances, such as small refrigerators, stoves and so on.
After exiting, they check your receipt and grocery bags to make sure you didn't steal anything (like they do at, say, Costco or BestBuy in the United States).
The quality of produce at the open-air market was very low. Amira and I disagreed about what was for sale there; she believes it's left-overs or past-its-prime fruits and veggies sold at discount and I believe it's just what product looks like in such markets. Surprisingly, root vegetables are still covered in soil. Lettuces and other such produce are browning and wilted.
Private farms now exist in Cuba, but I believe the markets we saw in Havana must have been from the government-run collectivized farms. Without competition, marketing or any of the other drivers of competitive improvement in at least the appearance of produce, the appearance of this Cuban produce was clearly neglected.
We've seen people walking around eating corn on the cob, and the corn looks amazing. It's super dark orange-yellow, and looks very good and healthy. However, Amira tried some and it lacked flavor and was very tough to chew through.
The fresh fruit we've eaten was strange, as well. We had fresh pineapple, which lacked flavor as well.
Cuba could grow amazing food, and probably used to. But collectivization of farming has, as it always does, result in barely edible food, for the most part.
My office today: the bar in the lobby of the Havana Libre hotel
My son Kenny convinced someone associated with the Obama visit to share the password for the event's special WiFi, which at this moment is the fastest and freeist WiFi in the country.
Today it's the WiFi Libre hotel.
Google has a newish feature in Google Maps that enables you to select just about any reasonably small area (say, a city or county) and download everything for offline use. By everything, I mean turn-by-turn directions, business info, small streets -- the works.
This is great for nomads, who often find ourselves needing the use of Google Maps offline.
However, Google Maps didn't let me do this for Cuba. I assume that Cuban restrictions or pressure somehow prevented Google from offering this feature for Cuba.
However, even offline and with location turned on, Google Maps shows me my current location against a map of any Cuban place. There are no turn-by-turn directions, and the detail isn't 100%. But it's super useful for not getting lost.