Cuba - May 1979
My one and only visit to Cuba was at a time that I was also visiting many countries in Central America and the only route to them was via Miami (and the USA Cuba blockade) so I found myself fairly unique with possessing TWO passports. I couldn`t enter the USA with a passport containing a Cuban visa/entry stamp so was able to obtain a second one. You could only visit Cuba on business with an official invitation which you MIGHT think meant that you would be expected when you landed!! Good luck with that. Limited flights to the island nation meant that we travelled via Spain over a weekend. The Cubans had failed to tell which hotel they had issued us with and in the rigidly state controlled system you could not stay anywhere except where you were told. Arriving over the weekend there was no official to meet us or tell us our hotel. So our first job was to find a taxi driver prepared to be illegally bribed with US dollars to take us into Havana centre - locals were not allowed hard currencies but of course that just meant a healthy black market in them,!!! Anyway once in the centre we spotted a fairly new hotel and attempted to get rooms. Oh no!! Not without a government letter even though we explained that our official had failed to meet us. So we camped in their lobby, buying coffee and snacks from their restaurant and after about six hours the management decided they had better do something about us and miraculously `found` a top floor suite provided that we signed a disclaimer protecting them and they retained our passports! And thus it was that sitting watching Cuban state TV we discovered that the UK had a change of government and Maggie was the first UK woman Prime Minister ever.
On the Monday morning we were able to contact the Ministry who had invited us and someone came down and took us to our designated hotel - Hotel Nacional with it`s twin bell towers (and a broken furniture workshop on the ground floor). Oh yes they had our government reservation and could check us in on the presentation of our passports (which the first hotel had retained). The impasse lasted for FOUR hours and was eventually resolved by the Minister coming down to the hotel and shouting at the front desk!!! We had been allocated ONE room for the three of us. The windows had broken glass. The room was already occupied (by mosquitoes). The toilet had no seat. The bathroom wash basin had no hot water and the cold tap was running permanently. And of course there were no basin plugs but we were used to that in East Europe so were carrying our own anyway. Apart from that (and the furniture workshop on the ground floor) it was perfect. We looked at one another, got a taxi and went back to our suite in the first hotel for the duration of our stay!. Actually, in fairness, from recent online pictures of Hotel Nacional it looks like all my 1979 issues have been fixed and it is now quite decent looking - certainly the main ground floor facilities. But back then Cuba was heavily state controlled and a total bureaucracy. For example there was officially no unemployment but this was achieved by having someone standing in every hotel lift pressing the buttons for you!!! And when I wanted to buy a local postcard - a simple enough task you might think, this necessitated going to one desk to choose and be issued a reference number. Then going to a second point to pay and get a recipt and then going to a third desk, presenting the receipt and someone wrapped and issued you with your postcard! All the time having you ears and senses assaulted by the only song to come out of Cuba . . . . Guan-Tan-Amara continuously.
The effects of the USA blockade were everywhere. Manifesting itself in a lack of imports of such things as vehicles (most cars/taxis/trucks dated back to the 1950s ) or even simple things like plastic plumbing - demonstrated by sewage flowing across the Malecon (main seafront boulevard) from extremely under maintained housing blocks. Sitting in the hotel lobby using a cheap £12 Sinclair electronic calculator I was approached by someone prepared to buy it off me from the Cuban currency equivalent of £100 but declined because there was no way that I could convert that into `real` money. Meat was strictly rationed for the general population - once every 9 days. Some individuals got round this by sitting on the seawall and fishing to bring in extra protein. One source of income was the production of tobacco and converting it into Cuban cigars which has always found a ready market on the world stage. And in recent years they have developed a healthy tourist industry with a number of beach resorts built. They are managing to attract visitors from outside the influence of the USA, like Canada and Europe. Hard currency funds sent `home` from family members now living outside Cuba also help finances quite significantly. In more recent times a degree of private enterprise has also been allowed to develop and in general this has improved living standards.
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