Hey dudes and dudettes, we have been so busy with my cousin’s wedding in San Francisco and getting ourselves set up in Ireland, that we haven’t organised our Cuba photos or sent the last 2 travel logs that we wrote 2 weeks ago… so here’s the first of them… we’ll send the other when we’ve sorted out our photos…
2/10/05
Hola Comrade Revolutionaries and Revolutionary Fairies
Well we are currently still in Vinales in the west of Cuba braving out the Cuban Cockroach Crisis, but we’ll be heading back to Havana this afternoon …and fortunately there have been no further episodes of Avril teleporting, although we were quite surprised about how many of you guys out there wrote back to tell us that that they too had witnessed the same phenomena in their girlfriends… so we’re happy that a lot of our Captain Caveman friends also have superpowered girlfriends out there…
In anycase, we just have to tell you about Cuba because it is such an interesting but fucked up place.
For all you fairies who aren’t up to date with the revolution, we have to tell you a bit about it first since Cuba’s history is definitely the most interesting that we have come across in Latin America.
Basically, Fidel C-astroboy and Che Guevara stormed into Cuba in the 50’s and overthrew the government in a well televised coup that was idolised by the youths back then as a great way to revolt against the capitalism that had been coming out of America, so they were considered revolutionary heroes.
However, after Che was killed, Fidel C-astroboy decided that communism/socialism was the way to go so they definitely pissed off the Americans, by hanging out with the Russians and eventually bought some missiles off the Russians which were meant to only target Miami.
However, the Russians obviously fucked up and instead gave Fidel C-astroboy missiles which could target all of the USA sparking the Cuban Missile Crisis and hence leading the USA to call for a trade embargo against Cuba which unfortunately mainly hurt the local people.
In anycase, Fidel C’astroboy was such a dumbfuck that he decided to trade only with Russia and decided to only grow tobacco and sugar cane for export to the USSR instead of crops to feed the locals, so when the USSR collapsed in the 80’s, heaps of people suffered and died from starvation…
In fact the worst stories we heard was from this period in the 90’s, when there were people who were so desperate that they ate all the cats in Havana, and some people even sold pizzas made with CONDOMS that had been melted onto them since apparently melted condoms resemble CHEESE!!!!!
…Holy Cow… I just threw up in my mouth a little just typing that…
In anycase, Cuba today is this amazing country where the commies rule and the poor people are stuck in the middle of this 50 year cold war girly fight between the US government and Fidel C-astroboy so everyone is justing waiting for Fidel to die…
We were pretty keen to see all of this before Fidel croaks, in case things changed, so we were totally blown away by how amazingly interesting and fucked up Havana actually is…
Havana is such a weird arse place since it is this totally amazing city that has literally been paralysed in 3 time periods…
There are amazing 1800’s colonial buildings, 1950’s bigarsed American muscle cars like 57 Chevy Bel Airs and Oldsmobiles that are literally being held together with tape… and then there are also heaps of Russian Ladas, buses and trucks from the 1980’s just before the USSR collapsed.
Because of the US trade embargo new technologies and cars, basic goods and repair materials just don’t exist here so the locals have to make do with what they have, so basically the centre of Havana is full of streets with amazing colonial buildings that are literally just falling down with makeshift wood holding up the archways and stone balconies that have crumbled to the ground.
In fact, the city is dirty, stinky, hot and crumbling down… and some Bulgarians who were staying with us described it as…
“…Havana is nothing like communist Bulgaria… in fact it is so bad, that it is like if you gave the Gold Coast to gypsies for 20 years…”
…which we thought was a piss funny way to describe Havana, but personally we thought it was really COOL since Havana is literally a photographer’s wet dream…!!! We actually took over 300 photos in 3 days!!!
The coolest thing we did though was to organise an illegal stay with a family in Havana…
We were lucky to meet Nikki a Brissie girl on-line and she set us up with a family homestay in central Havana which has been TOTALLY illegal, but absolutley fantastic because we learnt so much about how tough it is living here under Fidel C-astroboy and his communist/socialist wanky ideas.
Basically, Fidel C-astroboy has deemed that all tourists must stay in state run hotels or homestays (casa particulares) which are bloody expensive and very impersonal, so it’s been great to be able shove it up Fidel’s arse and stay with the locals, although we did have to sneak around a bit since there are a heap of communist Fidel supporters on our street so we didn’t want to get our host family in trouble.
It was really tough and yet cool to see how they live since they all have a ration card which gives them a small amount of rice and bread and soap and a couple of other things, but other than that, everything else they’ve got to buy… which is tough when even doctors only make $USD20 per month… so they all do some sort of illegal trade on the side…. and of course Fidel C-astroboy gets whatever he wants…
But even when they want to buy things, a lot of things aren’t available due to the US trade embargo, so such simple things like running out of toilet paper can be a hassle especially since, even if you have the money, it doesn’t mean that the shop will have any available anyway…
In fact anyone who believes in socialism or communism needs to come here and spend some time talking to the locals to see how totally fucked up it is…
But despite not always having food and basic necessities, the Cuban people are amazingly fun and good natured and they can go to the theatre for only 8c since Fidel C-astroboy has fixed it so that they are all really well educated in fine arts, music and heaps of other cultural things that are lost on us since the only culture we have is in between our toes…
In actual fact, Fidel C-astroboy has seen to it that all Cubans get a good education so it’s really sad to see these really intelligent and very westernised people suffering just because of the cold war girly fight… and it’s also really sad to see how the government treats its own people like shit since the locals are hassled all the time by police and prohibited from mixing with the tourists and going to beaches where tourists hang out, which really sucks…
And the amount of patriotic propaganda fed to the locals is astoundingly close to brain washing. Even with all their liberal freedoms gone, when I tried to argue it to one local, she completely defended Cuba and Castro in a blind patriotic rant of how superior Cuba and it’s culture is compared to other nations. Fuck me!
Anyhows, learning heaps about life under Fidel C-astroboy has definitely been the highlight of our trip and we would definitely recommend anyone going there to learn some Spanish and get in with a local family. We also found our Spanish got exponentially better since there is limited English there, although a few people speak Russian.
We also found the west of Cuba to be absolutely beautiful with rugged rounded mountains rising out of green tobacco plantations scattered with palm trees. We managed to go horseriding through tobacco plantations in Vinales and sit in workers huts and drink vodka with the farmers and roll cigars from local-grown tobacco leaves… which was definitely one of the coolest things we have ever done.
But we didn’t manage to go rock climbing here like we had planned, mainly because we got really sunburnt at Maria La Gorda, an idyllic 7 km white sand/torquiose water Caribbean beach which we had all to ourselves, so we literally couldn’t get our harnesses on.
Anyhows, we’ll write again when we get better email and we’ll sort our photos out soon too…
Lots of love and keep the revolution alive…
Revolutionary Fairy Ced &
Che Avril
PS. TRIP STATS: If you’re planning on going to Cuba and you want to get in with the locals and do it on the cheap, we have written a trip report which we posted on the Lonely Planet thorntree, but we also copied it to our website so click on this link CUBA TIPS
We can also totally recommend staying with Joel and Ania which is the family we stayed with if you want to be conveniently located in Havana and also want a fantastic look into Cuban life… it’s illegal but fine, but email us if you have any concerns. Their contact is joel200510@yahoo.es or aniaramirez@yahoo.es
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