Managed to get some text messages to him, but no phone calls. Tried twice and think he could hear me, but all I could hear was a crackle.
Got a really good night’s sleep last night and felt fully refreshed when our guide for the day picked us up after breakfast. A different guide, (but from the same agency) that I’d booked for a driving tour of the city. A 30-something woman who was lovely and again, very knowledgeable, and spoke to us very freely about everything here, which was so interesting and another reason it was worthwhile booking private tours rather than coach party tours. First we went to the biggest and most important cigar factory and saw the cigars all still being hand made. It is an interesting process, and no, beautiful Cuban women do not roll them on their thighs (as the myth goes!). One interesting thing was that whilst they have radio on in the factory for some of the day, they have kept the tradition going that they have a ‘reader’ for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. The workers choose what book is read to them – because those working in the factories are amongst the least educated of the Cubans, it is another way of getting them to know the classics. Later we visited a farmer’s market, where the fruit and vegetables were plentiful. There were no other tourists there – it is the market that our guide uses – and we could only pay in Nationals – that is, national pesos that the Cubans use as opposed to the Convertible pesos that tourists must use (these used to convert dollar for convertible peso, thus the name, but it’s now about 175 convertible pesos to the pound. To confuse you further, there are about 24 nationals to each convertible. For us, four bananas, a huge pineapple and two other fruits (guava, I think) came to less than one peso.
I can’t work it out but I think all that fruit cost us a few pence. Bear in mind though, that the average worker earns about 300 nationals a month. We think we have tipped our chambermaid about a week’s wage (five convertibles, or around £2). We also visited a 17th century fort (one of four on the water’s edge) and then took a ride to Revolution Square where Fidel used to make his two-day long speeches! He used to make Sid sound brief and to the point! Revolution square has a huge monument and statue of Jose Marti (the first revolutionary in Cuba who was killed in his first attempt at revolution against the Spanish in the early 1900s) and a very nice memorial to Che (the same picture that graced mine and every other student’s bedroom wall on a poster throughout the 70s).
Tonight we had planned to go to the Tropicana for the show, but the Buena Vista Social Club (very famous Cuban band – though I was always taught that if people are famous you shouldn’t have to say they’re famous) are playing in the gardens of the hotel, so we’ve booked dinner and that show instead.Who’s minding the shop?
The other place I didn’t mention on today’s visit was the house where Ernest Hemingway lived for 20 years. It is about 10 miles on the outskirts of Havana and has been preserved exactly as he left it. You can’t go inside – you look through the huge open windows, and it was a beautiful house (containing around 8,000 books). His boat was there too and is now being restored (this was the place he wrote the Old Man and the Sea). When we arrived there were only two other tourists there who had also turned up in their own hire car. We didn’t really notice them until they asked me to take a picture of them together and I then realised it was Dev from Coronation Street and his partner.
We walked around together a bit and he was very pleasant (I didn’t ask him about the tabloid stories about him or why he wasn’t back in Weatherfield) but they were most interested in where we’d been, kept asking us loads of questions, and I think may be heading to Vietnam or Tahiti at some time in the future!
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