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While this program was recorded a decade ago in 2016, it still does exactly what I designed it to do. Give a sense of Cuban life for those who've yet to travel there. Of course, with the current US embargo, a tough economy has become even tougher. And now it's not a comfortable time to visit. But Americans are still going to Cuba, legally through the United States and extra-legally through Canada or Mexico. Visitors are finding services for tourists, like life itself in Cuba these days, to be unpredictable, inefficient, and often exasperating. And they're experiencing power outages, unreliable internet access, and a cash-only economy.
But 11 million people call this island home. And with the rhetoric from the Trump administration escalating, I believe that it's just good style for Americans to get to know people before we bomb them. That makes this report from the Cuban Road as pertinent as ever. Thanks for watching and thanks for caring. Hi, I'm Rick Steves and I travel a lot in Europe, but I just got back from Cuba. What an exciting, mysterious, misunderstood, and quickly changing destination that so many of us are curious about traveling in. I was just there with my family. We learned a lot and I'm so glad to share with you the lessons I've learned along with a few hundred travelers right here in downtown Edmonds. Right now, we're
going to learn about traveling in Cuba. Thanks for joining us. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay. I just got back from Cuba. I'm certainly not an expert on Cuba. I go to Europe. That's my beat. But I just thought this is such an opportunity for Americans now to be able to travel in Cuba. And I like to go places that are a little bit confusing, that people are kind of wondering what can we do, what's safe, what's legal, all this kind of thing. It is such an opportunity now to go to Cuba. And I just want to share
with you as a neighbor and as a fellow traveler what I learned. When you go to Cuba, the big question is how do you go legally? You can go completely legal through an educational tour from the United States. But I wanted to kind of push the limits here and really see how is the embargo being enforced when it comes to American travelers. And you can go there now with a general license. And you need to get a general license, and that means you've got to declare one of 12 categories that qualifies you for a general license. You can be a professional visitor, you can go on religious reasons, you can go for family reasons, you can go for professional research. There's all different kinds of reasons you can go.
I chose to go with professional research. You just have to decide what is your excuse to get a general license and then stick with your story. That's the key thing. Stick with your story. I went with my partner Trish and with my son Andy and with my daughter Jackie. And we hired Rainier, who is a guide in Havana to meet us at the airport. This is the best investment I can say. It cost $100 a day for me to hire a private guide in a country where people make about $50 a month.
Isn't that something? Maybe I was getting ripped off and I so happy about getting ripped off like that. Rainier, here's 100 bucks a day. $400 for 4 days. Have fun. Don't spend it all at once. And make sure me and my family have a great time. He was there at breakfast and he tucked us in at night. I mean, it was the whole time he was taking care of us. And after 4 days with Rainier, we were confident for the last 6 days without a local guide. But I cannot imagine, frankly, anybody skipping the opportunity to let a local guide enjoy the business and have an insider to take you privately around. You can take tours or you can hire your private guide.
Havana is the capital and dominant city of Cuba. 2 million people, 500 years old, lots of fascinating neighborhoods. It's easy to pick up local information. It's easy to read your guidebooks. It's easy to hop in a cab, put those sites in a row, and check them off. Havana is well worth 5 days. It just keeps you busy. You got this romantic Malecon, the breakwater and waves crashing over it. You've got the harbor channel that is a narrow spit of water that is protected with cannons from the fortress here and Havana on the other side. And this little spit of water takes you to a very easy to fend basin, which is the harbor. The way I
understand it, this was the great harbor of the Caribbean. Twice a year, all the European trading ships would gather here in the harbor and then would go over in a safety in numbers convoy to be free from the pirates to go over to Europe with all their goods from the Caribbean. And Havana was a big deal. This is a 500-year-old city with a great history and lots to see. Havana has many different neighborhoods and frankly, it's kind of confusing. It's a big sprawling city and I didn't have much bearing on anything. And after a couple of days, you really get comfortable, but you need to do your studying in advance.
Uh Havana Vieja is the very dolled up, very touristy, very front door, very relatively expensive, and almost kind of garish, is that the word, uh tourism. Uh in a land of such egalitarianism and such relative poverty, here you got people spending a fortune, and uh you got all the mojitos, and all the music, and all the clubs, and all the beautiful, newly cobbled plazas and pedestrian lanes. For an American traveler, for a European traveler, this is the comfortable quarter. This is where most people understandably hang out. I would say enjoy it, but remember it can be mesmerizing to the point where you don't reach out and get into reality. There is lots to see and do in Cuba. In Havana, apart from all your conventional sightseeing and important
museums and so on, the real beauty of the city is simply getting out there and experiencing that slice of life. Wander through the barrios, meet the people, enjoy the architecture, and remember, when you connect with the people in Havana, that's what gives you the most vivid memories. While you're sightseeing in Havana, it's sort of the center of town is around the capital building, and right next to that is the Hotel Inglaterra, and from there they have something called the Paseo de Martí, or the Prado, it's nicknamed, and that's just a wonderful boulevard. Everybody you meet has a story to tell. Everybody wants to take you in. Any door that's open, it's kind of like if you poke your head there, they say, "Come on
in." I just loved it. It was very entertaining. Now, the tourist always have a home on a main square, where you've got all the cafes and beautiful, you know, music going on. It's just to fit your travel dreams when you're in Cuba. There's people dancing, it's great weather. It's just This is one of the things that I think people love about going to Cuba is that wonderful love of life in the streets. One of the big sights, surprising to me, was the cemetery. They've got the Christopher Columbus cemetery, which is supposed to be the biggest cemetery in this hemisphere, and quite an amazing place to wander through. What we did one day was we just had all of us made a list of
our favorite sites. We put them in a row, and we just kind of hired a taxi for 4 hours, and we had him drive us to each place and let us look around and drive us to the next place. Very easy to do. And when you use the taxis, it empowers you to just get from here to there. It's so cheap. You're helping a local hardworking person, and it uses your time smartly. So, I would highly recommend that when you're in Cuba. There's one touristy lane called Hamel, and when you go there, you've got the dancers and the Cuban Afro-Cuban culture going on. A huge market hall down on the harbor front was there to sell all sorts of simple art and souvenirs for tourists that are there. Very touristy, very fun,
very easy. I liked it. When you go to Cuba, one of the delights are these cars. You've got these classic American cars. Remember the embargo kicked in about 1960. So, there's no cars from the United States brought in after that. It's just a time warp. And anybody who's got one of these cars now dolls it up, and they rent it out to tourists. And everywhere you go, you've got guys with their old 1950s era Chevys convertibles wanting you to hop in. I got to play the little horns that do, and everything is just jerry-rigged so it still works, and the roads are full of potholes, and none of the cars have their original engines. They're all very proud of their cars. But, time and time again, we would just flag down a car, hop in,
and the guy in the car would say, "1955." And I would say, "Me, too, you know." You want to use taxis to get around. It's a big city. If you get into a big American classic car, this is more aggressive guy and he'll charge you $10 to $20 for a ride. Not cheap. Uh you know, you can bargain a little bit but he knows that we're rich and we'll pay for this cuz we're in Cuba for 2 days and we want to ride in these great cars. Uh if you want to get around without the aggressive cabby, you just hop in one of these guys and just when you get out of the seat, be careful the springs don't rip your pants. Uh but uh you know, we can pack four of us into this and get around very cheap and when you want to have a taxi that's
just with you for 3 hours, these are the guys that are not going to rip you off. So, if you're getting somewhere, flag them down and you can uh you can do pretty well. Uh we also just went on a whole uh montage of fun different ways to get around. They have uh bicycle uh you know, pedicabs that are just a lot of fun. They have these things called coco taxis, like a coconut on wheels. Uh local people never ride in these because they've seen too many of [clears throat] them just all tangled up in the roadside, you know, after an accident. But uh it's a hoot for a tourist for a couple of times. They're just big enough to fit three big Western uh travelers in the back seat and uh then you go for a
little putt-putt ride around town and uh it's just kind of fun. Uh when the Malecón I told you about is the big breakwater and whenever there's a chop, any kind of a surf, it's going to be splashing over that and all of these precious old 1950s era cars don't want to be near the salt spray. In fact, they close the Malecón entirely routinely when there's any kind of waves and then people have to go congesting all the inner smaller lanes and that must be a problem for Havana when it comes to traffic. A big part of visiting Cuba is checking out its revolutionary heritage. Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries came over on a boat in 1956. By 1960, he was with a million people in the square declaring Cuba is free. Cuba Libre. There's
lots of sites that give you that Castro take on that exciting time. I'm fascinated by the whole revolutionary story and when you go to Havana, you'll be able to go to the great museum that talks about the revolution and here you get the whole thing from Fidel's perspective. Remember, it's not a free society, it's a dictatorship and when you go to the museum, everything is going to be twisted with that narrative and I enjoy that. I mean, we have our narrative. I mean, if you go to Pearl Harbor, you're certainly going to get an American narrative and we just got to be honest about that. I want to stress you need to know a little bit about the sweep of the history to understand all of this in the right context and like
any Latin American country, Cuba had a 500 year relationship with the European colonial kind of way and in the 20th century before Castro, you had Batista and you had this dictatorship and very friendly to American interests and big corporations owning much of the economy of the country and of course that meant the peasantry was kept down and that was the people that hit Fidel wanted to rile up and in 1956, Fidel came over in a boat like this. This is the famous Grandma boat and it these exiles that were in Mexico, 82 of them came over, they landed and they kind of said, let's go and they managed to rise the people of Cuba up and overthrow their government and by 1959, Castro was
was here talking on the revolutionary square to millions of people having newly taken over the country. Now, when Castro took over Cuba and his revolution took over, the people took over Cuba, however you want to say that. At first, it wasn't to be an enemy of the United States, but they nationalized a lot of American-owned companies and they got an impasse on a lot of economic and you know, political issues and they didn't blink and America cut off Cuba and Cuba in order to survive, I think, was wooed by the Soviet Union. It was Cold War politics and you can't just have the Soviet Union bolster you up without drinking their Kool-Aid and I think that radicalized the revolution that really
wanted to be free from American imperialism but didn't necessarily want to be hardcore communist enemy of the United States. But, when they jumped into bed with the Soviet Union, they got a lot of money and they had to play by their tune. Consequently, we have the embargo and we have the impasse and we had that 50-year period that we're just getting out of right now. Now, when the Soviet Union was relatively healthy and when they were propping up the Cuban economy to be a showpiece right here in our hemisphere of communism, life was okay for the Cuban people. But, when the Soviet Union fell apart, suddenly, there was no more money at all. And then today they're trying to break out of the embargo so they can
prosper and still be free. The question is with all their economic misery, is it because of their communist system or is it because of the embargo? Well, depends on who you talk to, but both contribute, I think, to their economic hardship. As far as changing money goes and just your rudiments of eating and sleeping, um first of all, when you go to Cuba, there are two currencies. There's the popular peso and the convertible peso. Be really careful because if somebody was unscrupulous, they could pay you with popular pesos, which are worth 1/24 of a convertible peso. Now, local people live on the popular peso. Tourists, I know I don't I'm not proud of the way I just completely lived on the tourist uh strata there. I mean, a real
backpacker would have been right there with the local pesos, but I didn't have any occasion to use local pesos on our trip. You know, and uh we just the convertible peso was about one to one. Here you'd have the cover charge, and it's uh 15 uh CUP popular uh pesos, Cuban pesos, and one COOK for the tourists, you see? Now, remember, there's 24 popular pesos in one COOK. So, they're actually charging double the tourists there, aren't they? Uh which is it's a dollar, so you don't worry about it. But, it's just a an interesting kind of thing. You've got these two levels of economy and two different uh strata of population. Don't try to spend your dollars. Nobody wants
your dollars. It's not good for anybody have dollars there. They just have to change it anyways. You should change your dollars into local pesos. You do that at any fancy restaurant or any fancy hotel or at any uh exchange desk, and um it's very straightforward. I would remind you that because of the embargo up until now, our credit cards don't work. Bring crisp new bills if you can, 20s and 50s, and bring more than you think you'll need because I don't know how it costs so much, but it just adds up. Everybody knows you're wealthy, and you're you're over there having a great time, and it's just it's
not $2 mojitos. Somehow, you're spending thousands of dollars, okay? Traveling in Cuba presents some unique challenges. They've got their communist system, and they're dealing with the American embargo, and that makes changing money, finding a good meal, and getting a roof over your head a little bit of a challenge. Want to remind you, they've got nowhere near the infrastructure to handle the demand of all the people are going to Cuba right now, and I'd say, "Don't even try to find a hotel. Stay in a private home, casa particular."
We stayed in four bed and breakfasts over the course of our trip. Each one was wonderful. This is the funny thing about Cuba. You don't really know what is the reality until you go there, but you hear a vibe or a buzz from different people. Oh, don't even bother with hotels. That's absolutely right. The hotels are booked up, they're charging too much, and I don't know why you'd stay in a hotel. You get these wonderful opportunities to help a local family by paying their price, which is probably a huge price, but it's half what you'd pay in a hotel, and it's a better experience, a far better experience, and you book it on Airbnb or something like that. We spent $150 for the four of us
and get the whole top floor of a mansion with a rooftop garden in the embassy neighborhood, Miramar. Miramar is where I stayed. I really liked that. So, that's the view from our rooftop. Uh and this was part of our digs when we were in Havana. Each morning a maid would come in and cook us breakfast, and uh every night we'd hang out on the rooftop with our host and have a mojito and talk politics. I mean, it's just a great experience, and it was 40 bucks per person, and it was very comfortable, very safe. Small beds. But, this is our host, and uh just a beautiful couple, and they were thrilled to have us there, and we became friends, and you
wouldn't get that otherwise. So, this is a blessing when it comes to accommodations that you probably won't be staying in hotels. You'll be staying in people's home. When you travel to a country like Cuba, you can just go there and have a good time. But, when I'm in Latin America, I like to make an education out of it also, and that's what I call reality travel. I partner with some organization that's expert at connecting you with different dimensions of that society. I like to use the Center for Global Education and Experience. That's what we did on this trip, and with their help, we visited a healthcare clinic, we learned about the Afro-Cuban religions, and we checked out an organic farm.
Every time I go to Central America, I like to do it with an organization called the Center for Global Education and Experience. This is reality tour company working out of Augsburg College in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you're going to Central America, you get a lot out of it when you take one of these reality tour programs. I really like this organization, but there's a lot of good organizations. We went with the Center for Global Education and Experience and Rainier was one of their guides, so he took me to where they would take all of their programs. All of their tours would go to this clinic and meet this doctor and learn how they take care of their community, how they're into wellness, how they want to teach the kids good hygiene, how they
visit people's homes who are not well educated enough to take care of their own kids' health care and this kind of thing. So, they have a very aggressive approach to health care in Cuba and for us to be able to talk to a doctor who happily learn earns 30 or 40 or 50 dollars a month and is part of the system and loves it. You know, it's quite interesting to hear her talking about this esprit de corps that they have in their revolutionary society. And as a dad, it was really fun for me to be able to let my kids have that intensely educational bit of reality travel. I just really love this reality travel. I talk about that in my book Travel as a Political Act, by the way, a lot. My reality tour experiences
that I've had in the past in Central America. We also went with our guide to see a Santeria priest. Now, when you go to Cuba, remember there's a huge slave heritage there. And you have the indigenous population, you have the European conquistador kind of population, you got the American and you got the slave, all mixed together. The slave culture is huge and when the slaves come over, they bring with them their indigenous religions from Africa and then they've got the imposed Christianity on them and in good style, like many societies do, they mix it all together. And what you got today, Santeria, that's just one of many Afro-Cuban religions that have dimensions of Christianity and lots of their
African slave culture religion. And with our guide we met this priest and they tried to explain us all this voodoo, animistic, whatever kind of stuff that was really pretty far out to me. And then you have splicing a few crucifixes. And you have a you know, a couple of revolutionaries and a great emancipator. Now, why would you have Abe Lincoln here? Well, Abe Lincoln was the great emancipator and this is a slave society. So, Lincoln would be a huge figure in this Afro-Cuban community. The rum was like $3 for a good bottle and $5 for a great bottle, you know. And I'm interested in drug policy reform and how are you guys dealing with marijuana, all this kind of stuff. And I was talking to my friends in Cuba about this and they said uh
we don't really mess with marijuana. They didn't know anybody that smoked marijuana really and it was just not an issue. And first of all, they live in a police state and you know, it's illegal so you know, it's really a pretty serious if you're going to do something flat-out illegal like that. Secondly, they think of marijuana as a solitary thing that people do just to like get in their own zone and they're much more mi casa su casa, you know, communal, let's get together and drink some rum. They see rum as a social mixer and the marijuana as something that keeps you apart. And they said we got the best rum in the world and it's dirt cheap. So, why would we mess with pot, you see?
So, that's just everybody I talked to, that was their drug of choice is rum. And anytime you saw a party, there was just a bottle of rum. It's a $3 bottle of rum and that's what passes around and that makes a party. The Cuba Libre, the rum with the Coca-Cola. I've had a lot of Cuba Libres. I've never had such a good Cuba Libre as when I was in Cuba. Great rum and the I'm not a chemist about this, but the Coca-Cola apparently is made in Mexico, which uses cane sugar instead of our kind of sugar. And there is quite a striking difference. So, when you go to Cuba, it'll cost you two
bucks, but you can get a great Cuba Libre. So, you can mix it up between your mojitos and your Cuba Libres. We went from Havana over to Viñales. Again, that was a 3-hour bus ride, and then we went from Havana in a private car to Trinidad with a stop in Cienfuegos, and that was with a private car. This cost $150 and takes 3 or 4 hours with a private car. $150, I don't know what the best price is, but I mean, that's seemed fair to me. The guy had to drive all the way in there and all the way back. 8 hours of driving, and you know, the wear and tear on his car and the gas and so on. It cost us about probably $60 for the four of us to take the bus from Havana to Viñales. When you consider the headaches of going
to the bus station, getting a taxi from your hotel to your bus station, all that rigmarole, it's just practical to hire a car if you've got four people to split the price. When you go to the bus station in Havana, I found it was a real complicated mess if you don't know the language and if you don't know the system, and the people that work behind the desk aren't going to give you the time of day, and you got all sorts of frustrated tourists there, and you got taxis waiting outside to pick up the wounded who are still walking. I mean, that's just what it was. And I know the scene from all over my travels. It's just frustrated tourists. Sorry, you're never going to get on this bus. It just left. Come back
tomorrow. And you're dejected, you step out front, and here's a cabby. Trinidad? You know? How much? Uh, $200. Okay, you know. So, I would rather than fall victim to those people, let my bed and breakfast host find me a driver she knows and help that guy out and have a reliable ride cuz he's got to stay good with her, you see. Of course, you could spend months exploring Cuba, but I had 10 days and I'm happy with the way we spent them. Half of that time in Havana, the big capital city, and the rest of that time in the countryside, going over to Viñales to ride a horse through tobacco country, and then checking out Trinidad, the most delightful little 500-year-old colonial town. When we got into Viñales, this is the bus coming in with all the people with
their B&B's meeting people who have reservations or snaring people that don't have reservations. Almost every building in town is hired out to travelers. It's just sort of a beautiful backpacker scene and a cool thing about these B&B's is you get to know the host family. They're just all ready for you. I mean, there it raises the stakes on how you're going to make your bed when you get home. I'll tell you. You got your swimming pool. They're thrilled to have you there and they're even more thrilled if you'll have dinner with them. So, they say, you know, for $6 each we'll make you a nice dinner.
Sure. And they're going to just go bend over backwards to make you a real feast and you're up on their rooftop having a great home-cooked meal. And if you're lucky, you'll get a little frog that jumps into your soup bowl. A reminder that we were indeed out in the wilderness and this is a national park. This has a tourist industry. It's a very humble, you know, funky little artisan kind of tourist trade. Here you got the main street that is lined with all sorts of fun little knickknacks. You can buy a Cuban baseball for $2. You can buy your maracas and your little percussion things and your fancy boxes with hidden compartments. Everything costs one or two or three dollars. Our Christmas
trees can have all sorts of cool little carved Cuban trinkets on it next year. I enjoyed doing my shopping there as did Trish and my kids. You can get your revolutionary guard if you want. My son is much more clever with his souvenir shopping. He gets experiences and he wanted to get a haircut. So we went out to a back street and we found a guy with his barber shop which is just one chair on the sidewalk and we all gathered around and watched him and he the guy said what kind of haircut do you want and then he said Cuban and the guy said okay. So he got Cuban.
It took his sister half an hour to get it fixed up back at the bed and breakfast after he was done. So the big deal in Viñales, the big deal is to watch the sunset and everybody gets in a classic car and they go up to this Batista era resort on the ridge and it was interesting to me cuz I'm accustomed to watching the sun go down but here I don't even see the sun go down. Everybody looks at the valley and watches the light change in the valley which is quite nice and most tourists like us we're going to be heading out on a horse ride through the valley the next day. This is a wonderful place to have a
mojito and just enjoy the cool of the evening and imagine how fun it's going to be to explore that valley the next day where the very best cigars in the world are made. This is the tobacco country in Cuba. The next morning we headed out to This is something that all the tourists do and they act like it's some big Stonehenge kind of thing. It's called the dinosaur wall and I thought like it's going to be prehistoric. No, it's just some guy painted dinosaurs on the wall. So we saw that. Very nice. And then we went on our horse ride and this was a highlight. You got to do it.
Almost every tourist in Viñales is going on a horse ride and you get your you know, you get to know your horse and you always got a nice local guy that knows horses to make sure you're safe and you're on your way, clip-clopping through the back lanes. And for me, what was interesting here, and I remember this kind of a deja vu from my time in Nicaragua and El Salvador, you've got a whole economy going on off of the paved roads, off of the grid, where you've got farm communities and hamlets and little clinics and schools and shops and everything, where you can't get a car. It's just horses and rutted dirt roads. I thought it was fascinating, very peaceful and laid-back and a wonderful look at
beautiful Cuban society, and the economy there is big-time into the tobacco. And you visit a tobacco farm, and they take you into the house and show you all why the leaves are so good and how it compares to others and how they maintain the quality. And then, a highlight for me was they took us into this little pavilion, and this guy took the raw leaves and rolled the most beautiful, perfect cigar right before our very eyes that I had ever seen. And here's where I really thought I wish I had my public television crew with me, cuz this could be great TV. This little moment alone would almost get me back to Cuba to make a show. But he rolled it, he sealed it with honey, and then he showed us how they put it in these organic little
20-packs, just like cigarettes, 20 in a bundle. And then we got to smoke it. In the other direction, we hired a car and we went across country to Trinidad. We got to Trinidad, it's a 500-year-old town with a great, beautiful colonial heritage, a lot of history, a humble town, two-story town with a big church on the main square, and that's about the town right there. It was very hot while we were there, even in the middle of winter, it was, you know, deep into the 80s and also muggy. I remember going to the bus station and just marvel I just interested in the whole tourism thing opening up. You know, they had a rope
actually here to keep the hustlers away from the people that they're getting off their bus. So, you at least get off the bus and get situated and then you walk out there and everybody's trying to take you somewhere or sell you something or get you on a horse ride or whatever. Charming tourist oriented cafes and restaurants in this town. Every house seemed to have a big living room like this with a room available sign on it. Casa particular, rent in rooms and we stayed in this place, got to know the family, a wonderful place, beautiful food, wonderful fresh squeezed juice all the time, friendly welcome every time we came in and upstairs they had built it
where everybody had their own beautiful little room with a rooftop view. Again, we got to know the family and their dog and it just was a beautiful intimate experience that you wouldn't get when you stay in a hotel. You pay $100 to go to the Tropicana, this is free. You buy a $2 mojito from any bar and you just enjoy the music right on that square every night. Live music on the square in Trinidad. The people of Cuba know how to party in any time of year you can find yourself in the middle of a great festival. We happen to be there on New Year's Eve and whatever time you're there, you can go to the top of the hotel and party with
people from the first world or you can get out in the barrio, meet the people, party with the people and come home with a lifelong memory. When I'm in Latin America on New Year's which I've done a number of times, I know I've always got a choice. I can spend a lot of money to get the party favors and be on the rooftop of a hotel with a bunch of first world travelers. That's your ace in the hole, you can always do that or you can wander around the streets and make friends with somebody and get invited into a family party. It's so easy to get invited into a family party. So, I was wandering around just kind of making friends and this guy just really was fun and uh he just after a few minutes said, "Would
you like to come into our party?" And it just perfect. And we walked in and there's a multi-generational fiesta going on and this was just a beautiful experience for all of us. Completely impromptu. Uh and I got to say, we brought a lot of joy and fun to the party. It was just great when you get cultures together. You got to remind yourself when you're traveling that you are a potential boost of joy when you get into somebody's house if you're a good guest. And you know, they taught us to dance and we taught them some English and they showed us their favorite uh Abraham Lincoln quotes on their broken cell phones. And it was all everything was just a cool moment together.
I couldn't believe I was hanging out with a little kid in Havana and he was reading me in Spanish his Abraham Lincoln quotes. But uh there was just this beautiful multi-generational pride and joy and spirit as we welcomed the New Year. And the dad was so proud to have Americans in his place and not any sort of negativity, not any sort of you're rich and we're poor. It just was a celebration of the New Year. Uh what were they serving? They said, "Would you like a drink?" I said, "Yeah, do you have a beer?" They said, "Nope, rum." That's all it was. Not rum and Coke, not rum and anything, just rum. And that's what it is. You got three bucks, you got a party. Here's the bottle. All right, turn on the music. Of course, two blocks away was the
rooftop hotel in front of the capital building. The contrast to me was just amazing. I mean, here we were having the highlight of our trip for free and these people were on paying $100 each literally for the dinner with the party favors and the band at the poolside in a land where people make $50 a month if they're lucky. I just does the juxtaposition of that to me is fascinating. And to see what a wonderful time everybody was having. It just was really a fascinating New Year's Eve for me on the top of that hotel uh creating memories that we will never forget. And I think uh it's just uh if you got a chance to go down there and check it out, it's really fun.
The guidebooks are really important. There are good guidebooks. We had right up-to-date Moon and right up-to-date Lonely Planet. And I'll tell you, even the most up-to-date guidebook doesn't know what's going on because it's changing so fast. You need it, but you got to cut it some slack cuz it's always changing. And I would not want to be a guidebook writer in Cuba because I like to be able to put something in a guidebook and then know that it's going to work for my traveler the next year. In Cuba, it's just you know, it might work and might not. Uh it's just that way. You just got to be loose. Uh in Trinidad, I needed to change money. He said there's four places where you can change money. I
thought, "Good. I've got a reasonable chance that one of them will be open today with money." I mean, they may be open without money. They may be closed today. They may, you know, be open tomorrow or yesterday. But there was one out of the four that I could actually change money. So, remember, don't You can't rely on a place. If it says in the guidebook it's open till 6:00 and there's just one of them, forget it. It's dangerous. You've got to get there right now because you need a backup. Uh Always be thinking in advance that way cuz things are not going to go as reliably as you might be used to. Of course, when you're traveling in a country like Cuba, there's two sides of the experience. You can get
down and dirty in the streets with the locals, and you can do the top-end touristic things. I think you got to do a little bit of both while you're in Cuba. And while in Havana, you've got a chance to go to the greatest cabaret anywhere in the Caribbean, the Tropicana. We did want to go to the big Tropicana. Tropicana is the greatest cabaret in the Caribbean. And it's super touristy. It's obscenely expensive on the local scale. It's $100 per person for the show. Uh you get a bottle of rum and plenty of Coke and you get this amazing show under the stars Tropicana. So, it's got all your variety stuff and all of your contortionists and all of your dancers. And I thought
it this would be a good way to expose my son to some of the wonders of the real world. And I it's just fun. So, the Tropicana again it's expensive. It's I enjoyed it. But, it's the front door dimension of that city. You know, when you travel around I like to see what is the billboards, what are the advertising and so on. No advertising really cuz you don't advertise in a communist society. You just got a shingle out for each business that identifies it, but no billboards that advertise something. The billboards are political slogans. And the political slogans were not anti-America death to America stuff by any stretch. They were just we have our independence and we're not going to give it up. The revolution
gives us the dignity of not being owned by foreign corporations. It was that kind of message that I felt in the billboards and it was billboards that made the Castros look chummy with Nelson Mandela and these kind of alternative world leaders. The one anti-American billboard I saw would always be about the embargo. When I was in Cuba, I felt no animosity as an American. The only thing that was a bone of contention for the Cubans I met was the embargo. And they just said the embargo's it's just crushing us. It's it's causing our poverty. One thing I
felt very clear was safe in the street. We were in desperately poor neighborhoods at midnight where you'd never go in other capitals in Latin America and felt completely safe. Absolutely safe. It was like strangely safe. As far as women, my daughter and Trish, I've talked to them about this and their take was there is part of the tenants of the revolution is that women are treated equally and with respect. I felt that way back in Sandinista Nicaraguan times is that women are treated differently in a communist society. So, were the women safe? Did they feel safe on the streets? Did they feel respected From our experience, yes.
We came back to our bed and breakfast at midnight almost every night and we felt safe on the streets. It's interesting when you think about the Cuban economy, they say people make about $30 or $40 or $50 a month who are in the normal system. That sounds horrible, but remember they've got government subsidized that are paying for or making very, very cheap their food, their utilities, their housing, their medicine, their education, and their retirement. It's kind of like pocket money. The government takes care of you and here's some pocket money. You all got enough money to have your rice and beans. This is shared poverty, not many people get meat, and if you got a little extra money, you can buy it as you like. And a lot of Americans are
very quick to put down Cuba and their system because they're so poor compared to us. I don't think that's a fair comparison. If you want to compare Cuba and how their system's doing, I think it's more fair to compare it across the Latin American spectrum. Compare it to Honduras, compare it to El Salvador, compare it to Nicaragua. I found the rank and file worker in Cuba to be no more poverty-stricken and no wealthier than their equivalent in any other country in Latin America, you see. What's the difference? There is a difference. There's no edge to their poverty that I felt. I'm just reporting as a American tourist that doesn't speak the language. I was just there for 10 days for my first time, but
I felt that there's a dignity and a pride among the poor people on the streets of Havana. They were educated, they've got medicine, and there's no crime on the streets. There's structural poverty in those other countries, designed in that keeps this masses of people down. And that's what angers me when I go look at the systems and the struggles of people down in Central America. And in Cuba, they've got their corruption and their problems because it's a communist system and there's no incentive to work and all that kind of thing. But, you don't have that structural poverty that gives people the Sophie's choice of are you going to live where it's safe and pay half of your wages to take the bus to the plantation, or are you going to live in the
uninhabitable ravine that is polluted and you're going to all get a disease so you can not pay half of your wage to get to work. The consequence is peasants can't get their kids educated in Latin America. In Cuba, there's education. So, I don't know. It's an interesting thing. But, don't compare poor Cubans to Americans and say, "Look at their system is terrible." Compare them to Hondurans or Nicaraguans, and then you can make your decision. How do you wrap up an experience like traveling to Cuba? It's confusing. It's engaging. It's endearing. There's no clear answers, but one thing you come home so thankful you had a chance to meet those people and to humanize that island.
Our greatest memories were simply on the rooftop with our hosts and our B&Bs and connecting with the people. And there's more and more Americans going on there to meet people. Thankfully, one avenue of tourism that our government is very okay with is people-to-people missions and educational tours. And Road Scholar and organizations like this have busy tour programs, and it is really trendy to go to Cuba. You've got a chance to go to Cuba, and um I think in 20 years from now there'll be two kind of travelers in our community. There'll be travelers who went to Cuba before Castro was gone and travelers who went to Cuba after Castro was gone. And, uh you still got a little time.
Uh but, it's a country that as we talked about was in for a tsunami of change. We don't know if that change is going to be all good or all bad or somewhere in the middle. Uh but, when you get to know the people in Cuba, you just hope the very best for them. You really do. Uh leaving the country, it was I'm always a little antsy when I'm leaving a country that's a little bit uh unusual. And, uh for some reason our planes were very early in the morning and it was just like we had to get up at 4:00 to go out to the airport. And, and we got there and everything was very smooth. Got to the customs man in Houston. And, I was like, "Okay, what's going to happen now?" And, he just was passing me through. And, I said,
"But, wait a minute. I've been in Cuba." And, he didn't care. And, I said, "And, I've got cigars." And, he just said, "Welcome home." So, you know, I guess that's kind of the bottom line. You can go there, you can meet the people, and you can come back. And, I think it's okay. And, it's only going to get more okay. So, um it's a good time. And, it's a fun place to travel. And, I hope that you have enjoyed this talk. And, I hope you get a little chance to see Cuba on your own. Okay? Thank you very much and happy travels. Thank you.
