I am glad I visited Cuba soon after former President Barack Obama began to ease travel restrictions as part of his diplomatic detente.
Now, President Donald Trump is intimating he might quash one of Obama’s key foreign relations triumphs, the opening of U.S-Cuba relations put on hold for nearly 60 years.
In a tweet tapped out three days after Fidel Castro’s Nov. 25 death, Trump threatened: “If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal.”
With Trump, it’s difficult to tell if this is just cyberbullying in what New York Times columnist David Brooks calls Trump’s Snapchat presidency or if he really means to shut down U.S. relations with Cuba unless the Cuban government improves its human rights record. Some of Trump’s Cuban-American electorate is demanding he do just that.
IF YOU GO
Cuba
>> Best time to go: November through March for the coolest and driest weather.
>> Get your visa: Americans can buy visas at the airport when checking in for their flights to Cuba. Check with your airline to confirm the cost. Cruise ships will arrange visa purchases for passengers.
>> Bring cash: U.S. credit cards are not accepted. Be prepared for a 10 percent charge to change U.S. dollars into Cuban convertible pesos in addition to the current currency exchange rate. Better exchange rate if you bring euros or British pounds.
>> Water: Cuban tap water is not recommended. Bottled water is available everywhere.
>> Where to stay: Most hotels are government-run. Hotel employees can be surly and slow to respond when something goes wrong. Next time I travel to Cuba, I will stay in a casa particular, the Cuban equivalent of a bed-and-breakfast. Airbnb can arrange stays at casa particulares, or apartment rentals, in Cuba.
>> Tropicana nightclub: A must-visit on any trip to Havana. Located in 6-acre estate in the suburb of Marianao. The open-air show under huge tropical trees is an amazing display of cabaret dancing by some of the most beautiful male and female performers in the world.
>> Note: If you stay at a hotel, Cubans often will be waiting outside the hotel’s front door to ask you for the small packages of soap and bottles of shampoo provided in each hotel room.
— Denby Fawcett
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I am keeping my fingers crossed that Trump will tread carefully on Cuba relations when so many Cubans are beginning to enjoy better lives with their U.S.-citizen family members now allowed to visit regularly and money coming in from thousands of tourists and American companies eager to start business operations on the island.
I want to return to Cuba. And I hope all my friends have the opportunity to go there, too.
Currently, Americans can travel to Cuba with less hassle than any time since Fidel Castro took over the island in 1959.
Most major airlines have regularly scheduled flights from the United States to Cuba. More and more cruise lines have received permission to pull into Cuban ports. Norwegian Cruise Line is taking reservations for its first sailings in May. Carnival Cruise Line is already running regular trips from Miami to Cuba.
And travelers headed for Cuba now have fewer restrictions. Obama last year lifted the $100 limit on bringing Cuban rum and cigars into the United States. You can bring home as many Cohibas or bottles of Havana Club as you want.
My trip to Cuba was on a tour my husband, Bob Jones, organized for 33 travelers, most of them from Hawaii. We zigzagged across the island for two weeks on a Chinese-made bus, traversing from Havana to the easternmost end of the island called Santiago de Cuba.
The weather was uncomfortably hot. Temperatures hovered in the mid-80s but without much breeze. The dress of the day was cotton T-shirts and jaunty straw hats we purchased for $3 from roadside vendors.
We were on a “people-to-people educational tour,” which is one of 12 ways U.S. residents are allowed to visit Cuba.
Those educational visits are loosely defined. The people-to-people concept can mean anything from discussing dance moves with a Havana salsa instructor to bargaining with a taxi driver.
Regular tourism is still prohibited because of the 1961 U.S. Cuba trade embargo, which can be lifted only by an as yet unwilling Congress.
But even though conventional tourism is forbidden, nobody will chase you down if you spend every day lounging around a beach resort sipping daiquiris and writing postcards.
Our 29-year-old guide, Armando “Mandy” Galan, said, “The Cuban government (couldn’t) care less how you spend your time on the island. Cubans are eager for tourist dollars.”
We loved the friendliness of the Cuban people, who wanted to talk with us wherever we went. Not everyone speaks English, so even our high school Spanish helped.
One night, my Punahou classmate David Branch struck up a long conversation with the cook preparing our dinner. The cook owned only one knife. In our many conversations, we learned how few material possessions most Cubans have.
On a very hot day when I ducked into the interior of a church in Sancti Spiritus to cool off, I ended up chatting with a 32-year-old man named Alejandro Dias. At first I thought he was an unemployed ne’er-do-well but turns out he was the church music director.
While he softly tapped on his conga drum at the back of the church, he told me about having to live on the equivalent of $25 a month, the average Cuban salary. Like most Cubans, he depended on side jobs to get along. He said he and his wife subsisted mostly on beans and rice but even that simple repast was expensive for them. When I asked if he wanted to move to Miami, he said the beautiful Spanish word “ojala,” meaning “if only.”
When I left the church to walk through the rest of the town, Alejandro seemed sorry to see me depart. “Ask me more questions,” he said.
None of the people with whom I spoke seemed to be looking for a tip or a gift. They just seemed happy to chat after so many years of being cut off from Americans.
Many were anxious to tell us how much the U.S. trade embargo has hurt their country, and also about Cuba’s economic loss of almost $5 billion in annual Russian subsidies after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And Venezuela’s recent cutoff of cheap oil to Cuba.
Speaking of money, spending it in Cuba is a challenge. Travelers cannot use credit cards issued by U.S. banks, not even at hotels.
That means bringing a foreign credit card or enough cash to last the entire trip. In Cuba, there are two types of money: the regular Cuban peso used by Cubans, and the convertible Cuban peso used by foreigners and nicknamed CUCs (pronounced “kooks”). Cubans impose a 10 percent tax when you change U.S. dollars into CUCs, as well as a 3 percent service fee.
Travelers to Cuba should also be prepared for sketchy Wi-Fi service. When you see a bunch of Cubans sitting with cell phones in a clump in a plaza, you know that’s a hot spot. But hot spots are few and far between.
Most of the hotels we stayed in were clean and comfortable and some even outstanding. In Havana, we were at NH Capri La Habana, which lists rooms on Trivago at $194 a night.
The Capri has been completely remodeled since it first opened in 1957 under the management of American gangsters. It has a rooftop bar and swimming pool that was seen in movies, including “Our Man in Havana” and Mikhail Kalatozov’s “I Am Cuba.”
We were only a block away from the famous Hotel Nacional de Cuba, where we sipped daiquiris at sunset each night, overlooking Cuba’s famous oceanfront promenade, the Malecon.
When it comes to eating, the best Cuban food in the world is not in Cuba but in Miami.
Food in Cuban restaurants is generally overcooked and bland. Meat, rice and beans. Cubans use vegetables mainly for decoration.
To accommodate our American tastes, we were served salads, but they were always made with the same boring ingredients: cucumbers, green cabbage and tomatoes. Our guide Mandy jokingly called it “the national salad.”
When I went to Cuba the first time in 1999, sneaking in with some friends for a mountain bike trip, the food was even blander. My friends and I stayed in Havana then with a woman named Morales in her crumbling mansion in the city’s once elegant Vedado section.
The food at the Morales mansion was tasty, mostly large pork roasts. But Senora Morales warned me about Cuban cooking elsewhere.
She said the revolutionaries who seized Cuba were mostly poor farmers who ate mainly to live, not for enjoyment. She said they were clueless about fine cooking.
Today, more Cubans are aspiring chefs but they struggle to find good ingredients. The government still rations food.
Some cooks at the small, privately run restaurants called paladares have friends fly in needed ingredients from Miami in what’s jokingly called the Samsonite trade.
Reservations are a must at any paladar. Three of us dined on lobster and fresh fish at the paladar called Habana 61, with wine and cocktails for a mere $60 total. Other friends raved about meals at a rooftop paladar called Atelier.
I hope our two countries will continue to slowly renew their friendship, and that President Trump won’t bring everything to a halt.
Go to Cuba now, while you still can.