I have to lighten up a bit. Too often, the morning news feed puts me into deep depression before I've even finished a coffee. Beverly feeds the birds to dull the news blues and soon enough we'll be foster parents to nestlings (I do not want to go buy meal worms for the little beasts) who will commandeer my hanging planters. Anyway, let's go on a holiday.
"In spring, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." I hear ya Alfred, but north of the 49th, it's: "In winter, most folks' fancies lightly turn to thoughts of warmth." We went south. Waaay south. And as long as it can defend itself against the Big Bully of the Western Hemisphere, Cuba makes for a wonderful January getaway.
Getting to Cuba is about 0.09% of the fun given that airlines seem to have discovered how to squeeze 36 rows of seats into a space that should only accommodate 30 rows of bipedal customers, to which subspecies most of us belong. Never mind. Do refrain from singing anything that sounds like “Guantanamera”, as there is, I believe, some clause in the Helms-Burton Act that makes your aircraft a military target in that eventuality.
At any rate, the trip can be endured and the routes have altered of late so that you can “fly direct” (even “directly”) from Vancouver or from Toronto right over U.S. airspace to that festering little sliver of a socialist paradise in the Caribbean. Your knee joints should unlock in the time it takes to jostle down the aisle so that your descent of the mobile stairs can be accomplished without too much uncertainty. The tropical warmth will also help to rehabilitate your limbs.
Welcome to Cuba. Don’t bother drinking the wine; use beer after 11:00 am to stay hydrated, and learn to sip rum and water. Do these things after you get safely to your hotel.
Most people start checking their hotel vouchers as they leave the airport terminal. If you travel much you’ll have noticed this behaviour on the part of tourists encumbered by too much luggage doing some wild version of Twist ‘n Shout with a spouse as they go through all of their pockets trying to locate their travel folder containing hotel, transportation, and tour vouchers. Don’t be one of them. You’ll get red enough in the sunshine.
If you took the time to read everything you received and paid for when it arrived, and have just the slip of paper you need tucked into your passport in the outside pocket of your carry-on, you can proceed straight to your tour guide station – the place where the person is holding up a sign with your group name on it. Your guide will get all of the people in her group, even the ones still searching pockets, onto the minibus and on the way to happy hour before you’ve found how to say “Thank you” in your phrase book.
Hang onto that little phrase book, too. There will be times you will want to use it. And do so in the efficient tourist-tested manner. If you really must know “What is the current value of the Cuban convertible peso in Canadian dollars?” just point to the damn phrase in the book and give your informant a pen to write down an answer. Numbers translate very well around the planet. Huge amounts of tequila time are wasted every year by grimacing, sunburnt people struggling to carry on conversations just for the sake of making Spanish noises.
If you must learn the local lingo, do some classes before leaving Canada and then spend your vacation in a small-town market or café. It’s not everyone’s idea of a winter holiday but you can learn a lot of Cuban Spanish. I have a daughter who learned Mexican Spanish that way after many years in university classes and she tells me the Cubans do things to formal Spanish that rival any linguistic atrocity perpetrated by inner-city Torontonians on English. Who cares? Relax.
On the way in to town, your guide will explain everything you need to know about check-in procedure at your hotel and where to meet for an orientation session, and then she’ll let you enjoy the scenery with only a few comments. What you won’t get is a running lecture on the culture and shopping tips and currency conversions and tipping conventions while you’re trying to identify that 1950s car or antique motorcycle that chugged by. When you get to your resort, have your gear stowed in your room and have changed into native costume of sandals, shorts, loose shirt and hat. Then you can wander down to the cantina to have an orientation session. Take your phrase book. You may as well get an early start amusing the bartender.
There are many companies running tours to Cuba of course. We booked with a family team from BC farming country. They still bring the farming virtues to their new venture; namely, work hard at what you love, look after your crops, and don’t over-fertilize, although if Terry (our host) starts talking about baseball he’ll forget that last injunction. There’s no need to go through everything they’ll cover in an orientation; suffice it to say you’ll know how to get fed, what events are happening when and where to get a bicycle. Yes, bicycles are a very efficient means of transport as are buses.
The money conversion was significant for us. We decided to put a chunk of money into our bank account before we left Canada and then took cash in Cuban pesos from Cadeca (the places where you get money) down there as we needed them. US dollars being used, and you go to the Canadian embassy website https://www.international.gc.ca/country-pays/cuba/havana-la_havane.aspx?lang=eng or check out some links to the new currency regulations page and you’ll see that there should be no problems. The attempt at a two-currency system was bad for the country by all accounts, and that’s all the politics you need for now. You just want to know where to go and what to see. It really won't cost all that much.
Start with the ocean. That’s the big wet area in front of or across the road from your resort for those of you from the interior. Check for red pennants on the beach before rushing into the water as they’ll warn you away from areas of dangerous currents or indicate prohibitive surf conditions. There will be police patrols on the beach too and they really don’t want to have to wade in to save your soggy butt, so relax under your layer of sunscreen if you can’t swim and do some hydration drills.
We frequently saw truckloads of labourers who had disembarked along the beachfront doing cleanup duty on the sand. There were still places where discarded bottles and cans disfigured an area, but we can’t afford smugness, so take a plastic bag with you to pick up litter and wear sandals. Also, remember that you are in the tropics and the sun can burn you badly. A hat is a necessity anywhere even if you’re not as follicularly-challenged as I and you probably know the slip-slop-slap drill that the Aussies gave us – slip on a shirt, slop on a sunblock, slap on a hat. Be moderate in your exposure and you’ll come back tanned instead of peeling.
For activities other than beach roaming, you will probably have a schedule written on white boards and posted outside your guide's station. That location will become a focal point for everyone on your tour and there will be tours by bus or bicycle, to opera or baseball, through old town Havana or small town Trinidad.
Lineups don't happen in Cuba. They are nice people but when doors open for a stadium or opera performance, everyone tries to move inside at the same time. No queques, but keep moving and you'll all get in.
You’ve got to go see the rum factories, the old Spanish buildings, the cemeteries. The standard rules of safe tourist conduct apply no matter where you are. Don’t wear expensive jewelry (Why would you bring it with you?) and learn the currency. You can bargain your heart out in the markets as no one is going to sell you something at a loss, and some of the art really is impressive.
We bought prints at a gallery and got the necessary letter from the artist to help us through customs. We also followed the (Lonely Planet Guide) suggested procedure of wrapping the prints and stowing them in our luggage so that we never had to have a conversation with Cuban customs officials, who, according to the Guide, can designate any piece of artwork a national treasure and confiscate it. It seemed a far-fetched concern, but someone had apparently encountered the problem in the past. Mostly, you will just want some cute wood carvings and a suntan and they’re cheap enough.
A good general rule for sightseeing is this: Do it all. If you can’t afford it all (and the prices are really good) then do as much as you can afford. A tour of Havana for is a bargain. We later took the bus ourselves to Havana for $I (US) and spent a day walking around Old Town. The people of course were as memorable as any of the architecture. Music is everywhere and I will never forget three old guys percolating on a street corner -- snapping fingers, singing, clapping, cardboard box thumping, and just generally rocking. Not begging, you understand. No cup passing or sleeve tugging – just having their own public performance. If you stop for a beer in the pubs, the band will of course ask if you want to buy their CD, and you will certainly be accosted by beggars. You decide how to handle them. Neither was offensively persistent.
Problems with health and con artists are present, so be aware. Watch out for the "milk-for-my-kiddies" gambit. You'll be approached by a poor fellow asking could you please pay a grocer for some milk for his babies. Of course you would, and he selects a few litres from the cooler, thanks you profusely and heads out the door, stopping only to tell the man at the till that you'll be paying. You smile benignly and go to the guy to settle the account, only to find that the "bill" is in the hundreds of pesos. Do this. Forget all diplomacy. Abandon all of your quiet Canadian modesty and scream for the "policía". And keep doing it until one arrives. Before one even gets there, the guy at the till may be shushing you and assuring you it was all a mistake, but it's always worth reporting fraud. Cuban jails I'm told, are not nice places and crooks know that tourists are an important source of national revenue and messing with them is not tolerated.
We had no health problems, but mosquito repellent is advisable, so says Canada Health information with this interesting (2026) advisory:
Oropouche virus disease (OVD) is a disease spread to humans by the bite of an infected small fly called a midge (sometimes called no-see-ums) or possibly some types of mosquitos.
Most people recover from OVD without long-term problems. However, in rare cases, it can lead to serious illness.
I'd never heard of the disease; no-see-ums, yes, nasty little beggers that they are, but not oropouche. Spray and play. And give stuff away.
We took a lot of items to donate. All the little bars of soap and bottles of shampoo we’d collected from hotels over the years were given to cleaning staff at the hotel or just to folks on the street. Some popular gift items were sewing needles, first aid items, guitar strings, pens or small jewelry items like Canada pins. One chap had the bus driver stop by a lot in a small town where folks were playing baseball with sticks and a rock so he could give away the huge stash of old mitts and balls he’d brought. I think he became their patron saint.
And we had collected a lot of school supplies to hand out. You know how much gets thrown away in the trash buckets of the average Canadian school whenever there is a locker clean-out? Well, we had salvaged a lot of it, and when our guide had the tour bus driver stop in at a special needs school, we figured it was time to donate the lot.
The school consisted of a half dozen dark little block buildings each a classroom for maybe a dozen kids with a teacher and assistants. The children sang for us, chattered at us, hid shyly or showed off outrageously. They were just kids. The classrooms though, were the most Spartan I’d ever seen. They had nothing by our standards, But our guide spoke to the principal, and then she translated for us that lady’s request that we give our gifts to another school that was more needy because they had already received so much. This place looked more impoverished than the worst I’d ever seen anywhere in Canada and they were asking us with no false pride to please look after others.
We would encounter this attitude often. This was a small nation that took in children from Chernobyl, that sends its medical personnel to practise and to teach in the poorest of Latin American and African countries, and that collectively expresses a commitment to the Revolutionary belief that theirs is a you-and-me country, that everyone had to make it together. Over 30 of their soldiers have just recently been gunned down by the American force that kidnapped the Venezuelan president. We became accutely aware that the doctors, nurses and teachers that Cuba has sent to so many other destitute nations are there as a fragile lifeline of compassion.
The only rising class we saw were tour guides who often received more in tips each day than a doctor might earn in a month, but even they were taxed on a portion of their tips. Again, enough of politics; you’ll form your own opinions or hang onto preconceptions.
And of course, when you're going home to your Canadian winter weather, wear shorts and a T-shirt and swear to your friends who collect you at the airport that you forgot about the climate change. Even goose bumps look good through a tan.