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“¿Sabe usted donde esta?”: Cuba Pt. 2

Capitolio Nacional, HabanaActually, there was only one occasion when we had to deal with hassle that felt in any way unpleasant, and that was, of all places, inside the Capitolio Nacional, a carbon copy of the US Capitol building that sits by the Parque Central in central Havana. Whether due to an attempt to alleviate the boredom, or supplement their meagre wages, or both, the staff were extremely keen to extract money from us in whatever way they could. Having made the mistake of (a) carrying a camera, and (b) showing interest in the library, we were accosted by a steward who proceeded to rattle off some facts I’d already read in the guidebook before demanding “And now I take your picture”. Blurry Photo in the Capitolio Nacional, HabanaThe resulting snapshot, I’m sure you’ll agree, was well worth the convertible I had to pay her for it.

Elsewhere, other staff members heckled us with offers to take us to parts of the building that the other tourists couldn’t visit (“Sir, do you want to see the president’s room?”), and one lady even tried to sell us a 1 Mondea Nacional peso coin–“a souvenir of the typical Cuban money”. I didn’t hang around long enough to find out how much she wanted for it, but I’m guessing that it would have been significantly more than the CUC 0.04 that it was actually worth.

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For the rest of our time in Havana, the weather (unlike what we are told that we can expect this weekend) was so hot that we could barely manage to walk more than a few metres without breaking out into a sweat and having to seek refuge within whatever nearby air conditioning we could find. Luckily, there are plenty of hotels and bars scattered around the city that offer just that. I suppose it was just as well that the Lonely Planet raved about the interiors of the Hotel Inglaterra, for example (“a better place to hang-out than actually stay in”, apparently), so we didn’t feel too guilty to be just sitting there trying to recover from the exertions of simply walking about.

On one occasion (on our way back from the Museo del Ron, which was sadly bereft of donkey jackets and Aston Villa memorabilia, and instead about some sugary alcoholic drink) we ducked into a hotel where all the staff were dressed as monks, which seemed an odd choice of branding strategy, but made for pleasant enough surroundings as we sat in the courtyard skimming through the guidebook.

La Bodeguita del Medio, Habana ViejaWhen we ran out of hotels to sit in, we had to resort to the bars. We did our best to retrace Ernest’s steps: we sipped ludicrously overpriced mojitos in El Floridita amongst the bussed-in sunburnt tourists (our bill for two drinks was, at CUC 12, something close to the average Cuban’s monthly salary…), but I much preferred another of his haunts, La Bodeguita del Medio, which was just down the road, and where we drank beers at the bar, tried the cigars, and attempted conversation in Spanish with the amiable barman Enrique (“¿Como Sr Iglesias?” I attempted to joke) who told us how much he had enjoyed the two years he’d spent in London when he was younger, living at the Cuban embassy near Holborn. I never did establish quite what you have to do as a young Cuban to get that gig.

One of my favourite bars was the one that we stumbled into one night on the way back to our hotel: just across the other side of Prado from the Hotel Sevilla, we found a restaurant where we could sit on our own on the first floor balcony in the cool night air watching the world go by, drinking yet more cold cans of Cristal beer. We liked it so much that we went back the following night, and I did my best to take long exposure shots of the street below.

Night Falls on Prado, Habana

Our second trip to the bar was our last night in Havana, and we’d booked in for dinner at Paladar La Guarida, one of Havana’s most well known paladars. Or so we thought…

Emerging from the bar onto the street below, feeling slightly light-headed after all that Cristal, we hailed the first cab that passed. As with every other trip, I agreed a fare beforehand, and given that we’d caught a coco-taxi back from the place the other day when we’d been over to reserve the table, I didn’t want to pay any more than the fare for the previous trip. But for some reason the driver was very unhappy about taking us for the 5 CUC that I was offering, although eventually he reluctantly agreed.

We thought it was a bit odd when he turned the cab around and drove in the opposite direction to where we wanted to go, but I assumed that he was just taking the coast road because it was quicker than the pot-holed streets of Centro Habana. It was only when he sailed past what would have been the turn off, and continued onwards to Vedado that we began to wonder if this wasn’t, after all, a shortcut. With the Hotel Nacional looming into view, we decided it might be a good idea to check if he did, in fact, know where we wanted to go.

“¡Disculpe señor, La Guarida esta aii!” I attempted in best schoolboy Spanish, pointing back in the direction we had come. I fished around in my pocket for the business card and handed it to him as he pulled over and turned on his light.

“¿Sabe usted donde esta?” I asked as he swung the car around and set off back in the right direction, while saying that no, he did not in fact know where it was after all.

As we reached the edge of the city once again, he pulled up and jumped out, leaving us in the back while he asked a policeman for directions. After two more stops he somehow managed to produce a local who knew where it was: the chap jumped into the front passenger seat, and directed us to the restaurant, where, rather improbably, he turned out to know everyone, wandering into the kitchen to say hello to the chefs as we waited for our table.

To this day, I still have no idea where the taxi driver thought we wanted to go to, but we made it in time for our booking, and the food was the best we ate in our whole stay in Cuba…