Letter from Cuba 1: First of a series of letters from Greta in Cuba.
A place of fading beauty and decay? But little commercialisation and a negligible carbon footprint.
This year I am spending the holiday season in Cuba. I have arranged to spend four months teaching at the University of Habana. This will be my second visit to Cuba. In 2009, I had joined a walking tour of the island which I enjoyed immensely and I really wanted the opportunity to return to live and learn more about the country.
I arrived quite late in the evening at Habana airport on the 15 December 2011, where I was met and escorted to my home for the next four months. I am staying in a family home. Such tourist accommodation has been available in the country for some time, unlike the newly opened businesses like hairdressing, beauty parlours and drinking venues which are burgeoning in every front room of the capital.
The house where I will be living is in Vedado of the city centre, some 10 minutes by taxi (40 minutes walking) from Old Habana, the historic centre. Here in Vedado are the Hotel Nacional and the Hotel Habana Libre, both well-known haunts of the rich and famous for gambling, nightlife and mafia activities in the days of Fulgencio Batista’s presidency before the revolution.
I have a spacious bedroom with TV and radio which leads from a small sitting area with a good table from which I can take my meals and do my work. With a bathroom of my own and running hot water, this will cost me roughly £600 per month inclusive of cleaning, towels and sheets regularly changed and breakfast. For an additional £1.50 a week I also get my washing done. The house itself is old and solid with high ceilings and gives a sense of how the rich lived in those days. Clean neat and tidy, it provides homely comfort. Nowadays many of these houses have been split up into smaller units as people of all stations in life were able to benefit from the flight of the wealthy after the revolution.
The first impression of Habana is of fading beauty and decay. But you can also see all around the amazing preservation of buildings, cars, buses, furniture, soft furnishings. Now too I can see the results of restoration undertaken since my last visit in 2009. This is not a throw away culture. Walking down any cracked and dangerous pavement you will inevitably reach a delightfully kept park with well mowed grass, orderly paths, flowerbeds and clean seats where you can sit and enjoy the park’s calm beauty and the inevitable monument to some historical event. No commercial billboards here in Habana, at night no flashing lights of advertising, but music, music and more music. Here you know the carbon footprint is comparatively negligible.
From Greta, 15 -16 December 2011