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Dogs seem to be the preferred pet for people who can afford them. When we arrived, the weather was cool by Havana standards and we saw a number of dogs wearing T-shirts. We were told their owners had probably been for some exchange in Moscow before Russia pulled out of Cuba. The Russians put clothes […]

A model of Havana shows a large metropolitan area for a city of 2.2 million people planned to grow and able to absorb new inhabitants. The rub is in the transportation system. Again, economics matters. For those who cannot walk or bicycle to their jobs or errands, the cheapest form of mass transit is on […]

The students in the language school were mostly from European countries, with a sprinkling of Americans. They ranged in age from college students to one of my fellow Global Exchange participants who was taking up Spanish for the first time at age 75. This was my first language immersion experience, and after being tested, I […]

Most tourists to Cuba are Europeans and Canadians. Two or three times a week luxury cruise liners dock three blocks from our hotel, flooding the streets with camera toting gapers. I doubted they got much further from the ship than a few blocks. Their presence drew the Habaneras who thrived off their tips:  the parade […]

To my surprise, the face most seen on walls, shirts and buttons is Ernesto “Che” Gueverra and not Fidel Castro. Che was a good friend of Castro’s and died a martyr fighting in Bolivia after being a major player in the Revolution in Cuba. One of our resource people was part of the team who […]

After the legalization of the US dollar as a trade currency early in the 1990’s, a double currency standard emerged. As a tourist, I was supposed to only use US dollars or the convertible pesos that were worth the same amount. The coins were geared to our dollar, so it was not difficult to keep […]

A couple of ancient women hung out near our hotel, and I felt so sorry for them, their stick figures clothed in threadbare dresses the result of their forced diet and restricted resources. On my first day in Cuba, a rail-thin woman held out her bony hand and asked me for a dollar. I have […]

The Ambos Mundos Hotel was at dead center of Old Havana and close to the cruise ship docks. I generally do not tread tourist paths and would rather have been away from them after the second day. I had an outside room on the fourth floor I so did not hear the lobby piano that […]

In the area around the hotel, there were both traditional looking pharmacies and ones that look more like herb shops. In both customers waited in front of sparsely stocked shelves. The doctor who talked with us painted an interesting picture. Each person has a doctor, who serves 500 people. It reminded me of the Chinese […]