Dadcation
Our driver picked us up early Sunday morning in his ’89 Peugeot for the just over 2-hour drive to Viñales. The road west was 4-lanes, and it would have looked like an American interstate, but it was lined with men, women, and children standing on either side of the road hoping for a ride from a bus that seemed to never come. We sped on down the highway, turning off the paved road to a dirt one, past a farmer with oxen, and stopping in front of a…
There are lots of pretty islands in the Caribbean, so folks have been understandably puzzled by our going somewhere that requires as much planning as does traveling to Cuba, but ever since seeing his home in Key West last year and his grave in Idaho the year before, I’ve badly wanted to see where Hemingway spent most of his final 20 years. And so, on a Saturday morning at 8, we climbed into the back of an ’89 Peugeot and headed east 10 miles from Havana. Our first…
Friday morning after breakfast, I wanted an internet card to check email on my phone, so we started walking toward the Hotel Nacional when a local named Reynoldo told us we could get half-priced cigars just down the street, because it was a cigar holiday today! But only until noon. We kept walking toward the hotel, and just as we were about to enter, another local stopped us, said he recognized us from our B&B–because his mother lives next door–and he too said today’s the day for half-priced…
Get this. From Atlanta, you can fly 90 minutes and land in a parallel world. It has 2 currencies: the CUP for locals (featuring faces and colors); the CUC for tourists (featuring statues and shades of brown). Doctors, engineers, and teachers forgo their $60/month, $40/month, and $20/month salaries to buy 1989 Peugeots or even older Russian-built Ladas for $50k to be private taxi drivers, which you can tell from the “P” leading the string of characters on their license plates. Any new cars you see will start with…