Dadcation
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…