The first sign that it was going to be a weird day was the taxi driver’s name: Elvis.
Elvis had a shock of red hair and a battered Lada. Our host at the casa particular — or private house — where we were staying in Trinidad, Cuba, had enlisted him to take us up a hill on the edge of town so we could hike to a waterfall I had read about.
Trinidad is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a pretty cobblestoned town in central Cuba where — at least when we visited in 2000 — only 1950s-era vehicles were allowed to park on the street.
As a result, Ladas and other ugly Soviet-era remnants were often tucked away in people’s homes, accessed via gigantic Spanish-style doors.
Taxis were pretty ad hoc in Cuba and Elvis was asking a reasonable price, so we set off and began ascending the hill.
It wasn’t long, however, before we sputtered to a stop. We got out and watched while Elvis pulled out the box of bits and pieces that seemed to keep all Cuban vehicles going. “Soy mecanico,” he said. He poked around under the hood, then motioned us to get back in.
We sputtered along briefly before halting again. As we stood by the road, while Elvis rooted through his box, I watched wistfully as buses and cars sped past us up the hill.
Again Elvis motioned us back into the car. Again, it conked out, only this time, Elvis figured out that the problem was the fuel pump.
We all got back in and somehow, he got the car turned around. Then he put it into reverse and started backing up the hill. We looked at each other in amazement.
Surely we weren’t going to back the whole way up to the top of the hill, at least another 10 minutes of driving? Turns out we were. Elvis looked back with a grin and shrugged his shoulders. “Cuban way!” he said.
The hike to the waterfall and swim were gorgeous. But the backward taxi ride with Elvis was far more memorable.
It was the perfect example of the Cuba I experienced — crazy and weird and fun, but also annoying and frustrating. Best of all was Havana, a cool city that was at once crumbling and vibrant, fading colonial and perfectly preserved mid-century modern.
We stayed near the Hotel Nacional, in one of the many private houses where you could rent a room, often off a courtyard.
Nearby was the “modern” district of Vedado around the Havana Hilton, occupied by Fidel Castro in 1959, not long after it opened, and renamed the Hotel Habana Libre.
We lined up for ice cream at the Coppelia ice cream park and ate dinner in a huge 1950s-era private apartment where, when I asked for lobster — the house specialty — the owner put his finger to his lips and said “Shhhh,” since he wasn’t really allowed to sell it.
In Old Havana, we toured the Museum of the Revolution (the former presidential palace), where we saw part of the American U2 spy plane shot down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The exhibits were interesting in an authentically bloody and bullet-ridden way, but pretty much all the text was in Spanish only.
We also wandered through the gorgeous, Moroccan-style Hotel Sevilla — the setting for Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana — where dancer Josephine Baker stayed after being refused at the Hotel Nacional because she was black.
We paid pennies to cross Havana Bay to the impressive Castillo de San Carlos de la Cabana, crammed with dozens of Cubans into a shoebox-shaped barge that spewed black smoke.
Later, we toured a tobacco plantation in the Pinar del Rio while staying in a town called Vinales, where workers laid steaming fresh asphalt on 20 metres of road just before the arrival of dozens of cyclists in a bike race.
The cyclists passed by the little sidewalk desk on the main street that constituted the office of the local tourism representative, who wore a suit and had a phone attached to a line snaking out of a second-storey window above him.
Walking around town, we stumbled upon a baseball game and climbed into the stands to watch the most amazingly high-level ball I had ever seen, although play periodically stopped while the players yelled at each other.
We shared a taxi from Pinar to Trinidad with a couple from Vancouver we’d met through our friendly Vinales tourism guy. In the middle of the 500-kilometre drive through bleak, flat, treeless countryside, our cab driver suddenly pulled off the road.
We were confused, until we saw another taxi pulled over on the other side of the highway. Our driver crossed the road and embraced the other driver, who turned out to be her husband.
Those were the cool things. More frustrating was the food, mostly beans, rice and meat. Or beans, rice and fish. Or beans, rice and more beans. No spices. It got so tedious that I made the mistake of having salad in Trinidad, which made me ill.
We shared a taxi with a Chilean man who told us he once invited a Cuban friend for dinner and served him beans, rice and meat in a casserole. The friend wouldn’t eat it — it was too spicy and he didn’t like his foods mixed together like that.
Also, there were the jineteros or hustlers, relentlessly asking for money, for goods, services or nothing at all.
There was the university student who offered to be our “guide” in Havana, though he didn’t speak a word of English. When we refused, he followed us for half an hour before demanding $20. We gave it to him just so he would go away.
And the prices — we paid in U.S. dollars what Cubans paid in pesos, which seemed fair enough, given how little they earn. But the prices were out of proportion to value.
We were struck by the resourcefulness of most Cubans, like our driver Elvis. Shortly after our visit, about 10 tried unsuccessfully to escape the island in a pickup with the doors welded shut and an outboard motor.
We had gone to Cuba because we wanted to see it before Castro died and it became Americanized. It’s almost 15 years later and that still hasn’t happened, although the wheels are turning. Even since our visit, commerce has liberalized extensively.
But I’m sure it’s still an amazing, crazy, cool and frustrating place for tourists, and that’s definitely a good thing.
