Buenas Noches, Fidel

The prostitutes waved at my boyfriend from the shoreline; this was a regular occurrence and he said that he’d never felt so popular.

I was young then and relatively slim and perky. Of course, as a female, I’d been subjected to years of cultural conditioning and been brainwashed into feeling not ‘good enough’, so I didn’t really appreciate my youth and perkiness, nevertheless, I didn’t feel threatened by the prostitutes. (I’m not saying that had I not been young and perky, my boyfriend would have gone off with one of the prostitutes, in fact I don’t know what I am saying actually. I just wanted to recount his quip about never feeling so popular!) We’d been warned about them; the ‘ladies of the night’, as the tour guide referred to them but they seemed good natured enough.

Cuba 1998. A tropical beach paradise - such as I’d only seen in T.V programmes and holiday adverts. White sand, palm trees, azure sea.

Rum and music - music everywhere you went - ‘Chan, Chan’, ‘Che Guevara’. People playing guitars - men and women, in every single place you went to. We were fans of Che Guevara; myself and the party that I was with; my boyfriend was reading a big, thick book about him. We were socialists and, although this was very much a holiday: cocktail-making classes, (I was drinking Mojito’s back in 1998, I’ll have you know) salsa classes, aquafit in the pool with a swim-up bar, we still wanted to see how communism-in-action played out.

What did we learn? That every household had a T.V and a refrigerator, as standard. That the grand, colonial buildings had mainly been converted into schools and municipal offices - there didn’t seem to be a government elite, living in luxury while the rest of the population lived in poverty. We learned that the Cuban National Health service was the second best in the world. (The general consensus is that Castro’s greatest achievements in Cuba were the health service and education https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/27/fidel-castro-dead-revolutionary-history?CMP=fb_gu). The people that we met had aspirations, some of them wanted more; in some cases seemed a little frustrated but,on the whole, seemed happy (I do realise that we would have met a very small sector of the population and obviously I’m filtering all of this through my *Pinko-tinted glasses).

We learned that Castro’s Cuba was still holding its own amid a sea of hostility. A tour guide told us that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, China sent over a consignment of bicycles as a gesture of support and solidarity. She also told us that they (the Cubans) didn’t have a problem with the Americans, although the U.S didn’t seem to like them!

[*to steal someone else’s phrase]

I spoke to my aunt before we went away and she was incredulous. Obviously remembering the Cuban missile crisis and threat of nuclear meltdown; she cried; ‘Why on earth would you want to go to Cuba?!’

‘It is a Caribbean island.’ I reminded her.

The main holiday makers were Italians, Canadians and fellow Brits,. The T.V.s in our rooms transmitted VH1 (Canadian) rather than the American MTV.

We went on a two-day trip into the mountains, stopping off at Santiago for a show. I saw some short, bald, middle-aged  Italian men holding the hands of a couple of tall, beautiful Cuban women, in a hotel lift in Santiago.

So, to recap; Cuba - music, rum, music, equality, tourism and prostitution.

All photos courtesy of Pixabay - I can’t find my own!