In no particular order:
- What an odd country where health care is free but you can’t buy an aspirin.
- The best restaurants are private (paladares) which compete with state owned restaurants. Guess where all the gringos go. The state fights back though. They make the tour buses dump the tourists out at least four blocks from the private restaurants..
- Artists are the elite of the country, but they mostly sell out of there home and you pay by wire transfer to another country.
- Their national ballet company is as good as any in the world, but their ballet theatre had restrooms with urinals torn out of the walls and no toilet paper.
- There’s an eight lane highway from Havana to somewhere, but there as many donkey carts as cars using it.
- The 1950’s era American cars are everywhere along with an equal number of russian Lada’s.
- A private citizen can get internet access for one hundred fifty dollars per month if they had a computer which they don’t. Of course, the average pay is twenty dollars per month so it would take some good budgeting.
- The tourist trade is booming in spite of third world style hotels. Where is the money going?
- Old cars with their hood up and a crowd of men peering in.
- Some portion of the one million eight hundred thousand Cubans living in America are holding the interest of their fellow Cubans in Cuba and the United States hostage for reasons that no longer make sense…if it ever did.
- Cuba bet on sugar rather than food crops.
- I never saw a ripe tomato.
- Music is everywhere.
- Baseball is everywhere. Small boys playing a game of work up inside the gate of the Hemmingway estate.
- Art deco and Spanish architecture. Crumbling buildings.
- How does Cuba always finish in the top ten in Olympic medals with a population of eleven million.
- Far too many images of Che on everything from t-shirts to cigarette lighters.
- What’s with this love-in with Chavez? Ah, he sells them oil.
- No bill boards, no advertising at all. Some propaganda posters. Still trying to brainwash the people.
- Great international terminal at the airport; unfortunately US charter flights can’t land there.
- Very dark at night. No street lights. Rolling blackouts every day.
- The Tropicana night club tries to recapture the good old days, but doesn’t.
- Consistent smiles and friendliness to Americans. Still puzzled why our government doesn’t like them.
- Couples canoodling on the Malecon.
- Black beans and rice with every meal.
- How can lobster be that bad?
- Mojitos, mojitos, mojitos
- I’ll never try to salsa dance again.
- S. wants to go back.
- I agree.
