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Airlines are cancelling flights left and right from FL. - nobody is going
The cars are junk and falling apart and who smokes cigars anymore?
These Photos Will Make You Rethink Your Trip to Cuba
I recently got back from a 10-day trip to Cuba. And during those days I gained some insight into what thousands of Americans are going to find when they leave their luxury hotels and lavish supermarkets and spend significant amounts of money to travel to an island hobbled by embargo and food shortages. In a nutshell, it’s going to be a huge, huge mess. But (probably!) worth it, particularly for the adventurous and culinarily unambitious.
The trip I went on was a “people-to-people” educational group voyage, in compliance with U.S. State Department guidelines. I like to think of it as the last government trip to Cuba, before normalized tourism takes hold. The group spent most of its time in Havana, but we also visited Viñales in the west and Trinidad on the Caribbean coast. Cuba is a fascinating and outrageously photogenic place. Here’s what I saw.
The food is bad, but the plumbing is worse
Part of traveling is pretending that the food everywhere you go is some of the best in the world. But not everywhere can be above average on the culinary front. Mince pie and fermented shark are indigenous to somewhere, after all.
Cuban cuisine is based on imported rice, black beans, government issue cheese product #1 and enough sugar to give you diabetes in a week. It tastes about as good as it sounds.
I’m not blaming Cuba for this. The country is desperately poor, the embargo means nothing is quite fresh, and restaurants have only been legal since 2013. That’s hardly enough time to make a proper sauce, let alone develop a restaurant scene.
One of the most striking things about Communist Cuba is how little communist architecture there is. There is the revolutionary square — a vast parking lot with a scattering of dumpy post war buildings around it. But aside from that, most of the built environment dates from a several decade timespan around the turn of the 19th century. There are very few of the concrete apartment blocks that blanket Eastern Europe.
It makes for a lovely old-world feel on the surface, but the problem with a building stock that’s over 100 years old and hasn’t seen a drop of paint since 1989 is that buildings are starting to fall apart — everywhere, and at the same time.
Cuba has more than enough crumbling commercial real estate to go around and the Cuban people seem to desperately want access to the same goods and services everyone else in the world enjoys. I personally find dilapidated buildings and ration centers photogenic, but pretty much everyone would be better off with a McDonald’s there instead.
http://fortune.com/2016/02/21/these-10-photos-will-make-you-rethink-your-trip-to-cuba/
