Drunken tourists

The idea of Cuba was spawned on an Australian road trip, which Kayo and I dubbed the World Problems Summit after debating all night over beers and rum on a verandah of rotten wood planking at a broken pub in the New South Wales mining town of Singleton.

This time I sat with Kayo in plastic chairs in a roadside bar by the Bay of Havana, shaded from the sun by a big blue marquee, drinking mojitos and Cuba libres for CUC$2 apiece (US$2). Classic cars from the fifties, Fords, Buicks and Chevrolets, parked on the Malecón and the drivers touted city tours—CUC$40 for an hour and a half.

"Come on. We're doing that," said Kayo.

I talked the driver down to CUC$25 and we hopped into a maroon 1953 Chevy convertible.
These old classics were all converted to diesel back when it was a cheaper fuel than gasoline, and today Havana stinks heavily of diesel fumes. The driver lurched down the famous Malecón seaside strip past the 1950s-era hotels of Vedado, like the mint green cubicle edifice of the Riviera standing unmolested by the kind of crowded, towering beachside development you see in Miami or Australia's Gold Coast.

The driver passed us his phone. On the display was a picture of his car with him standing next to Johnny Depp. We both remarked, "hey, Johnny Depp!" which was about the only mutually intelligible words spoken between us. Depp portrayed Hunter S. Thompson, one of my favourite authors, in the film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson's drug-fuelled road trip with his Mexican attorney, Dr Gonzo, where they ruminate on the collapse of the hippie counterculture.

On the other side of Vedado is the manicured suburb of Miramar, housing dignitaries and their embassies, beyond which is verdant parkland of ivy-draped fig trees flanking the Rio Almendares. And a piña colada stand. So we stopped.

And in this fashion we went on, following the Chevy tour with the Hemingway circuit: El Floridita, known as the "cradle of the daiquiri," and La Bodeguita del Medio, famous for its mojitos. Given that I'd had better mojitos in Sydney than Havana so far (Sydney has its own "half a tiny wine cellar," though the name was changed, perhaps deemed too difficult to pronounce for Saturday night consumer bogans, to "The Cuban Place"), it was unfortunate that we only tried a few cervezas at the tiny, packed Bodeguita. We spent more time at the Hotel Ambos Mondos, Hemingway's lodging for seven years, where the piña coladas on the rooftop bar are criminally refreshing and joyously addictive. Several times we asked for double the rum, and finally the waiter came over with a bottle of white Havana Club and just poured it directly into our half-empty glasses. It fast became our favourite place to drink.

The Hotel Capri was too expensive to stay for more than a night, and we had since moved into a casa particular, a private home, where we had to ourselves a room and a balcony overlooking the time-worn and crumbling buildings on the edges of Old Havana. It was to this balcony we retired after a day of steady drinking, picking up a litre bottle of Havana Club for $12 on the way, to sit and deliberate on the problematic state of the world.

Trouble in Havana

Havana is frozen in the fifties, but it has not been spared time's ravages. Walking the derelict streets surrounding Habana Vieja—Old Havana—is startling. It seems as if an earthquake exacted a tithe on the buildings, and those left standing were scoured back to bare concrete by a typhoon then repopulated and draped with laundry. But inside the boundaries of these streets is a large and slow-growing bloom of colour and render—buildings housing countless museums and bars and restaurants connected by cobblestone streets plied by countless more tourists. Habana Vieja has been under meticulous renovation for decades, since the Cuban government realised there was tourist money to be made in a country sealed off from time.

There are some areas of Havana you should avoid. Kayo and I pressed the bruised edges of Old Havana. We weren't so much looking for trouble as wanting to liberate ourselves from the safe insulation of the tourist zone so we could see the real Cuba.

We walked the sea-walled Malecón at night, when the Habanistas loll on the seawall and socialise. From Habana Vieja we headed in the direction of Vedado, and as we approached the intermediate suburb of Centro, we were approached by a pimp. "Hey, you want a chica? Black chicas? Mulatto? What you want?" By now we were already used to this, and shook him off with a no and a steady pace.

The prostitution is immediately apparent to two white men roaming the streets. It is rampant. If we are not being solicited with a "¿quisieres la compañía?" by a pretty young thing, it's the more down-to-businesslike "you want the fooky-fook?" by something less pretty. It's illegal, but it's everywhere and widely tolerated, usually by police who have chicas of their own. It's mainly sex tourism. A white man in his sixties with a pretty young Latina on his arm is not such an uncommon sight.

As we strayed deeper into Centro, another pimp didn't appreciate being disregarded and shouted after us: "Va fanculo!" (which is Italian, but universal) and other obscenities. As the streets grew darker in mood, we decided to abandon this line of attack and tried Centro from another angle a dozen blocks south. Beyond the bar made famous by Ernest Hemingway (one of them, anyway), El Floridita, there is a broad boulevard called Prado. Now, Floridita is very touristy, and the street it sits on is well-lit, well-trod and well-kept. There is a buzz of people and police are regular. But on the other side of Prado, things instantly take on a different tone: dim, sparse, and sketchy. People loitered in dark doorways and those wandering the streets seemed to converge on us, like bedbugs migrating towards a sleeping host. It didn't take long before we were asked if we were here for the fooky-fook, as if it was some seasonal Asian festival.

There's little threat of violence, though. People don't want trouble. This they've learned. As has been noted by the outside world, and as was candidly confirmed for us by one local, people do disappear from the streets. Cuba can be a dangerous place, but not for the tourists.

The Havana hustle

All Havana tourists get hustled. It's small stuff, really, but it's relentless. Havana is full of jinateros ("jockeys", literally), who will swindle you with a smile out of a few cucs.

Meandering over the streets of the spread-out Vedado in the waning afternoon, we walked past a group of young, dark-skinned Cuban men playing dominos on a suburban corner. "Hey, Shark!" a soft-spoken one in green called out to Kayo, who was wearing a shark T-shirt. "Hey, Skippy!" another one called to me, pointing to my hat. "You look Australian!"

"I am," I said.

"Heh-hey, kangooroo!" He made the bouncy-bouncy hops towards me with paws curled, baring a soldered bar of gold spanning his top incisors. He looked like Jaws from Roger Moore-era James Bond.

They separated and bamboozled us with polite, friendly and enthusiastic conversation about our home countries. Cubans, starved of quality information, are genuinely eager for news from the outside world. All they get is filtered through the official national media channels which only tells them what the government allows them to know. There is a broad disdain for Cuban newspapers.

"Where are you going now?" said Goldenbite. I told him we are just wandering, having a look at the sea and the Malecón, and that maybe we'll find something to eat. "Heh-hey, I know the best place to eat. Good food, nice views. The price, es muy económico. Is a private restaurant. That building there. Fifteen floors up. Beautiful views!" Maybe, I told him. After the Malecón. I gently extracted myself, but became ensnared with the shark-fishing Green Softie, who was in the middle of telling Kayo about the same restaurant.

"Hey," said Goldenbite to Softie. "You're taking my...." Goldenbite stopped himself, realising he was speaking in English. He rephrased in Spanish, but it was clear what he was saying: you're stealing my mark.

They let us be to scout the Malecón but didn't lose sight of us, and when our thoughts did eventually turn to food the Green Softie was there, besting Goldenbite to guide us to the building with the private restaurant on the fifteenth floor. It was an apartment building, which struck us as odd. We wondered if this was a sign warranting suspicion. Should we enter the lift with this guy? And then we had. He yammered about Canada, about hockey and about dukes. "The dukes, you know? The dukes?"

"The dukes?"

"Sí, the dukes. The hockey team, yes? The mighty dukes?"

On the fifteenth floor, it was all apartments. He led us down the dim and windowless hall, opened a door to one of the flats, and lo! There really was a restaurant inside, with brightly festooned walls, a bar and tables and waiters dressed for dinner, diners and music and a balcony with, indeed, fine views of the sea. Before we were seated by the waiter, Softie said to us, "my friends, have a mojito. Sit down and have a mojito. Is okay you buy me a mojito?" So there it was. This harmless jinatero works tourists for mojitos, and perhaps also a small commission from the private restaurant which no tourist would ever know — and prices are in tourist cucs, not Cuban pesos — is there. The prices were not muy económico, but in fact rather caro: over CUC$60 for two of us. Sydney prices. Down on the street you could find a meal for CUC$10, we later discovered.

This is how La Habana is. Everywhere the people are friendly, but everyone is on the make. Constantly, "Hey, my fren, where are you from? Where are you going? I know the best place!"

Arrival in Cuba

We arrived in Cuba hung over.

For once the Solonaut is not travelling solo. When my good friend Kayo visited me in Australia last year and we took a long-planned road trip up the east coast of New South Wales, we resolved one drunken interlude to travel to Cuba together. Somehow the resolution survived the night and a year later, here we are: Havana.

I met up with Kayo at the airport in Mexico City. We stayed at the Hotel Riazor fifteen minutes away as we had an early flight the next morning. Mexico City is a gargantuan metropolis and the traffic is horrific, so a hotel close to the airport was prudent. The comfortable Riazor was reasonably priced at 1395 Mexican pesos (A$119) for a twin with breakfast, and it looked moderately swish, though I'm not entirely sure as we didn't get past the bar, toasting our reunion with a beer, followed by another, and yet more before the tequila hit the table, we forgot about dinner, and wound up staggering back to our room past midnight. Still, we beat the hangover to the sunrise, heading off the headache at 6.30am, but we didn't even get the breakfast as it isn't yet served at that hour. Sheesh.

When the plane touched down at Havana airport, passengers debarked onto the runway, filtered through the walled, green-washed immigration stalls, collected baggage from the flat carousel, and queued some 50 people deep at the single window of the foreign exchange office. Cuba doesn't allow currency to be taken out of the country so you can't buy any to bring in, so here we are, breathing booze, hung over and hungry in a 30-minute queue so we can get some money to pay a taxi driver to get us into Havana city.

Cuba has a dual currency system — the Cuban peso, called moneda nacional, and the Cuban convertible peso, referred to as cucs ("kooks") after the monetary symbol CUC$. A cuc is worth 24 or 25 pesos nacional, and the value is pegged to the US dollar. But forget about exchanging US dollars. Canadian dollars or Euros are the easiest currencies to exchange. American dollars incur a 10% tax. Tourists prices are in cucs and Cuban nationals pay in moneda nacional, so a 10-minute ferry across the water from Habana Vieja to Casablanca costs a Cuban national 50 centavos, half a Cuban peso, equivalent to about two cents, and a foreigner pays US$2—two cucs.

A taxi driver rescued us from the queue. "This line, phwoar," he dismissed with his hand. "I am taxi driver." He presented the licence clipped to his short sleeve collared beige shirt. "I take you to Habana, 30 cucs. It's okay. You change money at the hotel. I will wait for you." It was about five cucs more than the going price, but we'd probably have agreed to double that and free mojitos all night if he'd asked, as long as he could unburden us of backpacks and get us out of that queue and into a hot shower at the Hotel Capri, which he did. Well, he got us to the hotel. We got ourselves into showers.

The Capri is the old mob hotel in Vedado, built in 1957 by mobster Santo Trafficante at the western end of the famous Malecón seafront drive. Anyone familiar with Mikhael Kalatazov's Soy Cuba would recognise the rooftop pool from the party scene at the start of the film. Fidel's guerillas ended the party in 1959, though, and by 2000 the hotel had joined the innumerable uninhabited ruins of the city. In the last decade it has been carefully restored to its authentic 1950s modernist design with original gleaming white, gold-flecked hard floors, cool kitsch flourishes on the pristine dusty green walls, white and chrome conga-shaped Babaloo stools at the bar and a grand wrought-steel candelabra chandelier in the lobby. The rooms sport black and white photos of Cuba from the era. The hotel reopened in December 2013 with a fine dining restaurant on the top floor and a dusty rose-coloured buffet breakfast restaurant in the basement, and by June 2014 all the floors will be complete, including a third restaurant on level four and duplex rooms spanning two levels.

Settled in, showered, and luggage contents strewn, Kayo and I hit the streets to explore the Vedado. Within minutes we got hustled.

Latin America trek: Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala

On the first day of the first journey of 2014, I am operating on minimal sleep. It's a terrible and regular habit: the night before the flight I obsess over final details and still pending plans, and I never get a solid rest before the voyage on the plane. I managed a mere three hours of kip followed by a couple of catnaps on the 13-hour Sydney to Los Angeles leg. Arriving in the Californian morning, I then powered through the rest of the daylight hours to beat the jetlag—ignore the body's pleas for sleep and push through till dark. Then crash. That will reset the body clock. All of this means about four hours of sleep in 52.

This trip will see a week in Cuba, four in Mexico, and one more in Guatemala. I want to catch Fidel's Cuba before it is lost to the gradual changes the more moderate Castro brother, Raúl, is introducing since being handed the leadership. Mexico is at any time a wealth of treasures, and I have wanted to return since my memories—or rather, one memory—of straddling my father's shoulders at two years old in a Mexican souvenir shop, looking down into the bin at a punched out set of bongos. Somehow Mexico imprinted on me, with latent echoes of mariachis, piñatas and the skeletal iconography of Santa Muerta—Saint Death. And where Mexico's Yucatán peninsula bleeds into Guatemala is the world of the Maya, still here after the end of 2012 and home to colossal, ancient pyramids. I have a mission there: to reach the 2000-year-old Mayan murals of San Bartolo, hidden in the Guatemalan jungle until their chance discovery in 2001.

These things have waited a long time. But they can wait one more night. I'm going to bed.