Notes from Cuba: Day One of the visit

Editor’s note: Morning News publisher Mark Laskowski recently visited Cuba as part of a study group organized by the South Carolina Press Association. During his visit, he met with government officials, newspaper editors and many Cubans on the streets and in the squares of Havana. This is the first of several columns over the next few Sundays about his experience.

We arrived at Havana’s Jose Marti Airport around 2:30 p.m., having departed from Miami on a chartered flight just over an hour before. We deplaned at a small terminal removed from the large national and international terminal that serves the world’s visitors.

There were many Cubans on the plane who were returning from the U.S. to visit family. The huge crowds waiting for them outside the small terminal were pressed up against a chain link fence, waiting for loved ones to appear.

Our group of 13 boarded a Havanatur tour bus, along with our guide, Nelson Ramos, and our driver, Pepe, for the 20-minute ride along open, tree-lined boulevards to the Hotel Nacional de Cuba.

There was little traffic on this Sunday afternoon, although the Cuban love affair with autos, particularly classics — mostly Chevrolets, Buicks and Plymouths from the ’40s and ’50s — is obvious on every street. The beauty of the classics, according to Cubans, is that they have very simple engines and can be fixed anywhere with a little wire and an inner tube.

It appeared that three in 10 passenger vehicles are classics, with the remainder a mixture of Mercedes Benz, Peugeot, Jaguar and others. The most prevalent car is the Russian-made Lada. For those like our tour guide Nelson who drive a Lada, the joke is “I don’t drive a car, I drive a Lada.”

Another local joke is that if car pushing were an Olympic sport, Cuba would win the gold medal easily. It seems you can’t pass a neighborhood or street on which you don’t see several people pushing a vehicle down the road.

On our drive to the hotel, we passed many stately homes that once must have been beautiful. But like much of the rest of Havana, the homes are weather-worn and run down, in desperate need of paint, repair and, in many cases, a major restoration.

Our hotel, the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, was built in 1930 and was designed by the same architect who designed The Breakers in Palm Beach. The Hotel Nacional sits on a bluff at the western end of the San Lazaro cove, overlooking the Malecon Sea Wall in Central Havana. The sea wall was started between 1910 and 1920 and was finished in 1965.

In the pre-Revolution days of the ’40s and ’50s, the hotel was host to many notables, including Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, Johnny Weissmuller, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Marlon Brando, Ava Gardner and Ernest Hemingway. Heads of state who stayed at the Hotel Nacional included Winston Churchill and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. American gangsters Santos Traficante, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello also frequented the hotel.

I spent Sunday afternoon and early evening strolling along the Malecon, visiting with small groups of Cuban youth who lined nearly every inch of the miles-long wall. The young people were very friendly and wanted to know where I was from and whether U.S. policy would change with the upcoming presidential election.

They also were very curious, perhaps more so than many of our citizens, about whom I thought would win the election. I wanted to know if they thought anything would change with the transition of power from Fidel to Raul Castro.

None of us had the answers, although we agreed that U.S. policy change would be slow in coming. Many of them said Raul is more pragmatic than Fidel, but change in Cuba would also be slow.

That evening we dined at the Gringo Viejo (Old Gringo) paladar, one of hundreds of small two-room restaurants located in private homes throughout the city. In it was a poster from the movie of the same name starring Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda and Jimmy Smits. My pork, frijoles (beans) and rice dinner was exceptionally good, as was the Bucanero, one of two national beers.

We paid for our dinners with CUCs — convertible Cuban currency. While Cubans are paid in Cuban pesos and earn wages averaging $10 to $30 U.S. monthly, we were required to convert our U.S. dollars into euros or Canadian dollars, then into CUCs.

Our dollar is worth about 90 cents for each CUC, but the Cuban government applies a 10 percent exchange fee on U.S. currency, reducing the value to 80 cents.

We converted first to euros or Canadian dollars because both are stronger than the U.S. dollar and are not subject to the 10 percent exchange fee. We could not use traveler’s checks or credit cards in Cuba either.

Next Sunday: Touring Old Havana and Hemingway’s Haunts.