Hallo from Isla de la Juventud
.. or Treasure Island as we like to call it. It was the inspiration for Treasure Island, and you could see why on the ferry journey on the way over -- lots of little islands with caves and creepers and bays and all sorts of lovely piratey things. There are palm trees, coconuts and deeeeelicious bananas. But, guess what? It´s cloudy right now! I feel swizzed.
Today we went to the beach, taken there by a lovely taximan in an ancient American car. We were rather worried about getting into it, but in fact it was really lovely (if a little tatty) inside, with big comfy leather seats. I think he thought we were a little weird wanting to go to the beach in winter, but we went nonetheless.
We also went to the Presidio Modelo, the awful awful prison where Castro was incarcerated for two years (1953-1955). Lucky old Castro got quite a nice room, but there were these massive big round buildings which were absolutely awful. It´s difficult to describe them, so I´ll have to post photos here when I get a chance. Our taxi driver acted as a guide which was superb because I don´t think we´d have fully appreciated how awful it was without him explaining how it used to work. We got by with his broken English and our smattering of Spanish.
Havana is rather hectic really, with everyone trying to get money from you all the time. I found that pretty exhausting, so was quite relieved to get to this nice peaceful island instead. We´re going back to Havana next week, but I think that by then we´ll have got the hang of Cuba a little more so it´ll be easier. My camera was stolen on Sunday so you poor sabbs have been saved the misery of looking through my 1066 photos. However, the good news is that my mum´s camera will take several hundred photos.
Communism is a funny thing, but maybe I should wait until I´m not using a Cuban internet connection to talk about it.
I´m keeping a very thorough diary which I may turn into a blog when I get back, although it´d probably be so long that no-one would bother reading it.
3 comments:
It's cloudy here too :(
thats sad about your camera, and the lack of picture show. They could have seen my 2,500 from France at the same time?
Que te pases bomba!!!
I would just like to point out that Cuba is not acutally a communist country as many people believe but it is a socialist country! They're not a million miles away from each other but the Cubans can get a bit touchy if you confuse the two! :0)
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