Cuba Vacation

A very good friend recently traveled from Russia to Cuba for vacation. Attached is the review she sent me upon her return.  I am leaving this in her words so to not loose her personal enthusiasm.  She granted me permission to repost.

Dear Debbie,

My boyfriend is a member of Aeroflot program, he has a credit card which gives him bonus miles for the amount of spent money (1 mile for a spent dollar). he managed to get enough miles for 2 free tickets!i mean he was spending money using his card and accumulated the amount of miles which were enough for 2 tickets. he was saving up those miles for 2 years! That's why we didn't have to pay for the tickets and this is probably the main expensive thing in going to Cuba. the only thing we had to pay for is tax.

Russian citizens don't have to get visa to go to Cuba, so we just got tickets, packed our bags, found some information about hotels and were ready to go))

the flight took us 14 hours! we were happy when we finally arrived in Havana!it was early in morning.

we took a taxi and went to a hotel we were reading about in the Internet, it was a cheap hotel, we spent just one night there because there were no hot water. we left the bags, took a COLD! shower and went sightseeing! The architecture is outstanding but everything looks very old and shabby, some buildings need very good and urgent reconstruction measures, people earn 20-30 $ a month and care about their family first of all and don't have anything left for the place where they live. when you go out and local people notice a tourist, they start talking to you with "where are you from" question, offering cigars or alcohol or smth else hoping to get money from you, first it seems funny but time after time when like 50 people during a couple of hours come to you, it starts getting frustrating!

There are two types of currency in Cuba - local peso and convertible peso for tourists which is called CUC by tourists, one convertible peso equals to 22-28 local peso, that's why local people are interested in dealing with tourists and at the same time it means you need to be very careful. when you get change, you need to recount it, when you want to buy smth, you need to ask about the price first. and it' s so sad that people have to do that because of the situation in the country.

Well, after the first night we started looking for a so called casa particular. this is a house of a local citizen who can rent you a room for stay. Casas are much cheaper than hotels, approximately 25-35 peso (one peso is almost equal to a dollar). people offer you a very clean and cozy room with a bathroom, if you want you can order breakfast or dinner but for extra money. so we spend three more days staying in such a casa and exploring Havana. we tried different food in different places, cocktails, and a dinner in a restaurant cost us most of the time 10-15 peso.

After spending 5 days in Havana we decided to move to a resort town called Varadero where we hoped to enjoy the sun at the beach. Unfortunately, the weather was windy, cloudy and not very suitable for sunbathing. were were able to spend maybe 2 or 3 days at the beach in comparison with 7 days!

Varadero is a small town for tourists, it differs from Havana a lot, it is full of hotels and restaurants and tourism is the main source of living for local people. We booked 2 hotels in Varadero while we were in Havana. Casa particulars are prohibited in Varadero. That's how the government supports tourist business. Most of the hotels are all-inclusive and we didn't want that, we wanted to eat in different places, try different things so booked an all-inclusive hotel just for 3 nights and then moved to bed and breakfast hotel. So we were enjoying the sun when we could, were walking, talking to the locals, watching their street shaw the rest of the days. Cuban people who live in Varadero are different from those who live in the capital as well, they are more sure about the future, they have better life conditions, so they don't bother you a lot while you are out of the hotel.

I liked the trip very much, i was enjoying every minute, Cuba is a very domestic and unique country, people are very friendly and hospitable in general, it was nice to get a chance to explore life of such a colorful country.

i hope this wasn't boring for you Debbie, i will download some more pictures today. if you have any questions, i will be happy to answer all of them))))