The evils of the internet

An hour of internet (and mojitos), Cienfuegos

Common wisdom (well, according to Sam, anyway) has the youth of today suffering from two evils – excess time in front of an internet-enabled screen, and lack of concentration or ability to follow-through on longer-term projects. I have the solution to both: Cuba.

Before we left New Zealand, we didn’t know what to expect in terms of internet access here. We knew it wouldn’t be 24/7 Wi-Fi from home, but had heard some sort of access was possible.

As it turns out, internet is possible, and (as we thought) - not at home. You can’t buy a router, sign up with a provider, and spend the nights binge-watching Netflix or YouTube. Instead internet is a communal thing - available via a few Wi-Fi-enabled public spaces in the bigger towns and cities. You sit on a bench in a public square. I would bet that keeps teenage boys on the straight and narrow with their viewing.

The solution to the second evil? Just getting access to that desirable Wi-Fi involves a wonderful, long-winded complicated, bureaucratic… Cuban... sort of process. Follow-through extraordinaire. This is our experience:

Step one: Finding out where to buy an internet card. When you arrive in a city, you enquire as to the location of the nearest Etacsa office. That’s the government telecommunications and postal company and (we think) the only purveyor of all things internet. Each city seems to have at least one, but they are hidden, or under refurbishment.

Step two: Buying said internet card. You make sure it’s not too early, too late, lunchtime, or a month with an “a” in it, and head down to the Etacsa office with your passport and some convertible (tourist) pesos. You queue in the street for the allotted time (can be a good hour in Havana, though less elsewhere), until a man in a blue shirt lets you into the air conditioned hallows.

The queue outside the Etacsa office in Havana

Then you join a seated queue in the large, empty office for a shorter period, and finally get ushered to stand before a woman in a kiosk with a screen in front of her and one of those transactional holes at the bottom (like you might find at a train station, or in a bank). It feels more like immigration than a transaction. You worry about smiling, being flippant. Could you get refused internet for saying the wrong thing? So you stand correctly and the woman notes all your details on a computer. It seems to take ages, but maybe it’s only 5-10 minutes. Once you are in the system, she gives you the option of purchasing a card with either 1 hour or 5 hours-worth of internet access. Depending on the day, the office, the city, and the lunar cycle, both 1 and 5 hour cards may be available, just one of them may be in stock, or none at all. So far we’ve only found 5-hour cards once. The cost is $1.50 per hour, but you can only buy three cards per passport per visit. And while $1.50 isn’t much for a tourist, it’s heaps for most locals.

You wouldn’t want it to be too easy.

Step three: Using said internet card. Scratchy cards in hand, you go back into the street and enquire as to where the nearest square is with Wi-Fi access. Or you wander the streets until you find an area where bunches of young people sit hunched on benches over phones. Or older people crowd under a tree on an unreliable, pixelated video chat with Aunty Gladys in Miami. You find a bench, unwrap your internet card, scratch off the bar code, put in the username and password, and (sometimes) voila! You get some internet. (If not, of course, you do what any 50-year-old does anywhere in the world, you find a teenage boy and get help.)

Internet, Parque Jose Marti, Cienfuegos

Weirdly, in Havana we found tourists often couldn’t get access from the plazas, but instead had to perch in the lobby of a big hotel to get their card to work. In relaxed provincial Cienfuegos, however, visitors and locals alike vie for the coveted seats in the shade in a Wi-Fi enabled square. Best of all, of course, is a square with both Wi-Fi availability, and a café serving mojitos. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

The quality? It’s not ultra-fast broadband, but it’s not too bad for emails, Facebook, sending photos to one’s nearest and dearest etc. Not great for voice calling (WhatsApp etc), where it tends to cut out a lot.

Do we miss ubiquitous, all-consuming internet? Probably, though less as time goes on. Sam definitely does, but even he’s getting used to a once-a-day, or once-every-couple-of-days fix, with a limonade. Certainly we play far more card games than we do at home – or than we did in Chile and Peru, where we spent evenings hunched over our devices. Must be good for us.

I can dive, I can dive!

One of the drawcards of Cuba is the diving. Spectacular Caribbean reefs, tropical fish, heaps of diving sites all around the island, and (outside the tourist resorts and off-season, as we are now) almost no other divers. So one of our plans for living in Cienfuegos was to get our diving tickets. As it turns out, you can’t dive in Cuba before you are 15, which ruled out Sam, and Geoff had an ear problem and had to back out after the first day. But I got to carry on, and yesterday passed my final exam. Yay!! It’s a great feeling - like when you pass your driving test. You know that lots and lots of people have done it before you, so you have no reason to be smug, but that still it doesn’t take away from the jubilant satisfaction when you get your bit of paper!

Learning in situ at a diving centre with a reef 20 metres off the coast has to be the gold standard of dive lessons. On one of our dives we were joined by a couple who had recently spent three months in a diving class based from a swimming pool in Canada. Which sounded a bit dull in comparison. My book lessons were done sitting looking out over the sea, and the initial get-to-know-the-equipment shallow water stuff was done in a deliciously warm, sandy Caribbean cove.

And then the four dives that make up the course were all over the reef. We’d potter around looking at coral and brightly coloured fish and wrecked ships for a while (and for anyone who hasn’t done it, seeing a reef in real life is just as amazing as what you see on TV – you can’t believe how beautiful it is!). Then we’d settle on the sandy bottom to do the practical exercises – taking your mask off underwater, finding your breathing device when it falls out, undoing your weight belt etc. It’s a bit freaky at first but there’s the satisfaction of it getting noticeably easier fairly quickly – like driving, I suppose.

And then back we’d wend our way back through the coral to the boat. It felt like taking your driving lessons not among the roundabouts of industrial Berkshire (my driving stomping ground), but in the Grand Canyon, on a day when you had it all to yourself.

Totally wonderful.

A most idyllic beach

I’m British, so I can’t help it. I’ll talk about the weather. Cuba is hot. Cold showers, noisy fans, even noisier, dripping air conditioners sort of hot. Which is a bit of a shock after Cusco, which was wear-all-your-clothes-even-in-bed cold. And Cuba is going to get hotter - which is a bit of a worry, but I’m hoping we will get used to it. Maybe.

What do you do at the weekend when it’s hot? You go to the beach. So on Friday, when Geoff’s debit card got swallowed up by a malfunctioning bank machine and he was told he had to wait until Monday before the man employed to collect up cards swallowed up by ATMs got them back to head office, we decided to check out a 9km beach close to Havana.

The Lonely Planet guidebook description is glowing: “In Cuba you are never far from an idyllic beach. Havana’s own pine-fringed Riviera, Playas del Este, begins just 18 kilometres to the east of the capital.” Perfect.

Elsewhere, the book describes the beach as “suitably sublime”. It told us that there are six separate settlements on the stretch of beach. Some of the towns closest to Havana were becoming a bit resort-like, it said, but the last beach, Guanabo, was “the rustic Cuban end of the strip”.

Sold. We spent an hour on a packed bus with a cheery Havana beach day-tripping crowd, and got off at the end of the line.

Now the “pine-fringed” (see description above) could have been a typo. Pine… palm, anyone could make that mistake. (Though surely a proof-reader who’s ever leafed through a Caribbean island tourism brochure might have had a teeny bit of a suspicion?) But had the writer really been to Guanabo and found it “rustic”? What we found were: some seriously dilapidated beach front buildings; areas where old concrete reinforcing wire sticks up through the sand; rocks, rubble and, on the narrow strip of white sand, lots of people and lots and lots of rubbish. Bottles, cans, plastic bags, ice cream cartons, cardboard boxes, dirty nappies, everything left by the visitors for whom a weekend at the beach seems to mean drinking huge quantities of beer and soft drinks, eating pizza and leaving everything lying on the sand.

Actually we had a nice time. Despite Sam and Geoff coming home looking as if they have contracted the pox - Sam in particular is covered in red spots, but he's still alive and they don't itch, so we are hoping he'll survive... The sea really is clear, a wonderful blue colour and a refreshing temperature. And back along the beach there is a bit more sand, fewer rocks and slightly less rubbish and rebar. Guanabo had ice creams and some nice restaurants and cafés. And no one hassled us about buying anything. (In fact I suspect we were some of the only foreigners in town – certainly we didn’t hear English spoken all weekend.) We rented a couple of rooms and ended up with a whole house, which was good after staying in hostels for a month. And it was Mothers’ Day weekend and there were families having a good time with mum – and beer.

It just wasn’t very rustic.

Postscript: The man employed to collect up bank cards swallowed by Havana’s ATMs did take Geoff’s back to HQ and it was waiting there when we got back on Monday. There wouldn’t be that many countries where you could be (relatively) sure that would be the case. Go Cuba!

Soaking up the Havana vibe

7.30 on a Saturday morning is a good time to stand on the roof of our hostel and watch people waking up for the day. It’s still cool, and pretty quiet for a city of two million peoples. There’s an old woman in a rocking chair on the balcony opposite, and a middle aged woman with her curlers under a hairnet drinking a cup of coffee and cuddling a dog. On another first-floor balcony, a woman hails a passer-by in a vest and lets down a basket with some pesos in on the end of a rope. There is some discussion about the amount of money, she hauls up the basket, adds more notes, and the man heads off to buy something for her. Bread perhaps – there are lots of bakeries around, selling the sort of white rolls I remember from holidays in Wales as a kid, joined together in blocks. Yummy fresh with butter and jam. But I digress.

The basket on a string method of shopping is quite common. Ceilings are high in these old houses and stairs to the first floor flats are steep, so people seem to avoid going up and down if they can. Sellers come through the streets, on foot or in a rickety bike or motorbike cart, and call out their wares. It might be eggs or onions, mangoes maybe or bread. It can work the other way too. One afternoon we saw a school kid summon an ice block/ice lolly from a third floor window – delivered and paid for by basket.

Back to my Saturday morning people-watching. A guy goes past on a bici-taxi – a bicycle with seats behind, and a very common (and cheap, particularly for locals) means of transport here. Further up the street a man has the bonnet of his car up and tinkers for a while before it starts. Tinkering with your car is a major preoccupation in a country where American model cars date from the 1950s and Russian ones from the 1960s-1980s. With a bit more money in the economy these days and the lifting of international blockades, there are a few newer cars around now, but not many. And the roads are blissfully clear.

It’s Saturday, so kids aren’t going to school, but I’ll add a comment about the school uniforms here, as it’s slightly odd. High school aged girls wear very short mustard-coloured skirts, with a white shirt, perfect for the heat, though the very shortness seems surprising in a mandated uniform. We wouldn’t have got away with it with deputy head Miss Cuppleditch in my school days. Cuban high school boys, on the other hand, wear long trousers (of the same colour), which must be hot, if unrevealing of any tempting knees.

Off to school