Lyn's Log, 7th March 2007
Havana, Part 2

Havana, Cuba.
N23º05', W82º30'
13,347 miles.

We decided to explore further afield. We visited the fort that guards the entrance to Havana harbour, complete with an obsolete ICBM (hopefully disarmed) still pointed at the USA!

Then we went a little out of town to the village of Cojimar where Hemingway had his boat. There were many pictures of him fishing, hanging on the walls of the restaurant where we had lunch. It was Cojimar that inspired his writing of “The Old Man and the Sea”. We also visited Hemingway’s house located to the south of Havana. It was a lovely bungalow in a large, once landscaped, garden, on a hill overlooking Havana and the sea. The rooms were left furnished as they were when he lived there, with bookcases full of sailing and fishing books, and many hunting trophies mounted on the walls. There were windows all round the house for the visitors to look inside and take photos without actually entering the building. His boat was also on display in the garden.

One day, we took a coach trip out to the country where there was a spectacular range of hills, the Sierra de Los Organos. The limestone rocks forming this range spring vertically out of the ground and contain many caves. We visited one of these that had a lake inside, on which we took a boat out of the other side of the hill. The cave was quite dry even though it was raining outside, but much of it looked like the rock had been worn away by water in the past. There were also some stalactites to be seen. The drive through the country was interesting as we saw the tobacco plants and the thatched buildings where the leaves were hung to dry. There were rice paddy fields, fields being ploughed with oxen, chicken and pig farms, cattle, sugar cane fields and citrus trees. At junctions onto the main road were crowds of people waiting for lifts, and many bicycles, horse and ox carts on the roads.

The Hemingway marina was quite a complex, with shops hotels, even a hospital. One day we went to a live rock group performing in one of the small bars at the end of our canal. The group were very good and did some standards like ‘Hotel California’,‘Rock around the Clock’, and 'The Wall'. When they played the last, the young audience shouted out the words "We don't want no education, we don't want no thought control!". (Castro had famously described one of the objectives of Cuban schools as 'ideological formation').

The swimming pool in the marina was not easy to reach. Even though it was quite close to us, the marina is huge and it would have been over a mile to walk, due to the arrangement of canals. We asked the dockmaster if it was possible to get a lift from one of the many electric buggies they use, but no. Perhaps we could use our dinghy? So Andrew rowed first me and then Barry across a fairly narrow stretch of water to the pool, and then we hauled the dinghy out of the water there. The security guard nearby was not at all happy. We couldn’t row there, nor land our dinghy. We decided that since the dockmaster had suggested it, we would ignore his protests, and left the dinghy right by his hut. We enjoyed our swim, drink and sunbathe and a couple of hours later returned to our dinghy, reversing our procedure under the gaze of the scowling guard. Two days later we repeated our trip. It seems that if we didn’t give in, we could get away with it. It was much the same when we wanted to take some photos of the trees in the strong winds. "Oh no, you can’t take photos around here, not even of your yacht", say the guards. Well you can if you just do it.

A few days after Barry left we were ready to leave Cuba but had to wait for better weather. On 7th March we said goodbye to the friends we had made among the other visitors in the marina, paid our bill, saw Customs, Immigration and the Guarda Frontera, and after the customary search including a visit by a sniffer dog (were we smuggling drugs OUT of Cuba?), were handed back our flares and given our despatchio. We were cleared to leave for Key West in the USA.