Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The Guatemalan jungle: temples, drugs and vampires

My Guatemalan driver spoke English, but his accent was really thick.

"Uh, desculpeme," I answered. "I'm sorry... No entiendo. I didn't understand what you said."

"I jess say to you dees trock ees berry strong!"

He had picked me up at 6am and was driving me in a beaten-up Toyota an hour-and-a-half into what was once forest. The dense Petén jungle of northern Guatemala conceals an area in the Mayan world, which extends from Honduras to southern Mexico, where the ruins are most concentrated. Archaeologists are constantly uncovering new sites.

The smell of smoke followed us as we passed frequent smouldering plots of blackened land. The jungle is also being cleared, in an era of global warming, at one of the fastest rates in the world by illegal settlers who slash and burn the forest to clear it for cattle ranches and palm oil farms. Sometimes ranchers turn looters when, in doing so, they discover sites before the archaeologists.

We pass a military checkpoint, a common sight in these parts. The region has a reputation of being lawless and has become the main battleground of the drug cartels—Los Zetas, the Gulf cartel, the Sinaloa Federation and the Mendoza clan—in a turf war. For several years the fearsome and violent Zetas, special forces soldiers who deserted the Mexican army to act as enforcers of Northern Mexico's Gulf cartel before breaking away to form a cartel of their own, has been trafficking with impunity in these remote jungles, perfect for landing plane loads of cocaine on cleared airstrips. Establishing themselves in the sparsely populated Petén in 2007 barely a decade after the 36-year-long Guatemalan civil war ended, they presented a challenge to the fledgling democracy. In 2010, equipped with assault rifles, grenade launchers and armoured vehicles, Los Zetas encountered a Guatemalan army patrol and battled it to a stalemate. They provoked a state of martial law in 2011 when, near the town of La Libertad—on my route in the following days—they tied up and decapitated over two dozen farm workers who had no connection to the drug trade and scrawled a "you're next" message to the ranch owner on a wall in blood from a severed leg. He was reportedly helping the Gulf cartel. This is the real Breaking Bad down here.

Base camps for active archaeology sites have guards, and the drug gangs see that kind of permanent presence as a threat in detecting their activities. The temple site to which I was heading, El Zotz, is however inactive, though recent excavation of a hill of jungle detritus revealed elaborate stucco masks on the walls of a pyramid, dubbed the Temple of the Night Sun. Zotz means bat in the local language; the site is so called due to the clouds of bats that fill the sky at dusk from caves in the nearby limestone cliff. Vampire bats.

We entered a small village and my driver dropped me at a wooden shack, seemingly a family home with happy children, welcoming adults, and chickens and a dog roaming the dirt floor. It is the village comedor, or restaurant.

"You have brake-fast hair. I peek you up hair in two dace."

He said my guide to El Zotz would be along shortly, and then he was gone. A warm, smiling lady with a leathery face and a long skirt presented me with a plate of scrambled eggs and tomato, stewed black beans, salty cheese and tortillas, and poured me some sweet coffee, a typical breakfast here. As I tucked in I mused over my half relief, though the driver was a nice guy, that perhaps the new guide would speak clearer English. He arrived soon enough and addressed me with a  gentle, "Meester."

"Buenas dias," I said. I would be spending two days on a trek with him to learn about the jungle and this ancient Mayan site. "Me llamo Wayne. ¿Habla inglés?"

He shook his head. "Español," he said.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Buses: Guatemala

Looking like a giant jungle tree-house with its undulating stone garden courtyard, fully grown trees and steep, ladder-like steps leading to rooms, the Hostel Los Amigos in Flores, Guatemala, is one of the best hostels I've ever stayed in (joining other frontrunners Travellers House in Lisbon, Portugal, and the former HI hostel on Lake Alta in Whistler, Canada, where I stayed in 1994 and which sadly ceased 40 years of operation in 2003). Los Amigos has a restaurant with great food, a bar, a night lounge, and its own travel agency providing minibus connections to the Tikal temple complex, the big drawcard in this part of Guatemala.

A young Irish girl I befriended at the hostel, also travelling solo but right around Central America for nine months (making the Solonaut look like a lightweight), caught the minibus with me to Tikal for the sunset tour. She planned to stay the night, as did I to catch the pyramids at both sunset and sunrise (though I subsequently learned that there is no sunrise in a jungle that has 365 days of morning mist) and, both of us being backpackers, we chose the cheapest accommodation available: hammocks with mosquito nets in the campground for 85 quetzales (A$12).

I had never attempted more than an afternoon doze in a hammock. This one was made of denim and the mosquito net was actually an opaque cotton cloth forming a ceiling and four walls that draped to the concrete slab beneath my suspended arse, upon which I had visions of plummeting flat on my back mid-REM when the hammock rope sprang unwound at 3am. I was worried the full cotton enclosure might be stuffy in the steamy jungle, but on the contrary I was cold in the early hours and had to gather up the denim sides to wrap myself. All night I could hear mobile phone pings and beeps and twirrups until I realised these were the sounds of jungle nightlife. Nokia has been here with a microphone. Howler monkeys, on the other hand, sound decidedly unlike mobile phones and more like a hoarse lion, or a giant hound with whooping cough. Or rather, twenty giant hounds, as they howl in troops. If your mobile phone made a sound like that you'd set off a panicked stampede of fellow commuters. And I'm not sure exactly when howler monkeys sleep, as they make their calls to each other day and night. All in, I still actually managed six hours of sleep, though the knees were a bit sore from being stretched straight.

Los Amigos forgot they had sent us up there by the next day. The tour companies maximise profits, understandably, by sending minibuses up full, several per day. Unfortunately, they failed to send up two empty seats for our scheduled return on the final shuttle at half-noon. We found two others in the same boat, so it sounds like a common occurrence. The shuttle drivers told us we could catch the colectivo, the public service known to backpackers as a chicken bus, back into town.

The colectivo is also a minibus, seating twelve comfortably. A "conductor" rides with the passengers, manning the sliding door, collecting fares and securing any baggage on the roof via a side-mounted ladder. We left Tikal with ten people, and after a couple of roadside pick-ups soon fit twelve. We made another stop a bit further on and picked up one more. Then two more. The conductor made room by opening the side door and standing in the void, hanging on like it was a catamaran. We stopped again and let in another two. The conductor shifted to the ladder and rode outside. Then we let in a family of five. The conductor returned to the open slide door, this time to hold everyone in from falling out. After several more stops I counted thirty-three men, women and children wedged from rear window to windscreen, kids on laps and bodies pressed together standing and sitting. It was so ridiculous we all laughed about it. Guatemalans are pretty relaxed people. The conductor told us their record is forty, with people on the roof.

I complained to Los Amigos and made sure I was reimbursed for the cost of the colectivo—about $4. Hardly seems just.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Buses: Mexico & Belize

The long-distance buses in Mexico (we call them coaches in Australia) spoil me. First class buses have comfortable reclining seats and curtained windows to shade you from the Mexican sun. They play movies (though worth disregarding) and some include food (usually a simple sandwich and drink). But what I love is that they are cheap. I caught a 5-hour first class bus the other day for 120 pesos—about A$10.

Security leaving Mexico City from Autobus Terminal Norte is like catching a flight. My backpack was scanned, my hand luggage searched, I passed through a metal detector and I had two physical pat-downs. I finally took my seat and saw through the windscreen a security officer with a digital camera taking a video of the front of the bus. She then climbed aboard and walked down the aisle, recording each passenger's face! It was strange having a camera thrust at you. Do I smile? Wouldn't that look idiotic, as if I thought I was on this woman's vacation? Thankfully, my disorientation imparted a mere dazed look, like a two-year-old on Santa's knee. Christ, I thought. I hope a bomb doesn't go off and I get my stupid mug splashed on television screens around the world. "D'you know an Australian died in that blast in Mexico?" "Of course. He was the one with that cock-eyed stare." Maybe I should ask her to take it again. How do I explain that in Spanish? To everyone else this all seemed rather routine, which I guess it was.

There are no such precautions catching a second class bus through Belize. No such comforts, either. After two luxuriantly comfy Mexican coaches from Guanajuato to Mexico City and a short flight to Chetumal in the south, I took (following a five-hour sleep in a hostel) an eight-hour trip from the Mexico-Belize border to the Belize-Guatemala border in a half-clapped-out minibus with no air-conditioning and seats designed for people with disproportionately short femurs.

Belize is actually an inviting little country—indeed, I was literally invited to stay by the friendly immigration officer when I told her I was only passing through—and I was disappointed not to have time to stop. It has a Caribbean feel (being on the Caribbean and all) with dread-locked and corn-braided people of African descent, and is a member of the British Commonwealth. It is the only Central American country to have English as its national language. It is also a small-scale oil producer. Though I wouldn't describe the country as wealthy, there is infrastructure and real estate, municipal parks and schools, and towns with thriving businesses of internet cafes and DVD shops and bespoke furniture. People drive Toyotas and Mazdas and Kias, and two-storey painted mansions are not unusual among the wooden shanties.

The only thing I didn't like about Belize was the money changers at the Guatemalan border. Belize charges an exit tax of 30 Belize dollars, and having spent barely fifteen minutes physically on the soil of the country I naturally hadn't a single Belize cent. "We don't accept Mexican pesos," I was told by the clerk. "You'll have to see the money changers outside." The roaming men with belts full of various currencies are licensed money changers and present their laminated plastic in a kind of assurance that you won't get ripped off, and then proceed to rip you off. In an exchange of Mexican pesos and Guatemalan quetzales worth A$70, the guy took me for A$20. I wasn't expecting to have to buy Belize dollars so didn't know the exchange rate until I later checked.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Mexico City

My temporary travelling companion, Kayo, has a compañero in Mexico City who put us up for a week following Cuba. It's a good thing to have a host in Mexico City. It is a megalopolis, monstrous and perplexing, with disconcerting traffic skirmishes over ribbons of highway that fray like sprung cable for miles, some propped fifty metres in the air on concrete stilts to clear the other roads below. Incongruous lilac jacarandas sprout amongst it all.

We caught the metro to Zócalo in the historic centre. At every stop hawkers got on and trawled the passengers, shouting refrains like paperboys to sell sweets and pens, or blasting music from eighties-era ghetto blasters to sell bootlegged CDs. They worked their way up the ageing turquoise carriages that shunted and jerked the passengers to the next group of hawkers waiting to board at the next stop.

Everyone has something to sell in Mexico. I have never met a people more entrepreneurial, more enterprising and more determined to trade than the Mexicans. And this is a national characteristic, not one of a specific culture; the poor indigenous of the South are as much tenacious vendors as the Hispanics of the north. There is a vitality in the streets. At a party in Mexico City, I spoke to a girl who commented to me: "I can't understand these Greeks and Spaniards I see on TV who complain that their economy has left them jobless. Why don't they get out and sell something?" This is the Mexican mentality: 'Yes, things are bad. It's the same for everyone! So do something about it.' I can not help but admire them.

The biggest flag I have ever seen wafts over the Zócalo, the Plaza del Constitución in the heart of the Centro Histórico, an expansive public square that fits the huge Catedral Metropolitana with enough space spare to taxi half a dozen jumbo jets. On one side of the Zócalo, the tidy streets are lined with upscale shops full of branded merchandise and chains like Starbucks. On the other side, half a kilometre away, the bustling streets are filled with street sellers hawking counterfeit brands, street food and tacos cooked over mobile stoves, and anything and everything else. Organ grinders in beige uniforms and captains' hats looking like unemployed bus drivers crank hurdy-gurdies on street corners while their unoccupied brethren ask cap-in-hand for donations to keep them cranking.

Then there are the intimidating federales. Black body armour cloaks their dark blue police uniforms, their faces masked beneath helmets. Pick-up trucks patrolled the streets with three standing in the bucket brandishing automatic rifles. These guys are not here to help. They are no-bullshit, dangerous, hard-arse enforcers.

Suddenly there was a ruckus on the street. A language of sharp whistles pierced the street din and vendors scrambled, grabbing the four corners of their groundsheets and bundling up their knock-off goods in one swift, practised motion. One man leapt into the intersection with a hand up to hold the cars like a traffic cop while watching over his shoulder a neat row of sellers sprint around the corner in versed manoeuvres. A few minutes later, two federales on foot patrolled the street. This must be the daily cat-and-mouse of life in downtown Mexico City.

Drunken tourists

The idea of Cuba was spawned on an Australian road trip, which Kayo and I dubbed the World Problems Summit after debating all night over beers and rum on a verandah of rotten wood planking at a broken pub in the New South Wales mining town of Singleton.

This time I sat with Kayo in plastic chairs in a roadside bar by the Bay of Havana, shaded from the sun by a big blue marquee, drinking mojitos and Cuba libres for CUC$2 apiece (US$2). Classic cars from the fifties, Fords, Buicks and Chevrolets, parked on the Malecón and the drivers touted city tours—CUC$40 for an hour and a half.

"Come on. We're doing that," said Kayo.

I talked the driver down to CUC$25 and we hopped into a maroon 1953 Chevy convertible.
These old classics were all converted to diesel back when it was a cheaper fuel than gasoline, and today Havana stinks heavily of diesel fumes. The driver lurched down the famous Malecón seaside strip past the 1950s-era hotels of Vedado, like the mint green cubicle edifice of the Riviera standing unmolested by the kind of crowded, towering beachside development you see in Miami or Australia's Gold Coast.

The driver passed us his phone. On the display was a picture of his car with him standing next to Johnny Depp. We both remarked, "hey, Johnny Depp!" which was about the only mutually intelligible words spoken between us. Depp portrayed Hunter S. Thompson, one of my favourite authors, in the film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson's drug-fuelled road trip with his Mexican attorney, Dr Gonzo, where they ruminate on the collapse of the hippie counterculture.

On the other side of Vedado is the manicured suburb of Miramar, housing dignitaries and their embassies, beyond which is verdant parkland of ivy-draped fig trees flanking the Rio Almendares. And a piña colada stand. So we stopped.

And in this fashion we went on, following the Chevy tour with the Hemingway circuit: El Floridita, known as the "cradle of the daiquiri," and La Bodeguita del Medio, famous for its mojitos. Given that I'd had better mojitos in Sydney than Havana so far (Sydney has its own "half a tiny wine cellar," though the name was changed, perhaps deemed too difficult to pronounce for Saturday night consumer bogans, to "The Cuban Place"), it was unfortunate that we only tried a few cervezas at the tiny, packed Bodeguita. We spent more time at the Hotel Ambos Mondos, Hemingway's lodging for seven years, where the piña coladas on the rooftop bar are criminally refreshing and joyously addictive. Several times we asked for double the rum, and finally the waiter came over with a bottle of white Havana Club and just poured it directly into our half-empty glasses. It fast became our favourite place to drink.

The Hotel Capri was too expensive to stay for more than a night, and we had since moved into a casa particular, a private home, where we had to ourselves a room and a balcony overlooking the time-worn and crumbling buildings on the edges of Old Havana. It was to this balcony we retired after a day of steady drinking, picking up a litre bottle of Havana Club for $12 on the way, to sit and deliberate on the problematic state of the world.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Trouble in Havana

Havana is frozen in the fifties, but it has not been spared time's ravages. Walking the derelict streets surrounding Habana Vieja—Old Havana—is startling. It seems as if an earthquake exacted a tithe on the buildings, and those left standing were scoured back to bare concrete by a typhoon then repopulated and draped with laundry. But inside the boundaries of these streets is a large and slow-growing bloom of colour and render—buildings housing countless museums and bars and restaurants connected by cobblestone streets plied by countless more tourists. Habana Vieja has been under meticulous renovation for decades, since the Cuban government realised there was tourist money to be made in a country sealed off from time.

There are some areas of Havana you should avoid. Kayo and I pressed the bruised edges of Old Havana. We weren't so much looking for trouble as wanting to liberate ourselves from the safe insulation of the tourist zone so we could see the real Cuba.

We walked the sea-walled Malecón at night, when the Habanistas loll on the seawall and socialise. From Habana Vieja we headed in the direction of Vedado, and as we approached the intermediate suburb of Centro, we were approached by a pimp. "Hey, you want a chica? Black chicas? Mulatto? What you want?" By now we were already used to this, and shook him off with a no and a steady pace.

The prostitution is immediately apparent to two white men roaming the streets. It is rampant. If we are not being solicited with a "¿quisieres la compañía?" by a pretty young thing, it's the more down-to-businesslike "you want the fooky-fook?" by something less pretty. It's illegal, but it's everywhere and widely tolerated, usually by police who have chicas of their own. It's mainly sex tourism. A white man in his sixties with a pretty young Latina on his arm is not such an uncommon sight.

As we strayed deeper into Centro, another pimp didn't appreciate being disregarded and shouted after us: "Va fanculo!" (which is Italian, but universal) and other obscenities. As the streets grew darker in mood, we decided to abandon this line of attack and tried Centro from another angle a dozen blocks south. Beyond the bar made famous by Ernest Hemingway (one of them, anyway), El Floridita, there is a broad boulevard called Prado. Now, Floridita is very touristy, and the street it sits on is well-lit, well-trod and well-kept. There is a buzz of people and police are regular. But on the other side of Prado, things instantly take on a different tone: dim, sparse, and sketchy. People loitered in dark doorways and those wandering the streets seemed to converge on us, like bedbugs migrating towards a sleeping host. It didn't take long before we were asked if we were here for the fooky-fook, as if it was some seasonal Asian festival.

There's little threat of violence, though. People don't want trouble. This they've learned. As has been noted by the outside world, and as was candidly confirmed for us by one local, people do disappear from the streets. Cuba can be a dangerous place, but not for the tourists.

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

The heavy heart of the traveller

In Mexico, I catch an intercity bus to León from Tula en route to Guanajuato. It's not a direct connection, and we stop several times to pick up more passengers. At one stop, I watch through the window as two stragglers dawdle—a man and a woman. The man is wearing a day-pack and pulling a trolley-bag, which he loads under the bus. It becomes apparent why they are delaying boarding: it is a goodbye. They touch each other longingly and smile and hold each other in long hugs. The woman, dressed simply in a pink fleece top and Lycra pants, seems at one point to gently lecture the man, tapping his chest with splayed fingers as he looks at his feet and fidgets. Perhaps she is telling him to behave while he is away. She smiles and hugs him again; he returns her embrace, looking sombre. It is touching. I feel sad for her. Then the driver approaches the bus and it is time to go. She appears to wipe a tear from his face with her thumb, they kiss, and then... oh! It is she who is travelling! She boards the bus and he remains slumped against a post with his hands in his pockets as she takes her seat and the bus pulls away.

Madame de Staël said: "Travelling is one of the saddest pleasures of life." These are the moments of which travel is made.

Saturday, April 05, 2014

The Havana hustle

All Havana tourists get hustled. It's small stuff, really, but it's relentless. Havana is full of jinateros ("jockeys", literally), who will swindle you with a smile out of a few cucs.

Meandering over the streets of the spread-out Vedado in the waning afternoon, we walked past a group of young, dark-skinned Cuban men playing dominos on a suburban corner. "Hey, Shark!" a soft-spoken one in green called out to Kayo, who was wearing a shark T-shirt. "Hey, Skippy!" another one called to me, pointing to my hat. "You look Australian!"

"I am," I said.

"Heh-hey, kangooroo!" He made the bouncy-bouncy hops towards me with paws curled, baring a soldered bar of gold spanning his top incisors. He looked like Jaws from Roger Moore-era James Bond.

They separated and bamboozled us with polite, friendly and enthusiastic conversation about our home countries. Cubans, starved of quality information, are genuinely eager for news from the outside world. All they get is filtered through the official national media channels which only tells them what the government allows them to know. There is a broad disdain for Cuban newspapers.

"Where are you going now?" said Goldenbite. I told him we are just wandering, having a look at the sea and the Malecón, and that maybe we'll find something to eat. "Heh-hey, I know the best place to eat. Good food, nice views. The price, es muy económico. Is a private restaurant. That building there. Fifteen floors up. Beautiful views!" Maybe, I told him. After the Malecón. I gently extracted myself, but became ensnared with the shark-fishing Green Softie, who was in the middle of telling Kayo about the same restaurant.

"Hey," said Goldenbite to Softie. "You're taking my...." Goldenbite stopped himself, realising he was speaking in English. He rephrased in Spanish, but it was clear what he was saying: you're stealing my mark.

They let us be to scout the Malecón but didn't lose sight of us, and when our thoughts did eventually turn to food the Green Softie was there, besting Goldenbite to guide us to the building with the private restaurant on the fifteenth floor. It was an apartment building, which struck us as odd. We wondered if this was a sign warranting suspicion. Should we enter the lift with this guy? And then we had. He yammered about Canada, about hockey and about dukes. "The dukes, you know? The dukes?"

"The dukes?"

", the dukes. The hockey team, yes? The mighty dukes?"

On the fifteenth floor, it was all apartments. He led us down the dim and windowless hall, opened a door to one of the flats, and lo! There really was a restaurant inside, with brightly festooned walls, a bar and tables and waiters dressed for dinner, diners and music and a balcony with, indeed, fine views of the sea. Before we were seated by the waiter, Softie said to us, "my friends, have a mojito. Sit down and have a mojito. Is okay you buy me a mojito?" So there it was. This harmless jinatero works tourists for mojitos, and perhaps also a small commission from the private restaurant which no tourist would ever know — and prices are in tourist cucs, not Cuban pesos — is there. The prices were not muy económico, but in fact rather caro: over CUC$60 for two of us. Sydney prices. Down on the street you could find a meal for CUC$10, we later discovered.

This is how La Habana is. Everywhere the people are friendly, but everyone is on the make. Constantly, "Hey, my fren, where are you from? Where are you going? I know the best place!"

Friday, April 04, 2014

Arrival in Cuba

We arrived in Cuba hung over.

For once the Solonaut is not travelling solo. When my good friend Kayo visited me in Australia last year and we took a long-planned road trip up the east coast of New South Wales, we resolved one drunken interlude to travel to Cuba together. Somehow the resolution survived the night and a year later, here we are: Havana.

I met up with Kayo at the airport in Mexico City. We stayed at the Hotel Riazor fifteen minutes away as we had an early flight the next morning. Mexico City is a gargantuan metropolis and the traffic is horrific, so a hotel close to the airport was prudent. The comfortable Riazor was reasonably priced at 1395 Mexican pesos (A$119) for a twin with breakfast, and it looked moderately swish, though I'm not entirely sure as we didn't get past the bar, toasting our reunion with a beer, followed by another, and yet more before the tequila hit the table, we forgot about dinner, and wound up staggering back to our room past midnight. Still, we beat the hangover to the sunrise, heading off the headache at 6.30am, but we didn't even get the breakfast as it isn't yet served at that hour. Sheesh.

When the plane touched down at Havana airport, passengers debarked onto the runway, filtered through the walled, green-washed immigration stalls, collected baggage from the flat carousel, and queued some 50 people deep at the single window of the foreign exchange office. Cuba doesn't allow currency to be taken out of the country so you can't buy any to bring in, so here we are, breathing booze, hung over and hungry in a 30-minute queue so we can get some money to pay a taxi driver to get us into Havana city.

Cuba has a dual currency system — the Cuban peso, called moneda nacional, and the Cuban convertible peso, referred to as cucs ("kooks") after the monetary symbol CUC$. A cuc is worth 24 or 25 pesos nacional, and the value is pegged to the US dollar. But forget about exchanging US dollars. Canadian dollars or Euros are the easiest currencies to exchange. American dollars incur a 10% tax. Tourists prices are in cucs and Cuban nationals pay in moneda nacional, so a 10-minute ferry across the water from Habana Vieja to Casablanca costs a Cuban national 50 centavos, half a Cuban peso, equivalent to about two cents, and a foreigner pays US$2—two cucs.

A taxi driver rescued us from the queue. "This line, phwoar," he dismissed with his hand. "I am taxi driver." He presented the licence clipped to his short sleeve collared beige shirt. "I take you to Habana, 30 cucs. It's okay. You change money at the hotel. I will wait for you." It was about five cucs more than the going price, but we'd probably have agreed to double that and free mojitos all night if he'd asked, as long as he could unburden us of backpacks and get us out of that queue and into a hot shower at the Hotel Capri, which he did. Well, he got us to the hotel. We got ourselves into showers.

The Capri is the old mob hotel in Vedado, built in 1957 by mobster Santo Trafficante at the western end of the famous Malecón seafront drive. Anyone familiar with Mikhael Kalatazov's Soy Cuba would recognise the rooftop pool from the party scene at the start of the film. Fidel's guerillas ended the party in 1959, though, and by 2000 the hotel had joined the innumerable uninhabited ruins of the city. In the last decade it has been carefully restored to its authentic 1950s modernist design with original gleaming white, gold-flecked hard floors, cool kitsch flourishes on the pristine dusty green walls, white and chrome conga-shaped Babaloo stools at the bar and a grand wrought-steel candelabra chandelier in the lobby. The rooms sport black and white photos of Cuba from the era. The hotel reopened in December 2013 with a fine dining restaurant on the top floor and a dusty rose-coloured buffet breakfast restaurant in the basement, and by June 2014 all the floors will be complete, including a third restaurant on level four and duplex rooms spanning two levels.

Settled in, showered, and luggage contents strewn, Kayo and I hit the streets to explore the Vedado. Within minutes we got hustled.

Thursday, April 03, 2014

Impressions of America

There are characteristics of the United States that, living in Australia, I forget but which I remember lamentably upon revisiting. The hotel information card tells me that they've designed the "Link@Sheraton™ experience with Microsoft™, a connectivity hub in our lobby." It reminds me that every aspect of life in the US is commercialised. Nothing is unsullied by it. It unsettles me that the room service menu in my hotel room opens with "Brighten your diet with Color Your Plate™, a simple approach to eating right by adding colourful foods to your meals." (It goes on to provide oversimplified and perhaps questionable conclusions that red foods such as tomatoes and watermelon support the circulatory system, yellow foods like pineapple and squash optimise brain function, and so on for blue and green and other pretty, marketable colours of the rainbow.) I certainly won't argue against promoting healthy food choices, and good on the Sheraton for including it in their menu, but must we trademark it? Is the simple pleasure of eating forgotten by people and now usurped by the powers of commercial interests? Remember what it was like to be human, and to simply say, "mmm, I love pineapple"? All right, I'm in a hotel and it's a commercial environment. But this quality of pervasive commercialism was born here in America.

Another characteristic of American life is tipping wait staff. Here is a shameful demonstration of laissez-faire market economics trammeling the common worker: tipping for survival. Wait staff are underpaid. All of them. If patrons halted tipping en masse, an entire section of the working population would, after work and commuting expenses, be working practically for free, so miserly is the minimum wage system. Using the Australian example as an alternative, the union award system provides just recompense for the type of work, whereby waiters and waitresses earn a living wage paid by the employer, not by the customer. (Tips exist, of course, but are for good service as opposed to being obligatory.) This means personnel costs are higher and so restaurant opening hours are often shorter; 24-hour places in Sydney are rare. This in turn means patrons have less opportunity to patronise, less opportunity to go out and spend money and lubricate the gears of the economy, and fewer opportunities to be consumers. And therefore greater opportunity to be people, or citizens, to rediscover the things in life that have true value rather than apparent value: playing football with your kids; debating social policies and civic life with friends; throwing the stick for the dog; having a good meal for the joy of company and good food—food that is not a registered trademark.

This all sounds conspicuously socialist. Perhaps Cuba is calling.