Justine Fabienne Voogd-Thiess

Havana is a city with a lot of things to see. You can literally see that the time stands still in some of Havana’s neighborhoods. The buildings are still old, the kind of recent revolution (during the 1960’s) is still visible. The history of the city is impressive, the whole story of the revolution can be found in the revolution museum in the centro. Havana is a city that is living, it is always crowded with a lot of music and a lot of colors but what I noticed negatively is that tourists are clearly separated from the local society. Since the tourists have to pay in the currency which is especially for them, everything is super expensive. On every street and in every corner people are coming to you and try to sell you stuff, which is okay for the first day but after day 5 I’m only annoyed. If you walk in the side streets, you can see the real Havana, especially the poverty of the Cubans. Since the Cuban system works in a way that there is no real poor and rich, only poor, basically no one has money. There are no real supermarkets here and the country is constantly in a shortage of certain products. When I entered a “supermarket”, which was more like a little side corner store, I was only able to find one sort of cookies, one kind of food in a can, one sort of milk. That’s it, the rest was sold out for the week and it’s only Tuesday. Mentioning by the way that one package of milk was about 2€. The poverty forces may people here to beg for food or money and the houses are damaged and old. Also if you walk through the side streets you can see all kind of things, people chilling in their front doors, people cutting hair, a shit load of trash, people selling fruits, street dogs, dead birds and yesterday I saw a dead pig head. If you are a couple from the mid 40’s that is able to spend the money for a beautiful Cuba holiday (which I would btw. estimate at 2500€ speaking of a 10 day average consumer trip), you will be impressed by the beauty of the country and the friendliness of the people but I would definitely not recommend it to backpackers with a lower budget because then it could happen that you will be confronted by the reality of Havana or Cuba in general. I will not say it’s not worth the trip, it definitely is! But it will might differentiate from your expectations.Läs mer