Caribbean Travel: Five free things to do in Havana, Cuba

[Judi Lynn]

Caribbean Travel: Five free things to do in Havana, Cuba

From cobblestone squares to vintage cars to baseball, here's how to enjoy the best of Havana without breaking your budget.

By: Peter Orsi Associated Press, Published on Fri Aug 02 2013

HAVANA—For a city where people earn an average of $20 a month at government jobs, Havana can be a surprisingly pricey place, at least for tourists.

From $6 daiquiris at El Floridita, Ernest Hemingway’s favoured watering hole, to the ubiquitous hustlers looking to con visitors into buying knock-off cigars, much about the Cuban capital seems geared toward separating travellers from their money.

Fortunately some of Havana’s most charming details can be experienced free of charge. Here are five great ways to explore this city stuck in time, without adding to the hefty fees charged by tour companies.

(Note: While millions of tourists visit Cuba each year from Canada, Europe and elsewhere, Washington’s 51-year-old economic embargo still outlaws most American travel to the island. However, tens of thousands of U.S. citizens are now visiting legally each year on cultural exchange trips. These so-called people-to-people tours are rigidly scheduled to comply with embargo rules, but there’s almost always a little free time to go off on your own, and some of these attractions may also be part of official itineraries.)

More:
http://www.thestar.com/life/travel/2013/08/02/caribbean_travel_five_free_things_to_do_in_havana_cuba.html

[dipsydoodle]

1. For a city where people earn an average of $20 a month at government jobs.

That old chestnut which is half a story .

[Judi Lynn]

2. Isn't that stupid? They always toss it into every story they write,

if it even remotely seems to relate to the story.

They never appeal to the common sense of the readers, the evidence of their own eyes, and recommend they look at the people, their clothes, their health, their attitudes on the street, their general state of well being. The U.S. public has no way of knowing, because they are FORBIDDEN to travel the 90 miles from Florida to Cuba.

So now their lie is safe with the vast majority of U.S. Americans. They could tell the US public every day Cubans have to turn themselves in to the local police and get their butts kicked before going off to work at hard labor cutting sugar cane, and that story would stick, too.

It's always almost by accident when US citizens learn that people of other countries come and go to Cuba daily, and some come and go repeatedly. You wouldn't expect that from the crappola we are fed about Cuba!

(That may also be another reason no one's in too big a hurry to drop the travel ban, since a lot of US citizens touring the island would start producing evidence we've been told nothing but lies all along for the duration of the revolutionary government.

Could also be a reason to snatch the government soon and start taking credit for how well the Cuban people seem to be doing! That will be tough to pull off as the US starts shutting down their health care and education systems, which are known throughout the world as being phenomenal. I hope the US gov't would be more decent than that, but all we have is history to guide us, after all!)

[dipsydoodle]

3. If tourists are stupid enough to buy knock off cigars then so be it.

They'd be impounded at the airport.

If daquiries are $6 then so what. If its a state owned bar the government gets the income and if its private bar they pay tax on the income which goes to the state.