Day 5 Cuban impressions

Day 5.. Cuban impressions


Pool day… got pretty late yesterday.

I had some time to think about Cuba today by the pool.
It is hard to describe Cuba without getting political, but I will try not to…because I don’t know so much about it.
Havana is an amazing and interesting city with fascinating and very diverse architecture!
Habana veja is restored and filled with tourists. Centro Habana is very hectic, run down and filled with locals. In vedado there are some buildings white a typical soviet architecture.
And in Miramar where we stay, there is the Russian embassy that looks like a grotesque obelisk. Have to take a photo of that! Pretty fun to get a feeling of Eastern Europe among the palm trees.
The people are poor, but being used to Africa, Havana doesn’t look poor at al. It actually doesn’t look like anything I have seen before, and I have been travelling a bit…

There is no slum and even though some things are still like in the 50th I don’t miss the modern luxury we have in Europe. It is like time stood still here.

They are missing a lot, for example we went to the supermarket the one day they had apples. Everyone was crazy and bought hips of them. But you can’t blame communism for lack of things, when it is the American trade embargo….
Other Caribbean islands are poor as well and I meet so many Haitians’, Jamaicans’, and Dominicans that had fled poverty in their countries when I worked in Brooklyn.

There is a high education level in Cuba, good health system (but they miss a lot of equipment thanx to the embargo..). Woman make up 66,4% of the professional and technical workforce. Free kindergarten and 1 year maternity leave makes a carer possible. I don’t have the number of child mortality, but I think it is low.
From some stories I heard from Cubans, the system seems to be a bit bureaucratic and Kafka-esque. I have been talking politics to people working with tourism and I think working with luxury tourism and capitalism and live in socialism is not a good combination in order to be happy…
Cuban also spends a lot on culture and sport and that together with a good health system and high education level makes it a rich country to me.


Cuba; an independent social republic? Or Evil totalitarian one-man dictator ship?

I can not answer that. And again... I know so little about it.

I will defiantly read up on it now, starting with Thomas Gustafson’s book, Cuba (that I returned to the library before finishing it….:)

Being a doctor that just started the job, I haven’t spent the last year thinking much about politics. I can see that having money for the first time in my life :) and spend so much time with other doctors, I moved away a bit from my social working class ideology the last year.

…Well, now it came back.