Tuesday 13 March – Havana
Cold shower – brrrrr, aghhh! Today the rest of the tour are going on a long, long trip to Vinales valley in the West of the island, the tobacco growing area. This will involve seeing caves, the valley and visiting a tobacco factory. We have elected to spend the day in Havana instead. This involves a lie-in rather than an 8:30 start!
First up, negotiating a taxi ride to Hemmingway’s house. Our taxi guy wants to take up on an all day trip and seems upset for us when we reveal that we just want to go to Hemmingway’s house and come back to the city. But we get in and off we go.
Then we stop, pulled by the tourist police. They are not interested in us, they are interested in our driver, where has he come from and where is he going and where is his paperwork to prove it. All is well and off we go again. Ten minutes later, same thing, waved over to the side of the road and documents checked. Something tells me that it’s difficult to work ‘off the metre’ in Havana.
Half an hour and we’re at Hemmingway’s house. Our taxi guy will wait for us. He had laughed when we suggested we would be able to make our own way back. Hemmingway’s house is not exactly in the middle of nowhere, but the busses going up and down the streets we travelled on are either lorries or some strange sort of articulated carriage thing, like an artic cab pulling a bus carriage. They are all full, I mean full like those pictures you see of Japanese commuters on the Tokyo metro, but fuller.
The house is beautiful, I mean really beautiful. It’s like Churchill’s house, Chartwell, it’s been preserved and is set out as if for a dinner party. Or rather a cocktail party…Hemmingway liked booze almost as much as he liked books by the look of things. There is no route through the house, to see the rooms you lean in through the sash windows. Leaning in and snapping away (my five paso photographer’s permit safely stuck to my shirt) one of the curators sidles over and asks for my camera, saying she’ll take pictures for me. She vanishes for a few minutes and I see the flash going off in various rooms. Then she hands me my camera back. I hand her a couple of pasos.
Her photographs really are good, including one of a Picasso ceramic. Something tells me she does this a lot.
Wander the house, then the grounds, watching the carpenters at work on restoring the boat. It really is stunning here, you can see why H would love it so much, why anyone would love it. It joins my list of fantasy addresses, Chartwell is still at the top of that list…maybe with No 1 London, Wellington’s old home, surely the best address on the planet.
Back to Havana thanks to our patient taxi guy. Off to tour the Partagas cigar factory.
We only have to wait a couple of minutes for the tour to begin. Our guide, a gorgeous young woman, begins by asking our group of Brits, Canadians, Norwegans and one Israeli if anyone smokes cigars and if so what brand. I’m asked first and own up to smoking King Edward Imperials.
‘Pah.’ She gave me the sort of look you give to men hanging around school gates with their hands in their trousers. ‘You must smoke Cuban’. She asks a few others, eliciting more of less the same response, a mixture of ‘oh my god!’ and, my personal favourite, ‘yes, that is what ladies smoke’ – bringing shame on the head of the bloke who admitted smoking cheroots.
Making a cigar is bloody hard work, nine hours a day of solid graft. It’s all about craftsmanship. The men start by ripping the vein from the dried leafs that will form the outside. This on the ground floor.
Up a rickety staircase. Second floor, sorting room. Women sort the leaves. Our guide explains that there is a myth about cigars being rolled on the thighs of virgins, shrugs and tells us ‘good luck finding one’. Personally, I’d be quite happy for her to be involved whatever her virginal status.
Next floor, apprenticeship room. You do nine months and then, if you can make a shedload of perfect cigars in an hour, you get a job.
Top floor – the factory. Every cigar roller sits at a workstation, it’s about 60% women, the rest men. The cigar makers grab a leaf, then another, then another, packing leaf after leaf after leaf into their palm. Then roll and into the press. Then out of the press, outside goes on, then the tip, secured with maple gum. No wonder the bloody things cost so much, this is craftsmanship.
It’s lunchtime, and the staff are eating pint cartons of ice-cream for lunch! This, and smoking. Workers are allowed three cigars to smoke a day but most keep them to sell and smoke cigarettes instead. The cigarettes are made of the off-cuts from the cigars.
Famously, the staff are entertained by a reader, who reads from a newspaper in the morning, then from a novel in the afternoon. The Da Vinci Code is the current book, but is not a hit with everybody. The most popular are adventures such as The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers. Good to know Dumas still holds sway over Dan Brown.
The most interesting place was the packing room. Cigars cover worktables. If there’s any symbol of wealth, it’s the cigar. To see them piled up was like visiting a mint and seeing banknotes strewn across tables, except banknotes are simply bits of paper, each of these cigars is a hand crafted masterwork, rolled with love and care while the roller listened to classic literature.
So yes, it was down to the shop and I’ll have a handful of Cohibas please. I’ve met the lady who rolls them and the lady who packs them and my god, I’m looking forward to smoking them.
The staff are aware of the value of the cigars. The Partagas factory is working on a new cigar which will be the most expensive ever made. Our guide’s opinion of the sort of people who buy this – ‘a great cigar but…more money than sense’.
Lunchtime. We find the micro-brewery, have the best burger and beer I’ve had in a long time and watch people order their tubes of beer.
Then wander over to the Museum of the Revolution for a visit. But are turned away by police type people because there is a rally in the square in front today. Somehow, getting turned away from the museum of the revolution because there’s a rally is even better than actually visiting the museum of the revolution and, frankly, it allows more time for drinking. So, how to get back to the hotel?
Two pints means a ride in a coco taxi seems like a great idea.
Coco taxis are basically a fibre-glass shell mounted onto a moped trike. They look like a cross between a scooter and a hollowed-out grapefruit, only not as safe. The riders wear helmets, the passengers simply pray to whatever gods they worship to protect them.
We are in the centre of the city, a good ten minute ride from our hotel and we fully expect the guy to say it’s too far a ride. But no, he calls our bluff and in we get…and the bloody thing rolls backwards! There is no handbreak.
Off we putter, into the traffic, then onto the road along the esplanade. Three lines of traffic, three tonnes of Detroit steel hammering along to our left, a bus to our right and, oh my Christ alive, a lorry right up our arse and tooting. The engine of the scooter is going flat out and so are my nerves. Exhilarating is the word, the actual pleasure of the ride greatly enhanced by my terror.
We get to the hotel in one piece and I sit on the terrace, drinking Cuba Libres and reading ‘the old man and the sea’. I like to think it’s what Hemmingway would have wanted.
First up, negotiating a taxi ride to Hemmingway’s house. Our taxi guy wants to take up on an all day trip and seems upset for us when we reveal that we just want to go to Hemmingway’s house and come back to the city. But we get in and off we go.
Then we stop, pulled by the tourist police. They are not interested in us, they are interested in our driver, where has he come from and where is he going and where is his paperwork to prove it. All is well and off we go again. Ten minutes later, same thing, waved over to the side of the road and documents checked. Something tells me that it’s difficult to work ‘off the metre’ in Havana.
Half an hour and we’re at Hemmingway’s house. Our taxi guy will wait for us. He had laughed when we suggested we would be able to make our own way back. Hemmingway’s house is not exactly in the middle of nowhere, but the busses going up and down the streets we travelled on are either lorries or some strange sort of articulated carriage thing, like an artic cab pulling a bus carriage. They are all full, I mean full like those pictures you see of Japanese commuters on the Tokyo metro, but fuller.
The house is beautiful, I mean really beautiful. It’s like Churchill’s house, Chartwell, it’s been preserved and is set out as if for a dinner party. Or rather a cocktail party…Hemmingway liked booze almost as much as he liked books by the look of things. There is no route through the house, to see the rooms you lean in through the sash windows. Leaning in and snapping away (my five paso photographer’s permit safely stuck to my shirt) one of the curators sidles over and asks for my camera, saying she’ll take pictures for me. She vanishes for a few minutes and I see the flash going off in various rooms. Then she hands me my camera back. I hand her a couple of pasos.Her photographs really are good, including one of a Picasso ceramic. Something tells me she does this a lot.
Wander the house, then the grounds, watching the carpenters at work on restoring the boat. It really is stunning here, you can see why H would love it so much, why anyone would love it. It joins my list of fantasy addresses, Chartwell is still at the top of that list…maybe with No 1 London, Wellington’s old home, surely the best address on the planet.
Back to Havana thanks to our patient taxi guy. Off to tour the Partagas cigar factory.
We only have to wait a couple of minutes for the tour to begin. Our guide, a gorgeous young woman, begins by asking our group of Brits, Canadians, Norwegans and one Israeli if anyone smokes cigars and if so what brand. I’m asked first and own up to smoking King Edward Imperials.
‘Pah.’ She gave me the sort of look you give to men hanging around school gates with their hands in their trousers. ‘You must smoke Cuban’. She asks a few others, eliciting more of less the same response, a mixture of ‘oh my god!’ and, my personal favourite, ‘yes, that is what ladies smoke’ – bringing shame on the head of the bloke who admitted smoking cheroots.
Making a cigar is bloody hard work, nine hours a day of solid graft. It’s all about craftsmanship. The men start by ripping the vein from the dried leafs that will form the outside. This on the ground floor.
Up a rickety staircase. Second floor, sorting room. Women sort the leaves. Our guide explains that there is a myth about cigars being rolled on the thighs of virgins, shrugs and tells us ‘good luck finding one’. Personally, I’d be quite happy for her to be involved whatever her virginal status.
Next floor, apprenticeship room. You do nine months and then, if you can make a shedload of perfect cigars in an hour, you get a job.
Top floor – the factory. Every cigar roller sits at a workstation, it’s about 60% women, the rest men. The cigar makers grab a leaf, then another, then another, packing leaf after leaf after leaf into their palm. Then roll and into the press. Then out of the press, outside goes on, then the tip, secured with maple gum. No wonder the bloody things cost so much, this is craftsmanship.
It’s lunchtime, and the staff are eating pint cartons of ice-cream for lunch! This, and smoking. Workers are allowed three cigars to smoke a day but most keep them to sell and smoke cigarettes instead. The cigarettes are made of the off-cuts from the cigars.
Famously, the staff are entertained by a reader, who reads from a newspaper in the morning, then from a novel in the afternoon. The Da Vinci Code is the current book, but is not a hit with everybody. The most popular are adventures such as The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers. Good to know Dumas still holds sway over Dan Brown.
The most interesting place was the packing room. Cigars cover worktables. If there’s any symbol of wealth, it’s the cigar. To see them piled up was like visiting a mint and seeing banknotes strewn across tables, except banknotes are simply bits of paper, each of these cigars is a hand crafted masterwork, rolled with love and care while the roller listened to classic literature.
So yes, it was down to the shop and I’ll have a handful of Cohibas please. I’ve met the lady who rolls them and the lady who packs them and my god, I’m looking forward to smoking them.
The staff are aware of the value of the cigars. The Partagas factory is working on a new cigar which will be the most expensive ever made. Our guide’s opinion of the sort of people who buy this – ‘a great cigar but…more money than sense’.
Lunchtime. We find the micro-brewery, have the best burger and beer I’ve had in a long time and watch people order their tubes of beer.Then wander over to the Museum of the Revolution for a visit. But are turned away by police type people because there is a rally in the square in front today. Somehow, getting turned away from the museum of the revolution because there’s a rally is even better than actually visiting the museum of the revolution and, frankly, it allows more time for drinking. So, how to get back to the hotel?
Two pints means a ride in a coco taxi seems like a great idea.
Coco taxis are basically a fibre-glass shell mounted onto a moped trike. They look like a cross between a scooter and a hollowed-out grapefruit, only not as safe. The riders wear helmets, the passengers simply pray to whatever gods they worship to protect them.We are in the centre of the city, a good ten minute ride from our hotel and we fully expect the guy to say it’s too far a ride. But no, he calls our bluff and in we get…and the bloody thing rolls backwards! There is no handbreak.
Off we putter, into the traffic, then onto the road along the esplanade. Three lines of traffic, three tonnes of Detroit steel hammering along to our left, a bus to our right and, oh my Christ alive, a lorry right up our arse and tooting. The engine of the scooter is going flat out and so are my nerves. Exhilarating is the word, the actual pleasure of the ride greatly enhanced by my terror.
We get to the hotel in one piece and I sit on the terrace, drinking Cuba Libres and reading ‘the old man and the sea’. I like to think it’s what Hemmingway would have wanted.
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