Travel Ideas

With Fidel teetering on the verge of passing away, the Cuban exiles in Florida are already cutting deals with developers for the land along the coast. The moment that the government looks rocky, all the old mafia will jump up to try and muscle their way back in.

In fact, communism in Cuba has been an enormous success, given that they’ve had to get by with a total economic blockage from the states – they send 55,000 doctors to Africa for free every year, which is 55,000 more than the US.

The absence of a free market (apart from the hustling in Havana seeded by tourism) means that the Cubans have grown up without the media barrage common to most countries these days and are apparently all expert musicians – there’s nothing else to do.

To prolong your stay in Cuba beyond the tourist visa you just need to enrol in a Spanish course at Havana University for $10 or so and you can stay as long as you need. Then the trick is to get out of the tourist economy and live like the Cubans (most of whom earn no more than $25 a month) by converting all your money into Cuban pesos. It can be tough to work out where they’ll let a foreigner spend them though. God bless communist bureaucracy.

Cuba is an island frozen in time and will most likely not last too long once Castro succumbs so learn your Spanish, fill up on pesos, grab your guitar and hit the backroads into the Caribbean heart of the island.

Check out cuba-junky.com – a great intro to the island.

Tom has been traveling non-stop since the age of 18 and co-founded Road Junky in 2004. Follow him @tomglaister

He’s the author of Hand to Mouth to India, an account of hitchhiking from England to India with no money and which will soon be rereleased by Road Junky Books.

Tales of a Road Junky featuring tales of breaking people out of jail in Delhi, selling fake Rolexes in Japan and other adventures in Israel and Brazil will be out later this year.

He also writes fiction for anyone who never really grew up and his latest novel is Bozo and the Storyteller – download the audio book for free or even buy a copy…

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