Fidel Castro: a man of extreme contradictions.
Who in turn created a country full of extreme contradictions.
Was fortunate enough to spend a month or so travelling in Cuba during 2008 and can honestly say (as a foreigner) it was the friendliest and safest country I've ever visited. Started off in Havana and travelling independently worked our way down to Santiago de Cuba in the south.
Almost every person we came into contact was fiercely proud of their country, but in turn many hated their country due to the restrictions they had to live under - foreign trade embargo, more secret police than you could wave a surveillance mic at, crap food and the rest of the problems folks have when living under a dictatorship (anyone noticing a parallel here?).
We had a couple of brushes with the authorities, both secret and non secret police, but in general found them to be respectful and polite - obviously as foreigners bringing in much needed hard currency we were treated very differently to locals.
Our overriding memories of Cuba are music, rum and the friendly people. The food overall was pretty poor although we did have some fantastic meals at places most local folks couldn't go simply because they couldn't afford it.
One dark memory from Cuba was the high incidence of child prostitution in the popular Holguin area - families actively pimping out twelve year old daughters to rich Canadians and Germans. Even to the extent of them all going out for a meal together - it was after observing this and deciding that the fat middle aged German deserved to have his photograph publicised on the internet that we had one of our brushes with the local police...
JF
