Lessons from a Trip Into Rural Cuba

This past week has felt much more like a vacation. I’m writing this on May 18, the beginning of our second weekend here and the first we’ve spent outside of Havana. We left this morning for the Bay of Pigs and Trinidad, a city on the southern shore of the island.

Driving through the countryside between Havana and Trinidad gave me an entirely new perspective on the meaning of “rural.” Back home in Minnesota, rural means vast farmland and small barns. In Cuba, it means, essentially, jungle. We drove for miles down unpaved roads without seeing a single person, car, or house. It was a little jarring until I remembered that on this island, there are only 11 million people. And, Cuba’s population is actually shrinking in a way not unlike Japan — their population is growing increasingly more elderly as the young find a way off the island, often to the United States or other Latin American countries.

That’s where tourism comes in. Two weeks into the trip, this is really the first time we will be going somewhere without any journalistic plans. While some people will be writing rough drafts or cutting first edits on video projects, very few of us intend to spend our time in Trinidad working on our Global Reporting course. We’re mostly looking forward to the shops, where we can buy souvenirs and handmade goods, and the beach, which is just a few kilometers away and very cheap by taxi.

But being a tourist in Cuba, particularly an American tourist who is also studying journalism, is still very, very odd. As I talked about in my last blog entry, private businesses have existed in Cuba for two decades — but that’s not what makes being a tourist here so uncomfortable. That has to do with the currency.

Bear with me through a little history lesson so I can make my point. The peso is the standard Cuban currency used by all natives here. Tourists or visitors use the CUC, which is a Spanish acronym for Cuban convertible currency. The government has standardized the CUC so it’s not subject to inflation and the conversion rate between the U.S. dollar and the CUC is 1:1. Most hotels and exchange booths take about 13 percent, so you get 87 CUC for every $100 you exchange. Here’s where it gets tricky: The conversion between the peso and the CUC is 25:1; it takes 25 Cuban pesos to make just one CUC.

That’s why it’s so weird to change hats from a journalist to a tourist. When we spent time at an art market outside of Trinidad, one of our local handlers told us we could bargain for a lower price on any item. But when a woman offered me 10 CUC for a handmade table runner, I couldn’t bring myself to go any lower. $10 is nothing to me. But to her, $10 is 250 Cuban pesos, almost a month’s pension.

Cities like Trinidad, close to the beach and far from bustling Havana, have begun to rely on tourism to survive when the state salaries are too low, which is always. We stayed in people’s homes, two or three of us per house with different families. Our family had been running a bed-and-breakfast style business in their small home for almost eight years. In 2017, they won a TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence and the company even sent them a flag. Carlos, the husband, built a flagpole out of wire to hold it up. He quickly takes it down when it begins to rain.

I’ve been trying to write your typical travel blog full of tips for others who may be coming here. But the truth is that tourism here, particularly after Trump changed the Obama-era policy around Cuba, is just still not possible for the average American. And, there are so many problems here that I’m just not interested in writing about how much fun I had at the beach.

Trinidad is particularly cool, though, from a historical perspective. It’s essentially a preserved, Spanish town full of colonial architecture and ancient buildings. Most of the main houses are now museums, with art, sculptures and other interesting information. A lot of the museums discuss slavery in Cuba, which existed similarly to slavery in the American South. The history of Afro-Cuban culture, or the mixing of African and Cuban peoples, is very strong in this part of the country. This is where sugarcane was the most productive — and the slaves were the ones working on the plantations, harvesting the crop. Many people here are descended from those slaves and can even trace their lineages.

It was really a fascinating place to be and I wish we could have spent more time there or been able to do more reporting during our visit. We were there as tourists, but I can’t shake off my journalism hat that quickly. I feel strange treating Trinidad’s residents like animals in a zoo. If I return to Cuba, which I hope to do, Trinidad is one place that will be high on my list to revisit.

It’s sometimes hard to separate what is tourism and what is journalism. Everywhere we go, whether we are acting as tourists or journalists, we tend to ask a lot of questions. The majority of the Cubans we meet and bombard with them actually love it, which is really fun. We’re interested, they’re interested, and that’s the best kind of conversation. Ultimately, though, I don’t think I like being a tourist in a place like Cuba. It feels wrong to come to a place with so many stories and so many amazing individuals and just look at them, without sharing it with the world.

I hope our journalism projects speak for themselves. They haven’t even been created yet, we’re only halfway done, and yet I know they will capture life in Cuba in a way Americans can’t understand without being there on the ground. That’s the point of journalism — to tell stories that no one is telling, and to tell them well.