Havana ice cream, cars and communism
Finally at the end of our trip we ended up back in Havana, staying in Varadero just down the hill from the rather majestic front of the Universidad de la Habana. I loved Havana. Varadero is a residential area of wide streets, crumbling old colonial house, cracked pavements and shady trees. From here we could walk along much of the length of the Malecon, the road along with sea wall that sweeps around and up to Habana Vieja. We had some very good food in a leafy plaza, browsed the book stalls and craft markets, wandered through romantically run down streets, smoked cigars (well just me), drank amazing hot chocolate and caught a few local bands playing for afternoon mojitos. We achieved full propaganda overload at the Revolutionary Museum although I did adore the prominent “Wall of the Cretins” in the entrance hall featuring cartoons of Batista, Regan and Bush thanking them for helping to Cuba to make, strengthen and consolidate their revolution! We also spent a morning in the Cuban Modern Art section of the Museo de Belles Artes which has some really wonderful, really weird and really interesting displays of Cuban Art through the decades. Our final night in Cuba was spent in the magnificent Gran Teatro watching a Cuban performance, in Spanish, of the Magic Flute. It was undoubtedly the funniest and most entertaining opera performance I’ve ever seen!
We left our final Cuban experience for our final hours before catching the flight home. We went to visit a Coppelia ice cream, a Government-subsidised ice cream chain aimed at keeping the communist masses happy. We queued up for about 40 minutes to get a table and then tucked in to a spread of six heaped bowls of excellent ice cream and three bowls of cake. Incredibly unhealthy and completely wonderful!
