Thursday

We are slowly regaining our strength and have become real tourists doing real touristy things. For breakfast today, Kirsten ate the equivalent of a year's supply to a Ugandan orphanage. Myself, I was still queasy after a night filled with daemons whispering to me that I would end up in a Cuban jail because I wrote that the security guide at the airport had bad breath.

Soon thereafter we put on our walking sandals and walked 8 km to see a statue of Jose Marti. The statue was made from marble and is bigger than Mount Etna. Jose Marti is to the Cuban people what Nelson Mandela is to the world, except that Jose Marti was never in jail and Nelson Mandela did not write poems.

The path to there went along a busy road with lots of hooting cars and general chaos. It was not so much a bumper to bumper chaos as a rather few cars moving at Schumacher speed while veering freely over six lanes chaos. We brought bicycle helmets for this trip, but gas masks would have been better. People stopped to speak to us and offered us coffee in their homes. One woman had only two teeth but she could speak French. I have not encountered that combination before.

Later in the day we moved to a hotel in Old Havana where Al Capone once rented the whole of the fifth floor, apparently to seal some Mafia drug deal. We stayed on the third floor and no drugs were involved, unless you count the Aspirins Kirsten takes when she remembers to thin her blood. Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana" starring Alec Guinness was filmed in the hotel.

The hotel is a beautiful old Spanish colonial style building, reasonably well kept under the circumstances. It is however surrounded by blocks and blocks of beautiful colonial style, baroque, neoclassical and art deco buildings in various stages of decay. Sadly they have not seen any hammer and nail since the 50s. They just loom there as mostly empty ghosts with broken windows swaying on their hinges. "Music turned into stone" like someone once famously said. Here and there amidst these houses are charmless blobs of more recently poured concrete.

We ventured out into the streets after dark, trying to find a restaurant for a nice evening meal. The restaurant we headed for was rated as excellent by the Lonely Planet guide book, and with the best food in Havana. On arrival we found out that it was closed for sanitary reasons. The chef next door gesticulated something about rats running on the floor. After hearing that, we crawled back to our hotel and had rum and pizza.