1. Airport Transfers (included in trip price). Required for arrival in Havana and for returning to airport in Havana. This fee includes transfer in and transfer out by bus up to the Habana Libre Hotel or another point to be specified in the Vedado area. As we will be staying in private houses, the bus WILL NOT drop you to your doorsteps; you will have to either walk a few blocks (usually with your hosts who have come to meet you), take a taxi or "tip" the bus driver. We will make sure you are taken care of. If you pay for a taxi or “tip” the bus driver, this should not cost more than a few dollars.
2. City Tour (day of or day after arrival)—3 hrs. SOME but not all of these famous sites in and around Havana will be visited (all these can't fit into 3 hrs.). For example, the Malecon (road by the coastline), a cigar factory, a rum museum, Old Havana, El Morro Castle, Plaza de la Revolucion (Revolution Square), the Granma memorial (boat used by the revolutionaries), a Cuban school, the Capitol building, the University of Havana, the Callejon de Hamel (an alley of Afro-Cuban religious art), etc. Sometimes there are extra fees (small) to get into rum factories and cigar factories; sometimes not.
Usually the city experience includes a one-hour walk in Old Havana. It is easy to walk to though later on your own, from Vedado, and you will most likely end up going there quite a bit. BRING SOME GOOD WALKING SHOES because Cubans walk everywhere. They say, “It’s just up the street,” and that can mean a mile or two! Taxis are relatively cheap but you should negotiate before you get in one, or they will charge you too much. Or take a “cocoa taxi” or bicycle carriage (these only hold two people). Centro Habana with its Central Park is on the “Prado,” a very wide road with a huge sidewalk down the middle that runs down to the Malecon (the road by the sea). We stay in the Vedado area, which is just West of Centro Habana (Central Park) and Habana Vieja (Old Havana). The famous Hotel Nacional de Cuba and the Habana Libre are in the Vedado area. You can walk to Old Havana either on the Malecon or on streets running East-West farther from but parallel to the coast.
3. Hemingway House—4 hrs. You will learn about Hemingway, the home itself, and the fishing village of Cojimar (where the real “old man & the sea” lived-- Gregorio Fuentes, boat captain to Hemingway who died there in 2002 at the age of 104). The house remains as it was when Hemingway last walked out of it in 1960--his boat, a swimming pool, his writing tower, and gardens surround the house (you can’t go into the house itself but all the doors and windows are open so you can see into it). Lunch at a restaurant in Cojimar includes a full meal and one drink.
4. Viñales Valley in Pinar del Rio province—10 hrs. This is a visit to the countryside on the far western side of the island, where you will see one of the three main mountain ranges of Cuba (the Viñales valley nestled within it is a UNESCO World Heritage site). You will see a tobacco farm and watch a farmer roll tobacco in his barn, a bohio (palm-thatched house modeled after the structures of native Amerindians), and go on a boat trip through the Cueva del Indio (cave of the Indian). Price includes lunch & entrance fees.
5. Yoruba (Afro-Cuban Religion) Museum. This museum is in the city across from the capitol building. Once there, you will walk around the museum on a guided tour (or on your own if you prefer). If we can arrange it, an additional fee can be paid for access to a drumming and dancing performance of the Yoruba orishas (you can film this). It is also possible to meet Cubans who will take you to the “real” thing; the performance in the museum is staged for visitors. This excursion is usually paired with a rum museum or cigar factory or, if it is raining, the San Jose Arts and Crafts Market (see #8 below).
6. Institute of Fine Arts in Havana (ISA). “In January 1961, the Cuban revolutionary leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, having finished a game of golf and now enjoying a drink at the bar of Havana’s formerly exclusive Country Club Park, pondered the future of a country club whose members had all fled the country. The Cuban Literacy Campaign had just been launched, and with the inspiration of extending the program’s success into a wider cultural arena, Guevara proposed the creation of a complex of tuition-free art schools to serve talented young people from all over the Third World. He conceived of the schools as highly experimental and conceptually advanced to serve the creation of a “new culture” for the “new man”. An innovative program called for innovative architecture, and Castro saw the Cuban architect Ricardo Porro as being that architect who could deliver such architecture. Cuba’s National Art Schools represented an attempt to reinvent architecture in the same manner that the Cuban Revolution aspired to reinvent society. Through their designs, the architects sought to integrate issues of culture, ethnicity, and place into a revolutionary formal composition hitherto unknown in architecture.”
7. Museum of the Revolution. You can walk by yourself, take a taxi, or we can arrange for a larger group to go together.
8. San Jose Arts & Crafts Mall. By the harbor and Old Havana, paintings, sculpture, instruments, clothing and fabrics, etc. are for sale there. You can walk by yourself, take a taxi, or we can arrange for a larger group to go together.
9. Santa Maria Beach (East Havana) – 5-6 hrs. Spend a day at Santa María, the best beach East of Havana. You can go by taxis in groups, or there is a Havana bus (shuttle) that that will take you there; it runs every 20-30 mins. from Havana’s Parque Central (Central Park). We may get passes at an all-inclusive hotel that offers a free bar, a lunch buffet, a swimming pool, and chairs/umbrellas on the beach. Rides on catamarans and peddle-boats are also free. Food and drink is available on the beach, as well as massages. (You may also arrange a trip to Varadero Beach as it is the most well-known coastal area near Havana, with the whitest sand and clearest water, but it takes at least two hours by bus and is very commercial and "touristy.” Under the general license, you aren’t supposed to be a tourist but a person making contact with the Cuban people.)
10. Fuster House and Fusterlandia. José Rodríguez Fuster “has made a major contribution over 10 years of work of re-building and decorating the fishing town of Jaimanitas in the outskirts of Havana, where he lives. Jaimanitas is now a unique work of public art where Fuster has decorated over 80 houses with ornate murals and domes to suit the personality of his neighbors. The Artists’ Wall composed of a quilt of dozens of tiles signed and donated by other Cuban artists, a theatre and public swimming pools. Nowadays, Fuster’s art is a cherished part of Cuban culture and joins the rank of other public artworks such as that of Gaudi in Barcelona…” (singletravel.com)
