As we prepare to leave Cuba, it is mostly the Cuban people with expressives eyes that we remember. They have had a hard life, yet seem content. We ended our Cuba photo tour by returning to Havana for one last evening. On the way there, our van got a flat tire with the retread flying off […]
Cuba 7 – Trinidad, Part 2
We visited some Cuban homes while in Trinidad. One of the first things that struck us was how small all these homes were. The home above (upper-left) is little more than the size of our living room in Ecuador, yet houses three generations. Also, the people are so desperately poor, yet are always smiling and […]
Cuba 6 – Trinidad, Part 1
On our first trip to Cuba, we fondly recall Trinidad as our favorite city. After this visit, it remains our top choice. What has changed is the number of rooms now available on AirBnB, as well as the diversity of restaurants, the loss of the horse-drawn carts delivering bottled milk, and many more tourists. In Trinidad, […]
Cuba 5 – Cienfuegos
We spent one night in Cienfuegos, a city located on a bay on Cuba’s south coast of Cuba. This was mostly just meant as a stop-over between Viñales and Trinidad, and to give us the feel of a small Cuban town that few tourists see. One of our stops in town was at the La […]
Cuba 4 – Viñales
After leaving Havana, we drove to Viñales, which is best known for their cigar farms, spectacular landscape scenery lined with steep-sided limestone hills (mogotes) and rural Cuban lifestyle. The major highway was mostly devoid of cars, with plenty of horse drawn carts taking workers to their fields for the day. The countryside appeared very much […]
Cuba 3 – Havana, Part 2
We spent a few hours walking the area around the capitol building (left), which is modeled after the White House in Washington, DC. Our first sighting of it was in a painting at the Casa Particular we were staying at. It baffled us where the scene was from, since it seemed a combination of the US building and […]
Cuba 2 – Havana, Part 1
After spending a night in Hanabanilla, we joined up with the formal photo tour led by Johnathan Esper, whom we met in Iceland in 2014, and Joel Hernández Marin, a professor of photography in Havana. We will be staying in Casas Particulares throughout our travels in Cuba, which are rooms in private homes. In Havana, we stayed in the Vedado […]
Hanabanilla – Welcome to Cuba!
On our 2005 visit to Cuba, both of us got sick, with Evelyn’s cold developing into bronchitis, so we’ve wanted to come back to experience the real Cuba for some time. When we got to the airport, it took more than an hour to get our luggage and clear customs. Then, we changed money into […]