11 January 2025, Havana ... and home ...
La Mansion del Centro €25 (R495)

Tomorrow night we begin our long journey home. Having bid Garth farewell this morning, we spent a leisurely day, strolling the old city streets for the last time, recording what is fine about Havana and what is not.
The city was more lively on a Saturday morning than on our previous walks. Lively with both tourists and locals.
This evening we had a couple of drinks in Havana's Casa de la Musica, there to watch people dancing the salsa, and more...
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DID YOU KNOW that with a little help from ChatGPT you can compress Cuba’s history into 10 bullet points?
1. When Columbus claimed Cuba for Spain in 1492, it was already inhabited by around 1m people from south America and the Caribbean islands.
2. 30,000 Spanish settlers arrived in the 1500s and sugar and other plantations were established.
3. Between 600,000 and 1 million African slaves were brought to Cuba between the 16th and 19th centuries.
4. Cuba fought for independence from Spain in the 19th century.
5. The US, largely for economic and geopolitical reasons, assisted the Cubans via the Spanish-American War of 1898-1902.
6. By the 1950s, opposition to Batista’s government and the US influence in Cuba was growing.
7. Castro and Guevara led the 1959 revolution, establishing a socialist state, and, for example, nationalising American assets, leading to US sanctions.
8. Cuba aligned with the Soviet Union, leading to increased US tensions, including the Bay of Pigs and Missile Crisis.
9. Cuba faced additional economic hardship after the Soviet collapse.
10. Economic reforms, including encouraging tourism, beginning in the 1990s, and partial US diplomatic restoration in the 2010s, have made life easier for citizens, but repression continues and Cuba remains a one-party state.
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DID YOU KNOW that Ernest Hemingway's most famous novella, The Old Man and the Sea, was written in Cuba in 1952?
The story won him both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes.