Happy Valentines Day!! 

The smaller cities wifi was very unreliable, but now, Havana! We are in a hotel built in 1931, and absolute luxury. I swear I saw Keith Richards, English accent and all. But, this guy looked slightly less weathered, and he is on our floor, so highly unlikely. Inless Keith lost some of his wealth and had Botox. The hotel is Hotel Nacional de Cuba. Winston Churchill, and lots of movie stars, mafia, have stayed here. I will post pictures tomorrow of it, I have unlimited internet, so far, but that could change at any time! 

I’m going back a couple of days and catch up with pictures over the next few days we are here.

 

The top photo is a ration shop,  Cubans get rations and can get basics at these shops’ when the items are available. Flour, sugar, shampoo, oil, rum, yes rum etc. The shops. Are located in different neighborhoods, and people have to go to the one assigned to them only. I don’t understand how they are stocked.. some seem to have many more items then others.
We visited a ranch, The King Ranch. Before the revolution it was privately owned by a rancher from Texas. Since Fidel,it is government owned. They greeted us with flags, performed a little rodeo, and explained how the ranch worked.

The most interesting part of the ranch visit, was time spent in the village nearby. The people who live there work at the ranch. We were invited into one of their homes, and the poverty was, well, look at the pictures. They all do seem to have TVs, but no indoor plumbing for most of them. This particular home’s shower was a bucket with a cup. 

The last photo is of the local school. We did drop off many items of soap, shampoo, pens, pencils, etc. but it didn’t seem enough. Many of them have mango trees, banana and livestock running freely, so food seemed plentiful. Before Havana though, this was the most impoverished area we had seen. 

I’m going to try and blog daily now that I’m back in the states, to catch up, and help myself remember what all we saw. I will eventually do a post of just all the classic cars we saw. They were everywhere.