Cuba: Trinidad

Trinidad, the last stop on our trip, feels like a colonial snapshot back in time with cobbled streets and tiled rooftops. Like I have described many times, it is another completely different city to the places we had visited on our journey here. Exhausted from our jeep excursion through the mountains (and of course our engagement!) we had a rest in our new casa before heading out for dinner at La Cubita, with a celebratory rum cocktail or two. Over our time in Trindad was had delicious home dinners at our casa and enjoyed another ropa vieja in Restaurante El Dorado.

We had four nights in Trinidad and spent the first of our full days exploring the streets. Perhaps for the first time on our trip, we noticed the number of tourists that were arriving into the city on tour buses from Havana, but no wonder when you have a well-preserved historic town. There are souvenir shops a-plenty but if you sought them out there are beautiful artisans selling their hand-thrown pottery as well as contemporary painters. For architecture or urbanism geeks, there is a scale model of the city, Maqueta de Trinidad, where the guide gave us a great description of the development of Trinidad, and I translated from Spanish into English for Dan! For some beach time, Playa Ancon is a short drive or 40 minute cycle from the centre of Trinidad, so we spent a relaxed day down there too.

A highlight of our time in Trinidad was taking salsa dance classes, that our host organised with a colleague of her husband (as is the case in Cuba, everyone know someone). He came to the casa over two nights and up on the balcony taught us the basics of the dance. I've danced salsa before, but Dan was a complete newbie and realised soon in how the man is really in control of the dance, and has to work pretty hard! In the evening we headed up to the central square, where up the sweeping steps in the open air, the Casa de la Musica has live music and everyone is either sitting enjoying a drink, watching the performances or joining in the dancing… and with our new dancing skills, we had a go too! Music and dancing are integral to life in Cuba, and after some Dutch courage, I'm glad we joined in too.

Viva Cuba!

Looking back on when and why I first became fascinated with visiting Cuba, it must have been a combination of studying Spanish at school, and an exhibition on the iconography of Che Guevara that was on at the V&A back in 2006. My topic of choice for my A-Level speaking exam was Che, when I researched his life and the adopted country he fought for, and so it began. Throughout university, like a student of the 70s, I had the exhibition's poster on my wall, the famous photograph of Che's face gazing out into my room. During this time I also became really interested in urban agriculture, and discovered how Cuba is world renowned for growing food in the city. All in all, I became mildly obsessed with this communist island isolated in the Caribbean!

As plastered all over the media in recent years, the country is on the brink of change. With its progressive relationship with the United States, it felt like it was now or never to make the trip. We wanted to see what we could of authentic Cuba, avoiding the resorts and staying in the casas particulares, or B&Bs, of everyday Cubans that there are in each town or city.

Cuba truly is an island of contrasts: every city and town we visited was vastly different from the next. Even with its social structure there are distinct differences in wealth of the citizens, but what doesn't change is the friendliness and inquisitive nature of the people. Plus what we discovered (to our delight) is that the food wasn't as disappointing as we had expected, in fact quite the opposite!

In a place where very few people speak English and it does feel like you have stepped back in time by at least 30 years, the trip wasn't what I would call relaxing, rather more of an adventure, but that was what we were looking for. First stop: Havana!