Cuba, Santiago de Cuba – The big economical divide between the locals and the tourists

We did a taxi share with another couple into the city to stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables. Our driver and car for the day cost 15 CUC ($15) between the four of us. He took us to two different out door markets, the hospital (for our companions), a hotel for internet, grocery stores and the old city centre before dropping us back at the Marina. He worked very hard for his fare, and was a lovely friendly fellow.

We loved the markets. It had been so long (Eastern Caribbean) since we had see such a big selection of fresh fruit and vegetables. Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, every type of onion, regular and sweet potatoes, garlic, okra, carrots, cabbage, aubergines (egg plant), squashes and pumpkins. Fruits in season included oranges, mangoes, pineapples, papaya, key limes, soursop, watermelon and tamarind. Everything was incredibly cheap, but you still find yourself haggling over pesos. One minute you are trying to negotiated a vender down on his 25 peso pineapples, ‘what deal will you give me if I buy two?’, when you realize that 25 pesos is only $1. And they were the most expensive item we bought. To give you an idea, tomatoes were 4 pesos/pound. Oh and I forgot the huge selection of fresh herbs and spices. Perfect place to find your mint to go with your cheap Cuban rum to make Mojitos.

But this was a stark contrast to the hotel we visited. Here we found inflated ‘tourist’ prices, and be prepared to be ripped off. Internet is not available to the general population. It is only available at hotels and it strictly regulated despite being rubbish. They wanted 12 CUC for the first 2 hours and could not guarantee that it would work, but could guarantee that it would be very slow. I wanted to make sure that the SSB radio was uploading my blog info to you and also to send you at least a few photos to see. After 1 hour of trying to upload one photo the wordpress program of the blog just spit out an error message because it was taking too long. Sorry guys, 300 pesos later (more then we spent stocking up on food for 3 weeks) and it was all a waste of money. We have heard from other cruisers it will not get any better, so you are not getting any photos for a while.

Feeling a little ‘ripped off’ by the hotel we decided to walked the half hour into the centre of town. We left the driver and all our shopping with our companions to meet up later. We had heard that there was a park along the walk that sold 0.50 peso ice cream. We thought a healthy serving of cheap ice cream would cheer us up…..and it did. We found the park on the main road and it was totally designated to selling copious amounts of vanilla ice cream. Locals queued, at every stand, with every variety of contained to have them filled at 0.50 pesos a scoop. We got a double scoop in a cone for 1 peso each ($0.04/each).

This gave us the fortitude to continue on into town in search of a cheap lunch. For those on a budget pizza is the way to go in the town of Santiago de Cuba. Just follow the locals. Pizza, local style, is a healthy sized slice of fluffy crust with a dusting of cheese, and if you are lucky, a squirt of tomato sauce. Nothing fancy, but light and filling at between 2.5-5 pesos a slice (10-20 cents).

The centre of town is where you will find small stores that are like grocery stores. These stores sell dried goods, cans, jars and the odd bit of yogurt or meat. Each cost around 2 CUC/each ($2/each). These are expensive items for the locals. Security required you to check in all bags at the entrance and two or three guards manned each tiny aisle, in the big stores, or they were all behind the counter in smaller stores. We could not find coffee beans, flour or cheese on this trip. The availability of some items is limited. These stores only sell items surplus to a households allotment of food. These stores also sold the odd house hold item. We were surprised how expensive luxury items were because of their limited availability. A tiny flat screen TV sold for 450 CUC. The taxi driver told us an average new car sold for 250 000 CUC.

All our stocking up is done so it is time to move on. We are going to make our way west along the coast of Cuba towards Cienfuegos stopping along the way on the mainland and a few cays. We are checking out of this port tonight to make an over night passage west along the coast to Marea del Portillo. City visits are nice for the culture, but I am looking forward to running on a beach again.

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Photos, charts and information add once we got internet on link below:

Review of Southern Cuba Part 1- including the pictures you missed