Havana - Cuba April 2017 Tour
In April we traveled to Cuba (Havana - pop 2.1 million, Cienfuegos - pop 150,000, and Trinidad - pop 15,000) on a Cultural Exchange with the Grand Circle Foundation. It really was a cultural experience. Besides the travel we met individually wth 6-8 entrepreneurs creating capitalist companies alongside the socialist system of Cuba. Throughout this commentary, I am borrowing occasionally from thoughts written by Bob Totten, a new friend and fellow traveler. We met with artists, sculpters, musicians, farmers, dancers, architects, trade unionists, fishermen, residents of a senior center, and kids and teachers at a day care center. We found it safe, the food was good, the weather was good. People were welcoming often stopping us on the street, "Where are you from? What are you doing here? What do you think of Cuba?" Our Spanish came back considerably making these less than rhetorical questions.
So we were on a Cultural Exchange - but by the end I began to suspect that it was carefully designed to show us only the best of Cuba. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but we saw a carefully filtered view of the country, one that omitted showing us a dark underbelly of the country.
Read MoreSo we were on a Cultural Exchange - but by the end I began to suspect that it was carefully designed to show us only the best of Cuba. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but we saw a carefully filtered view of the country, one that omitted showing us a dark underbelly of the country.