After four days relaxing on our honeymoon, we returned to the capital and this time we had a beautiful day of sunshine and blue sky, finally! The center looked even more beautiful with the good weather.

This time we took the tourist bus and went to visit the square of the revolution, which has the famous big piece of art with the face of Che Guevara and Camillo Cienfuegos, the greatest heroes of the revolution.

Traveling in Cuba is a unique and amazing experience and definitely Havana is our favorite place. It is there where we can see the strong roots of the communist system but also his failures. It’s a completely anti-capitalist system who make you feel like anywhere else.

It’s funny to walk the big streets without seeing any advertising anywhere, not once in the country! The only thing we can see it’s big propagandas made by the government, slogans about revolution and socialism spread everywhere around the country, many with images of Che, Fidel or Camillo.

In Havana Vieja you will see some international stores for tourists but in other neighborhoods you can walk blocks and blocks without seeing any store, and when you found one, it is very strange, no decoration, few options of products, in a same store you can buy shoes, clothes, food, beauty products and stationery.
Cuban artists are extremely encouraged and privileged and may have a better quality of life. With so much focus for music, art and sports you can see talented artists everywhere. In our capitalist society if a teenager says his father: “Dad, I want to become a musician,” the parents will say, “Music is something bum, you have to study something real to have a good career my son.” In Cuba a father would never say that and in fact children can already choose to study music from secondary school. It’s another world.

It is interesting to try to understand a system where everyone, no matter the profession, earn between 15 to 25 dollars a month. This is something hard to believe but every Cuban in their own way are trying to make extra money and it is common to see many business in the garage at the people’s house, like a small fast food, selling fruit or other products or even a restaurant. There’s always a black market for everything.

People are very poor but we never saw a beggar asking for money or any person living on the street, it seems that it doesn’t exist in Cuba.
Like every good socialist country, education and health care is a right for all and there it really works. It is the only third world country on the planet with 100% of the population literate. People have no economic power but everyone is well educated and no matter with whom you interact in the street you will always be able to talk about everything. They are aware of the world of politics, history… But after so many years of military controls where freedom of expression does not exist, the population is afraid to express it selves on some issues, like about being against politic ideas of the country for example, people may even be arrested for it.

It’s hard to explain everything briefly, but Cuba is definitely worth a visit, and if you want to still feel all this, go there soon, before things change. In all that time travelling we never had visited a country with a social culture so unique. A system that had good intentions to guarantee the basic needs for all but had many flaws to ensure his self-economic-sustainability and ended up falling to the side of oppression to keep their cause in difficult economic times.

To end the trip in the middle of the night, we got a nice surprise when a friend of Eva arrived in a convertible Chevrolet Impala from the 60’s in perfect condition to give us a ride to the airport. This is just one of the last 5 still existing in Cuba, it was great! Happy ending!