Some of you well-informed people may have noticed I was not covering the important North Battleford city council budget deliberations last week.
That was because I decided taking a vacation was more important, and so I went to Cuba.
I needed time off. I had juggled doing sports for two months in addition to my regular news duties this fall, which also included coverage of the election. That all left me exhausted, so when the opportunity finally came to take a vacation to Varadero at a reasonable price, I couldn’t say no.
The following are just a few of my random thoughts about my vacation in Cuba, since that is all I can muster today. I am still zonked out from the flight I took the other day.
I guess the first question people have is why go to Cuba and not to Las Vegas where I usually go in the winter. The easy answer to that question is I was looking for somewhere new and different to go to. Since Cuba had been in the news recently with the improvement in relations between that communist country and the United States, a trip there made a lot of sense. There talk about how people ought to see Cuba now, before the embargo is lifted and the Americans overrun the place with McDonald’s and Starbucks.
But there were other reasons. The biggest fear for me was the terrorism situation in the United States and around the world. My biggest fear about Las Vegas was that some Islamic State idiot might blow up something on the Las Vegas strip at the exact moment when I happened to be inside the building. This was on my mind when I booked my trip to Cuba, and this was all before the San Bernadino shootings happened.
The weakening Canadian dollar was another factor that made trips to the United States and also to Mexico prohibitive. The dollar’s woes, I noticed, were really being felt in the sun destinations. Even in Cuba, the talk was about how the resorts in Varadero were far less crowded because the Canadians were staying home.
Perhaps that explains why prices to Cuba have been so cheap lately. The resorts there must be getting desperate. I found a great deal for a week’s vacation there for less than $800, and this was for a three-and-a-half star resort. I thought I was doing very well for myself until I noticed other deals for something like $150 less than that a week or two later.
I guess my main point is not to let either the Canadian dollar or the worldwide terrorism situation deter you from a sun vacation if you really are determined to go somewhere. There are still deals out there, and I’m thinking there may be more of them once Christmas is over, because the sun destinations are really starting to feel the pinch.
I ought to talk about Sunwing. This was my first experience travelling with Sunwing and it was great. The food was better than what I usually get from WestJet. But as I noted earlier, their flight times to and from Varadero are absolutely ridiculous.
The first flight left Saskatoon around 7:40 p.m. and didn’t arrive in Cuba until after 3 a.m., so I was checking into my hotel room in the middle of the night. As for my return flight a week later, it ended up being delayed by 40 minutes so it didn’t leave until after 4:30 a.m.
Here are a few other random thoughts about the overall trip to Cuba:
Life on the resorts in Varadero gives travellers a skewed view of life in Cuba in general. The resorts provide first world living conditions and first world food, but if you take a day trip outside of Varadero to Havana you see for yourself what the real Cuba is like and the living conditions for people there.
People should definitely see Cuba before McDonald’s and Starbucks are able to enter the country and put their franchises all over the place. Cuba is widely promoted as this “authentic” destination, a place not overrun by the big multinational corporations and franchises.
Having said that, Varadero could have used a McDonald’s or a Starbucks while I was there. The place has a definite shortage of decent fast food joints and shopping malls.
Public washrooms outside the resorts in Cuba are a joke. Most have no toilet seats and toilet paper is in short supply. There are female attendants located outside these public washrooms who actually have the job of providing toilet paper to the patrons. This is an actual job in Cuba. Think about that.
Another thing in short supply — good bookstores and newsstands. There were bookstores, all right, but the problem was with the selection. It was all Che Guevara this and Fidel Castro that, and copies of the Communist Manifesto and other leftist propaganda. It was terrible.
I was hoping they might have some good books about Cuban baseball or Cuban cigars or something actually interesting. Instead, it was all politics.
Thank God my resort offered satellite TV. It was the only way I stayed informed at all.
I’ll end with a story about how I managed to keep up with news about the Saskatchewan Roughriders during my trip. I had a feeling the team would announce its new general manager and head coach Monday, so that evening I made sure to be back to my hotel room in time to watch the CTV local news from Montreal, hoping they might mention something about it during their sportscast.
Sure enough, they ran a clip from the press conference in Regina that day, announcing that Chris Jones was named the new GM and coach of the Roughriders.
So that was how I found out that big local football news from Saskatchewan, by watching TV from my hotel room in far-away Varadero, Cuba.
