Mastering a queue and finding a taxi

Mum and I have been thinking about how Cuba will change when Castro dies, and when the US embargo is lifted. People talk about Cuba "becoming" capitalist, but in fact it already is. Okay, so the government is a communist/socialist dictatorship but most of the people we meet only seem to care about making money. In Ireland if we offered to do something for someone such as show them the way somewhere we would never consider asking for money for that, and we'd feel rather embarrassed if we were offered it. It makes me rather distrustful of anyone offering help here. We've probably rudely rejected assistance from a number of genuine people, but it's so hard to separate the real offers of help from the people hoping to make money.

Today, however, nobody has been trying to rip us off. I like Nueva Gerona. We had a lovely breakfast similar to Diane's on Sunday - fruit salad (the banana here is delicious), omelette, bread, jam, and very milky coffee. Then Ray took us to the
Cubana airline offices to see if we could get a flight back to Havana (only 25 minutes and cheaper than the ferry!). We had a rather baffling conversation with the people there who kept shaking their heads and saying '25'. Eventually we worked out that they meant there weren't any free flights until the 25th (Saturday) and that they didn't actually know whether there was a boat or not.

So we traipsed downtown to the port where we had quite a bit of fun mastering the Cuban queuing system (no, that's not just a random crowd, there is method to the madness). We felt rather pleased with ourselves when we managed to buy both our ferry and our bus tickets relatively easily. With just one transaction! Streamlined or what?

Flushed with our success we managed to find the state-run taxi company who told us we couldn't have a taxi to Presidio Modelo. In fact, they didn't really seem to have any taxis, just buses, but a kindly bus-driver gave us a free lift to the bus-stop we needed and then found us a charming taxi-driver as well, one with an actual car (the bike taxis which are everywhere here wouldn't be so good for longer journeys).