We wandered towards Parque Central, managing to stave off a couple trying to con us into spending 12CUC on milk for them, and searched for a place to eat. We considered El Floridita but I think its reputation as a Hemingway halt probably inflates the prices beyond all reason. Instead we had a wonderful sandwich at the Hotel Telegrafo.
A wander down the Paseo de Marti took us to the Museo de la Revolucion, housed in Batista's rather splendid presidential palace (oh the irony).
What an odd museum, though. In each room we had to figure out which order the cases were in and even then they weren't really in chronological order. The guidebook had told us that all the displays were in English and Spanish, and it was true that most signs were bilingual. But in quite a lot of cases the main signs saying what was going on were only in Spanish, leaving us to piece together what was going on from the mottley collection of toothbrushes, mugs, shoes and shirts from some revolutionary hero or other. My personal favourite was the frying pan which had apparently been "seized" from the enemy. A good day's work for our revolutionary heroes.
What I found particularly interesting (apart from the propoganda-ish language used) was the section on the reforms Castro introduced. For example, there was mass unemployment so he created 500,000 extra jobs. A housing shortage so he built hundreds of thousands of extra houses over the years. Illiteracy was at about 40% and has now been completely eradicated.
But there doesn't seem to have been a (to use a buzz word) holistic approach to these reforms, so individual sections improved but the economy stayed as bad as ever. Where did all these new jobs come from? From what we've seen over the past few days all they've done is made everything as inefficient as possible so more people can work on each job. For example (I'm jumping ahead a bit here), on Monday we wanted to buy a bus ticket to Batabano and a ferry ticket to Nueva Gerona. Now there's nothing much in Batabano so a combined bus and ferry ticket would be what most people would want. But no. We were told to arrive at the bus station at 6.30am. We went to the ticket desk where the woman examined our passports, filled the details into a little book, handwrote what we thought was a ticket, gave us little cardboard squares with numbers on them and recorded which numbers she'd given us in another book. We stood around waiting for an hour and a half, then a man called us through a gate to the bus park in numerical order, taking our pieces of cardboard as we went. Then we got on the bus and a conductor walked up and down and sold us our 5CUC bus ticket. Then later in the journey he came back and took it off us. When the bus approached Batabano a lady got on and examined the docket we'd been given in the bus station and our passports. And, finally we got to Batabano and bought our ferry tickets, again having our passports checked. This baffles me. Why couldn't we buy a combined ticket in Havana (with our passports) and show it to the bus driver as we got on the bus, and the ticket official in Batabano, thus eliminating the man collecting cardboard squares, the conductor (twice), the lady in Batabano and most of the staff in the ticket office in Batabano? Because Castro is creating jobs, that's why. He is a hero.
Okay, so the American embargo causes huge problems for Cuba, but I'm not convinced that the massively inefficient system when you want to do anything helps Cuba at all.
Anyway, there we are. It was on the way between the Museo and the Hotel Nacional that I got robbed. That distracted me for the rest of the evening. We had a bowl of chicken and vegetable soup in the Hotel Nacional, then went home for an early night.
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