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Boston Globe

Vintage cars and vibrant culture: Inside a Cuba tour for US travelers

Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Having enjoyed a European tour with the company several years ago, from Prague to Vienna and Budapest, we were eager to try its Havana-based trip. And now, back home in Hingham, we find ourselves happily reliving our Cuban experience. Advertisement Our tour started in Miami. After a night in an airport-area hotel, we got to know others among the two-dozen passport-and-visa-bearing Tauck customers ready to make American Airlines' brief Havana flight. Also on our flight were many Cuban Americans, who can freely visit the island to bring supplies to family members there. (Cuba's economy continues to struggle, for a variety of reasons.) Once on the island, we boarded the coach our group would use throughout our visit, and met Cuban-based guide Hector, who would also serve at times as translator. On the trip's overall agenda were programs with community educational and arts organizations, an architectural walking tour, visits to an art studio, museums, historic sites, and a day-long trip to the island's scenic western province, known especially for its tobacco-growing. (Our Tauck tour director, Laura Nunez, advised that past Tauck trips had included stops in eastern Cuba, and said the company hopes to return there as economic conditions in that region improve.) Day One in Havana featured a delightful lunch at Cocina de Lilliam — a long-established 'paladar,' as the city's privately-owned, family-style restaurants are called. Our tour included nearly all meals, primarily at paladars, where the service is generally family-style. Featured were a variety of local fish and lobster, along with pork, chicken, and beef dishes. A dinner one evening was at La Esperanza paladar, occupying the first floor of a beautiful Cuban home where the owner lives upstairs. In both paladars and restaurants, live music featuring Cuban styles and rhythms kept us immersed in the rich culture of the island nation. Advertisement Roy Harris (green shirt) admiring architecture in Old Havana. Eileen McIntyre As we drove through Havana, heading for the hotel that would be our main base, we were struck by the many buildings with severely deteriorated facades, outnumbering well-kept-up structures on some city streets. (Access to imported materials, along with the economic conditions, make building-maintenance challenging.) Over the next several days we'd visit neighborhoods that included the sites of diplomatic embassies, and the 'Old Havana' historic area. While those areas were very well-maintained — we found them the exception. Our group stayed in Havana's Hotel Parque Central — a Hilton prior to 1959 — which is again privately owned and comfortably met our needs. (Tauck chose it both because it was not on the blacklist of hotels and other Cuban institutions maintained by the US State Department, and because it had a reliable generator to deal with rolling blackouts that are part of Cuban life — because of challenges in importing fuel for the generation of electricity.) Immediately catching our eye on the streets of Havana — and from our hotel's view — were the many vintage cars, mostly mid-20th-century American models, for which the country is famous. Hector explained that while importing more-modern cars is now allowed, most Cubans cannot yet afford them. An early visit on our tour was to a privately-owned auto-restoration business, where two near-mint-condition old American cars were on display. The owner, Raymond, proudly operates his business in a garage once operated by his grandfather. He also mentors car owners belonging to an antique-auto club. Such cars are often known as 'Frankensteins,' we learned, because of the variety of parts under the hood that keep them running. Advertisement 'We'll take this one!' The authors with a vintage car. Courtesy photo While our trip touched on expected topics associated with Cuba — like cigars, rum, salsa dancing, baseball, and Ernest Hemingway's time on the island — we were most touched by the hours we enjoyed at intimate programs involving community and cultural organizations. Among them: BEYOND ROOTS, a center for the Afro-Cuban community, where we learned about the importance of Santeria, a Cuban form of an African religion, in the country's culture; and HAVANA COMPAS DANCE, a dance company that mixes Cuban and contemporary dance rhythms with flamenco and other Spanish dance styles, and percussion drawing on the island's African traditions. We also came to appreciate important 20th-century Cuban artists at the beautiful galleries of Havana's National Museum of Fine Arts. And history came alive as we walked around Revolutionary Square — imagining the large crowds that once stood for hours to hear Fidel Castro. A walking tour of Old Havana, guided by a local architect, covered key aspects of the island's history as a Spanish colony, as well as the important restoration work on historic structures begun after a 1982 Heritage Law was passed. Because of Roy's ancestral history with tobacco farming in Colonial Virginia, we found our visit to western Cuba's rich agricultural Vinales valley, in the Pinar Del Rio province, of particularly interest. The beautiful valley — a UNESCO World Heritage site — is surrounded by stunning, rounded limestone hills, called mogotes. At a piece-work factory we saw how tobacco leaves are manually sorted, with the most-perfect leaves saved for use as outer wrappers of cigars, while less-perfect leaves are used for inner cigar portions. Broken or partial leaves get set aside for use in cigarettes. From a farm owner who showed us how to hand-roll a cigar, we learned that the tobacco season runs from seedbed in October to harvesting and processing in March. Farmers, we were told, are required to sell 90 percent of the tobacco they grow to the government. Advertisement Ernest Hemingway's Finca Vigia home. Roy Harris and Eileen McIntyre Another highlight: Hemingway's Finca Vigia home, about a half-hour drive from Havana. As the two of us years ago had toured the late author's home in Key West, Fla., we were pleased to learn about his life in Cuba — with rooms on view 'just as Hemingway left them,' the docent told us. Our time in Cuba touched us deeply and taught us much. And it also offered moments of exhilaration — including the fun we had being driven in vintage convertibles through the Havana Forest and along the coastline. If you go . . . Both a Cuban visa, and local medical-insurance, are required — along with a signed US affidavit regarding the 'People to People' nature of your visit. (A tour company like Tauck likely will handle such logistics, along with booking the flights and hotel.) Check on additional vaccinations you may want to get. (We visited a travel clinic for these, though they were not required to enter Cuba.) Depending on the time of year and your itinerary, you may want to bring mosquito spray, as Cuba and some other Caribbean nations have seen an increase in dengue fever. Visitors, as well as the Cuban people, can freely access the internet, but US telecommunications companies do not have direct service in Cuba for phone or text. The all-inclusive Tauck tour we booked has a current price of $5,990 per person. Finally, be aware that Americans are not allowed to bring back any Cuban cigars or rum. Roy Harris, a retired journalist who spent 24 years with The Wall Street Journal, is the author of Pulitzer's Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism. His wife, Eileen McIntyre, a local history buff, is a retired corporate communications executive.