Farewell London, I'm Havana bound!

8am, New Year's Day 2012.  With rucksack packed - weighing a record low at 11.2kg - winter coat safely stowed in my wardrobe, ipod loaded with BBC World Service documentaries to educate me in all matters Cuban, and buoyed up with the excitement of discovering a new place, I closed the door on the British winter and set off to catch a train.

I can't stress enough how brilliant it was to start the new year in the sunshine.  My trip came about following a conversation with my dear friend CDD over a glass of wine in the queue for returns at the theatre a couple of months previously.  Within minutes we'd agreed on our destination and when we'd go, and a week later our flights were booked and the planning had begun.

Cliches about Cuba abound:  faded glory, 'must go before Castro dies', oh, the rum and the cigars!.... My knowledge was a fraction wider, thanks to a course on Latin America in the final year of my Geography degree.  Curious to recall what I'd learned, a few days before my trip I dusted off my files and dug out an essay I'd written about Cuba, where I seemed to argue that capitalism and socialism were beginning to co-exist tentatively, at least in the form of exclusive holiday resorts, although the benefits were only reaching a minority of the island's inhabitants.  Not an especially cogent argument, but my kind professor had given me a 1st for it so there must have been something convincing about it!  Alongside the essay were photocopied pages from an academic tome with the rather illustrious title 'Reconceptualising the Peasantry' - and for a moment I drifted off into a distant world of academic jargon....

I had loved learning about Cuba, and I've wanted to visit ever since.  Although this was my fourth sojourn to Latin America, I'm ashamed to say that my Spanish hasn't improved since the first time, and once again I benefited enormously from the fluency of my travel chum CDD who spent eight of her formative childhood years in Argentina, and is completely fluent in Spanish as a result.

What follows is simply an account of my observations as I travelled around Cuba - nothing more highbrow.  Internet is pretty hard to come by in Cuba so I'm blogging retrospectively from back in the UK (with snow falling outside the window on a cold February Sunday!).

A friend said to me before my trip that everyone finds their own Cuba.  Here is mine.  Hope you enjoy reading about it!