I apologise for being a bit quiet recently, but I was on a little jolly to Cuba. Each year a bunch of geography students from my university get to spend a week or so in Cuba, looking at all sorts of interesting things that are going on. Of course, bringing a bunch of twenty year students anywhere would involve serious recreation, but there was a healthy balance between the consumption of local culture (drinking rum) and the study of consumption of local culture (the curious contradiction of luxury tourism in a socialist country). This was my second year on the trip, and this year was even more educative and entertaining than last year.

I was there in my capacity as an academic member of staff, so involved in the teaching and assessment, but as I was the only member of staff fluent in Spanish, I had quite a bit of translating work to do. This ranged from acting as a go-between with some students and a representative of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, who was more interested in talking about sex than in the benefits of world socialism, and translating warnings from bar staff to students about the danger of jineteros*, a concept that they didn’t believe could be possible.

There are a great number of similarities but also differences between Cuba and the DR. Both have rich cultures that are mainly a mix of African and Spanish influences, and the art, music, religion, food and many other areas of life share a great number of commonalities, although Cuban rice and beans is superior, as instead of using artificial flavourings and MSG, the economic problems have forced them to use natural spices. Forty nine years of socialism have created some great differences – whilst most visitors find the 1950s American cars a great attraction (how strange it is that no tourist brochure mentions the 1970s Ladas), I was more struck by the lack of large, expensive 4*4s, a feature as common to Dominican urban life as beggars and slums. Whilst both Santo Domingo and Havana were both great colonial cities, the old town of Havana is far superior and better preserved – whilst Dominicans have been knocking down old buildings to build boring concrete blocks of boring shops, Havana has been saved by the combination of four decades of benign neglect followed by one of frantic preservation. Apart from a handful of colonial buildings saved by the state as museums, the only people who look after Santo Domingo’s colonial heritage are private owners (almost all foreign individuals and corporations) and the Catholic Church.

We made a visit to the building at the forefront of the American attempts to stamp the imperialist jackboot on the people of Cuba, the American special interests section. This is the frontline in the war of words – at night a scrolling message board at the top of the building spreads the benefits of democracy and capitalism mixed with messages relaying baseball results, whist the surrounding billboards denounce the American sponsorship of Miami based terrorists. The war of words is more of a playground scrap, as accompanying the billboards are hundreds of fascist looking black flags, which the Cubans claim is to represent the dead from American sponsored terrorist attacks, but the Americans claim is to stop people from viewing the message board.

Not generally the sort of architecture that tourists come to see in Havana, but interesting none the less.

*Jinetero: a good looking, snake hipped Cuban who hangs around bars frequented by tourists, distracting them with their charms before stealing their wallets, or convincing them that they are really the love of their lives in order to gain access to their money or a visa. Their Dominican cousins are called Sankeys, and both are real dangerous professionals.