We side tripped out of Havana to Vinales, a three hour bus ride southwest. It’s a small town with one main road, a main square with a church. There are nearly as many tourists as town people, and most of the Cubans are in the tourist industry. Groups of people meet you at the bus stop selling a room for the night. Almost every house off the main road looks identical, and each has been converted into a casa particulare, a room for rent in a house occupied by a Cuban family. Because there are very few hotels in Cuba, many tourists stay in casas particulares. We stayed at Casa Rosa, complete with air conditioning to battle the heat. During the day the temperature was in the 90’s and humid. Probably the hottest place we’ve been–ever.
The ‘Vinales Tour’ the next day brought us to all the best sights in the area; starting with view point overlooking the valley, a primitive mural of evolution painted on the side of a rock, a visit to a cave, and my favorite, a visit with a local farmer.
The farmer we met ‘owns’ four hectareas of land which has been in the family for four generations. The farmer is completely self-sustaining with his fields of potatoes, taro, corn, sugar cane, rice. He also grows avocados, tangerines, oranges, mangos, and coffee beans (which is left out to dry for months, and is very, very strong coffee). Lastly, each farmer by law is required to grow a minimum amount of tobacco. November to April is the only growing season for tabacco, the government buys the dried tobacco leaves for $600 dollars for 3 tons of tobacco (or something insane like that). Since there is no private industry, the government owns everything, including the tabacco industry which is one of Cuba’s largest money generators. So, it buys the tabacco from the farmers at a favorable price for itself, barely covering the cost of the labor for the farmers, and sells it’s Cuban cigars for huge profits.