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Cuba: 10 travel tips for first-timers
21.07.2023 - 08:07 / roughguides.com
Cuba is an infinitely fascinating country and undoubtedly different from most places you've travelled. If you're planning your first trip, take on board these Cuba travel tips from our expert co-author of the Rough Guide to Cuba, Matt Norman.
If you want to get to know Cuba you’re going to need to get to know Cubans. There’s no easier way of doing this on a two-week trip than to stay in the Cuban version of a B&B, a casa particular. You’ll feel more like a lodger than a hotel guest, sharing the owners’ living space with them and, given the national penchant for chat, engaging with them in next to no time. It's essentially the socialist Airbnb.
As far as the internet goes, Cuba is among the most poorly connected countries in the world, with severe state restrictions on who and where gets access, dreadful connection speeds and no mobile broadband other than wifi.
Unless you are staying in or near a top hotel, don’t expect to be able to connect with your phone at all. You might just be lucky enough to find one of the few public wifi spots or patient enough to queue at one of the small number of internet cafés – where the connection will be screen-gazingly slow and the rates usually exorbitant.
So unless you do all your online research before you leave home, one of our best Cuba travel tips is to bring a guidebook.
Leaving a night out to chance can be the making of a memorable one anywhere in the world, but in Cuba the chances are slimmer. Even in the holiday resorts, trying to find ‘the buzz’ or ‘the strip’, you’ll be on a hiding to nothing – there just aren’t enough venues and those that there are, in most towns and cities, are sparsely spread.
Find out in advance where the night spots are, be prepared to spend some time travelling between them – especially in Havana where they are greater in number but dotted sporadically over a huge area (you’ll probably need to use taxis). If you find a venue you like, stick with it.
Explore our guide to the best things to do in Cuba for lots of ideas on how to spend your Cuban holiday.
Lime daquiri © summer_sandra / Shutterstock
The confusing dual currency system in Cuba has spawned a whole family of local scams so it pays to get to know one set of banknotes from the other. Cubans get paid in pesos, also referred to as national pesos; the faces of peso banknotes are printed with head-and-shoulders-pictures of Cuban heroes.
You’ll pay for most goods and services in convertible pesos, twenty-four times more valuable than national pesos; depicted on these banknotes are national monuments but their values are printed as pesos, just like their counterparts. The words pesos convertibles only appears in a smaller font below the value.
Paying in convertibles and getting change in
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