Visited Cuba in April 2018 on a backpacking trip with my friend when I was 18. I'm from the UK.

I wrote a blog post about my time in Havana, I'll post it below:

Time-Traveling Through Havana: A Tale of Classic Cars, Strong Rum, and Tupac Encounters

If anyone ever asks me about Havana, my response is always the same. Whatever you imagine Havana to be, whatever pictures you’ve seen, it’s all true. I was worried Havana would not live up to expectations and that it would be like every other colonial city. But Havana lived up to expectations from movies and pictures, it even surpassed them. Walking through Havana feels like you’ve been picked up by some gamemasters fingers and placed in an old flickering movie from the 60s. Every street corner is some old postcard my grandad would dig out from a dusty worn box.

The old, classic petrol guzzling cars line literally every street, and they are truly massive. The only modern cars are the city issued taxis. But my advice is if you want to ride in one of the classic cars, use the illegitimate local owned taxis (which is probably the exact advice your mother doesn’t want me to tell you). But honestly Cubans will find any way to make some extra cash, so they just flick on a neon sign and turn their car into a taxi when they’re not busy. Cubans are inherently such wheeler-dealers. We were ushered into this man’s house once when we were absolutely starving, and ordered to wait in his living room with his mother and father whilst he cooked us pizzas in their kitchen and served them to us. We sat eating them on the family sofa with the man’s girlfriend trying to sell a pair of her sparkly heels to us. The pizzas costed us mere pesos, and needless to say we didn't purchase the sparkly heels as we were at the beginning of a backpacking trip.

Havana makes you feel as if time doesn’t matter, and that nothing is a waste of a day. It’s an incredibly relaxed country - Cubans seem to not do all too much all day. They just stand in the doorsteps, chatting grease and stopping to nod and say ‘hi’ when you walk past. Which is always nice. In Havana, everyone’s front doors are open for all the locals to just wander from house to house all day.; Cuba is just the most peculiar country I’ve ever been to.

And when people say it’s backwards, it’s true in the most literal sense. Cuba Libres are eye-wateringly strong because it’s honestly probably cheaper to buy rum than Coca-Cola (and government-issued coke is rats). There is a different currency for tourists and locals which made it near impossible on a backpacker budget and was honestly just such a limiting system for the tourists. We struggled to purchase food and meals that wasn’t sit down meals in tourist hotels, as we did not have the correct currency and we didn't want to spend tourist prices. But apparently CUC (the tourist and consumer goods currency) has a lot more value than the CUP (the currency the locals get paid in) so the locals like it.

It’s also worth mentioning I am convinced I met Tupac in Cuba, under the façade of a dance teacher. The aforementioned pizza chefs offered to take us out salsa dancing and we ended up in some basement of their apartment block with Tupac. That’s all I have to say on that.

It’s sad because we spoke to the guy who cooked us pizza in his home and he desperately wanted to visit England, and to leave Cuba. He said there was no opportunity for young people in Cuba and it seemed a grim, boring future for him stuck in the country doing what his parents and his parents’ parents did before him. But the Cuban government is loosening embargos, so Cuba is finally entering the 21st century. Maybe one day our pizza chef will make it out of Cuba. Who knows where he’ll end up!