Do-it-yourself Cuba: Here's how to design your own cultural trip

Build your own cultural connections

Should it really cost $500 a day to tour Cuba, or $600-$700 for a 30-minute round-trip flight between Miami an Havana? No, and it doesn't have to any longer. 

U.S Tour companies and airlines operating charter-only flights have profited handsomely from U.S. government-sanctioned "People-to-People" group tours, the only legal way most American tourists have been able to visit - until now. As of March 23, new rules announced by the Obama administration will be in effect allowing American travelers to put together their own independent educational trips for the purpose of leaning about Cuban people and culture. 

Travelers who fill their days with museum visits, cultural sightseeing and interactions with Cubans could meet the requirements. You'll be required to keep record of your activities for five years, but other than that, no special license or advance permission will be required. 

I visited Cuba a few years ago, partly on an organized tour and partly on my own, and agree with John Caulfield, chief of the United States mission in Cuba from 2011 to 2014, who told the New York Times that the change will expose Americans to a more authentic experience in Cuba than they have been able to get on tours. As the Times points out, many of the commercial tours "involve a relatively closed circle of architects, performers, economists and organic farmers who cycle through American tour groups," who often receive money for the visits.

“They’ve essentially deregulated travel,” Robert Muse, a Washington attorney who specializes in U.S. laws regarding Cuba, told the Los Angeles Times. “This is a standing invitation to travel to Cuba for U.S. tourists.”

In other words, Americans are now to free to make their own arrangements much the way thousands of Canadians and Europeans do, with the exception of making plans for a beach vacation.

Despite what some tour operators would have you believe, there's no mystery to booking independent travel to Cuba. Other than the requirement that all travelers obtain a visa, the Cubans themselves place no restrictions on what Americans can do once there. Here's some tips to get you started, along with some ideas on how to fulfill the educational and people-to-people requirements.  


Air: Tricky to book on your own, but still doable, and about to get easier. U.S airlines, including Seattle-based Alaska Airlines, have applied for new commercial routes that the U.S. government will allow, possibly starting as early as this fall. Alaska Air has proposed two daily round-trip flights between Havana and Los Angeles. U.S. airlines are currently restricted to offering only expensive charter flights. InsightCuba, a tour operator that offers 12-day tours to Cuba at a cost of about $500 per person, per day, charges an extra $665-765 for the round-trip flight between Miami and Havana.

Alternatively, Air Canada and Cubana Air offer daily commercial flights into Havana (Air Canada from Canadian cities, Cubana from Cancun and Mexico City) that can be booked and paid for online or through travel agents. American travelers can also book iInternational and domestic air travel through Cuba Junky, a long-time and reliable online travel agency for Cuba travel.

Cuban bed and breakfast in Vinales

Accommodations: TripAdvisor offers hundreds of reviews for Cuban hotels and bed and breakfasts (called cases paticulares), offering what may be the best way to interact with Cuban people. Cuba Junky provides hotel booking services, and publishes a $4.99 app for finding and booking casas particulares directly with the owners. Some casa owners even have Facebook profiles. Airbnb lists more than 800 casas on its website. It charges a booking fee which may be worth of the convenience of booking online and paying for the reservation with a credit card.  

What can you expect in a casa? The Cuban government regulates homestays, requiring owners to set aside dedicated rooms and bathrooms and meet inspection requirements. 
On our visit to Cuba, my husband and I took a bus three hours from Havana to the rural community of Vinales, a UNESCO site known for its national park, limestone cliffs and traditional farms harvesting tobacco and corn. Scenic hikes and cave explorations await, but the best reason we could find to come to Vinales was to stay in a casa particular.

I looked over reviews on TripAdvisor, then made an online booking at Casa Papo y Niulvys. They requested no deposit, only asked that I call the day before to reconfirm. 

Papo met us at the bus stop on his bike, and we walked to the peach-colored house the couple built few years ago on what was a vegetable garden next door to his parents.
Niulvys was a gracious and talkative hostess, and a great cook. We paid $20 per night for the bright, spacious room below, with windows overlooking the garden, AC and a private bathroom. A breakfast of fresh fruit, eggs, toast, juice, coffee and cereal was an extra $4 each. Dinners (lobster one night, chicken the next) were another $8. Add a couple of Papo's pre-dinner Mojitos spiked with fresh mint from the garden, and we paid around $50 a night for the room, breakfast, drinks and dinner.

When it comes to hotels, it's easy enough to find their websites, and book directly. Rooms at the upscale Hotel Parque Central, Hotel Nacionale de Cuba and many others, can be booked this way.

Enter the Cuban economy:  Familiarize yourself with Cuba’s dual currency system. You’ll be exchanging dollars for convertible pesos (CUCs), a “hard currency” worth $1 each, minus a 10 percent exchange tax, a tit-for-tat for the U.S. embargo against Cuba. You can avoid the 10-percent tax by bringing either euros or Canadian dollars.

One of the hardest concepts for outsiders to grasp is that most Cubans are paid a government salary of about $20 per month, earned in the local currency, called pesos Cubanos or CUPs (worth about 4 cents each). Education, housing and health care are free. CUPs buy the basics: cooking oil, cheap meals, coffee cut with pea flour. But much of what the average Cuban wants and needs — drinkable coffee, washing machines, materials to fix up their homes — is only available to those who can pay in hard currency. (Tourism and money sent by relatives in the U.S. are the main sources).

Cuba is moving towards eliminating the dual currency system, and there are already signs of convergence.  Many previously CUC-only stores now accept either, and a new system of CUP pricing and accounting is being rolled out.

Join the locals at La Coppelia

Waiting in line is part of the experience

To get a sense of everyday Cuban life, tip in convertibles, but for a truly local experience, change $5 into pesos Cubanos, and enter government-subsidized Cuba. Buy a 4-cent ice-cream cone. Or patronize one of the fledgling entrepreneurs selling ice cream and pastries for pennies or pizza from their kitchen windows. Havana's famous La Coppelia ice cream parlor, a sprawling outdoor complex where Cubans line up by the hundreds, accepts only CUPs, except in a tiny area walled off for tourists. Use your CUPs and join the local fun. 
It's an ideal place for foreigners can mix with Cubans who don't have something to sell or aren't working in the tourist industry. Many tourists miss this real La Coppelia experience, however, because the guards steer foreigners to a separate "hard currency'' area where two scoops served in a glass dish cost around $2.75. 

Visit a local artist: Artists and musicians are Cuba's elite. They can keep all the money they earn, and enjoy special privileges, such as freedom to travel out of the country.  One of the most successful is Jose Fuster. HIs hose and studio in the suburban Havana neighborhood of Jaimanitas are on the itineraries of many tour groups, but independent travelers can easily visit themselves via taxi or local bus.  

Mosaic sculptures by Jose Fuster

Starting around 1995, a time economic belt-tightening after the break-up of the Soviet Union,  Fuster got the idea to brighten up his neighborhood. His home is covered in ceramic tile sculptures, and now so is his neighbor's house, the doctor's office and many more homes - with their permission, of course. 

Habana Centro

Get off-the-beaten path: Tourists see Havana's renovated Habana Vieja (Old Havana), but for a feel for what living here like for most people, walk through a neighborhood like Havana Centro, where kids play ball in the crumbling streets. Calle Obispo, a pedestrian shopping street linking some of the prettiest parts of Havana Vieja with seedier Centro, brings tourists and locals together with its eclectic mix of luxury hotels, art galleries, cafes, hard currency stores displaying frying pans and toothpaste in the windows and "peso'' ice cream shops. The spiffy old American cars get all the attention, but try the local transport. We road around most of the time in these little egg-shaped open-air taxis. 

Local transport

Learn about Cuba’s changing economy and differing views about life under Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul. Follow blogs by Cuban activists on Translating Cuba. Among the writers is Yoani Sanchez, author of Havana Real, whose blog is translated into English by Mary Jo Porter of Seattle.

For more ideas, photos and snapshots of everyday life in Cuba, I invite you to see my full Cuba blog.

From squid on a stick to temples and hot springs, Taipei has much to offer

Taipei's night market fun

They give us the thumbs up sign on the subway, offer us extra free samples at the markets, chase us down the street asking if we need directions, and always ask where we are from and how long we plan to stay.

If you want to feel like a VIP (or someone who just landed from Mars, depending on your perspective), come to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, the independent island off the coast of mainland China, once known as Formosa.

We've seen maybe a half-dozen Western faces since arriving here more than a week ago from Saigon. This amazing city is popular with other Asians, especially mainland Chinese tour groups, but Taiwan remains off-the-radar for most Americans. Why come? Food and friendly people are two reasons. We've spent the week walking an average 8 miles a day while eating our way through the night markets, exploring tea plantations, dipping our toes in thermal hot springs and just soaking up life in a high-energy city where street vendors dishing out 30-cent dumplings do business next door to New York and Tokyo-style shopping malls.

Occupied for years by the Japanese and by a short time by the mainland Chinese, Taiwan is an independent democracy with a newly-elected female president. Its official name has been the Republic of China since 1949 when its first president, Chiang Kai-shek, moved his Nationalist government here after losing control of China to the Communist party. Taiwanese culture reflects this unique upbringing. Financially prosperous, Taipei seems to work in ways similar to what you might experience in Singapore or Tokyo rather than Hong Kong or Shanghai. There's little or no crime, no bag-snatching or pick-pocketing, no short-changing or littering. It's considered impolite to bargain in the shops because that would indicate that the vendor was trying to cheat you by not offering a fair price in the first place.

My Taiwanese "grandma'' and her tofu pudding

It's true that fewer people speak English than in other big Asian cities, but those who do are anxious to practice. We've found that knowing how to say "Hello'' and "Thank you" in Taiwanese goes a long away. This Taiwanese "grandma'' and I communicated with hand gestures, smiles, a peak into her refrigerator and a thumbs up or down sign to win me a dish of her healthy homemade tofu pudding with peanuts and tapioca.

Banana...or is it the peel?

Among a population of more than 8 million are hundreds of thousands of young people such as the young woman above whom we met our first day out on a hiking trail to Elephant Mountain, just a few minutes walk from an area chock-a-block with high rises, multi-level Starbucks stores and the Taipei 101 Tower. The reason for her costume? She and her friends played a game of monopoly, and agreed the loser would to go out in public dressed as a banana.

Friendly faces at the Yuan Taipei cafe

We tend to think of the Chinese as tea drinkers (Taiwan grows and produces vast amounts of quality Oolong tea), but coffee is extremely popular here, and Starbucks has lots of competition from local roasters. Some of the cafes occupy gorgeous spaces. Others are simply open-air, sidewalk storefronts churning out brown sugar lattes macha green tea smoothies for about $2. This cafe above is in an 80-year-old house that the owners refurbished near Dihua Street, one of Taipei's oldest streets. 

All aboard the MRT

Everyone gets around on the MRT, an underground and above-ground high-speed mass transit system linking all parts of the city. Stations empty out into miles of underground shopping malls, with dozens of different exits to street level. We've been lost several times. One day we walked for at least a mile underground between stations before finally finding our way out. Americans might object to a slew of rules for good behavior on the MRT, but this is Asia where concern for the common good trumps the right to do as you please. Announcements in Taiwanese and English warn passengers "not to smoke or chew betel nut," and to "please wear a surgical mask if you have a cold or the flu." Surgical masks, in fact, have become so common that some women have begun coordinating them with their outfits.

Restrooms are plentiful and clean. What woman hasn't been frustrated by having to wait in line to use the bathroom? Here you know exactly how long that wait might be. Electronic signs posted outside indicate how many stalls are available, and "real time'' wait times for both western-style and Asian-style toilets.

Electronic displays indicate restroom wait times

It's possible to tick off Taipei's major tourist sites fairly quickly. Our first stop was the Taipei 101 Tower, designed to resemble bamboo rising from the earth. Between 2004 and 2009, it was the world's tallest building. Elevators zip passengers to the 89th-floor observation deck in 37seconds. A film shows how the building swayed slightly during a recent typhoon. Tickets to the top cost $15, an outrageous price compared to cost of most everything else, but they came with a two-for-one coupon for a beer and mango float. 

The Taipei 101 Tower

Gate to the Chaing Kai-shek Memorial

We weren't all that impressed with the Chaing Kai-shek Memorial, maybe because a huge, temporary tent housing an exhibit of Disney's "Frozen'' movie obscured the view. Tom did get a nice picture of the changing of the guard.

Changing of the Guard

More impressive than Taipei's monuments and museums are its temples dedicated to colorful Chinese deities.

Old man under the moon

Our favorite was the Xiahai City God temple. It's the most popular place for young people in Taipei to make offerings to the Old man under the moon, also known as the Matchmaker, the god of marriage and love in Chinese mythology.

We noticed people throwing curved tiles on the floor. These are divining blocks used to seek advice from the gods. People first stand before can icon, and burn three incense sticks. Then while holding the blocks, they silently state their name and birthdate and present the petition in the form of a question. They then throw the blocks. If one convex side and one flat side shows, the answer is positive. Two convex sides are "angry blocks.'' The answer is negative. If two flat side show, no answer has been given, and you have to try again with the question framed a different way.

By far, we've had the most fun wandering through the crowded, chaotic night markets. Everyone goes for the xiaochi or "small eats." Food vendors try to outdo each other hawking snacks with strange English translations. I spotted signs for "Pig and Miscellaneous Soup," "Salty Poridge," "Black Tea Juice," and "Nutritious Sandwich."

Not-so-stinky tofu

Stinky tofu is a big seller. We learned to recognize the smell, but as it turns out, it's only stinky before it's cooked, according to a Taiwanese friend. Marinated and grilled, it's delicious. Taiwanese food tends to be healthy, emphasizing lots of veggies, but a lot of night market food is similar to what you might find at a carnival or fair in the U.S., only with an Asian twist. Popular are fried fish balls on a stick, fried squid on a stick and tomatoes (on a stick) dipped in a red, candy apple-like syrup.  Mostly, we played it safe, passing on the fried seafood, but going for cubes of blow-torched steak and ice cream made with liquid nitrogen.

Tom enjoying ice cream made with liquid nitro

Lemon jelly drink at the Shilin Night Market 

A hot climate calls for a steady supply of refreshing drinks. The woman above is making a lemon jelly drink spiked with fresh lime. Remember bubble tea, sometimes called pearl tea? The craze started in Taiwan. Market vendors make their own  homemade tapioca pearls for "Boba Milk," a mixture of tea with milk, sugar, ice and tiny tapioca balls the size of pearls.

Homemade tapioca for Boba Milk

Taipei is surrounded by mountains, so it's easy to literally go from concrete jungle to the real thing via a short ride on the MRT, bus or cable car. What could be one of the world's longest (45 minutes) and cheapest ($3) gondola ride takes visitors to Maokong, Taiwan's oldest tea-growing area filled with lush forests and hiking trails.

Maokong: Countryside in the city

Tea tourism more than tea production keeps the economy going these days. From the gondola, it was a pleasant mile or so walk to trails leading to the Yaoyue Tea house, one of the best among many scattered along a winding road. We went on a weekday when here were few people around, so we were surprised to find out that Yaoyue is open 24 hours a day.

Afternoon tea at the Yaoyue

The Taiwanese like to visit the tea houses at sunset or after dark, especially during hot weather. Wait on weekends can be long, but on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, we had our choice of tables inside or out. Tea and snacks run around $20 for two. We settled on two types of steamed dumplings, one filled with bok choy and the other with a sweet cream. The tea was a typical Taiwanese oolong, light, almost watery, and low in caffeine.

Smoke rises from Beitou's Thermal Valley

Our other outing away from the city was to the suburb of Beitou, a town known for its thermal hot springs, about 20 minutes out on the MRT. Beitou could be what Ballard is to Seattle or Hyde Park is to Cincinnati. Mom-and-pop shops, neighborhood bakeries and street vendors (this is where I met the tofu pudding lady) cater to locals benefiting from a healthy economy fueled by hot springs resort hotels.

Breakfast at the Solo Singer Inn

We stayed two nights at the Solo Singer Inn, a traditional Taiwanese inn opened four years ago by a group of artists and travelers and historians. The Japanese stayed in inns like this one opened during their occupation (1845-1945). Few of the inns survived, and from what I could tell, the Solo Singer is a unique accommodation in Taipei. Rooms retain the original layout with sloping walls and narrow, wooden staircases, each one with one unique window onto an everyday scene of alley culture. We loved the young English-speaking staff and the traditional Taiwanese breakfasts sourced from local Beitou purveyors.

Fish pedicure

Most of the thermal baths are in the resorts, but their are three public options, including an outdoor spa built into the rocks near a park that runs through the town. It looked inviting, but there was a long wait to get in due to a public holiday, so we opted for one of the indoor bathhouses where an hour's soak in a private hot tub cost around $10. Afterwards, the staff encouraged us to take advantage of a "free'' fish pedicure. These little toothless carp called "doctor fish" eat away at dead skin. Let's just say we dipped our toes in long enough to get a picture.

Pucci buns

We ate our last meal in Taipei at a restaurant on the 8th floor of a department store. Like the MRT stations, the store had several entrances, so we spent a long time wandering in and out looking for the one leading to the 8th floor elevator. Along the way, we spotted this "Kitchen Pucci'' stand specializing in Shanghai-style steamed dumplings . It was closing for the night, so I didn't get a chance to try a Pucci bun.  I have no idea how someone with an Italian last name the same as mine came to run a chain of bun shops in Taiwan. This is what I love about Asia. There's always a mystery.

Click here to see more photos of our trip to Saigon and Taipei.