Until recent years, Cuba offered very limited access to the internet. During our most recent visit in 2016, we noticed that the situation had improved quite a bit by the proliferation of wifi hot spots in public parks across almost every sized towns. Nonetheless while in Cuba, we could not count upon the same internet speed and reliability which we’ve come to take for granted at home and in others parts of the world. In order to better prepare for this situation, we first spent a fair amount of time planning our itinerary ahead of our visit. Secondly, we would privilege offline applications on our phone. As we’ve used Maps.me, an offline GPS mapping application on our phone, successfully throughout our previous travel to foreign countries, we are expecting to use Maps.me again extensively for all of our navigation on the island. Thirdly, we also took care of downloading leisure reading ebooks and travel guide ahead of time as many e-commerce website hosted in the USA don’t allow on-line purchases originating from Cuba.
A second challenge for cycling in Cuba is that the source of food supplies are somewhat limited to special “dollar stores”, vegetable and fruit markets, casas particulares, paladares (family owned eateries) and finally the occasional not-so great government hotel/resort restaurants. The common convenience stores, bakeries, cafes and the like found in most other countries are far from being prevalent in Cuba. Our approach to this context involved relying heavily on the use of casas particulares, the Cuban equivalent of a B&B. Until a couple of years ago, it was a costly undertaking, due to the hefty government licensing fees, for home owners to open-up their house as a casa particular. A few years ago, as the government licensing fees decreased significantly, the number of casas particulares available across the country increased a lot. In 2019, there are likely over 3,000 casas particulares across Cuba. And, very recently the casas have started to appear on popular reservation websites such as Booking.com, AirBnB.com and TripAdvisor.com. The casas particulares are also increasingly showing up on Google maps. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the casas particulares were simply inventoried across several websites specializing in Cuban travel information. The reliability of using a reservation websites in Cuba such as AirBnB remains unclear to us. We will certainly find out shortly as we have booked our first stay in Cuba through AirBnB. We’ve reserved a casa for three nights in the town of Matanzas, near the popular resort area of Varadero.
Locating casas particulares upon arriving in a town was very important to us as to avoid being “escorted” to specific casa by the ever-present young Cuban touts (i.e. jinetaros). Hence, we invested a lot of time and efforts over the past few months to compile a list of casas particulares including addresses, landline and mobile phone numbers. We succeeded at compiling and mapping the location of over 1,800 casas particulares across the island. We managed to import all this information into Maps.me in order to provide an convenient offline access.
As the casas particulares will serve us both as our accommodation and as main source of meals, we will be leaving our camping and cooking equipment at home. The lighter load means we will be able to carry all our equipment and clothes using our tandem’s four panniers while not relying on a trailer either.