The clock was ticking. How to see and photograph the old city (Habana Vieja) while good light remained? We'd been told to not take the Calle Obispo, the best preserved but most gentrified street, so as to avoid the tourist traps. And we definitely wanted to avoid the Bodeguita del Medio, a famed bar and restaurant frequented by Hemingway.
When Gorky, our guide/chauffeur (no, I'm not making this up – his name means bitter in Russian), offered to take us on a 40-minute horse and buggy ride for only 15 CUCs, or $17, it sounded like a good deal. We'd tour around the outskirts of the old city (it's massive), then go through a few cross streets. Normally, I'd have run away from a horse and buggy tour, but Gorky was a real charmer and assured us we had good light for photo taking.
He was right. We saw the Russian Orthodox Church, and a series of crumbling buildings. Snap. Snap.
"Oh, Gorky, can we slow down?" Ever try to take photos from a carriage on cobblestone streets?
"Oh, Gorky, would you recommend the Bodeguita del Medio?" This was my way of testing our guide's impartiality. I knew it was a tourist dive and merely wanted to see his reaction.
"No, the food is terrible, and don't go there for the watered-down mojitos."
A good sign. Still, no offer of his choice, either. The horses clip-clopped down the narrow, cobblestone streets.
Finally, I couldn't resist. "Gorky, where would you go for a good Cuban meal?"
There, I'd asked the question he had been waiting for but had been too nonchalant to bring up.
"You must be hot and thirsty," he said, and offered to take us to a place famous for its sugarcane juice cocktail.
Gorky admitted that he received a commission for bringing tourists in, even if only for a sugarcane cocktail.
We bought in – after all we were dog tired, uncomfortably hot and ready to drink anything. Sure, it had the smell of a scam, but we did need to drink something and maybe have a bite to eat.
After plodding along another 15 minutes through dark, narrow streets amid collapsing buildings and countless curious Cubans, we made our way to the restaurant.
Huge men were stationed in the stairway, fresh sugarcane stalks at the ready. Gorky busied himself collecting his commission. We looked like the only foreigners there, though the waitresses wore Santa Claus hats (even though it was mid-December, this was a sure sign of trouble).
In a nutshell, we were served the most insipid meal in recent memory, and we forced down a pitcher of sugarcane juice cocktail. How did it taste? Sweet. Now we could say we'd had a sugarcane cocktail in Havana! But it was far from a sweet deal, something we immediately realized upon receiving the bill, which included a gallantly added 10-per-cent service charge.
The bill was written up in U.S. dollars, Euros, Canadian dollars and the local CUC, but we had barely enough of any of it to pay the entire bill in the same currency. We even ended up arguing, gamely trying to persuade the waitress that the Canadian dollar was worth less than the U.S. dollar.
We left feeling totally shafted. And, because the restaurant refused to give us our change in any currency, I was unable to tip the lady in the washroom, the only person I felt hadn't ripped us off.
In all fairness, it was I who had asked the question – so, where is the local tourist trap? I had attempted the unthinkable, trying to outsmart the local tourist guide. A man named Gorky. Our man in Havana.
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