Day to Day Life in Havana

The pictures in this post in no way correspond to the content of the post itself. Just thought you'd like to see some images from Havana.

I couldn’t possibly tell you everything that has happened in the last three weeks, so I’m just going to summarize what our day-to-day life is like here in Havana. Yesterday marked the third week of our arrival in Cuba and it seems like time is flying by. We’ve really started to settle into a routine. I wake up around 8 am and head down for breakfast, which the residence makes every morning. We usually have eggs “a la plancha” – kind of pan-fried eggs – with ham and bread. The kitchen makes what it can with what it has, so some mornings we have hot dogs or just ham, but usually breakfast is decent. After breakfast, we walk to class which takes about 15 minutes.

Class-wise, we have History of Cuba on Mondays and Thursdays, Spanish on Tuesday afternoons and International Relations on Wednesdays and Fridays. The 14 UNC students have class with 9 American University students who are also in Cuba till May.

View of the Capitolio from one of the neighboring hotels. The Capitolio was modelled after the US Capitol Building. Today it is the seat of Cuban Parliament.

So far, International Relations has been the most interesting class – the professor, a former Cuban diplomat who served as Cuban ambassador to the E.U. as well as several other countries, is really interesting. Although he worked for the government, he is open to our questions and criticisms of the Cuban system while maintaining his own strong views and opinions. The first day of class he said boldly, “I am a socialist and a Marxist,” a statement that is kind of shocking for most American ears. We usually start class with questions which have varied from why the Cuban media portrays U.S. assistance to Haiti as a military occupation to questions about Cuban immigration. His views are very interesting and sometimes border on offensive to the U.S., but at the same time it’s very easy to see why he has such disdain for the U.S. government.

View of the Hotel Nacional, the Malecon and the rest of the city from the FOCSA building in Vedado, Havana.

Our History of Cuba class tends to be kind of dry and has been marred by some drama between the UNC Study Abroad Office and the students on the program – basically, the Study Abroad Office imposed an arbitrary 20 page paper on us on top of the weekly 2 page paper that we have to write. A 20-page paper is very steep even by UNC’s standards, never mind the fact that we have extremely limited and slow internet access, no access to English books and not even any printer paper to print on. Most of all, our history professors themselves have told us that they are unwilling to read 460 pages worth of essays and who say that, if they had their way, they would assign us the more customary 10-page limit.

After class, we usually go to lunch. We’ve finally started to find some good lunch options (good cheap food is scarce in Havana). Rooftop Pizza is the most entertaining of our lunch spots – an enterprising man set up a pizza oven on his roof and nailed the menu to his door on the first floor – people simply yell up what they want (options: cheese, ham, pineapple, onion, chicharron), and he lowers it a few minutes later in a basket. The best thing is the price: 10 pesos for one personal pizza, or about 40 cents.

Most of the group at an Industriales baseball game.

Other lunch options include hot dogs (40 cents), which Cubans seem to be oddly fond of; ham sandwiches (20 cents); ice cream (4 cents per scoop); fried rice with pork or hot dog (80 cents); croquetas (4 cents per piece) which are small fried balls of chicken or pork; or cajitas – my favorite – which usually consists of some type of meat (chicken or pork chops), rice and vegetables served in a cardboard box for the equivalent of $1. Of course, there are nicer options – the hotels have nice restaurants and there are some restaurants that serve high-quality food, but they cost from $5-20, which is absolutely unaffordable to us considering the price of the alternatives.


After lunch, the group goes different ways. It’s nice getting out of class by 12 because it lets us enjoy the rest of the day. We’ve gone to Habana Vieja, the tourist area which is a 20 minute bus ride away, dance classes, swimming at the Hotel Nacional (when they don’t catch us sneaking in), movies (we went to see Inglorious Bastards, which was surprising considering its American origin), and more. Jonathan and I have also started working with the University of Havana’s Model United Nations, which will hold a national conference at the end of February. Ironically, I was assigned to represent Iran in a conference about Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so that should be fun.

Street scene in Habana Vieja

We have dinner at 7 at the Residence, which usually has some sort of meat – “ropa vieja”, or shredded beef, tuna chunks, fried fish or eggplant, along with rice and vegetables. The dinners are usually good, although the lack of variety can be underwhelming.

After dinner, everyone starts working on readings for the next day. Occasionally some of us will go out with some of the friends we met here and go to the Malecón or a student café called Café G, which is just around the corner and where mojitos only cost 40 cents. We also have movie nights where we all gather on the balcony and watch Mad Men, The Office or some other movies we have.

Another old American relic from the 1950s

On the weekends, we usually try to check out different restaurants or areas that we haven’t been to. Havana’s food scene is not as extensive as that of Istanbul, but it does have some hidden jewels. A lot of the best restaurants are paladares – the Cuban name for restaurants that are hosted in private houses – a capitalistic reform made during the economic depression known as the “Special Period” in the 1990s.
So that’s it – daily life for us in Cuba. More on our recent trip to Matanzas later.

Swimming at the Hotel Nacional (before we got kicked out)