XXXJay - Adult Webmaster Blog

The Cuba Debacle (a must read blog)

February 28th, 2007

It all began as a bad idea.

After having been an esteemed invited guest to partake in a summit of all the world’s top online smut peddlers in Panama (I would include more details, but this is a PG-13 blog), a decision to be made:

1. We could do “more of the same” in Costa Rica.
2. Or do something “really gangsta” and visit Cuba.

Over dinner, a business associate was telling us how awesome Cuba was, how he went all of the time, and could set everything up for us to go through his “travel assistant” if we wanted . Honestly, I’ve always been curious about Cuba, so…

We opted for #2.

A few fun facts about Cuba:

1. Americans aren’t supposed to be there.
2. Because of the embargo: Any American ATM and Visa is useless.
3. There is no internet access.
4. You have no cell phone service.
5. There are probably 3 cops for every 10 persons and they are all on the take.
6. Cuba isn’t so much a foreign country — it’s a fucking time machine!

After the end of a pretty good 5 day bender in Panama, I woke up at 8AM to catch a cab to the airport. We had booked 2 tickets on COPA Airlines from Panama to Cuba, ran up every bank card we had and managed to scrape together enough cash for 3 nights / 4 days in Havana. Our hotel was supposedly already paid for by the travel girl we’d given a check to, so we should have more than enough spending money for our stay.

Cuba is cheap, right?

Wrong!

When we got to the check-in counter, I was informed that my flight had been overbooked and would have to fly standby. We decided that if we both don’t fly, neither is going. When we get to the gate, COPA tells me that could put me on the flight BEFORE the one I was supposed to be on. They rushed me over to another gate, I got on the plane, and my bags would arrive on my original flight.

I hope you are still paying attention because here is where the shit hits the fan…

I tell my business partner (JC) that since I would be getting in first that I would just wait for him outside of immigration. I get in and wait on the bench at the side of the large room. This woman keeps coming up and asking me questions in very broken English. I try in vain to communicate.

She keeps coming back with more questions, but now with mean military looking guys carrying nice big automatic weapons and precious little English. Fumbling nervously through my English to Spanish dictionary in one hand and my Treo in the other, I typed up a sentence explaining my flight situation that probably read like:

“My name is payment deferred albatross. Would you please direct me to the nearest water buffalo although my hovercraft is infested with eels?”

They were getting confused and keep coming back with a more menacing looking man in a higher level uniform and bigger gun.

Fuck, this is getting ugly.

This scenario plays out again and again through the course of the next 45 minutes. Finally when the flight I was supposed to be on arrives and I see JC. I feel relieved for one second but then the woman asks if this is mi amigo. I say "Yes". Next thing you know, she and the goonsquad are on JC like George Clinton on a crack pipe.

And the games begin.

They take our passports away; drag us into separate interrogation rooms and start working us over. This is before we even can get to our luggage spinning around on the carousel surrounded my a dozen drug sniffing cocker spaniels. We get our bags and the second phase of the interrogation begins.

They take us to another room where they start going through my luggage with a fine tooth comb. They have all pulled out these clipboards and are taking notes of everything I am saying. Any minute I am thinking something I’d forgotten from my “extra curricular activities” (sniff, sniff) in Panama to drop out of some of my jeans and that would be the end.

Mentally, I was prepared myself for a 20 year stint in Guantanamo Bay.

While all of this is going on I see the customs officers drag JC off to the back room which he describes as “loaded with pliers, hammers, and electrical equipment”. I thought that they had found something in his luggage for sure. In the meantime, the lady that is harassing me is giving me the business about the “Samsonite 10 Year Warrantee” card that had broken into pieces in the pockets of in my suitcase!

Yes, people…the Mattress Police are real!

This was only level 2 interrogations. After that, I go through 10 other different sections of harassment, each, when I was thinking one would end only leads to another more severe tier.

“¿En qué hotel estás permaneciendo?” they press on.

“NL Hotel”, I respond. (its only the best known hotel in Havana).

“No hay tal lugar unhotel NL!” they mock.

They start going through some books I had taken for the flight. I had two Charles Bukowski books in my bag (Tales of Ordinary Madness and Hollywood).

“¿Quién es Charles Bukowski?”

She suspected I had some form of anti-Castro propaganda and scribbled that down on her pad as well. They keep repeating the same questions using some antiquated Soviet Interrogation technique and going back and forth between JC and myself to see if our stories matched. This shit went on for over three hours.

The lady, finally satiated, and says…

“I’m sorry, welcome to Cuba.”

I step outside and it was literally like stepping into Zoloft-land. Everyone is happy. The sun is shining bright. I finally see JC emerge from immigration with a look of sheer terror on his face. We ask at the information counter about Hotel NL (Hotel National) and all of a sudden everyone on the other side of the door knows exactly where it is and speak English too!

Those sadistic muther fuckering customs fucks!

So get go outside and get a cab to the hotel. We had been told that the hotel was part of a Spanish chain our Visa would work there because it it appeared as if it was being billed by a bank from Spain. Upon arrival at the desk, we found this to be untrue. Now, all of a sudden, the money we had brought for spending money would pretty much be for our hotel rooms. So the first thing we did was emailed and called our “friends” in Panama, asked if they would put it on one of their non-US cards and we would Paypal them ASAP.

They said fine.

We decide that after all of that shit we ought to see Havana some. We go outside of our hotel, this guy approaches and starts talking to us in pretty good English. Now I am good at spotting a hustler but I will have to say that this guy had New York style hustle. Make a long story short, he somehow tricked us into coming into this bar for a Mojitos and next thing we know these Cuban gangster guys are coming up and trying to sell us cigars that we didn’t even want. It became pretty clear by the crowd of street thugs that were gathering around our table — if we didn’t buy the cigars something was going to happen to us. So we wind up dropping everything we had in our pockets on some cheap cigars and 3 Mojitos just to get out of there with our lives.

It was good we’d left some money in the room.

Just a few short hours in Cuba: tortured, robbed, screwed, and going broke fast.

So we go back to the hotel and try to chill out. By this point our nerves are completely frazzled. We have some dinner and hope tomorrow will turn out better. The next day we find out our friend’s “offshore” visa had been declined. We were still in the same money predicament.

Seeing the problems ahead, we try to just switch our flights and just bail.

No dice.

We have no cell phones, so each call out of the room is getting billed at about 4$ USD per minute. Our friends in Panama told us that our money would be getting sent Western Union to us and everything would be fine. We go up to the pool for a while to have lunch. The place is pretty boring — packed mostly with snooty baby-boomer aged Europeans. We decide to take a walk around and look at some of the sights. We check out old town Havana, which seemed pretty cool until we made it down to the bay and could see oil pollution in the sea that would make the Exxon Valdez look like an oil leak from an old ’79 Chevy!

Al Gore should really start blaming the Commies for Global Warning.

They’re responsible for most of it.

Still aware of the imminent money problem, but hell-bent on doing something fun — we decide to go to this club Johnny’s that a friend of ours had recommended. The place pretty much sucks. I would rather do a cyanide caplet buffet dinner than hear one salsa song again! Playing the unusual role of “the responsible one" I drag JC out of there and we cut the night short, but not before a rather embarrassing Mexican standoff with a 50 something year-old-pear-shaped Dutch stewardess at the hotel bar.

We wake up the next morning and have to square up the hotel bill and now we are left with a mere $83. $50 of it we needed to hold onto for the airport tax and $25 for the taxi. Keep in mind that we would have checked into a much cheaper hotel right off the grip had we not been constantly assured the cavalry was coming.

At 1PM we were getting kicked out of our hotel room with 8 bucks in pocket and 32 hours left in Cuba. Even worse, that phone in our room was the only way to make contact with the outside world.

The desk calls. The Western Union failed.

The concierge tells us of place called “Touraid” where stranded tourists can get money right down the street. After being given countless sets of wrong directions we find this supposed “Touraid” and it is nothing more than a medical office for tourists.

As much as I hate to say it: The Cuban people are very stupid. They walk exist day to day like Zombies on Xanax waiting — on their pensions. I guess it is the nature of Marxist communism. The lady that takes change for the bathroom makes the same as a brain surgeon, maybe more! Why should anyone aspire to anything? Cubans have no motivation to do anything for anyone…including themselves!

We get back on the phone with Panama. They said there was another change in plans. They said the money could only be send from Costa Rica or Miami, which made no sense all. So now, the hotel manager and some guy named Hector were supposed to get the money.

This wound up being wrong too — Western Union was not an option.

Now, the hotel can see that we are really in a bind and agree to extend to room for two hours, so we could get our shit together. At this juncture, we are both raging mad at the guy who set this up. Never once during this whole ordeal did he ever personally take one of our phone calls, instead kept routing us through his network of inefficient 200$ per month Panamanian lackeys!

Pretty fucking lame man…

Next we hear that the cash will be sent via airbill on Copa, but nobody can give us time or a flight. If we took a cab to the airport and the money didn’t show up, we’d only have enough money for the airport tax, we’d need to stiff the hotel, ditch our baggage, and spend the rest of our time dodging authorities or we’d be rotting in Castro’s Graybar Motel.

1PM the hotel shut off our phone to outgoing calls because they know we have no money. All we could do was site around next to the phone and wait. It wasn’t even like you could walk around or do anything to take your mind off this mess. Just sit and wait. Sit and wait. To add insult to injury, from across the street these annoying muther fuckers are standing on the roof blasting bagpipes NONSTOP!

I was starting to loose my mind.

Next thing we learn that the airbill was not going to happen, but the hotel lets us stay in one room for a few more hours while things get sorted out, which seriously didn’t look like it was going to.

Weighing our options:

1. We would take our bags and spend the night on the streets (which are far from safe).
2. Or go to the airport and try to wait there for our flight with all of those scary ass muther fuckers from the beginning of this fabulous disaster. Hell no!
3. Turn ourselves in to the American Embassy for a $12,000 fine and loss of passports.

#1 / #2 = extended stay at camp X-Ray.
#3 = Not an option.

Finally, deep in the eleventh hour we get a call from the desk telling us that some good soul named Richard Burry from the Netherlands had paid our tab.

Richard you are a good man, whoever you are — much thanks!

Now, the only thing we needed to do was get the fuck out of there. We turned in early, woke up early, snap some quick pictures o the George Bush = Hitler sign and get the fuck out of Dodge.

Though this blog has become a rather bloated 2500+ word opus, I still have left a million other things out that went wrong over those 72+ hours. Words can not properly convey how fucking horrible that country is. Communism is a failed ideology and Cuba is a failed country. Why Cuba is the last Warsaw Pact Marxist Communist country while the rest of the world has torn down the wall and moved on?

Fact is: Cuba sucks balls.

I wouldn’t send my worst enemy there. The worst thing that ever happened to Cuba is their bloody glorious Revolution. JFK should have pulled the trigger on the Bay of Pigs and the American Mob should still be running shit down there — the place would be better off. Nothing is good about Cuba. The food isn’t good, the women aren’t gorgeous, the place is dirty, polluted, dangerous, expensive, the indigenous people are morons, the nightlife blows, and you can’t walk 10 feet without encoutering some corrupt pig or tell friend from foe

As soon as Castro takes a dirtnap, Cuba will open up to the West - the island will be bathed in the cobalt-green-light of capitalism. There will be a McDonalds on every corner, a Wal-Mart in every town and a former communist shithole has a chance at becoming a tropical paradise! Yet, the Cuban people have been brainwashed for so long that they actually celebrate their way of life by glamorizing goons like Che Guevara — they don’t even realize they’ve been shammed for 50+ years.

Sadly, much of the outside world has also bought into the rebel mystique.

The Revolution has been brought to you by Hot Topic!

Fuck Castro!

Chow,
Jay

Entry Filed under: Drama, Rants