Tony is the owner of the Casa and the head of the family. There is his wife, his daughter, her husband and their two kids. For Cuban standards the house is huge and probably sets them firmly in the upper middle class (for comparison I count us to be lower middle class in Germany). There are two guest rooms (our upstairs „apartment“ and one downstairs), the sleeping room of the daughter’s family, the sleeping room of Tony and his wife, a large living room, the dining area, a kitchen, bathroom, a little courtyard, and even a small patio out the front entrance of the house which seemed to serve as a social congregation area throughout the days. Plus they have nice things that can be tough for Cubans to get, like a big TV and a laptop, though of course no Internet.
Breakfast turned out to be as good as dinner. An ample array of fruit, bread, honey, coffee, jugo naturales (fresh juice made from even more fruit that was so pure and so close to frozen that it was as thick as any fruit smoothie you could hope to find), eggs made to order in any style and, as a local treat, a jug of speciality Baracoan hot chocolate. More than anyone would need. Afterwards we behaved like locals and sat on the front ledge of our upstairs terrace for a while watching the going-ons in our street.
Rafael picked us up at 9:30 as promised. We went a little outside of the city to the so called Cacao Trail. There you can learn how cocoa is grown and how to make chocolate. In the end you get a little cup of hot chocolate to try. Entrance is normally 2 CUC per person, but Rafael, who is actually a freelance tour guide (who used to work for the government run tour companies too) conveniently knows everyone and convinces them to charge just 2 CUC for the both of us – well worthwhile.
Afterwards we wanted to do a boat trip on the Rio Toa, but because it had been raining a lot in the last days the water was dark brown and so high that the company recommended not to go for safety reasons. There was a German tour group there at the same time whose guide insisted that they would do it anyway. Seemed like a pretty stupid risk – the boat operators wouldn’t be saying not to go if they didn’t think there was real risk plus it’s Cuba, you have to be prepared to move with the changes of everyday life. Stupid. Anyway, we jumped back in the car and continued on our way to Playa Maguana. White sand, palm trees and coconuts, just as one would expect in the Caribbean. The only disruption to the idyllic setting is a continuous trickle of locals trying to sell things to the tourists – coconuts, sweets, souvenirs and other stuff. Rafael has to at least make the token gesture of translating their offers to us and explains afterwards that if he doesn’t then they will blame him for us not buying anything and be angry with him. This is after all his regular day job and he has to keep friends with the locals in the „industry“.
Back home we scouted local stores to buy some big 5 litre bottles of water, a suggestion of Rafael’s on how to be frugal while travelling here, but were unable to find any in the whole town! One of the first obvious cracks to be seen in the communist system of the country – on one hand it’s nice to be able to buy the same 5 litre bottle of water for the same price of $1.90 from literally any vendor, but on the other hand if there is only one supplier of water in the country and they are unreliable getting deliveries to more remote towns then stores don’t exactly have the luxury of buying from the competition instead. For dinner we went to a (very) understated terrace restaurant that we never would have found without Rafael’s help (there was no signage at all, even if you knew where to look) and had basic but filling spaghetti and pizza. It was certainly no Michelin restaurant, but for less than 2 CUC each there was nothing to complain about.