...snippets of a country...2...

...from our breakfast table we look out at a carefully guarded Museo de la Revolucion whilst grappling with a wide-ranging but somehow not-at-all-integrated Cuban breakfast. There is still no cigar smoke in the air and it surprises us; in fact there is very little smoking going on at all. Has it all been a hoax? A complex  conspiracy? Anyhow, it's 0900 and what's it to be? The Revolutionary Museum or is it time to head across Havana to find the Rum Museum. The latter. Cuba has a few basic products: sugar, tobacco and nickel. It makes the most of all three. Thus you are strongly (and I mean strongly) encouraged to take sugar with your coffee: it's the ways Cubans do it. And rum of course is a clever production of sugar. At the museum we are the only ones in the English-speaking tour and the nice Cuban lady explains things very carefully including  the 3 ,5 and 7 year maturing process. At the end of the tour we are encouraged to try a free sample of the best rum. Wow. No wonder Mojito has funny j in it.

Dodging the rain which is now falling heavily we continue to be amazed by the beautiful streets and squares and we take in lunch with a Cuban who appears to have been to London; he wants to go again but apparently - he smiles knowingly -it's not encouraged. It's still raining heavily, so let's stay close: The Museum. 

It's heavy: pity any little children taken on a school trip here to get to grips with their country's history. (By the way: they are unlikely to be equipped with the ubiquitous pads and pens so beloved of school trips, at least in the UK. Both paper and pens are very scarce and special in Cuba). Sure there's Che's tank, a US spy plane which was shot down and a mini Versailles Hall of Mirrors. But there's also an awful lot of clothing with blood on it. A lot of black and white photographs of bearded people with cigars hiding in odd places. And whichever way you look at it, an awful lot of bravery, passion and sheer belief in a cause. I think you need to be of a certain age to take it all in. Or perhaps it's simply best done after The Rum Factory...we certainly needed a long sit down. The colonnade outside the Hotel Inglaterra will do nicely..