We gladly accepted their invitation to stay with them during our visit. We got in touch with a travel agent in Mexico City, who arranged to get us visas to enter Cuba and booked the Mexicana flight from Mexico City to Havana for us. He even met us at the airport when we arrived in Mexico and we took care of all the final arrangements right there. We spent that night in a hotel right across the street from Alameda Park and early the next morning caught the 2 hour flight to Havana. Havana served as the gateway between Spain and her colonies for about 400 years and grew extremely rich as a result.
American cars driving around, Havana definitely has the air of a living museum.
We were just beginning to feel we had really gotten to know the place at the end of our two week visit. The 'special period' which occurred after the fall of the Berlin Wall was especially difficult and the country was on the verge of starvation. Whenever we ate at one of these 'paladares' we found both the people who operated them as well as the other people eating there to be extremely friendly and we usually slipped into friendly conversations about economics or politics or just small talk. During the post Berlin Wall period, the Cuban government also began to encourage foreign tourism. Today, there are lots of Canadians, Brits, Germans, Spaniards, and Mexicans vacationing in Cuba.