Impressions about Cuba To finally arrive in Cuba after so many months of imagining how it would be was, on the one hand, reassuring, because we could recognize people's open smiles and the humid green of La Habana. Leon, our taxi driver, won't park his car under any balcony. And he's right. In several places fresh ruins are to be seen. We are told that the sewage doesn't work, that the garbage is not collected and people must burn it.
People live crowded on top of each other.
Behind each door there is a whole different world. Now the paint is peeling off the walls and many houses totter on the brink of falling. The streets bustle with merchandise, something new this year. Most of the books contain speeches by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. When we ask for something a bit more exciting, a street seller proudly flourishes a book written in the Seventies by a poet who dared to criticize the Communist system.