Friday Morning

I wake up Friday morning in a better place than I was the night before.  But I had a knot in my stomach.  I wasn't sure what to do.  I was completely out of my element and not dealing with it well.  While I speak a decent amount of Spanish, VERY few people speak any English and it's difficult to communicate effectively.  I pull myself together and go to the hotel lobby for breakfast.  I'm careful to avoid anything that looks raw as I have no idea what's safe at this point.  I hear a Brit order food and watch him walk through the buffet.  I decide an omelette with peppers is ok.  It was.

I head to the front desk to ask about making change.  The woman working informs me that this hotel doesn't make change and that I would have to go to the bank.  I ask where it is and she tries to describe it before telling me to go upstairs to the gift shop to buy a map.  I do, but the map is three CUCs and I only have 1 left from the previous night.  She points out the street where all the banks are and lets the take the map making me promise to return and pay the additional two CUCs.  I head back to my room, reassemble my bike and pack my bag to bike over there but finally decide that a cab is the best way to go.  I load up my necessities: passport, Canadian dollars, health insurance card (we were told to carry it everywhere), wallet, and iPhone which is currently a $400 paperweight that can also play games.

The view from my room

I go downstairs and get a taxi explaining to the driver what I need to do.  Change first, then a SIM card for my phone.  Changing my currency was easy.  We drive for a while to where a Cubacel office is passing all the embassies:  Kuwait, Sri Lanka, Malaysia.  We start passing one that keeps going and has a massive concrete tower that overshadows the entire compound.  I ask what embassy.  Russia.  I forgot to take a picture of the Russian embassy, so I shamelessly ripped them off of Wikipedia.  Like every other building, the embassies are old.  The Russian embassy looks like something out of a Steven King novel.  Old, greying concrete from the 50's comprises all the buildings.  Seeing the brand new Audis parked in the compound is just flat out weird.

Russian Embassy (courtesy Wikipedia) 

Russian Embassy (courtesy Wikipedia)

We arrive at a Cubacel office but the line is at least 40 people deep.  I ask if I can get a SIM card for my phone from one of the locals, a kid, waiting in line.  He says yes, but I have zero interest in waiting for several hours.  He takes me around to his buddies and asks them if any of them have an extra SIM card.  They don't.  I go back to my taxi and ask if there's any other offices.  He says yes, but it's in the complete opposite direction of my hotel than we went.  Disheartened, I told him to just take me back to my hotel, but he tells me wait a minute and we find a hole-in-the-wall satellite office on some random side street a few minutes from where we were.  There were only a few people in line and one of them speaks perfect English.  I ask why so many people are waiting at the offices and he says that it's the last day of a 2:1 promotion by Cubacel.  All Cuban cell phones are prepaid and the promotion is for every CUC you spend, you get one.  No limit.

I get my SIM card and take it next door to be cut to fit in my phone.  I plug it in and turn it on.  After unlocking, I see full bars and Cubacel in the corner and nearly cry.  I speak with a man who has family in Miami and he shows me how to make an international call.  No texting.  The Cuba systems don't talk to the American ones.  The embargo is present everywhere.  I call my wife and get her voicemail.  I finally break down and cry babbling something incoherent about needing to talk to her and then hang up.  I have the cabbie take me back to my hotel trying a few more times to reach her.

I try again when I get back to my room.  Success!  I try to keep it together while I talk to her and fill her in on the previous 40 hours.  I am doing much better.

In Cuba and Back in Time

It's late Friday night and I'm about to spend two hours trying to get through Cuban immigration.  There are 30 counters all with officials working but there are literally 400 people waiting in various lines.  Apparently 7pm is when all the European flights get in as well.  I pick one that looks shorter but after waiting 20 minutes and literally not moving, I pick another.  And then another.  This last one turned out to be the winner, but when each person takes two to five minutes at the counter I did the math and settled in to wait.  I chatted with the two men behind me in line who were on my flight from Mexico City.  One is an attorney for casinos and the other is in marketing.  They are here for a bachelor party, only the bachelor missed his flight.  Mexicans come to Havana to party.  It is to them, what Cancun is to Americans, but without Americans.  The attorney's son was born in Dallas and he speaks about his many ski trips to the U.S., including several weeks he spent in Telluride.  We then talk football; the American kind.  He's a huge Raiders fan.  I apologize.

I finally get to the front of the line and it's my turn to play 20 questions with the officer.  Where are you from?  What is your flight number?  Have you recently been to Africa?  I....wait, what?  Africa?  Have any of your family members recently been to Africa?  Cuba takes the Ebola threat quite seriously.  Do you have health insurance?  Show me.  She finishes and unlocks the gate to let me pass.  I go though X-ray and then on to baggage claim.  Since it's been two hours, our luggage has already been offloaded.  I find my suitcase.  It's missing the brand new REI luggage tag I just bought.  Maybe it got ripped off.  Where are the bicycles?  I ask some official looking person in Spanish.  He rattles something off that I don't understand.  I ask him to speak slower.  They are in the corner.  I find my bike box and it, too, is missing it's luggage tag.  They were ripped off all right.

Exiting baggage claim and into the terminal, I'm met by hundreds of people all waiting for someone or something to go through those doors.  They all stare at me.  After all, I have a massive box on wheels.  I push it around the terminal looking for cambio, change, where I can get some CUCs, convertible Cuban pesos.  Cuba has two currencies:  the CUC which is used by foreigners and tourists, and the Cuban peso which is not.  In reality however, it seems like everyone uses the CUC.  The CUC is pegged at 1:1 to the American dollar, but there is a 10% penalty for converting dollars to CUCs so I brought Canadian dollars, which have no such penalty.  I was told that it wasn't all that long ago that locals would be arrested and thrown in jail if they were caught with American dollars.  Wow.

After wandering around for a few minutes, a cabbie walks up to me and asks if I need a taxi.  I say, si, pero tango no Pesos.  Yes, but I have no Pesos.  He shows me to the second floor where I make change.  I ask about Cubacel, the national cellular carrier.  He says they are closed.  There will be no phone calls tonight.

We go outside to his cab and along with only one working headlight, his cab held together by will alone.  We barrel along on pitch black streets at speeds your mother told you never to drive, barely missing cyclists who wear no lights or helmets.  Everything is old.  Everything is run down.  Think of it as buying a brand new house and car in the 1950s and then just letting them sit.

I get to my hotel and check in.  They have no WiFi.  It dawns on me that I cannot contact my wife at all and tell her I made it and I'm ok.  I get to my room on the 12th floor and my first thought was "Oh.  Hell no."  All the reviews I'd read online and ignored were right.  It was a two star hotel.  I changed into some warm weather clothes and took a taxi to the National Hotel which I knew had WiFi because some of the other athletes had posted.  Not only were they fully booked, the business center which sells the WiFi cards was closed.  I tried to make change at the change counter but was told it was for guests only.  I took a cab back to my hotel and nearly lost it and broke down.

Completely disconnected.  Alone.  Exhausted.  A stranger in a strange land.

Cuba Bound

It's just after 4am and I'm sitting at my gate at DIA for a 5:30 departure.  The dichotomy of where I am and where I'm going is pronounced: It snowed 4 inches last night and is currently 14 degrees outside.  Daily temps in Havana for this time of year are in the mid 80s - though it does cool off to the mid 60s at night.

I peruse Facebook posts from the athletes who left yesterday and briefly chat with another who leaves today.  It seems everyone is getting in earlier than myself as I don't land until 7pm.  A thought enters my head that I haven't seen any posts from anyone since they left and wonder as to the Internet situation there.  I'm not even sure yet if my hotel has wifi.

While this trip is about making history and helping the future of the sport of triathlon in Cuba, I can't help feeling like I'm going back in time.  The embargo went into effect nearly 15 years before I was even born and the recent pictures I can find online show a country that in 2015, still looks like something out of the 50's with the classic cars.

The reality of what I am embarking on finally starts to set in and I am both very nervous and excited.  Few people can say they've truly represented the United States in anything, but the small size of this group (25) and the destination makes this feel even more important than the Olympics - except that no one is watching.