With No Respect: How We’re Treated at Cuban Hotels
HAVANA TIMES – As overused as the saying “remember is to live again” may be, it remains true. Even today, seven years later, I remember those days at the Guardalavaca Hotel in Holguin, and I still get upset.
It was the wedding of a close friend of my wife’s, who had already married in a civil ceremony in Canada and came to Cuba specifically to hold a symbolic wedding ceremony so she could share that moment with her loved ones.
She chose the location because it was roughly halfway between her native Santiago and the other provinces where relatives and close friends lived.
My wife and I took a week’s vacation and used the days before our stay at the hotel to visit my relatives in Holguin.
Overall, we had a good time, surrounded by many people we knew and cared about, including our friend’s Canadian husband, who was kind enough—and had the considerable amount of money it took—to pay for the entire package for more than twenty people.
We enjoyed the food, which wasn’t great but was well above what people in our circumstances were accustomed to on a daily basis. We enjoyed the pool and the usual nighttime shows, and I played a few games of chess with the husbands while our wives caught up.
However, there were several unpleasant incidents during our stay that left a bad taste in our mouths overall, enough to make us never want to return. Feeling miserable over a gift we had received also made me feel ungrateful, and I hold the hotel staff partly responsible for that as well.
The first bitter experience came one morning at breakfast, when I said good morning to a restaurant employee and he didn’t answer. I thought he hadn’t heard me, so I greeted him again. He looked at me but still didn’t respond. When I called him out on his attitude, he reacted angrily.
Another day, this time at the pool, something rather strange happened. The employees divided the group of tables in front of us into two sections, and what the people sitting in one section were allowed to order was different from what those in the other section could order.
It was quite uncomfortable because, besides taking a long time to bring the orders, you didn’t even know what you could or couldn’t ask for, since nothing was posted.
The last straw came from one of the room attendants. Some towels had gone missing, and she had the nerve to ask me whether we had stolen them.
That is the sad reality of life in Cuba, and you experience the same thing whether you get on a bus or are admitted to a hospital.
That’s why I have no desire to set foot again in the land where I was born. At least not until things change enough that people are no longer subjected to this kind of mistreatment.
In Brazil, as an immigrant, I generally experience far less mistreatment than I do in my own country. Discrimination tends to be isolated. You come across someone with backward ideas and have an unpleasant experience. In Cuba, by contrast, the mistreatment is constant and comes from the citizens themselves, fueled by the system.
Read more from the diary of Osmel Almaguer here on Havana Times.