2024-03-28: Trinidad
Author: David
We spent our final few days in Cuba in Trinidad. We had read rave reviews of the town, and pretty much every travel blog we found said to spend multiple nights there, so that's what we had booked. But honestly, our impression of Trinidad was that it was just okay.
The town itself was scenic and pretty, especially when viewed from the tower in the middle of town, or from the viewpoint on the hill to the north of it, but there just wasn't that much to see or do. By the end of our first afternoon there, we had already walked around the entire town center and more. The food and drink was similar to the rest of Cuba as well - simple, good enough, nothing to write home about - but the prices were a notch up from everywhere else given how touristy the place was. As a bit of a silver lining, we did manage to find some ice cream that was actually really good for the first time on the whole trip, and not icy or mushy as it had been everywhere else, at the Covadonga Heladería.
The next day, we still had a full day to fill. Many people on the street hawked horse rides, or a trip to the beach, or a tour of el Valle de los Ingenios, but we had already done all of those things. So we decided to just take it really chill, and it was a perfect way to spend our last day of the trip. We sauntered around some more, and spent the afternoon at our casa particular relaxing, beer and cigar in hand, playing cribbage and Yahtzee and word games.
We also spent a fair amount of time chatting with the hosts of our casa particular, Teresa and Rodolfo. I thought this was the most interesting thing we did in Trinidad. There was still a bit of a language barrier, but from them, we learned a lot more about what life in Cuba was really like, how they dealt with all the ingredient shortages and power outages (which were particularly severe in Trinidad, even for the short time we were there), what they thought about the rest of their family moving to Miami, and more. Rodolfo had very cool grandpa energy, walking around shirtless in jeans, and saying "¿Cómo están, jóvenes?" ("What's up, youngins?") every time he walked into the room; I hope to be like him one day. And Teresa must have really taken to us, because by our final morning there, our breakfasts had evolved from the very standard casa particular breakfast that we had eaten everywhere, to a feast featuring fresh tamarind juice (instead of a bland fruit shake or Tang), super flavorful and crispy vegetable fritters, the best coffee we'd had on the entire trip, and actual real honest-to-god butter for the bread, in addition to all the standard fixings. Objectively, we may have had better meals in Cuba, but this final meal felt like the best one we'd had on the whole trip, because we knew at this point how rare a lot of the ingredients were, especially to the home cook, and it meant a lot to us that Teresa wanted to treat us to something special.
Objectively, if I had to plan it all over again, I would have rather spent more nights in Cienfuegos, and used Cienfuegos as a home base for a day trip out to Trinidad and el Valle de los Ingenios. But at least for me, getting to know Teresa and Rodolfo made the multiple nights in Trinidad worth it. Moreover, I think that it was nice to wind down a whirlwind trip with a very relaxed final day before our long journey home, from a flawed and antiquated and deeply beautiful tropical paradise, back to our reality in New York.
