La Habana - final day in Cuba

We were up early for our final full day in Cuba as we had a long bus ride ahead of us back to La Habana. First we were stopping in Santa Clara to visit the mausoleum of Ché Guevara, which meant driving an hour in the opposite direction to La Habana.

Tony played us a documentary during the journey about Ché's life, and we arrived just before the site opened so we were close to the front of the queue. The mausoleum is beautiful, with planted jungle-like gardens inside the building as well as beautiful wood and stone to represent the environment Ché fought in during the revolution.

The museum next door has photographs of Ché throughout his life, from childhood in Argentina to revolutionary hero and government minister in Cuba, then revolutionary again in Africa and South America.
Being a museum, there are also mementos from Ché's life: the requisite selection of firearms and other weapons that no revolutionary warrior's memorial would be complete without, but also instruments from his medical kit and classic novels he read in his youth. 

The top of the mausoleum-museum structure is also a monument to Ché. Great blocks of textured stone bear several quotations and a magnificent bronze statue of Ché himself, depicted as he entered La Habana at the moment of victory for the revolution.

To break up the drive back to Havana we stopped for lunch at a roadside café. The sandwiches came in rolls shaped like sea creatures including crocodiles and crabs.

We arrived in La Habana mid afternoon and were dropped off at our casas particulares. Arrangements for our accomodation had only been completed that day as according to the original plan we should have been staying at the Hotel Nacional. Most of the casas were on Calle 19, the same street our first accommodation was on. However, this time we were much further from the city centre and the group more distributed. The neighbourhood was very pretty with tree lined streets and beautiful houses.

An hour later we were picked up again and headed to Parque John Lennon to be collected for our classic car tour. We all had our photos taken with the statue of John Lennon, which depicts him casually sitting on a park bench. We bade a sad farewell to the two Tonys as they headed off to prepare for their next tour.

Our group all climbed into four classic cars - we were in a pink one of course! The drive was lots of fun. Our driver Alex spoke very good English and told us that his car had originally been purchased by his grandfather and stayed in the family ever since. We stopped at La Plaza de la Revolución again to take pictures with the cars, and then at Parque Almendares, a forested area inside La Habana city. We finished the tour at Hotel Nacional with Mojitos Mafias - just a slight twist on regular mojitos, but referencing the former mafia connections at the Hotel Nacional.

We stayed with half of the group to watch the sunset and then found a restaurant nearby for dinner. To finish off the evening we went for a drink on the top floor of the Focsa building - a fairly ugly Soviet-style tower block resembling a large open book, just across the street from where we stayed in La Habana the first time. The views across the city were amazing - it was the first chance we'd had to get an idea of its true size.

The next morning there was time for a stroll through the streets of Vedado before heading to the airport. We were very sad to be leaving Cuba as we both enjoyed it so much!