Hurricane season is over so perhaps it is time to plan that Caribbean vacation. If you’re curious to visit Cuba as a U.S. citizen, you can choose between going native (hotels) and just touching briefly at the edges via a cruise.
Based on my December cruise with Royal Caribbean on Empress of the Seas, here are some thoughts…
The cruise is way cheaper than any of the land-based options that I saw. The basic rooms with window were being marketed at $100/night per person, including food and entertainment. If you need to be connected, Internet is roughly $40 per room additional per night (two people, one phone and one laptop each; unfortunately it was not working consistently on our ship and in our room).
A lot of the fun of Cuba seems to happen after 9 or 10 pm. Some cruises will dock overnight in Havana or stay late (we departed at 1 am so that people could come back from scheduled shows), but if you’re passionate about Cuban music the hotel option is probably best.
(Note that the cruise ship essentially becomes a temporary downtown hotel. The dock is smack up against the old city and a 5-minute walk from many of the liveliest tourist sections of town. See picture below.)
Cuban official salaries are low by US/EU/China standards, e.g., $60/month for a doctor or $20/month for a government job that requires a college degree (though keep in mind that they don’t have to pay taxes or rent). A pedi-cab driver can charge $5 or $10 for a ride if a tourist isn’t passionate about negotiation. A schoolteacher can substantially supplement her income with one night of, well, “work” with a tourist. Thus there is an entire industry of hustlers trying to persuade tourists to buy various things. Walking around Havana unescorted, a pair of male tourists will be saying “no, gracias” to offers of taxis, women, restaurant meals, and bars/shows every 30 seconds. A tour group out of a cruise ship, on the other hand, glides through this semi-official economy mostly unnoticed. Near the paddle-equipped guide and sporting a matching tour number sticker, the same two guys will be presented with an offer once every 10 minutes.
If you want to expend minimal dollars and zero effort to satisfy your curiosity regarding what life is like in Cuba and how socialism has worked out (recognizing that it hasn’t truly been given a fair chance!), the good news is that a couple of all-day guided tours off a ship will suffice. Perhaps it is the demographic, but we didn’t hear anyone on our ship saying “Boy, I wish we’d had three more days in Cuba to dig into the local experience.” People were more likely to comment on the poverty and disrepair that they’d observed.
Beginning of a new year and time for some tax planning. If you’re not a U.S. citizen and thus subject to worldwide taxation, maybe it is time to move to the U.K.? The all-in tax rate for “entrepreneurs” is 10 percent for capital gains (see Entrepreneurs’ Tax Relief). Compare to 37.1 percent for a California resident (20 percent federal plus 13.3 percent to uphold virtue within the state plus 3.8 percent Obamacare tax).
Happy New Year’s Eve from St. Augustine! My hope for readers is that excessive alcohol consumption doesn’t interfere with the efficacy of their medical marijuana edibles…
Back to my favorite topic: Cuba.
It seems that much of Cuba’s appeal in the pre-Castro days was the availability of goods and services that were considered sinful and therefore illegal in the U.S. For example, Cuba has casino gambling, legal alcohol (during our Prohibition period), and prostitution that was at least de facto legal.
Our Cuban guides suggested that if the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba were lifted, the river of American visitors would flow again.
But would it?
Suppose that the motivation for a lot of American visitors was sin. Isn’t there a lot more competition in that market now?
Boston’s Encore casino will open in 2019. Restrictions on purchasing alcohol have been relaxed town-by-town and day-by-day (now on Sundays too!). New recreational marijuana shops are opening monthly. (Prostitution doesn’t make sense here since the first pregnancy with an upper-income customer would eliminate the need for further sex work; Massachusetts offers unlimited child support profits.)
The Massachusetts resident who isn’t satisfied with that mixture of sin can fly in nonstop comfort to London, which offers casinos, alcohol, and legal prostitution.
Cuba is in rather tough shape physically. Meanwhile, billions of dollars have been invested in competing sinful destinations.
Could it be that the our embargo against Americans going to Cuba for a carefree vacation ends with a whimper rather than a bang?
(Our own New Year’s Eve will be spent catering to the whims of the next generation, so please Party like a Kavanaugh (TM) on our behalf!)
We set a meeting for the playground the following week. We three adults had planned it out carefully. My son and I would be playing on the monkey bars. My boyfriend would show up and I would introduce him as my friend.
When this began, we still lived in a large apartment in the Mission; there was room for privacy the nights my boyfriend stayed over. It was awkward at first, but as the years passed we spent more time as a foursome — cooking, playing board games.
Then the owner of our apartment decided to sell and offered us an enormous sum of money to surrender our rent-controlled lease.
At the new house, my beau built a platform so I could store the mattress beneath a raised office, but it never felt right. It wasn’t sexy to sleep with him under piles of papers and the glow of the computer screen saver.
Will more people envy her life of sexual adventure or the rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco that she had?
Our guide in Havana said that Cuba has one of the world’s highest divorce rates and attributed this phenomenon to the real estate shortage. “People have to live with their in-laws and that leads to a lot of unhappiness.” Wikipedia backs her up on the ratio of divorces to marriages, which is indeed slightly higher than in the U.S.
(Since Cubans marry much younger than people in other countries, could the high rate simply reflect that people married at 18 are more likely to split up than people who marry at age 30?)
“Divorce was a scandal in the old days,” she explained. “Now it is easy because we have no money to fight over, just babies and always the mother keeps them.” What about the right to occupy, rent-free, real estate? The guide explained that the mother can always win that one too, but the right may not be permanent. “There were a lot of women coming to Havana from the east and marrying older men with nice houses, having a baby [double hand gesture of swollen belly], and then taking the house. Now they have the right to stay until the child turns 18, but they won’t own it if the man owned it before the marriage.”
What about child support profits after meeting a higher-income Cuban in a bar? “She can get paid if she knows who the father is,” the guide explained, “but she can’t get an apartment, only about 2 CUC per month maximum. [$2/month].” The child support formula is based on the father’s official earnings, which would be only $20-60/month and is a much smaller percentage of after-tax income than in the U.S. A child support plaintiff could collect $2/month, for example, from a physician earning $60/month (a 1/15th share), but wouldn’t get a share of the physician’s side-job earnings. Compare to New York or Wisconsin, where a plaintiff’s tax-free share of the doctor’s after-tax earnings will be roughly 1/3rd.
In looking at the above numbers, remember that Cubans don’t pay rent, tax, health insurance, college tuition, etc. That’s all included in the package of Cuban citizenship (into which immigrants are not invited!). Also, the $20/month that someone might earn is sufficient to purchase staple foods at subsidized prices via ration cards. Cubans who desire luxury items such as mobile phones need a second job, but those who are content with a basic standard of living apparently can survive on the official salaries.
The CIA Factbook says Cuba has a population that is falling in size (growth rate -0.27 percent) and older (median age 41.8; older than the U.S. at 38). This is consistent with what our guide in Havana told us, i.e., that since the fall of the Soviet Union the typical Cuban family can afford only 1 or 2 children. This is despite women going into their at first marriage when just over 18 years old, according to our guide (consistent with some published, but older, statistics that I could find, also with this NYT article that quotes a woman married at 17 (divorced her husband when she was 35)).
Relaxing on a Wednesday in Cienfuegos (on the southern shore)
Politicans in Europe and the U.S. say that a flood of young immigrants, regardless of lack of education, local language proficiency, and job skills, will boost an economy with an aging population. Should Cuba be trying to get its share of the caravans of young Spanish speakers making their way through Mexico? (they previously grabbed Che Guevara from Mexico after he made his way north from Argentina)
[From 1960 to the present, Cuba’s population did grow, though not as fast as the U.S. population. The guide explained her theory for why there was more growth in the old days: “Back then we had no electricity, phone, or TV set so we make a lot of children.”]
The officers of Empress of the Seas were kind enough to host a Q&A session with passengers.
The life of an officer is 10 weeks on, 10 weeks off. The company is responsible for air transport to and from the officer’s home, wherever that happens to be on Planet Earth. There were no American officers on our ship and an American would be at a big disadvantage relative to a European. The typical European country doesn’t tax money earned elsewhere and, in any case, the officer can always choose to locate in a tax-free jurisdiction for his or her land home. The European officer with a family is not an attractive target for a divorce lawsuit due to the elimination of alimony (Germany, and similar) and/or the low caps on child support revenue ($2,000 to $8,000 per year per child, depending on country; see Real World Divorce). The land-based partner of a cruise ship officer cannot substantially live on the officer’s salary following a divorce.
(There is not a huge temptation for a heterosexual officer to stray while on board. All of the officers on our ship were men and the majority of crew members at all levels are male. There are apparently few women who are willing to be away from home for stretches of 6 months or more.)
Our ship is the smallest in the Royal Caribbean fleet. The captain explained his plan to catch up: “Every time we go into dry dock we will add 6 feet to the length. Over time we will grow into the largest ship.” (Empress of the Seas is being refitted in February 2019 in Freeport, Bahamas. Given that everything will need to be shipped in, I was shocked that it was more cost-effective to do this work in the Bahamas rather than in the U.S. There must be some spectacular inefficiencies in the American shipyards! In what other manufacturing or technical area is the Bahamas competitive?)
Why are all of the new ships big? The officers explained that the path to real profits starts with ships that hold at least 3000 passengers. That isn’t practical for these Cuba excursions due to the small piers that are available.
One thing that is not big on cruise ships is the draft. The captain explained that ocean liners, which are engineered with a deep draft to challenge big waves, can’t get into most of the Caribbean ports. The Queen Mary had a draft of 39′, the Queen Mary 2 is at 34′. Even the 6,000-passenger Oasis of the Seas draws only 31′ and the Empress of the Seas has a 24′ draft. There seems to be a mismatch, however, between how cruise ships are designed and how they are used. People are crossing the Atlantic and Pacific on these tall and shallow-drafted machines. We went through about 8 hours of dramatic (for a landlubber) rocking when sideways to what looked like a modest swell. Seasick bags were deployed in all of the elevator lobbies. This is despite the ship being equipped with stabilizers.
This year: We helped 60 sea turtles make their way from frigid Cape Cod to warm Panama City, Florida. Some photos:
Merry Christmas to everyone!
[Credits: Rectrix at KBED and Sheltair at KECP both provided superb support for loading and unloading. Turtles Fly Too and Kate Sampson of NOAA coordinated everything. Tradewind Aviation‘s superb maintenance and dispatch crew made sure that the Pilatus PC-12 was ready to go. Air Traffic Control gave the turtles a VIP direct clearance at FL220. The New England Aquarium did the initial rehab for the cold-stunned turtles. Gulf World in Panama City continued the rehab and also gave us an awesome tour of their facility (there was minimal damage to Panama City beach from Hurricane Michael, though it was a different story just 10 miles east). ]
Good news: I made it to Jacksonville without suffering the indignity of three hours on JetBlue.
Bad news: the trip was officially scheduled to depart on Friday, thus making this a three-day journey.
The Cirrus SR20 was theoretically capable of handling the low clouds and heavy rain of Friday in New England, but not the forecast icing conditions once airborne.
Why not depart on Saturday? The FAA issued an Airmet for occasional moderate turbulence, but that didn’t seem to square with surface winds forecast to gust up to 30 knots in the Washington, D.C. area (usually calm). Boeing crews were reporting moderate turbulence and a Cirrus SR22 in northern Virginia reported “severe” turbulence:
Turbulence that causes large, abrupt changes in altitude and/or attitude. It usually causes large variations in indicated airspeed. Aircraft may be momentarily out of control. Report as Severe Turbulence.
Occupants are forced violently against seat belts or shoulder straps. Unsecured objects are tossed about. Food service and walking are impossible.
Later in the day, the FAA issued a SIGMET for occasional severe turbulence.
So the trip departed Sunday morning and the D.C. overnight was replaced with lunch followed by an overnight on the Virginia/North Carolina border.
So… at least in the winter, it is fair to say that a four-seat airplane is approximately 1/24th the speed of a basic economy airline ticket (and a little slower than a Honda Accord).
