Cuba is not cheap. The Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC) is the only currency that can be used by a tourist and can be bought for the equivalent of $1.25 per CUC, if you use something like the Euro or Canadian Dollar for the exchange. If you try to use the U.S. dollar there is a roughly 20% surcharge on the conversion. Prices are often close to what you would pay at a U.S. hotel or restaurant. Gas is about $6.00 a gallon.
The biggest difficulty for a U.S. visitor is that none of your credit or ATM cards work here. We were able to use a Canadian travel agent and pre-pay our hotels, airfare and base car rental, but everything else required cash. We’ve included a couple of stories about the challenges this caused. As a result you end up carrying a LOT of cash around with you. While we came home with some cash in our pocket, primarily because we got much of our car deposit back on the last day, we really feel we didn’t take enough, in hindsight. All sorts of things from auto accidents, flat tires, to health issues could have cropped up, which we frankly were not prepared to handle without a credit card. We never ended up skipping activities we were interested in because we didn’t have enough money, but we spent more time worried about the “what if’s” than we wanted to while we were trying to have fun. And frankly, if we had run out of money before the end, we haven’t a clue how we would have solved the problem.
To make matters worse, we never saw any paper money larger than $20 CUC, which meant we were always carrying around big wads of money, and counting our large piles of it for every purchase. All of this added to the normal stress of travel that is inevitable with any but the tamest of foreign travel.
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