The group stumbled upon a small Cuban band playing traditional music. They visited a 400-year-old church and learned about Santeria, a mix of West African spirituality and Catholicism practiced by many Cubans. Santeros undergo a year of training wearing white and following special rules. The group also went snorkeling in the Bahamas and saw rural areas of Cuba where small farmers had electricity and cement houses, with few homeless people seen.

1. We stumbled upon a small band that played the best traditional Cuban music we’ve ever heard.

2. We visited a church that’s been around for over 400 years in one form or another.

3. Many Cubans practice a religion called Santeria, which is a mix of traditional West African spirituality and Catholicism. African slaves managed to maintain their religion in the face of Christian missionaries by replacing their gods with Catholic saints. Below you see an altar to Yemaya, goddess of water. She is known as the mother goddess to Yorubas in Nigeria, and her Catholic equivalent is Our Lady of Regla. When people become “santeros” they undergo a full year of training during which they must wear nothing but white clothes and must follow special rules.

4. We cooled off at the beach and went snorkelling. The snorkelling in the Bahamas is much better than in Trinidad.

5. We then took a ride north through the Sierra Escambray mountains. This was a very rural part of the country, but we were impressed that everybody had electricity, even the small peasant farmers. Also, almost everyone lived in a cement house with a roof. There were no SLUMS in Cuba. There were also no homeless children and in all our time in Cuba, we saw 2 homeless adults only in the city of Havana (population 2.5 million people).