In areas without easily accessible public transportation, people must walk to commute, run errands or get to school. But in many cases, foot travel just isn’t efficient enough. For many people, a bicycle is the answer. Community bike programs have already been running in major cities all over the world, including Paris, London, Montreal, Mexico […]
Cuba is often portrayed as a travel destination that creates different worlds for tourists and locals by having two currency systems and keeping locals out of nicer establishments such as resorts and restaurants that are reserved for travelers. The government chooses to import tourists to bring in capital, but do travelers truly benefit the local […]
“In a real revolution, you either win or die.” – Ernesto “Ché” Guevara (who managed to do both) I was twelve years old when Ché Guevara was shot by a firing squad in Bolivia. That was in October, 1967. The Argentina-born Guevara had left Cuba, and was fomenting revolution among Bolivia’s farmers. He was ambushed, […]
Let me level with you, readers. I came here with big plans for writing concise, revealing dispatches, in 800 words or less. But Cuba is one of the most complex, nuanced societies I’ve visited, awash in delights and frustrations. It would be a maddening place to make sense of even if it wasn’t in the […]
A weathered individual stood against the sea wall of the Malecón, holding a battered guitar. He made a comment as I walked past him, chatting with Amanda and Cristina. We’d just come from dinner at El Patio, an architecturally lovely restaurant, with unusual stained glass windows and divider screens, on the Plaza de la Catedral. […]
In 1960, right after the revolution, Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara met on the grounds of the Havana Country Club, a golf course in the posh suburbs of the Miramar district. They posed together for pictures, played some golf and brainstormed about what they were going to do with this gorgeous monument to bourgeois manners. […]
Journalist Jeff Greenwald, co-founder and executive director of Ethical Traveler, will be visiting Cuba between mid-June and early July. His dispatches and photos will be filed as time and Internet access permit. There are only a few countries in the world that have intimidated me; places where the social and political atmosphere is so electric, […]
It’s one of those common fantasy questions. If you could spend half an hour with any person on the planet, who would that person be? At any time during the past two decades, I would have answered without hesitation – Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy leader and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. […]
Thirty years ago, when more people were traveling with cameras than ever before, Susan Sontag, in On Photography, observed that tourists had become so photo-hungry that travel was just “a strategy for accumulating photographs.” Like their counterparts a century earlier, who invaded Native Americans’ sacred spaces and had them alter ceremonies to be more photogenic, […]
