Rum, cigars, salsa ? is Cuba really a good place to take your teenage kids? Yes, especially if you can sneak in a little political educationWhen she was 12 or 13, Laura said to me: "Mum, who's that man with the hat and the star that you see on people's T-shirts?" So I told her a bit about Che Guevara. "Oh," she said, "everyone has him on posters and things, but no one knows who he is."Teenagers today! My 1970s contemporaries who pinned Ernesto "Che" Guevara's image to their walls might have done it more to shock than out of revolutionary zeal, but at least we knew who he was.So when Laura was turning 16 and I was pondering a post-GCSE mother-and-daughter trip, I determined to take her to the land of Fidel and Che. We both love beaches and sunshine, and Laura is a natural at dancing, so I figured with the climate and the salsa music, she wouldn't even notice she was being educated. What I didn't anticipate was that she'd learn things that are much more important to a teenager than history and politics. Like smoking. And drinking."Go on, darling, take a drag," I coaxed, as we sat in the shade outside a simple farmhouse. Was I really encouraging my daughter to smoke? Well, yes, but we weren't talking Silk Cut, rather a fat cigar that a Cuban farmer called Francisco had just rolled from his own tobacco crop. The 12 of us in our tour group took turns to suck in the fragrant smoke and roll it around in our mouths. (You don't inhale a fine cigar, so it couldn't be doing too much harm, could it?)Thinking that Laura would need more than Mum's company on a two-week holiday, we'd joined one of Explore's teen tours, designed for families with older kids, featuring activities suited to their age group (or perhaps a little older, ahem) and no pesky small people to cramp their style.Neither of us had ever been anywhere tropical, so the palm trees and humidity were new to us, but so much more was startlingly different about Havana. It is, as writer Henry Shukman put it, a place where "the endless grasping of consumerist capitalism drops away". As we drove from the airport, we could see there were no adverts. No cars, underwear or fizzy drinks clamouring for our attention. No golden arches. Hoardings bore ideological slogans ? socialismo o muerte. The few retail outlets were tiny and low-key, most just holes in walls. I'd brought a teenage girl to a place where there was basically no shopping!But our hotel was the delightfully battered Plaza, where Anna Pavlova and Albert Einstein stayed. We toured the city in beautifully kept 1950s cars. We had a salsa lesson on the Plaza's roof terrace. And we had our first taste of another major plank of my daughter's Cuban education ? at the Havana Club rum museum. I don't think she felt the lack of Topshop."Vitamin R" was a prominent feature of the trip, mostly in cocktails, from the familiar Cuba libre and pina colada to the tunturuntun (Cuban slang for "go to hell"), with orange and grenadine. For the adults, local Cristal beer and mojitos (lime, mint and sugar) soon came to punctuate most days. And the kids learnt by example ? avidly ? often undertaking self-guided study into combinations such as rum and TuKola, the local brand.From Havana we drove west to Vi�ales and its beautiful valley with weird rounded limestone hills called mogotes. It was at a small farm here that I was that terrible mother cajoling my daughter into tasting the evil weed ? and into swigging homegrown coffee, black as hell and strong as death.Vi�ales is prime tobacco country, the enclosed valley acting as a humidor, nurturing Cuba's finest leaf. The whole island felt like a humidor, in fact, because we were there in hot, humid August. It's called the rainy season, but mornings dawned sunny and stayed that way until mid-afternoon when, most days, it started to pour.We walked or rode horses through tobacco fields and visited picturesque drying huts made from palm leaves. We picked guavas straight from the trees, and bananas the length of a forefinger, still warm from the sun.The kids had approached their smoking lessons diligently, but did they take in much from Julio, our guide in Vi�ales? The exotic birds and butterflies, the medicinal value of various plants, that each mogote has its own unique ecosystem, that in Cuba you get 30 years in prison for killing a cow ?? Nah, not a chance.But they did see how different from their own were the lives of Cubans: families living in small, one-storey wooden houses with slats for windows; jobs such as ploughing fields being done by teams of bullocks, not tractors. The streets were buzzing, though, and there was music everywhere, from bands in cafes to loud reggaeton in central Vi�ales on Friday night and brilliant salsa in an open-air club.A few days later, at the Unesco biosphere reserve of Las Terrazas, were our teenagers struck by the picturesque lakeside settlement, with its history of devastation at the hands of colonial coffee planters and subsequent regeneration as an eco-tourism community? Don't imagine so, but they loved a zip-wire ride over lake and forest, and enjoyed (hey, a shop!) the ingenious crafts made from available materials, including ring-pulls from Cristal beer cans, fashioned into coasters and purses.Walking to a river for a swim that afternoon (Explore understands that holidaying teenagers must be dunked in water at least once a day), we heard excited young voices through the trees. It was a group of young women in green army fatigues, students from Havana university, we learnt, doing 10 days' military training in their summer holidays. They were as flirty and chatty as any gaggle of teen girls out on a sunny afternoon, but each had a Kalashnikov slung casually over her shoulder, where our daughters might have had a Primark handbag.Our teens (two girls and three boys, aged 14-16) spent their time in the bus chatting, giggling and playing guess the tune on their iPods, but as we neared Cuba's south coast, I think they shut up and paid attention as Luis, our guide, talked about the Bay of Pigs invasion. How in 1961 CIA-backed rebels chose this mosquito ? and crocodile-infested ? region so that US involvement would be less noticeable. How invaders' planes were painted with the markings of the Cuban air force. How the abortive coup resulted in humiliation for the Kennedy administration and made Cubans revere Castro.A tank used by Cuban troops and one of the invaders' (British-built) planes are on show at the Bay of Pigs museum, but most poignant are photos of the 176 Cubans killed in the fighting: black and white, some aged, others no older than our teenagers.By now we'd spent a week in Cuba, and Laura and I had learned what to expect at Cuban hotels: there won't be any sink plugs; something ? a door catch, a window pane ? will probably be broken; the shower may barely work, and hot water will be unreliable; tablecloths will have mysterious stains, and butter at breakfast may have a distinctly cheesy whiff. But we'd also learned that none of that mattered. There are slick, well-run hotels all over the world; these places were very individual, and very Cuban.In any case, we were about to give up such bourgeois luxuries as beds and bathrooms. The most memorable part of the tour was two days' trekking in the Topes de Collantes mountains, sleeping under the stars at remote haciendas. Leaving our bus, we piled into the only vehicles allowed in this national park ? Russian-built trucks with wheels a metre high and engines that do just 1km to a litre of fuel.When we piled out again, I was relieved to learn that our trek would be downhill initially. Hah! Rainy season, remember. The steep narrow path was slick with daily downpours. There may have been fantastic views, but finding somewhere safe to plant each foot, without holding anyone up, made looking at the scenery impossible. Several of us had mud up to our knees by the time we arrived at our first farmhouse stop to refuel with bananas and coffee.It was a steep climb to our home for the night, Hacienda Codima. This is eco-tourism in the raw: traditional farms converted into basic accommodation. You sling your sleeping bag on a foam mattress on the veranda (there were some small tents if you really wanted privacy) and eat locally grown food. Solar panels provide electricity and occasional hot water, and meals are cooked on huge wood fires.If some of us felt what we needed after the trek was a long hot shower and a nap in an air-conditioned room, that was too bad. But hey, it was relatively cool in the mountains, and rum eases most discomforts. With hens scratching around citrus orchards, breakfast was clearly sorted, and there were free-range pigs in the forest.Another lesson we'd learned was that command economies don't mean good food. Meals in Cuba are monotonous, mostly chicken or pork with rice and beans. There was usually fruit at breakfast, but in this abundantly fertile country none of us was getting our five a day.The startling exception to this was our second, much more basic, mountain billet, Hacienda Gallega. It had just one (cold) shower, but they served us a tomato soup the River Caf� would be proud of, deliciously flavoured with wild oregano. Then, cruelly plucked from his rootling in the jungle, basted in lemon and orange juices, and cooked over a eucalyptus fire, came the spit-roasted pig. Appetites had been piqued by fresh air, exercise and days of boring food, but I still say this was the best pork ever.The last few days of the tour were to be spent by the beach on a beautiful Atlantic cayo. But first there was the answer to my daughter's long-ago question ? Che Guevara's memorial in the city of Santa Clara. Christianity, though tolerated, is not very prominent in today's Cuba, but Che is venerated. The atmosphere inside the mausoleum was more hushed and reverent than in many churches. Shorts and strappy tops are frowned upon, as is talking. There are stones, wood and plants from the clearing in Bolivia where Che was executed, and an eternal flame lit by Fidel Castro.The museum next door has hundreds of photographs of the handsome hero ? growing up in Argentina, practising dentistry on a comrade in the jungle, in disguise to put the CIA off his track. His possessions were more affecting: a white coat from his medical student days, a glass and leather asthma inhaler and, yes, a trademark beret with star badge.It probably seemed like ancient history to our teenagers, and Che's hasta la victoria siempre! has given way to a truce with capitalism in the form of resort complexes and tour buses, but the youngsters were thoughtful as we left Santa Clara. From Cuba's idealistic past, we were heading for its inglorious future, the new resorts on a chain of islands off the north coast.Our hotel, Villa las Brujas on the island of Cayo Las Brujas, was a low-key affair, with 24 rooms in wooden cabins by a palm-fringed white beach (fantastic snorkelling). But further east the hotels were bigger and brasher, sprouting fountains and laden with marble. A purpose-built "village" (empty in this low season) felt like a cross between Disneyland and The Truman Show.Though busy working on her tan, Laura was nostalgic for the real Cuba. "It's nice to know the whole world isn't affected [by consumerism]," she mused. "I know I am, but perhaps if I lived here ?"If she lived here, would she sing in a band and paint instead of hunting bargains in New Look? Who knows? But I'm thankful that Britain's strict underage drinking laws mean my daughter will have to bid hasta luego to her Cuba libre habit for now.CubaFamily holidaysHavanaCaribbeanLiz Boulterguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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