Hitch hiking, la botella.

This is a common way of traveling.

Cubans do a lot of walking everyday everywhere so I didn’t understand why here in Australia people wanted to walk or run. For us in Cuba, to get into a car is a big luxury, something that happens very rarely. So I can say people in Cuba are fit, most of them. In Cuba we travel to the university and to work by hitch hiking.

If it were necessary they would jump on a truck while it was moving to get a ride, scenes like you see on the movies. This type of action was not always a success, especially if you were not young. I remember doing it as a young woman on my way back from school, a sea of strong arms would offer to lift me into the truck. As I said this was not for fun, it was the product of necessity.

We travel like that, no matter the season of the year, raining in May, hot September, hurricanes in October or in the night, something you wish to avoid, but it may not depend on you. There is no reliable public transport in Cuba.

We would spend an entire day just to get home from one province to another. And you can see on the map of Cuba it is a small island. Some places would be more difficult at this task. My best friend used to travel from a town called Camajuani. She said that it was a very warm town because we could spend about 4 to 5 hours trying to get out of that place hitch hiking, sort of like the town wanted us to stay. My friend Ivan had to sleep one night on the road and wait until 6.00am, and then luckily a bus came along the road and he was able to get home. To me it was not nice to have lessons on Friday afternoon and then have to travel home hitch hiking, often in the night.

Many students would stay in the school and travel home once a month or so. But the majority would go home on the weekends to get clean clothes, home cooked meals and money to be able to survive at school, where the food provided was terrible. Also sometimes you were too far from your school doing some work experience at another school where you needed to buy your lunch, so it was not only a matter of that you wanted better quality food. Money was sometimes necessary too for traveling, in some places you were not able to move if you did not pay.


We depended on our parent’s money because at that time it was not possible for students to work, some boys would work during the two months vacation to be able to have some extra cash. Others would sell things illegally at school for this purpose.

I am not able to say if today things are better, but I know that you still can see a lot of people standing on the side of the road hitch hiking.