Cuba4U

09/08/2022

We are back!! Pleased to announce the 2023 Havana Jazz Festival tour from January 22nd to 30th with option for an extra week to explore Trinidad, Cienfuegos and the surrounding authentic country side.
For more details watch for this page and our page.
Feel to contact me with questions.

09/08/2022

11/23/2021

Let’s try for 2022!!

02/14/2020

That was fun!!

Nelson on percussion heats up the night in Trinidad Cuba

02/02/2020

Relief care every Saturday evening to Sunday evening for 92 year old man

01/28/2020

Hi Everyone. I need a good caregiver for my 92 year old father as a relief helper for his full time care giver.
At this time we would like regular care from Saturday 6:30 pm to Sunday 6:30 pm ongoing. If there is flexibility we can use other times down the road.
PLEASE let me know if you are a trained caregiver or know someone as the situation is getting very difficult.
I appreciate any leads.
Thank you 🙏 in

01/14/2018

This is the secret gold of Cuba
Better than a Gucci watch
Ah Havana!!!

02/04/2017

Tribute to El Jefe after his death. His legend is continually kept alive on the island. Maybe he IS immortal!
Find out with a unique trip with cuba4u.ca

01/28/2017

Shimmery green son at la Casa de la Trova

01/28/2017

Nelson on percussion heats up the night in Trinidad Cuba

01/07/2017

Back in Havana with a giant Cuban flag hanging limply on the face of the building across the street. After 3 weeks of travelling off the beaten track from Havana to Trinidad, to Camaguey, Sierra Maestra, Santiago de Cuba and Baracoa with a group of adventurers from North America on the Crazy Adventure Tour that I offer I find Havana absolutely luxurious. Hmmm, just goes to show, its relative folks.
Christmas was a low key affair with pigs squealing as they tried to escape their fiery fate on the river at the foot of the Sierra Maestra with Ulysses and Alexeis hosting us as we recovered from climbing the Commandante. There the remnants of Fidel and his band of bearded pranksters plotted revolution and guess what...??
60 years later the blockade is intact and the people are still struggling. La Lucha, the struggle, a word one hears a lot but now the meaning has shifted. Like finding eggs or bananas or a water tank. Just saying. Priorities change.
Back to the trip..High points, mountains with views and history that lives on, horseback rides to waterfalls with nobody else around and New Years dinner cooked by sublime Deulis in Barracoa and served on the terrace with a view of El Yunque (anvil) the square topped mountain that dominates the landscape like a brush cut from an Archie comic strip.
The Hurricane that hit Baracoa in September destroyed the majority of the palm trees, banana plants and many many homes but because it is a micro climate which we kept hearing and hearing "Micro Clima' the resurgence of green is remarkable and the majority of houses are open for business and the people are still quirky and wonderful.
I spent New Years Eve dancing to traditional music a El Patio with local men who showed off their shoulder shakes with aplomb and the next day my knees hurt enough that I was reminded that another year has indeed passed.
In Camaguey we were kidnapped by a young hustler on a bicycle who guided us so helpfully to our house because our young driver, Jonny, (Johnny be good to us) did not know where he was and I repaid his act of kindness with a tip except...it was not our house. It was his commission grabbing house. Sigh.
Ok, back to high notes. A brass section in Santiago de Cuba that would be at home on any world stage, playing under the stars into the wee hours of this Caribbean town, sweltering in the folds of the hills that surround it. The smiling faces of the Son dancers languidly sliding to the floor, never missing a beat at the Casa de la Trova while wearing lime green nylon transparent shirts that made me sweat just looking at them and my envy at their dancing abilities. Oh in my next life...
visiting Fidels grave in the big clean cemetery in Santiago with the soldiers goose stepping on the hour with very serious expressions on their young brown faces.
Riding in big old dumptrucks converted into buses and Cadillacs to Guantanamo where the base is a hazy line on the horizon from the look out.
And flying back to Havana on a propeller jet plane that was built in the era of Soviet fists and caviar but now gusts clouds of air conditioning into the cabin yet still gives a smooth ride. Below the terrain shifting from Tropical green undulations to flatter subtropical regions as we headed West.
And the cold beer glass that sweats on the table as the soft sounds of the malecon and voices and piano rise and fall, like waves, like the perceptions that continually change shape and colour in this vortex where time is flying forward but keeps getting thwarted as it bumps up against the invisible wall of 1960.

01/02/2017

2017 A new year is the perfect time to do something that refreshes your spirit and usher in a whole new perspective. Let Cuba4u.ca custom design a trip to Cuba just for you!

12/21/2016

The Riviera Cinema, one of the venues for the 2016 Latin American Film Festival in Havana, Cuba that just finished on the 17th of December.

Come, join us next year for the Festival or a fascinating and relaxing getaway any time.

We have a beautiful Central Havana Penthouse, very close the the famous sea-walk the Malecon, with a spectacular view of Havana and the ocean to watch the sun set over.

12/07/2016

Belinda was a teacher up in the Sierra Maestra when Fidel was hiding out in the mountains. In the final two years of the 1950's, heeding the lure of a group of bearded firebrands, the desperate peasants, young people from all walks of life and intellectuals made the muddy trek up the hot mountainside to teach reading, writing and offer health care to the disenfranchised population of the Eastern countryside of Cuba.
I met Belinda at dawn on Tuesday, November 30th, on Calle 23 as we stood by the side of the road, hemmed in by bodies, waiting for Fidels ashes to be driven past in a calvacade of green army vehicles that were embarking on a slow salute across the entire island.
Cubans lined the sides of the roads from Havana to Santiago de Cuba to pay their final respects. Shouts of Fidel! Fidel! rang out in the early morning as the small box wrapped in a Cuban flag and nestled in a circle of white flowers on an open flat bed glided past. Otherwise it was a quiet, subdued and gentle crowd. One helocopter hovered overhead and young military personnel stood at intervals making sure nobody stepped out on the road.
Belinda and her grand daughter were just behind me and we began to talk. Her grand daughter kept her arm protectively draped over the small shoulders of the bright eyed, diminutive woman who smiled at me and offered me her flag to wave.
"It is a recuerdo para ti. (a memory for you)"
Something about her prompted me to ask if she had been in the Sierra Maestra and she lit up.
"Yes, I was a teacher. It was something!"
Was it hard I asked.
"Oh si, but it did not matter, we were all doing something important."
A small woman with white hair that most people would not even notice on the street and she was there beside me in the peeling dawn, reflecting on the page of history that was her life. A story that evolved in many unexpected ways, with twists and turns, exploding ci**rs, condemnation and glorification and yet, for her it was a personal tale that symbolically came full circle on that blue morning.
Before we parted ways she kissed me on the cheek several times and gave me her phone number.
"Please come and drink a coffee at my house."
I nodded and we parted ways as the crowds streamed in four directions to begin another day in the lucha (struggle) of a Havana day.

11/29/2016

Sunday November 26th, Havana, Cuba

A Complicated Man

I found out that Fidel Castro died via email from a friend in Canada even though I was in Havana, in bed nursing a cold and the only television that I had in my garish apartment was the size of a box of cereal and I rarely turned it on.
It was not a surprise considering the man was 90 years old but he had loomed so large and invincible for so long that it felt like a let down in some ways. The immortal attributes that were so lavished on El Commandante for so damn long had become a joke that in turn became ingrained as a real part of the STORY that was Cuba.
I wasn’t sure what to do so I walked to the window and listened. In Cuba you can guage most situations from the sounds on the streets; the students parades shouting slogans, the fights below my terrace that never seemed to go anywhere except to disturb my nights, the honking of horns from pink and gold Classic convertibles breezing down the Malecon carrying VIP’s . That night there was a silence that has continued turning the entire city into one long Sunday.
It’s all about timing isn’t it? You meet the love of your life because you are in the same movie line as he or she is, or the flight you have to cancel due to a winter storm crashes into the North Sea.
Fidel Castros passing came as a soft exhalation rather than a guttural cry, because he was no longer in power. Ten years of his brother as President and the legend stayed strong but the presence grew wane. Time is a sly player and events rarely play out in reality as they do in anticipated imagination.
I always wanted to be here in my second home when this moment came. I thought the streets would throng with shouting and tears and fights and a show of government power but yesterday as I walked the streets from Vedado to Old Havana I encountered an unsettling pall, a silence all the more startling because the State issued a nine day ban on any and all music. This includes all bars, cabarets, restaurants and homes.
Never before have I been so aware of how prevalent the sounds of drums, voices crooning and guitars wove into the every day fabric of life in this city. The blaring of taxis radios, the trios shaking their maracas in the doorways of small pubs trying to lure you in with their seductive rhythms and the Afro Cuban ceremonies throbbing drums relaying secret messages even today in Modern Times.
Ashe, Ashe, the cry of the Santeria for luck and blessing.
It is nowhere to be heard.
Everyone is careful. The police are on the streets in Miramar, standing and watching. It is not wise to say too much but perhaps that is ok. Like any passing of an important person in ones world it is contemplation that is the perfect response.
As my taxi driver in his Jeep said, ‘Which president was perfect? Why criticize our president when they are all guilty of good and bad. “
Indeed, a 60 year reign, no less than a reign, thumbing his nose at the greatest power on earth and surviving with all the costs that entailed is not a small feat.
Illegal CNN tv is showing the parties in the streets of Little Havana, in Miami, where the Cuban immigrants gyrate and munch roast pork to celebrate the death of a man they consider to be a hated dictator. This is utterly distasteful to the Cubans. Even those who had issues and rebelled against the powers that be, carry a certain dignity and love for the higher ground that this country tried to emulate. It is insulting to them that those who did not live here for so long reduced the death of such a complicated man and such a long fight to a fiesta in the streets and a dance.
Cuba is anything but simple, despite the reputation of rum, sand and smiling, sensual people. Scratch the surface and one finds an educated population that has learned a thing or two about patience and tiny forms of resistance.
Call it survival but who does not learn to survive in whatever fish bowl we find ourselves in, swimming and fighting the currents. Or not.
The future is not clear. Nobody I spoke to is making any predictions but what good are predictions in todays world anyway. I would not have dreamt that a boorish, overweight millionaire could succeed to the White House of the Greatest Power on Earth. Never.
So we lay to rest a complicated man.
Jung said, ‘A big man casts a big shadow.’
El Jefe was cremated last night as he desired. His ashes will be scattered along the entire Island and he will be memorialized in Santiago de Cuba. Scattered to the wind, quietly landing on the soil where so much happened in his name and under his shadow.
And the streets of Havana will throb to the sounds of salsa, Trova and drums again.

11/01/2016

Want to Getaway from it all? Cuba4u will take you there 😍

10/30/2016

Wherever your Passion leads....trust Cuba4u to take you there in style!

10/29/2016

Looking for your very own Tailor-made Vacation Tour?? Cuba4u.ca will style it any way you like! Booking now..