How to make Cuba Cheap
Here are a few tricks to make Cuba cheap, although it will never become as cheap as Asia.
Buy food at the market and preparing your meals will bring down prices of feeding yourself by 80%.
Eat in MN restaurants and cafeterias. A meal for 1.50!
Buy big 5 litre bottles of water and fill up your little bottle. Or just get your water from the tap. Filter first.
Be a student and take your student card with you. Age does not matter
Buy, rent or borrow a bike, walk or take the bus/fixed route taxi.
Negotiate a lot and about everything. That does not make you cheap; they will respect you for it.
Spent a few days at a Campismo, they are very cheap
Never arrive somewhere with a Cuban by your side.
Ignore everybody that starts talking to you on the street.
Don’t make (too manny) Cuban friends.
Speak Spanish. Nothing drives up prices more than the inability to communicate.
Know what you owe and count your change.
Eat 5 pesos pizza (once).
Book your Casa beforehand, using the Internet. Or read this.
Stay away from the tourist areas.
Don’t believe anything anybody tells you.
Use MN whenever you can. Never pay in Hard Currency if you don’t have to.
It can be fun to be cheap
Not all of these tips will enhance the fun you have, but they all bring your budget down. Other ways make Cuba cheap and preserve the quality of your holiday: For those tips we refer to our book, which is cheap too, compared to the savings it will bring.
Your Spanish is better than you think!
Nothing raises prices more than the inability to communicate. Learn some Spanish!
You know more Spanish than you think. Almost all words that have more than three syllables in English are derived from Latin and have the same meaning in Spanish. Just pronounce: reservation, communication, vocabulary, direction, investigation or permission with a Spanish accent and you will be understood.
An exception would be ‘introduction’ (‘exception’ itself is no exception by the way), if you ask to be introduced to someone, you are asking if you could put part of yourself into the other person. In Spanish, you present yourself
You see, your Spanish is already a lot better than you think.
During the next part, I will put the Spanish word between brackets just to show you how good your Spanish already is. (to read that part.. you have to buy the book 🙂 though… Sorry…)
Save money, buy our book
No matter how hard you try, Cuba will never become cheap as long as you are not a Cuban. So the best tip to make Cuba cheap… become a Cuban… :-)… the second best tip is to read our book. We’ll give you a time-saving tip on this page…
You might want to understand the double currency system too. (spoiler alert: there is non)