Our flight into Varadero arrived around 1:30pm and by the time we went through customs and retrieved our luggage, it was well past 2:00pm. Since there were three of us traveling together, we had initially made a plan which consisted of one of us grabbing our suitcases, one of us looking for the bus and one of us going to the currency exchange to line up. I was most concerned about the currency exchange as I had heard that there is often a long line up of people waiting to exchange money and sometimes the buses don’t wait, so we wanted to make sure one of us went to line up as soon as possible.
Our plan only half worked. We didn’t see the currency exchange booth inside the airport, so we decided we would have to collect all of our luggage before we headed outside. We didn’t want to run into the issue of having one of us exchange money and then not being able to find the other two. Once we made it outside, there was a gentlemen directing us to the buses and when we asked about the currency exchange, he pointed towards it and said that there was a long line up, so we should probably go to our bus first. Well, my first thought was that people in Cuba must define “long line” in a very different way, as I only saw about 3 people in line.
Two of us brought our luggage to the bus while the last person stood in line at the currency booth. We had previously read online about a back-up plan for exchanging money – there is another currency exchange booth located inside the departures gate and rumour has it that there is almost never a line there. The problem was, we didn’t know where the departure gate was and since Varadero is an international airport, we figured it was probably large enough that we’d have to somehow go to another area or level, and we just didn’t want to take that chance. It wasn’t until a week later when we returned to depart that we realized the departure gate is actually right next to the arrivals gate. The currency booth where we lined up to exchange money initially is pretty much what divides the building into arrivals and departures. Had we known that, we definitely would have gone into the departures area to exchange our money when we first arrived!
Prior to arriving into Cuba, I had heard and read many stories about how these booths try to rip you off by counting really quickly in Spanish to confuse you, and after you leave the booth, you will realize that you’re missing 10 or 20CUC. Well, we had a plan to stand firmly at the booth until we were sure that we had all of our money.
When we arrived, we were surprised to see that the exchange rates were not posted anywhere. Technically, they could charge us whatever they wanted, since CUC is a restricted currency and you cannot obtain it outside of Cuba, but to not even post the rates just made us feel like we were already being ripped off.
When it was our turn, the lady said she only had 10s, and we were fine with that. In hindsight, we wondered if this is how they always get away with cheating people. Since she was only giving us 10s, it actually made it much easier for us to calculate how many bills we were to receive. I stood there and counted through the entire pile of 10s and we seemed to be short two. I handed it over to my friend who counted it again and she came up with the same conclusion. We handed all of the money back to the lady who ran it through the counting machine, which we knew was probably rigged. She ran the wads through the machine about 4 times before handing the cash back to us and we began to count again. In the middle of us counting the cash a third time, the lady actually stood up and went into another room. I guess by that point, she had given up on trying to cheat us, but I have never seen someone leave their seat in the middle of a cash transaction!
To this day, we are still clueless as to how she put two 10s back into our pile, but I’m sure glad we were given such good advice about not budging until we knew we had the right amount.
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