magazine Secret Cuba part 2 Secret Cuba by Damian Bird Continued Make do and mend This ex-Cuban boxer has been punched blind during his long boxing career. I met him sitting outside a boxing club in Havana. He just wanted to be near the sport that had been his life and taken his sight. Both men and women enjoy the cigars of Cuba. Most Cubans I spoke to do not agree with this propaganda poster. Police regularly arrest people for no reason and beat them up for sport or money and although Cuba is famous for having a national health style system, I was told that you are often safer not going to hospital than going to hospital, due to the poor, negligent and often amateur treatment available. Mending your own engine on the street works well when you learnt how to strip down and re-build an engine before you could walk. Cuban mechanical skill is legendary and is what enables Cuba’s fleet of 60 year old cars to carry on, like new. The beautiful port of Havana at sun down In Havana the revolution is always around you. No one is ever allowed to forget it. Cubas’ answer to gaming. Street games are free and very popular. A tank from the erea of the revolution. Pepole do own real guns in Havana but they are always hidden away from the home and kept as a final resort. Possesion of a real gun can lead to a prison sentence. When all else fails there is always rum. The Cubans drink it neat and use it as the Russians use vodka. This is the unofficial Cuban lottery taking place.  It is being run out of someone’s dining room. (article continued from beginning of part 1) Whilst initially writing the captions for this photo-essay, I sort to give what I thought was an unprejudiced view of life in Havana’s slums.  I left out the more unpleasant anecdotes such as ‘Coconut Village’ where Castro dumps Aids victims who have fallen prey to tourists’ diseases. I was told that Castro simply wants them to die quietly and to keep out of the way of the tourist industry from which he draws vast revenues. I also left out the detail of having been propositioned for sex up to five or six times a day by normal girls.  However much I may have wanted to think this was due to my own personal attractiveness, it was explained to me that people are just so poor and desperate for money that they are looking to sell the only thing they have. I also took many testimonies of unlawful imprisonment and beatings handed out by the police.  Castro pays his police so little that extortion is the only way that they can live and it is so commonplace that normal Cubans stay away from the police as a matter of course. I met people who had been given very amateur and what can only be described as ‘experimental’ surgery/care in Cuban hospitals.  One child crippled for life by a botched back operation sticks in my memory the most. So while I tried to water-down my captions for this photo-essay, after receiving many comments from readers who believe my photographs and opinions are based on US propaganda, I felt I had to describe my full and honest first-hand experience of living with the locals in the slums of Havana.  My experiences have not been tainted by US propaganda, they are true and real and I am simply passing on the beliefs of a large number of Cuban nationals that I met and interviewed during my fascinating stay.