Your luggage in Cuba and how to hang on to your stuff

Setting out to sail in Trinidad—fully dressed

If you’ve been following our trip to Cuba, you’ll know our bags were missing—although you probably didn’t know this situation lasted for nine days. ARGH!

The good news is we have our luggage back. The bad news is a very important item is missing.

In the interest of sparing you (or anyone else) similar grief regarding belongings in Cuba, here’s the story of what happened to us. Plus advice on how to avoid similar things happening to you.

For starters, from the time we left Mexico, we were pretty sure our bags wouldn’t arrive in Havana. Our flight from Cancun to Mexico City left 80 minutes late, cutting the time we had to change flights to about 10 minutes.

We were able to run between planes, but our bags couldn’t do the same. So while we were disappointed not to see our bags trundling around on the carousel in Cuba, we were not surprised.

The lost luggage window was directly opposite the carousel and the two women there spoke good English. They asked for all our paperwork and spent quite a long time recording our home address, local address and contact details, bag descriptions and such.

They then presented us with a claim receipt that included a file reference number and two airport phone numbers to call if we wanted to find out the status of our bags.

They also said the bags would come sometime the next day, the 29th.

This was encouraging, but given that our flight arrived well after 11pm, we wondered whether they might come on an earlier flight. We were leaving Havana in the early morning of the 30th, and would need the bags to be at to our homestay address (362 O’Reilly) by the end of the day on the 29th.

More problems arose as soon as we reached our homestay. The address was 309 (not 362) O’Reilly. It’s now close to 1:30am and we’ve awakened the homestay family to let us in.

The only thing to do was go to bed and hope to sort things out in the morning.

Now it’s hard to make this story short, but I’m going to try.

Turns out that 309 O’Reilly is overflow for 362. Fine. But we needed to let the airport know of the change of address or let 362 know about our bags.

Even though we had four phone numbers (two for 362 and two for the airport), not one answered. I called, the homestay family called, the homestay family friends called. In the end we got through to a fifth number (the brother of 362 and the person who seemed to be dealing with things).

Although I didn’t speak to him (Leandro), he went to great lengths to promise our homestay people that he would call and call and call the airport, and do everything in his power to sort out our luggage problems that day.

I have no idea what Leandro did that day. We went on a lengthy walking tour of Havana, and our homestay family kept trying the airport numbers.

Evening came but the bags didn’t, so we left the next morning on our pre-paid tour—with our minimally loaded daypacks and two spare white t-shirts given to us by the folks at 362.

From Havana we stayed in Playa Giron, Cienfuegos, Trinidad and Santa Clara. Every homestay family called the airport numbers (no answer ever) and Leandro (who was still knocking himself out to get our bags back).

Up to this point, my only complaints were with AeroMexico, which may or may not have gotten our bags to Havana, and the airport, which never answered the assistance lines.

Which crocheted dress would suit me?

Replacing clothes hardly an option
Oh, clothes were another problem. We had the clothes on our backs, the two t-shirts, one spare pair of slacks and a pair of bike pants.

Playa Giron was tiny and sold no clothes at all. Cienfuegos was bigger and where Poor John’s foot flared up. Most of our time there was spent at the hospital (I’ll do a post on that and have to say the service and care were excellent).

My homestay hostess gave me a brief walking tour of downtown Cienfuegos, but only tourist clothes seemed to be available. There were sarongs, t-shirts, and crocheted dresses and tops. No one had undies in our sizes.

By then I’d developed a fairly good routine for washing clothes at night—in the sink with bath soap. It was windy and hot, and laundry dried in a couple of hours. That said, I hadn’t planned to accompany Poor John to the hospital wearing no bra and a cheap white t-shirt that said a relative went to New York City and bought me this t-shirt. You know the ones I mean.

We were in Trinidad on a Sunday so only tourist clothing was displayed, including bathing suits in sizes for Barbie and Ken.

Santa Clara seemed like our best bet clothes-wise. Our guide had great English and was very fashionably dressed. Turns out her sisters send her clothes from the USA. We did try a few shops for undies, but the sales people always said there was nothing in my size.

The reunion
So nine days later we returned to Havana. A nice taxi driver took us from the bus back to 309 O’Reilly. He gave us his phone number and said he’d take us to the airport later in the evening if we wanted to go.

We trotted over to 362 (no one at 309 spoke English) and found no luggage. The airport numbers didn’t answer either, so we booked the taxi for 7:30pm.

After running around the airport for a bit, we were led to the lost luggage cage. Our claim receipt us got us into the cage (then they locked us in) where about 12 other people were waiting to claim bags. Three gals from Germany said they had been waiting a couple of hours to be served. Their taxi driver had even delivered them to the cage entrance. He knew all about lost luggage issues.

Clearly lost luggage is not a surprise in Cuba.

After about an hour, the officials started calling people to come inside to see if their bag was the one that had been hauled out of the bowels of the building.

The first success came to the German girls. Oh my, the squeals of delight could be heard across town. They were two or three days into their 18-day trip, so they were overjoyed.

Then a few local parcels were handed out—large bundles wrapped in plastic.

And finally Poor John’s bag appeared. They had him sign off all the paperwork and tried to send us on our way. I kept tapping the claim receipt to show them two bags were involved. In the end, they let me into the bowels of the building to search for my bag. Surprisingly, there were only about eight bags still on shelves and mine was one of them.

So the reunion was complete and we hopped in a taxi to 309. By then it was approaching 10pm. Our homestay family was entertaining guests and they bounded down the stairs to carry up our bags.

Leandro still alive
Now there’s more long story here, which I’ll tell in time, but the very short version is that the next morning we finally met Leandro and told him about our trip to the airport for the bags.

He said, more or less, oh yes, that would be right. The airport doesn’t deliver bags. You have to go get them yourself. And they certainly wouldn’t have let me go get them.

And he expects me to believe he knocked himself out to get our bags? We have no idea when they arrived, but we might have been able to have retrieve them if we’d gone to the airport late on the 29th.

Leandro is still alive, but only just. And I have an even longer list of why I’d like to choke him. Stay tuned for more episodes.

A last comment about baggage
Don’t pack anything in a checked bag that you are not prepared to lose. When we were leaving Cuba, we checked in at the airport about 3 1/2 hours early.

The next day in Chile, when Poor John opened his bag, which had been locked, he found the contents had been ransacked. Only his iPad was missing, but the contents were in disarray. The coffee set he carries (two stainless plunger cups and a packet of ground coffee) was out of its carry bag. His monocular was out of its case and had been tampered with. And his clothes were strewn about. It was obvious that someone had had plenty of time to scrounge through his bag. And that could have happened only in the baggage handling area in Havana.

We’ll be writing to Lan Chile to let them know about this.

Don’t let something like this happen to you.

No matter where I’m travelling, I carry all my precious items in my backpack. I don’t travel with jewellery, so that means cameras, chargers, cords, spare batteries, a little laptop, and usually a change of clothes. No idea how I managed to forget that this time.

P.S. I have plenty of good tales to tell about Cuba. We’re glad we went. Stay tuned for more.

I wonder where he got his clothes?