Havana, The Day Fidel Died

I was standing at the gate in Schiphol Airport, passport and boarding pass in hand, when my phone exploded with messages.

News alerts. WhatsApps. Headlines shouting at me from a tiny screen.

Fidel Castro is dead.

Friends and colleagues started writing, one after another:
“Don’t board that flight!”
“Are you crazy? Who knows what will happen when you land?”
“There could be a coup!”

My heart was pounding, but there was no part of me that was about to turn around. I understood, very clearly, that this was a once-in-a-lifetime moment to see Cuba at a crossroads.

Then the plane doors closed, and the world disappeared for a long international flight. No news. No updates. Just my imagination and the quiet hum of the engine.

Landing in a silent news bubble

When we finally landed in Havana, my first instinct was to turn my phone back on.

Nothing.

There’s no regular roaming package in Cuba, no quick “I’ll just buy data.” The only way to connect was to buy scratch cards from the hotel and stand in a specific spot to catch a weak signal for a few precious minutes.

So I arrived in a country in shock, with almost no way to know what people were saying about it anywhere else.

I was also nervous about my gear. I’d come with a professional camera and several lenses. Would anyone question it? Stop me? Take it away?

To my huge relief, nothing happened. The airport was crowded and basic, but uneventful. The drive to the hotel was uneventful. Even the hotel itself felt strangely normal.

Seven days of mourning

The next morning I headed out to the streets of Havana.

The first thing I noticed was the quiet.

I found a woman holding that day’s newspaper, Fidel’s face on the front, her own face grieving. The government had announced seven days of official mourning. No music in the streets. No alcohol. Many stores closed.

But underneath the stillness, life went on.

People still queued for bread. They still talked and laughed in doorways. Children played. The city didn’t freeze; it just folded its joy inward for a while.

Walking with the funeral procession

I was lucky enough – if that’s the right word – to be there for the funeral procession that accompanied Fidel’s coffin.

Families put on their Sunday best. The military stood in formation. People lined the streets, serious but composed. I walked among them with my camera, photographing everything, and no one stopped me. No one told me to put the camera away.

I tried to imagine handling a moment like that in other countries. I couldn’t.

Later, a local newspaper approached me. They wanted to know what I thought of Cuba at that exact moment in its history. I was polite and cheerful, and very careful not to say anything that could be interpreted as criticism. This was not the time to be careless with words.

A country stuck in time, still moving forward

Beyond the mourning, I loved simply walking through the hot streets of Havana.

The old American cars rumbling past. The bright paint peeling off balconies. The smell of frying oil and cigar smoke. And, most of all, the people – many of them inviting me into their homes and lives for a few minutes at a time.

Cuba feels like a country suspended in time, but you can sense it slowly opening, shifting, adjusting.

I’m grateful I got to see it in that in-between moment: a city in mourning, a country in transition, and everyday life still pulsing under the surface, refusing to stop.