Cruising the last 10km of a 2000km tour, the car in front grinds to a sudden halt in the middle of the fast lane. Luckily so do I. But then there's a ¡CRUNCH! as the old Russian Lada following behind ploughs into me. F&ck is all I can say under the circumstances, but quickly realise that this maybe a blessing. A week earlier I'd dented two doors trying to exit a narrow farm gate on a tight corner at midnight - which I would surely have been charged for, but now this huge dent at the rear of my car offered to eclipse this, because this crash would be fully covered by the insurance - the car in front is never to blame.
No pasa nada claims my poor pursuer as he eyes the huge hole in the back of my car. He lamely tries to call it quits as he knows he's liable, but clearly he's in for a long evening too. A traffic police patrol car, also a Russian Lada, happens to be parked across the road, struggles to start, and splutters over to meet the scene, then parks in the middle of the road without any hazzard lights. I begin to understand why I never received any speeding tickets during my 2 weeks in Cuba.
The night before I'd watched a Cuban film called La muerte de un burocrata which takes the piss out of the extreme bureaucracy of Cuban administration. This was perhaps an omen as I was about to experience a taste of this - with a total of 4 hours paperwork in getting this all sorted. But everyone involved was very helpful and all went smoothly, if slowly, though 4 hours was probably pretty good (I mentioned I had a flight to catch so some steps were queue-jumped). As it turned out my flight wasn't due to leave till 7am so I had pretty much the whole night to kill, and killing that time in a Cuban clinic (to certify health) and police station was probably more interesting than killing it in the airport. I got to read Fidel's posters about the importance of the revolution, and received an official certificate stating that I'm a Mexican citizen living in Havana.
I did feel a bit sorry for the poor chap in the Lada though (the one that crashed into me), he had to stay on longer at the police station and no doubt received some kind of fine, all because I had a modern car with better breaks.
Finally on the way into the airport, in my all dented and holey car, I make a wrong turn and stop to ask a policeman for directions. Upto now I've only had good experiences with Cuban police, who had consistently let me off minor offences without even a whisper of a bribe. One even offered me his female colleague if I was looking for company. Anyway this last one was bent on speaking quietly to me in terrible English, maybe so that his colleagues could not hear or understand that he was trying to blackmail me for 20 dollars for crossing some white line or other. After 4 hours of official paperwork that evening I was done with this shit so just handed him a 1 peso note and made haste - he didn't chase.
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