Kuba: Bahia de Cochinos

We were getting tired of the cities and so we chartered a car again and drove to the Bay of Pigs to spend a few days at the beach. After calculating the expected costs, we decided to stay in an "All-Inclusive Hotel" for once, as the offer was actually very cheap. Since this is not our usual way of traveling, we were quite ashamed to wear the bracelet that marked us as "todo-includo guests". 😊 It should be noted that all hotels in Cuba are 51% owned by the state, and we have heard from many people that the quality of the hotels is not very good as a result. This turned out to be true. The rooms in the Casas are much more comfortable, cleaner, and nicer. The food was actually bad, just as René had said. The only advantage of the hotel was that the shower in the room was powered by solar energy, so there was not only "very hot" and "very cold" water, but actually various nuances of lukewarm water. At least. However, we were lazy to pack and move again, so we stayed there.

There is not much to tell. We spent an afternoon lounging around the hotel's beach (with an ugly concrete wall as a wave breaker) and enjoyed plenty of Mojitos. Worth mentioning is the discussion about beach chairs, which brings us back to a man who was mentioned earlier:
I'm not a fan of the beach. But when I'm at a beach, I want to sit comfortably in a lounge chair and read. I don't want to squat on the sandy ground. These are my conditions. Unfortunately, this hotel has about 200 beds but only 50 lounge chairs. They were all occupied, of course. So we decided to take a regular chair to the beach. Immediately, an employee came and forbade us from doing so. He said these were pool furniture. Only the lounge chairs were beach furniture and we were not allowed to take the other chairs to the beach. After a 10-minute discussion, we argued the young man into the ground (after all, this is all-inclusive, and the beach belongs to the hotel, it doesn't make any sense, etc.), but still had no chance. And then, lacking better arguments and because he was simply doing his job, he said the famous words: Este es Cuba. The good man could not have expressed it more accurately.
The remaining days, we either went to Caleta Buena or Punta Perdiz. Both beaches are also "todo-includo", which means you have to pay admission, lunch, and Mojitos. Caleta Buena was a natural swimming pool in a small bay in the sea, a really cozy place, not a sandy beach but lined with trees and really charming. Punta Perdiz was not a beautiful beach as such, but you could snorkel relatively well here. There was a reef about 30 m off the coast and you could see a (small) sunken US landing boat, which the Cubans sank during the invasion in the Bay of Pigs.
As for the invasion in the Bay of Pigs, we also visited a small museum in the town, which was interesting but also spread the usual revolutionary propaganda.