At the street fair in Havana, the thing to do is to buy an empty plastic 1 1/2 liter bottle for 4 pesos (about 15 cents) and get it filled up with beer for 12 pesos (about 45 cents). Over and over again, all day long. Many thousands of people, many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of liters of beer.

Now remember, this is out on the street, so the city provides port-a-potties. Sort of. Low tech Cuban port-a-potties. Basically they consist of three full walls, a half wall in the front, and a little half wall down the middle making a little hallway. That is it. Nothing at all inside… it is just a place to give you a little privacy while you pee in the street. Open at head level so you can have a chat with your friends in line while you are doing your business. The best ones are placed over drains, but some of the them are just in the middle of the street, collecting larger and larger pools that you don’t want to slip in.

I have often wondered who chooses the Port-a-Potty business as a career, and that was thinking about the nice clean American port-a-potties that use the nice big clean suction trucks to clean everything up. Can you imagine the person who has to take these babies down when the (9 day) festival is over?

- Andrew Sharp