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

This little itty bitty triangular room actually feels quite a bit smaller than it appears in this picture, as the door opens into the room, nearly touching the toilet. So it is necessary to step past/over the toilet bowl into the little ‘point’ of the triangle to close the door.

Now no toilet seat and no toilet paper is fairly common in Cuba. No tank is a little more rare. Well, to be fair, there is a tank here, in the form of a 5 gallon bucket filled with water. At least it is supposed to be filled with water. This lovely toilet is a good demonstration of the underlying physics that all toilets generally work on (gravity) – it is just that the physics is generally hidden in the workings of the toilet. In this case, when your business is finished, you just pour water out of the bucket into the toilet… carefully. If you go too fast it will overflow, which is why it was so kind of the Bar San Juan staff to leave a mop in there. If you go too slow, it doesn’t have the required ’sweeping power’ necessary to carry away your waste. Amazingly, this low tech method works – the new water from the bucket will wash any solids in the toilet down the drain, while still maintaining the proper water level. Liquids tend to become diluted but not entirely taken away, as evidenced in the yellowish tint of the water in this freshly flushed toilet. Takes a few tries to get the speed of the pour down… but an afternoon of drinking mojitos here will generally give you several opportunities.

When the bucket is empty, it is considered good etiquette to let the bartender know, so he can refill it for the next customer. That was not a Spanish sentence they taught me in high school.

There is no sink in the bathroom. Being outside the jurisdiction of OSHA and other US regulatory bodies, Cuban workers are apparently not required to wash their hands before returning to work.

- Andrew Sharp