Part 4: Mobile phones

Before I left I was even contemplating leaving my mobile phone behind, after having read how poor coverage is in Cuba. Quite the contrary! CubaCel, the local mobile phone carrier, had amazingly good coverage in pretty much every city I visited - Havana, Viñales, Cienfuegos and Trinidad. And pretty much all the while in between these cities, too. Amazing.

So I'm on a GSM network here in the UK, I'm not sure how others on CDMA networks from the US will fare, and again, my handset being tri-band, I'm not sure which radio frequency spectrums of GSM are supported as my handset supports all of the major frequencies.

But, what was unexpected was the COST!! Yes, mobile phone networks love to rape your phone bill with completely unreasonable charges regardless of where you're roaming, but they've really gone the extra mile with Cuba. Actually, from what I understand, CubaCel does get a large chunk of it, so I guess it's not that bad then. :-)

I ended up paying £0.50 to receive an SMS, and £0.80 to send one. And about £2 a minute to make phonecalls. Insane!!

But at least the convenience was there and if you are travelling in a group, having SMS messages to keep in sync can be invaluable.