CUBA:Policies of Castro brothers are as interchangeable as their shared name, writes Rosita Boland
The most striking thing about the queue of people waiting to check in for the twice-daily Havana flight at Mexico's Cancun airport less than a fortnight ago was the staggering amount of luggage they had with them.
Returning Cubans pushed, hauled and dragged massive boxes and bags to the check-in desk.
These were crammed with mainly electrical items - huge flatscreen televisions, DVD players, computers, and sound systems, but also vast quantities of medicines, toys, kitchen equipment, items of furniture, bed linen, shoes and clothes.
The staff at Cubana Airlines were clearly used to this. They stared at the one small rucksack I presented with considerably more amazement than they did at the armchair-sized boxes I had seen being casually checked in ahead of me.
Cuba in the last 10 days of Fidel Castro's long presidency seemed like a country where the culture of mending, recycling and rationing was so much a part of life that it could, in theory, continue forever.
The vintage Chevrolets, Dodges and Chryslers are a marvel of inventive mechanics who have kept them running for half a century; the interiors of many homes with their nylon bedspreads, huge wardrobes, and pink paint reflect a period of decor that belongs firmly in the past; the vegetables that appear on your plate are invariably tinned because fresh ones are so scarce.
So little is new, is the overwhelming impression, and even the widespread huge murals of Che Guevara, dead since 1967, look to the past: surprisingly, there are very few publicly displayed images of Fidel Castro.
You do not go to Cuba to go shopping. Because to the embargoes, there is virtually nothing to buy, which is why relatives and friends bring such a range of goods into the country with them each time they travel there.
Local people queue all over Havana to buy the simplest necessities of life - vegetables, meat, detergents.
Department stores offer few goods. Walking around one such store I saw an entire display case occupied by three Chinese-made torches - only. Another had a German-made set of plastic forks, and yet another the plain white shirts with four pockets worn by many Cuban men.
The absence of choice and accompanying western advertising serves as a far more visceral example of the unique time capsule Cuba is in than does the picturesque, but dangerously tumbledown, buildings of its cities.
Cuba is not a museum, but frequently as I travelled around, it struck me that many of the things that any country needs to function as a society - transport, housing, services - were of museum quality. The public city "camel buses" in Havana are tractor units that pull the shells of old buses on trailers; in the cities, the unpainted apartment buildings are falling down, shored up by wooden struts. Each multistorey building has an elevator operated by a state employee whose sole job is to crank the operating handle scores of times a day.
There are plenty of tourists in Cuba, and your passport is not stamped when you enter and leave the country, to make life easier for those who later have to travel through America.
Unlike the situation in former communist countries such as Russia and eastern Europe, where potentially capitalist-contaminating tourists are almost always required to enter the country solely in organised and supervised groups, tourists in Cuba are welcome to come and go independently.
This is perhaps one of the most uncomfortable things about Cuba - the sight of tourists eagerly photographing the every day life of Cuban people, because it is clear that people on both sides of the camera are fully aware that what is being recorded is a way of life long gone elsewhere.
The owner of one casa particular I stayed in - the privately occupied homes all over Cuba which are allowed to open two rooms as accommodation for tourists - was a medical doctor, who earned less than the equivalent of $20 a month. This is the average monthly wage.
By contrast, it costs a foreigner between 20 and 30 Cuban convertible pesos - the currency which foreigners are required to use in the country, at an exchange rate of 1.3 to one euro - to stay a night in a casa.
Most of this goes in taxes to the state, but it's clear that a tourist pays the local equivalent of more than a month's wages for one night's accommodation. Hotels cost between three and four times more than a casa per night.
The eight-hour bus journey I made from Vinales to Trinidad cost twice the Cuban monthly wage (locals pay reduced prices on transport).
A simple, poor dinner (you no more go to Cuba for the food than you do for the shopping) in a state-run restaurant of fried chicken, black beans and rice costs one-third of the Cuban monthly wage. With such obvious contrasts in cash flow, no restaurant or bar frequented by tourists is without its salsa band, who pass around the hat afterwards, mannerly urging for hard currency tips.
People did talk to me about Castro, but there was always a sense that the policies of one Castro brother were as interchangeable as their shared name, and that no big change was going to lurch on to the horizon with the news that broke on the day I was leaving.
The owner of the casa I stayed in on my last night was less interested in the fact that Castro had resigned that morning than in the favour he wanted me to do for him - recommend his casa to the Lonely Planet guidebook writers, so it might get a listing in the next edition.