Fathom’s first Cuba cruise greeted warmly

ABOARD THE FATHOM ADONIA — When Steve Richter, a ship pilot
from Philadelphia, heard that the new Fathom cruise brand was going to sail to
Cuba, he and wife Debi jumped at the opportunity.

“We signed up that day,” Richter said.

After the first three days of their history-making cruise
aboard the Fathom’s Adonia, Richter was happy with his decision.

“My first impression of Cuba was on the negative side,” he
admitted as the ship sailed toward the city of Cienfuegos after two days in
Havana. “The infrastructure was worse than I expected it to be.”

But Richter said the Cuban people quickly changed his view
of the country.

“People as a whole were very happy,” he said. “Very proud.”

Indeed, as the first cruise between the U.S. and Cuba in
decades played out last week, passengers of all sorts were feeding off the
warm, at times overwhelming welcome they experienced.

“I never expected the reception we received,” said Luis
Rodriguez, a Tampa-based travel agent whose parents emigrated from Cuba.

As we motored into Havana Harbor shortly before 9 a.m. on
May 2, cheering locals, including a few waving American flags, lined the city’s
famed seaside promenade, the Malecon, to greet us.

The welcome was even more raucous, and personally moving,
when the ship’s 700 passengers exited Havana’s Terminal Sierra Maestra San
Francisco to a throng of cheering locals. As passengers moved through the
approximately two dozen-deep crowd, they shook hands, exchanged kisses, slapped
high-fives and accepted various salutes of welcome from the assembled locals.

Rodriguez, for example, passed the miniature American flag
he was carrying to a Cuban woman, who kissed it. Denise Kahoud, a New
York-based travel agent, said she was moved by a smiling woman who made eye
contact with her as she passed through the crowd. Passengers of all sorts
described the welcome as an experience unlike any other they’d had.

The gracious welcome was not an isolated incident.

Mary Pena, whose parents left Cuba in 1961, made her first
trip to the island nation on the Adonia, and as part of her journey she knocked
on the door of the home her grandparents had lived in before moving to the U.S.

The residents, until then unknown to Pena or her family, not
only let her in but also pulled out the family albums the Penas had left
behind. The albums included photos of Pena’s parents’ wedding; she said she
cried for the next three days.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said.

Not every Adonia passenger had a storybook Havana
experience. Some who chose to tour independently of the formal excursions said
they were approached often by scammers, selling cigars of dubious origin or
offering to arrange liaisons of the flesh.

But peddlers of the less innocuous variety largely stayed
away from the Adonia tour groups, led by operator Havanatur.

A free walking excursion on the first day in Havana, which
lasted most of the afternoon, took passengers through the Plaza de Armas, the
site where Havana was founded in 1519, and eventually to three other plazas in
Old Havana.

In addition to offering a lesson in early Cuban history, the
walking tour featured a stop for a multicourse lunch as well as a visit to the
Palacio de la Artesania marketplace, where shops sold everything from Cuban rum
to perfume and crafts.

During their second and final day in Havana, passengers had
the option of a free daylong bus tour featuring a drive along the Malecon and
into several of the city’s neighborhoods. It included the seaside district of
Miramar, the neighborhood that was home to Cuba’s social and economic elite
prior to Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

Buses stopped at the Plaza de la Revolucion, with its
massive monument to Cuba’s national hero, Jose Marti. The excursion also went
to the national art museum, the famed Hotel Nacional de Cuba and to the town of
Cojimar, just outside Havana, which Hemingway used as the setting for “The Old
Man and the Sea.”

Each bus also stopped at one of five Havana neighborhoods,
such as Callejon de Hamel, a central Havana alley that has been transformed
into a home for Afro-Cuban street art and Santeria-inspired dances.

Passengers were largely complimentary of the excursions.

Kahoud, for example, said she was so pleased with the entire
Adonia experience that she would push it hard to her clients.

Rodriguez, too, said the excursions were better than he had
expected, given that it was Fathom’s first cruise to Cuba.

But passenger Johnnie Westerhaus from Houston commented that
she had hoped for more of a person-to-person element.

Speaking to Travel Weekly last Wednesday, Fathom president
Tara Russell said the company was very pleased with how its first Cuba cruise
was unfolding. She added that the excursions would evolve over time.

“There are these old cars, incredible architecture, cigar
factories, amazing entrepreneurs, farms exploding all over the place, so we
will be developing those fabulous opportunities,” she said. “But you have to
remember that we only got approval in late March.”