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.

Restored colonial buildings line portions of Old Havana. Photo Credit: Robert Silk

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.”