Cafe Rueda
When the apartment below where we live became available I purchased it to store my bicycles, the ones used to conduct our bicycle tours. We put a coffee machine in the building and then realized that we could possibly turn it into a very small coffee shop. We came up with a plan, to do just that and the bikes got the boot.
The original apartment was built into the exit ramp of the underground parking lot during a time of short housing. We obtained planning permission to build the coffee shop and erected a wall in front of the building to replace the ugly wire fence. I did not get all I wanted; the powers that be would not allow me to build two bikes into the wall. No matter we took what was on offer and later found a way to install and old bike as a safety rail to the stairs.
I was lucky to have my friend Juan Carlos on the team; he could do anything my crazy mind could conjure up. He even built our sign using fire bricks from our home made pizza oven and a small disc cutter, I wondered if it would stand up to the weather, we are located just one block from the Malecon and are visited occasionally by the odd hurricane. Juan Carlos construction has stud up to the tests and can be certified Hurricane proof.
Keeping to a bicycle theme we came up with, Italian, English, Canadian and American tables by downloading logos and creating decals to put under the glass table tops. Then we added bicycle related pictures and paraphernalia on the walls. The waitresses ware cycling jerseys as uniform and it has grown to become a popular little coffee shop.
It is now the hub from which our tours run. The staff at the coffee shop makes sure that we have enough bottled water for the tour buses and help us load the buses, with the water and the ride equipment. Our clients are billeted in local casas and it is a convenient location to park the bus and assemble the riders for our departures to all parts of Cuba.
This coffee shop is a lot of work and employs a staff of 15. Running such an establishment in Cuba is very difficult; so difficult that one of our staff is employed as a full-time shopper. The government has advised us that we will be allowed to import food ourselves, this will make it much easier to give the tourists what they want, a good old American style breakfast. I am not impressed by a government promise; these are the same worldwide and are proclaimed just to stop you complaining. My needing good quality bacon is not a big deal in their eyes, running a country has far bigger issues than good breakfasts.
The Americans, Canadians and British do not like to be compared with each other but they all do have one thing in Common, that is their love of canned baked beans at breakfast time. Cubans are not into these beans sticking with their love of the good old black bean, which incidentally I do like but they are just not correct with sausage and eggs.
The locals come for our pizza, which is made in our home made oven. The oven it’s self is a story. We went to the Cuban restraint supply shop, with the intention of buying a new oven. Once there we encountered a price so high it was an insult to our intelligence. We scoured the underground market and came up with a guy who was advertising that he could make us an oven.