Administrator of thelemmy.club

Nerd, truck driver, and kinda creeped that you’re reading this.

  • 38 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Pretty much for travel. I wanted to go to a Spanish speaking country, living in Florida makes Cuba one of the cheapest to get to and also very safe for foreigners (which helps get my GF on board). Plus being communist well… Kinda makes it top choice lol

    I’m just flying straight from Miami. There’s definitely restrictions and rules but they are very easy to meet. Can’t stay in pretty much any hotel. (Have to stay in a “Casa Particular” which is just like an AirBnB - quite literally most of them). Because the hotels are state run and the US wants you to not give them money. Then you need to eat at the private restaurants and have “meaningful interactions with the people” it’s really not a big deal for Americans to go anymore. Of course all these rules on what I can and cannot do are the rules of the “land of the free” not Cuba’s rules.

    But here straight from the US govt is an example of how to comply:

    Example 1 to § 515.574:

    An individual plans to travel to Cuba, stay in a room at a rented accommodation in a private Cuban residence (casa particular), eat at privately-owned Cuban restaurants (paladares), and shop at privately-owned stores run by self-employed Cubans (cuentapropista) during his or her four-day trip. While at the casa particular, the individual will have breakfast each morning with the Cuban host and engage with the Cuban host to learn about Cuban culture. The traveler will not lodge, or pay for lodging, at any property on the CPA List to the extent prohibited by § 515.210. In addition, the traveler will complete his or her full-time schedule by supporting Cuban entrepreneurs launching their privately-owned businesses. The traveler’s activities promote independent activity intended to strengthen civil society in Cuba. Because the individual’s qualifying activities are not limited to staying in a room at a rented accommodation in a private Cuban residence (casa particular), eating at privately-owned Cuban restaurants (paladares), and shopping at privately owned stores run by self-employed Cubans (cuentapropista) and the traveler maintains a full-time schedule that enhances contact with the Cuban people, supports civil society in Cuba, and promotes the Cuban people’s independence from Cuban authorities, and that results in meaningful interaction between the traveler and Cuban individuals, the individual’s travel qualifies for the general license.

    https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-V/part-515/subpart-E/section-515.574

    Of course, the one and only department that actually enforced this is the Treasury department. I’ve heard some formerly Cuban immigration agents in Miami get huffy about it on the way back but they literally can’t do anything. The treasury has the right to request your receipts and records from the trip for 5 years. AFAIK they’ve never done this to individual travelers. So people can and have just flagrantly violated these rules with no consequences. Not that I would of course.


  • Sure. The method I use is called “Comprehensible Input”. To start I used/use Dreaming Spanish.

    Basically you just kinda… Watch stuff in Spanish. That’s it. No translation. To start you begin with really simple stuff with tons of hand gestures and visual aids, so you don’t really need the words to understand.

    Then you move on to less and less visual aids. Then you can do podcasts and other audio only stuff. Then you can move on to just watching whatever you normally would but in Spanish. The beginning is a bit of a slog because the stuff you can understand really isn’t very interesting but you’ll get through it. Now I listen to audiobooks and watch dubbed TV series. It really works. I’ve been at it 9 or 10 months or so. I can get by with basic speaking and can get my point across (if in a very roundabout way sometimes) but I definitely need much more practice there. I have about 750 hours worth of watching/listening to stuff in Spanish. The method says English speakers need about 1500 hours to get to a practical fluency. (Plus a few dozen hours speaking practice, which you don’t do until the later parts.)

    If you spend a lot of time watching or listening to random stuff online, you can totally just replace that with this and learn Spanish in 1-3 years. It’s almost magic tbh.

    Here’s a playlist that explains it (turn on English subtitles)

    https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpPf-YgbU7GrtxQ9yde-J2tfxJDvReNf