This was a present to my husband to celebrate our Silver Wedding Anniversary (which took place on the cruise) and I selected it specifically because it visited 2 ports in Cuba. In the end we only visited one port (Havana) and had 6 useful hours there and only 2 of those in daylight.

Some time towards the end of October the itinerary for this cruise was changed and the stop at Santiago de Cuba cancelled. We received no notification of this at all from RCCL and were offered no alternative cruise. The stop at Santiago was replaced with Key West. I found out about the change by accident when I received an e-mail from the tour operator in Santiago with whom I had booked a tour.

The new itinerary specified that the arrival time was due to be 2.00 p.m. on 9 November. This was then changed to 3.00 p.m. We docked at 3.00 p.m and this was when the real shambles began. The disembarkation of passengers was very poorly organised. Groups who had booked shore excursions through RCCL were called forward to disembark first and those of us who had booked independent tours were told to wait. As far as we were concerned, this was unacceptable. We managed to join a queue to disembark but did not clear Immigration until 4.45 pm. We started our tour at 5.00 p.m - 1 hour late and had only 1.5 hours of touring Havana in daylight before it got dark. Some of the people who had been in Group 3 did not get through Immigration until 6.45 pm. RCCL blamed this on Cuban Immigration, but there seemed to be plenty of officials processing people through the booths, so the problem really seemed to be from the organisation of groups leaving the ship. Read more