Joanna Lumley’s Hidden Caribbean: Havana to Haiti, review – She’s an absolutely fabulous tour guide

Lumley jets off to the Caribbean uncovering the hidden side of Cuba for her brand new two-part series

I’ve just been to the Caribbean with Joanna Lumley. Not literally, that would be an absurd, though absolutely fabulous, idea. No, darling, just an hour spent in front of the telly watching Lumley in Hidden Caribbean: Havana to Haiti (ITV), covering a lot of ground in a lot of style in Cuba. (Even if she admits to sweating a lot. Another shattered dream.)

That is to be expected. What is novel is how inquisitive a tour guide she is, and how well she lives up to the “hidden” billing. She and her producers avoid the usual clichés about Cuba, which has, if anything, probably been overexposed. We don’t dwell too long on Ernest Hemingway, Fidel Castro and those big old Yankee cars that rumble around Havana. Instead, we get some Cubans boxing. You see, ever since she met Muhammad Ali in the 1970s, Lumley’s had a thing about boxing. Cuba, for some reason, produces lots of Olympic boxers, and so we set out to meet some. She is dismayed to find that, in socialist Cuba of all places, there is a ban on women boxing competitively, a strange chauvinistic quirk that means that these girls can’t use their talent to make a better life for themselves.

There are more discoveries, too. Manolo and his magnificent fern garden. OK, it does sound boring, but it is a magical place with flowers that virtually drip honey and hummingbirds that practically whisper in your ear. “Hidden” too are the little front-room shops, where Lumley gets herself some dazzlingly white no-label trainers, luxuries in Cuba that are only now available (outside the black market) thanks to some modest concessions to small-scale capitalism. Otherwise, as Lumley observes in the long queues at the state-run store, Cubans have to wait in line for their basic ration of rice, sugar and other necessities.

The Cubans are usually cheerful enough; but the workers in the cigar factory look very bored. With virtually no machinery, it is all hard manual labour. Instead of listening to whatever the Cuban equivalent of Heart FM is, they are read to all day by a lecturer for their entertainment and education. Lumley gamely does a turn, with A Tale of Two Cities. Superb diction, but it would have worked better in Spanish, let’s just say.

I especially appreciate the large family group who have made it their business to preserve the original form of rumba – with all its heavy African influences brought by the enslaved people who came to work on the plantations – with free street performances. They all love Lumley, and Lumley always wants to make new friends. Disconcertingly, this includes a huge rat-like creature that lives in the mangroves: she spends an inordinate amount of time waving a biscuit at it. It feels just like you are on holiday with her and it’s frustrating because you’re late for the last electric train running on this dilapidated socialist paradise, but she is going to spend however long it takes to get to know El Ratty.

Without getting all political, Lumley deftly flicks at both sides of the communist story of Cuba – the social solidarity and the defence of unique culture; but also hardships and shortages for people who have lived under Marxism-Leninism and punitive American sanctions for longer than most of us have been alive. Surely Cuba should be more than a living fossil to be gawped at by wealthy westerners? Even ones as curious and as nice as Lumley.

By the way, if you noticed the news story from last week, and you were expecting to see her held up at gunpoint, that’s next week, in Haiti. Maybe she charmed her way out of trouble.