There seem to be two species of foreigners in Havana--those who love Che Guevara, and those who don’t know who Che Guevara is. The former come with camera lenses the size of traffic cones and leave with bags full of first edition contraband books. The latter come with dinner reservations and leave with cigars and tan lines.
I didn’t have a plan, per se, as to which category I would fall into (or really much of a plan at all, considering I bought my tickets only a few days before my arrival). I wasn’t particularly interested in museums of the revolution, but I wasn’t particularly interested in piña coladas by the pool either. I just wanted to meet people and see things I’d never seen before (that, and return with my badge of Badass saying that I’d been to Cuba). But despite the fact that I never intended to be The Tourist nor The Political Commentator, in my mini 8-day trip I ended up dipping my toes a little in both worlds.
The first day walking around town, I felt like a kid in a candy shop. Ten inch pizza for 50 cents! Coconut ice cream in a coconut shell for 40 cents! A whole bag of churros for one dollar! But after three days of nothing but sugar, oil, and bread, the novelty began to wear off. I would have renounced pizza for a year in exchange for a fruit or a vegetable. But in Havana, finding fresh produce is like finding a hamburger in New Delhi. In fact, unless you’re at a restaurant with stemmed water glasses, you’re pretty much relegated to eating cheese and bread--in the form of a sandwich, or a pizza, or a pizza folded like a sandwich.
Once I rubbed the stardust of salsa dancing and palm trees out of my eyes, I began to notice other undeniable realities of life in Cuba. Fruit isn’t the only endangered commodity: beef is actually illegal for most people, the “Supermercados” are practically empty--the bottles of rum and vegetable oil cast shadows on the sparse shelves. Street vendors offer their art in exchange for soap or deodorant and Sadys (my host) had to ask her friend from Spain to bring her bandaids. When one of the flautists in her quintet mentioned a Brazilian man had visited her, the other four gathered around like teenage girls at a sleepover, “What did he bring you??” Their hands touched their hearts and the jaws opened dreamily when she told them of perfumes and CDs of portuguese music--products impossible to acquire for a local on the island.
Cell phone calls are enormously expensive, one text message costs the equivalent of 25 loaves of bread, and the internet is a luxury--not to mention extremely slow. In order for Says to get in touch with me, she has to give her email password to her sister in Argentina, who sifts through the junk, forwards the important emails to their mom, who then calls Sadys and reads the messages over the phone, and then types up her dictated responses.
I have no credentials to speak to the political, economic or social merits of communism. The teenager in me wants to give Cuba a high five for sticking it to the might-means-right war-mongering imperialists. But in Havana I observed an ironic paradox in Fidel’s game plan. It must be tricky to maintain a nation founded on the culture of Anti-Man when you become The Man. There are more images of Che Guevara in Havana than of the Pope in the Vatican, but the people of Cuba seem to be burning for a new revolution. Now that the Spaniards are out and the Yankees don’t have missiles aimed at their eyeballs, the spirit of rebellion boiling in Cuban blood is aiming its fury at its most present oppressor.
The propaganda billboards encourage the proletariat to unite against tyranny. And so the artists flee to Madrid and Buenos Aires and send back satirical hymns of revolution.
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