Gringo here.

One might think that “embarazada” is a cognate and means “embarrassed.” I was so sure of it, I said to a taxi driver, “estoy embarazada,” informing him of my often meager Spanish skills. “I’m so embarrassed,” right? No. Not at all. Embarazada means pregnant. Lesson learned.

Here's me being a tourist in front of the capital building:



Being a tourist with a creepy statue:



The city from the giant steps of the university:



We went to Hemmingway’s house last week and walked around the property. We couldn’t go in the house for some reason, but we could look in the windows and see it was set up just as it was when he lived there...type writers set up and everything. He lived right outside of Havana in a town called San Francisco de Paula, where he was nothing short of a celebrity for the residents. We climbed up to the top of the writing tower built for him by one of his wives. It looks out over miles of the island – the city, the countryside, and finally, el mar – the sea. I think if I had a writing tower like that I could produce some genius as well. Although, he apparently didn’t like to write up there because it was too luxurious; he liked to be in the middle of all the Cuban village chaos. Another interesting fact: when the U.S. government was in its paranoid commie period, Hoover sent a CIA agent to investigate Hemmingway. Well, a body was found on the property fairly recently, suspected to be that man. In a strange way, that makes me like him even more. Whatever the case, we gained some beautiful novels out of his eccentric and troubled life.

On the steps leading up to the main house: