Cuba Week

A couple of weeks ago, I got tired of paying for bottled water, so decided to risk drinking the tap water for the sake of saving some plastic and a few CUCs. Smart decision? So far so good, and now all six of us are ingesting agua Habanero. We’re also browning up quite nicely and becoming less and less surprised at the site of goats roaming the city sidewalks. We’ve been disconnected from technology, forced to question our political beliefs and shed our cultural pretenses. We’ve had interviews with intellectuals, social workers, farmers, dancers, and religious leaders. In essence, we are assimilating into life here on the island. But, of course, we are still privileged Americans pretending that we know what it’s like to live in a third world country. We sit in a classroom and discuss Cuba’s economic situation, but we have no idea what it feels like to be on the other side of la frontera cultural.

So what is one to do? We have decided to live one week on the average Cuban salary – less than $30/month. So, beginning tomorrow, each of us will put $7 in our wallet and not reload until the next Friday. This dollar-a-day includes all of our food and bus money. No cappuccinos, taxis, internet, alcohol, souvenirs, or late-night pieces of coconut cake from the bakery downstairs. Our diet will consist of fruit for breakfast, street vendor food for lunch, and beans/rice, pasta, and veggies for dinner. Because that’s not difficult enough, we’ve decided to only speak to each other in Spanish for the week. We should really be doing more of this anyway, but being here has shed light on how much I take communication for granted, so being able to converse in English after a long day of classes is a relief.

Anyway, we’ll see how this next week progresses. Won’t be blogging or facebooking or emailing or..…eating, apparently. Not really, though. Have I not emphasized enough how cheap food is?

A lot more to write about, but of course, not enough time. We went to a cigar factory today, which was incredible. Will elaborate later. Also fought a windstorm with flying trash and hubcaps. Salsa dancing classes in Yamila’s tiny apartment with her hippie friends have been a success, besides the space issue. In more monumental news, we’ve established some solid friendships with Cuban students in the past few weeks which has improved our Spanish dramatically. I’m making progress on my urban food security project and have an interview with a land management representative tomorrow. Got my 4 pages of questions and tape recorder (and khaki trench coat?) ready.

I have two six-page Spanish papers due on Monday, so I’m hoping this Cuba Week/no-spending-money-thing will force me to be more productive. Be back in a week!