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!

El Museo de Che

On Saturday, we drove 3 hours east to Santa Clara to pay homage to Ernesto Guevara, the Argentinian whose love for Latin America and dedication to social equality led him to Cuba, where he committed his life to the revolution. Pavia has been reading Che’s biography, a GIANT book that is basically a day-by-day account of the Cuban revolution. Anyone who attentively reads it cover-to-cover deserves a PHD on the life of Ernesto Guevara. So, in the absence of Google, she has become my personal, portable source of Che knowledge, as well as a fellow Che admirer who indulges my enthusiasm. In Cuba, one cannot escape the presence of Che. His face is everywhere. He was captured and executed during the revolution, so he is frozen as a 30-something year old and has come to represent the optimism of a revolutionary youth.

Here’s my pre-Che Museum excitement:

After 3 hours on the road, we piled out of the van and learned that the museum was closed for renovations. Ah, yes. In case we had forgotten, estamos en Cuba.

Outside the museum, there was a tall statue and some quotes carved into a monument, so we soaked that up, then drove further into Santa Clara to spend the day.

It’s a remarkably ugly city. We set off to find the train that Che derailed during the revolution. That’s why the museum is in Santa Clara – it was there where he successfully derailed a train traveling full-speed to Havana, filled with Batista’s reinforcement. The train cars are still scattered as they were after the crash, the insides converted into an art museum. The bulldozer is there, too. Brad pointed out that ironically, it’s a Catepillar – an American brand. Whatever you gotta do, Señor Che.

After walking around and working up an appetite, we encountered a quaint creole restaurant. Black bean soup, rice and (more) beans, fresh tomatoes and lettuce, and just-out-of-the-fryer plantain chips. Shelby and I ordered fish; pork for everyone else. The waitress came back out and told us that we would have to wait a bit longer for the fish, which we were fine with. When the others were practically finished with their meals, out come our steaming plates, and much to our surprise........

Shelby had Pavia cut off her fish’s head, while I preferred to bond with mine throughout the meal. Making eye contact made it even tastier! Really was delicious. Followed it up with chocolate peanut butter ice cream (for a dime!) and went on our way back to La Habana.

Una Mezcla de Fotos

I cooked everyone dinner last week because once again, I am a helpful, amiable person. This time, my pseudo-humanitarian act was a payback for Brad, to whom I passed a note in class, furiously demanding him to give me a question to ask this guy we were interviewing. I could not understand his thick Cuban accent, and instead of breathing like a normal person, I became so frustrated with myself that I just made the problem worse. Anyway, it gave me an excuse to make a nice dinner, and now the six of us are making it a weekly rotation.

Complete with flowers and hors d’ouvres, cuban style:

For the first course, I assembled a ghetto cheese plate with the only 2 kinds to be found at the supermarket: cheddar and “queso.” (Ahhh yes, the cheeeese type of cheese). Stumbled across some saltines on the cookie isle, cha-ching. Of course, olives. And a loaf of bread from the Panadería – about a 40 minute round-trip walk down 70^th and sooo worth it.

I stole some pictures off of other people’s cameras. Here’s a mildly embarrassing display of Calambokidis and I being Cuban – rum and cigars, etc. Yeah well, maybe not Cuban, rather Americans in Cuba.

As a follow up to that: Waiting for the bus on my first day of school!!!

This was earlier in the semester, as seen in the pastey skin tones:

It really is beautiful here. The weather, obviously, and the natural landscape, but the overall aura of the city is unique. It’s extremely poor and decayed, but – in part due to the decay – so rich in culture. There are vibrant colors everywhere. I think for all the things Cubans don’t have access to, they make up for in color. All the houses are vivid blues and reds and greens – with equally bright shutters to match the orange flowers in the yard. But all the paint is peeling, which is just another constant reminder of their shortages. The average salary is less than $30 a month and the poverty is certainly visible, but the people here have so much pride for the revolution that they created for themselves.

Everyone is so happy to see that we’re trying to learn Spanish. All the taxi drivers light up when we start bombarding them with questions in our broken Spanish. Havana is all they know (most of them have never left the city limits), so they love telling us where to go and what to do. They correct our grammar and ask us how to say words in English.

Since internet is so expensive, we have to be really creative in our use of free time, which involves talking to a lot of locals. There are old men on street corners playing dominos, couples drinking coffee on their front porches, shirtless children playing impromptu sports games. It is a 1950’s time bubble like I had been told, but not only because of the old cars and limited resources. Life moves at a slower pace here. It’s a very in-the-moment culture, perhaps like the world was before the internet.

In the absence of technology, we’ve gotten really good at the creativity thing. Sometimes hazardously so.

Such as, airplane rides on the university quad. At the moment this picture was taken, I threw my lower back out and was crippled for a few days.

Bus stop yoga. (I swear it will catch on)

Learn how to eat rice without silverware: check. Who needs forks when you can tear off some of the cardboard box and elegantly scoop the rice into your mouth?

We went down to the Malecon (seawall) one night and hung out with a guy named Raul, whom 2 weeks later we found out is a celebrity. When we met, he informed us that he was famous, but we didn’t believe him. He and his friends took us to a discotec where the power went out, so we left and they showed us around downtown Havana. We then made our way back to the Malecon where I forced Raul to teach me how to salsa dance. He obliged, and his friend taught Shelby as the boys laughed at us. Two hours later, I was no better at salsa dancing and it was time to go home. Fast forward a few weeks, as we were browsing through the pictures from that night, Yadira, our maid, excitedly recognizes him and asks what we were doing hanging out with Raul. She informs us of his status and tells us to turn the TV on channel 15 at 9:00 that night. We do. A famous Cuban soap opera comes on. And there’s our friend. I have his number, so perhaps one day we’ll call him and go see what Cuban stardom is like.

Dillon and Raul:

Here's Dijon and I enjoying the Malecon during the day:

That’s the end of this hodgepodge of pictures and stories. So much more to write, not enough time. I can’t believe we’re in our sixth week already!

Soroa

A few weekends ago, we took a day trip out to the pueblo of Soroa. Climbing down about a million swerving steps carved into the mountain, we made it to a waterfall, where we sat and admired it like well-behaved tourists for a while before we had our fill of good conduct and decided to scale the slippery rocks to go swimming. Then we climbed back up the million swerving steps with wet shoes, back to where the van was parked. Catching our breath and leaving Profe at the base camp, we set of for the highest peak, a 300 meter…hill. It wasn’t exactly a gradual rise in elevation though, so on the 30 minute hike up, I hit my week’s exercise quota. The little platform at the top, called a “mirador,” offered a beautiful panorama of western Cuba’s lush countryside, all the way to the northern and southern coasts of the island. We were the only ones there except for a man sprawled out on some rocks selling coconuts. Best job ever.

Drinking coconut water and doing yoga on a mountaintop, one of the highlights of the trip thus far:

Climbing down in half the time it took to get up, we had lunch in a little hut and set off for the orecería: orchid farm. I’ve been fascinated with orchids since reading “The Orchid Thief” a few years ago. Although, perhaps my fascination is not with the orchids themselves, but the community of crazy orchid breeders and the extremes they go to. Didn’t see any crazies at this place, but the flowers were pretty. I took lots of useless flower pictures and someone took a photo of me: