hey,
Trip´s over. It´s been a while since my last email, so i´m going to try to explain everything that happened since then, and also write down all remaining thoughts about cuba. more because i want to make sure to remember it than anything else.
well, first thing is again first: the whole Fidel thing turned out to be a huge anti-climax, which in itself is very telling. Here´s my read: basically, cubans just didn´t care that much when fidel resigned. Not because they don´t care about fidel, and not really because they´re oppressed and hopeless, but because there was no real change. The symbolic aspects of the news were more or less swallowed up by the complete lack of practical significance. Fidel´s been too sick to serve for 2 years, and his brother Raul has served in his place. It was correctly predicted by everyone that Raul would be named the next president, so no change. On top of that, the cuban democracy separates the people from the election process pretty well- they elect people from their neighborhood, who form a committee and elect the representatitive to a more powerful committee, who elects the representative to a more powerful committee, etc, until there is a very powerful committee who elects the president. Even if there had been a chance of change, the cuban people would have had no hand in the decision. On the flip side, i was told that when Fidel first got sick it was a huge deal- what would happen, who would take over, would america try to attack? it was a big deal. This time around, it´s pretty much just same old same old, which, in the end, makes sense. (by the way, did i not call this whole fidel thing in advance by noting the correspondence between my arrival in cuba and the opening of the new Rambo movie? Rambo, who fought so hard against communism in Nam that he decided to keep fighting delussionally in America?)
So, my trip. I last wrote from Trinidad. The next day, i went to the beach, which was nice except for the fact that i stayed for a very beautiful sunset and thereby learned that cuba has sand fleas that come out at sunset. my body was covered in bites for the rest of the trip. Anyway, sunset was great, and that night there was both a full moon and a lunar eclipse, which was pretty crazy. I had planned on leaving trinidad the next day, but i was talking with some musicians that night and they said to come to their rehearsal, so i stuck around to do that. It was fun, interesting, if not really enlightening. However, i then realized that i ought to take a couple lessons while there were some musicians i knew, so i stayed yet another day. I took lessons on bongos and congas, learning basic patterns from a really good musician who was also the conductor of the Trinidad Symphony Orchestra. Nothing big, but i started getting a better sense of the anatomy of cuban music at least. Anyway, 3 planned days in Trinidad had very easily become 5, and it was time to move on to Cienfuegos, a hilly 80km bikeride away.
One thing that´s weird about spending extended periods of time travelling around a country is that you repeatedly run into others doing the same thing, or sort of similar things. Because of this, you get to know people just by seeing them randomly in different cities- even if you never talk to them. For example, there´s the really nice dutch couple who are also biking around cuba, who i biked 100km with in western cuba and then ran into unexpectedly in Trinidad; there´s the french couple who speak no spanish, and who i see getting hustled out of their money by jineteros in every city; the british party guy who i met in Vinales, and then 3 weeks later saw in Cienfuegos, his pale skin all freckled and his eyes a bit more bloodshot; and then there´s the middle-aged woman travelling alone who likes to dance salsa and who, in every city she goes to, uses her money to pick up young cuban men who would otherwise have no interest in her. The recurrence of these characters, and their development in my consciousness, has definitely been one of the more bizarre subplots of this trip. Relatedly, in Trinidad i ran into three spanish girls i´d met in Santiago, and they ended up more or less defining the last leg of my trip. more on that soon.
About biking: obviously, my often-present urge to irrationally just keep pushing, especially in physical activities, is disasterous for long-distance cycling. that´s kind of self-evident. One related character trait of mine, though, has made itself really clear on this trip. When something goes wrong with the bike, even if it´s something small that just slows me down and makes me work harder, i would rather just work harder- even if for hours on end- than spend 10-15 minutes trying to fix it. I already knew this about myself, and have noticed it several times in less physical manifestatiions, but i think it´s interesting how literally it manifests itself while i´m biking.
So, as i departed on my bike the next day, i realized just how much my staying in Trinidad was actually an excuse for staying off my bike. Finally, after 3 and a half weeks in cuba, i admitted to my self that i hate biking. hate it. My bad mood that usually starts around 12:30 on biking days had already begun by 8:45, and things were not shaping up well. Then, fifteen minutes into the ride, a cuban teenager on a bike rode up beside me and said that his friend had a flat. Well, when in cuba, do as the cubans do, which is help random strangers fix their broken stuff. As we fixed up the tube, i got to talking with the two guys, 15 and 17 years old respectively. It turned out they were for real cyclists, athletes sponsored by the state (i also found out that athletes, even at their age, are paid by the state in Convertibles- tourist money, which is pretty interesting to know). They were training to, within a few years, compete on the highest national level of cycle racing, and were hoping to make the olympics in 2012 or 2016. They were pretty awesome. Anyway, they were going to Cienfuegos and back that day, and in perfect cuban fashion, they wouldn´t leave my side for the rest of the day (very cuban not because they wanted something out of me, which they didn´t because they´re paid in tourist money, but because when cubans decide to help you there´s no way of stopping them, or even of helping them help you. what was yours to do is now theirs to do, and you better just stand back and watch). They rode ridiculously slow for their capabilities, and i rode ridiculously fast for mine, and when we got to hills they each put a hand on my back as they rode and physically pushed me and my bike up the hill while i was still, impotently, riding it. It was cool, i felt like a really incapacitated Lance Armstrong, with my team focused on me having some juice at the end. Maybe Lance Armstrong right after his testicle surgery or something. Also, it was just good to talk to cubans all day long, especially because their youth and athletic/financial privilege took the issue of money out of the picture. In the end, with a stop to fix the flat, a stop for food, and a stop to run around and watch a dog chasing a deer, we made it 80km in by 3pm, less than 6 hours (and they turned around and went back that afternoon). Before they left, i gave them as a gift my all-in-one bike tool, which is the perfect gift for a cuban cyclist. they´d never seen anything like it, and i think it will help them.
So, finally i was in Cienfuegos, which is a pretty old city with french architecture situated on a really big bay. Enter the spanish girls: in Santiago there were 3 spanish girls staying in the same casa as me, and we got along pretty well. Very unexpectedly, i ran into them again on my fourth day in Trinidad, and they were headed to Cienfuegos next, just like me. Also like me, they´re traveling on a pretty serious budget. We agreed to meet up and share rooms in order to save bread. So, i met up with the three spanish girls- Lucia, Julieta, and Maira- and crashed with them for a couple nights in Cienfuegos. This was also very good because not only did they speak fluent spanish, which makes things much easier in cuba, but one of them had a family friend in Cienfuegos, and that family friend happened to be a singer. So, for those two nights, we were pretty much hanging out with a bunch of cuban musicians, and the level of familiarity negated the money issue that haunts tourist-cuban interactions. It was pretty fun, and i learned exactly how much cubans drink. a lot.
A really good moment of this trip that i forgot to mention in my last email: At playa caletones, where i camped on the beach with all the wind, i got to talking with some of the people who live in the village there. We were talking about cuba, america, etc, when we heard two yelling voices: a woman´s, and a pig´s. Turning around, i saw the woman chasing the pig, who had her purse and a bag of bread in his mouth. We spent about ten minutes chasing this pig around the village (pigs are agile), it terrified and screaming but refusing to drop the woman´s stuff. It was fun, and we finally did get her stuff back.
There isn´t a lot more to say about Cienfuegos. My next stop was Matanzas, which is three long bike days from Cienfuegos. This was not appealing, and when the spanish girls said they were renting a car and would drop me and my bike off in matanzas, i was pretty relieved. We managed to squeeze the bike into the cuban hatchback rental car, and we were off. I have to admit, i felt pretty bad about whimping out like this. Basically, i was trading three days of biking so that i could have one day of beach at the end of the trip. This was by no means sprinting through the finish line, and i was a little conflicted, disappointed to know that i was squashing the chance of any more hardships on this trip. Naive. i´m naive.
Along the way to Matanzas, we stopped at Playa Giron, known to Americans as The Bay of Pigs, the site of what very well may have been the dumbest moment in the history of American military strategy. There was a museum, a beach, a big billboard proclaiming Cuba´s victory over america, not much else. Mainly, we hung out on the beach. Gradually, we made our way along the southern coast and then north across the island to Matanzas, which is on the northern coast about 60-65 miles from La Habana. It was a really nice day- no biking, lots of company and talking with the spanish girls. And then, literally 10 minutes outside of Matanzas, we started smelling gas. We pulled over to check out what was going on, and there was a huge gas leak, and the car wouldn´t start (yeah, we probably shouldn´t have tried to start the car when there was a huge gas leak, but we did). Fortunately, the spanish girls had cell phones, so we called the rental company, who said they could be there in an hour- which is very cuban, because we really were only ten minutes out of matanzas. Even more cuban was the fact that one hour became two. As buses, motorcycles, bikes and horsecarts passed us by, the sun went down, and we ended up sitting on the side of the road in pitch dark, hoping someone would show up. as i paced back and forth, i stepped wrong on a rock, and one of my beloved American flag sandals snapped. frustrating. If, as the billboard outside of Playa Giron proclaimed, the Bay of Pigs was the first great victory over American imperialism, this was surely the second. Eventually, the tow truck came. we made it to Matanzas, spent about two hours looking for rooms to stay in, and went to sleep.
I ought to mention Cuban lines. Cuban lines are the best. They´re huge, and really lines are a way of life in cuba- grocery stores, banks, telephones, restaurants, and of course ration stores, all involve hours of waiting in line. But cuba has a really good line culture. First of all, everyone knows everyone, so it´s just more fun. People are talking, laughing, etc. Also, though, Cubans actually understand that one need not stand in single-file order for a line to be successful. In cuba, you just walk up and ask who´s last and who´s second-to-last, and stick around until the next person comes behind you. Once that happens, you´re set, and you can go do whatever you want so long as you´re back when it´s your turn. Isn´t that better? Shouldn´t lines be like that everywhere?
Back to the trip. We were in Matanzas, and the next morning the spanish girls were going southwest to Vinales by car, and i was going west along the coast, to the beach. My plan was to bike 40km along the coast and spend a night in a campismo, the basic but cheap accommodations where cubans stay when they vacation, then bike about 30km more to a beach town, where another traveler was waiting to buy my bike. That morning, though, i checked my email, and the guy who wanted to buy my bike had written me that he had a free extra room if i wanted a place to sleep. I could really resist that offer, but it was already noon and his extra room was at least 70km away. And so, fittingly, my last day of biking was every bit as stupid and poorly-planned as my first: trying to bike 70-80km, leaving at noon, during the hottest part of the day, and almost entirely without water. Fortunately, my body had adapted where my mind certainly hadn´t, and i made the distance in 5 hours, almost without stopping. Free dinner, free bed, day at the beach, sold my bike (very happy to be rid of it), and took the bus to La Habana the following afternoon. (A cool thing about local cuban buses: the payment system is pretty much a free-for-all. they say it costs 40 cents, but you just throw in whatever you have, or nothing, and no one really cares. i like that.) The bus ride back to La Habana was a bit somber, with the trip ending and all, and actually felt very similar to the train ride back into Tokyo as my Japan trip ended.
La Habana was fun, though. i met up again with the three spanish girls, and spent my last 2 and a half days with them, pretty much just walking all around La Habana, and seeing music at night. And now i´m back in Cancun. Here´s a tip: don´t spend time in cuba and then go to cancun during spring break. Cancun sucks, and spring break sucks, and i´m getting a capitalism overload. I had forgotten McDonalds even existed. And i miss the spanish girls, they were great. Anyway, cancun sucks.
So, that, more or less, was the trip. here are all my random final thoughts:
Cubans are at once the warmest people in the world and the biggest lying cheats in the world. I don´t mean to say that there are extremes of each- that´s true anywhere. But, while there are certainly many who display each trait to extremes at the sacrifice of the other, cuba is different in that, as a tourist, anyone you meet is likely to be both at the same time, and the voracity of the one somehow does not negate the sincerity of the other. interesting.
This will only make sense to the greenhill people receiving this email, and i´m sorry to include inside jokes, but i think it´s worth noting because it´s a thought i want to remember: At the beginning of this trip, in La Habana, i was walking downthe street and thought i saw Mr. McMurray. I hadn´t considered it before, but i realized then that Wells McMurray is pretty much the only person in the world i would not be surprised to run into in Cuba. That´s about right, isn´t it?
Cuban ice cream. I love cuban ice cream, and i will miss it terribly. I don´t know what percentage of my diet was ice cream on this trip, but i would put the over/under at 20%. best ice cream in the world. In fact, all things sweet are just better in cuba: sugar, candy, pastries, fruit, juice. but especially ice cream. i don´t have the words. And, for that matter, cuban coffee is the best, too. I don´t drink coffee at all, and i usually don´t like it, but when it was mixed with cuban sugar, i couldn´t resist. And yes, cuban tobacco really is that good. And no, i didn´t bring any back for any of you, because none of you expressed interest in paying the fine if i got caught. sorry, talk to the US government.
By the way, if cuba has allowed me to be certain about anything, it´s that the embargo is stupid. I believe this even more than i did before the trip. It has proven useless in political change, and the cuban government has proven that it will continue to maintain itself and live richly with or without America´s help (and more than that, it retains its acquiescent popular support through propoganda that blames the US for cuba´s economic situation). So, the only real affect it can have is on the cuban people, and it decidedly makes their lives worse. I guess i knew these things before i went to cuba, but now i´ve seen how the whole machine actually works, and it´s ugly. Spending time with those people and seeing what life is like for cubans makes me fairly sick that our government would rather act like a 5-year-old, and a particularly poorly-raised 5-year-old at that, than help some people out. The law is impotent and ill-conceived, save the fact that it has successfully won the Cuban-American vote, and often thereby the state of Florida, in every election since 1960. And i suppose it is therefore extraordinarily potent and brilliantly-conceived, but pretty much evil. That´s my political rant. sorry if i´m being dogmatic, but show me that i´m wrong here, or that it´s not far more outrageous and despicable than we give it credit for. You know what sucks? explaining to cubans over and over again that americans generally don´t support or believe in the embargo laws, but don´t really care enough about cuba to make a big deal of it. sorry, i´m done.
Cuba leaves me with many, many more questions than answers; but this has been, for the duration of the trip, the hardest question to answer: Why does cuba have two currencies? Why? really, why. it makes no sense. note: after i wrote this, in Cienfuegos, Raul Castro became official president, and announced that cuba would switch to one currency. many questions remain regarding how that will happen and what its affects will be (some cubans will get screwed, probably those who have spent their time and effort ammassing tourist money), but it seems that the source of my confusion will, even if never addressed, gradually fade away.
Another confuser about cuba: racism. Cuba boasts of being a very well racially-integrated society, and it is. There aren´t black and white neighborhoods like in america, and the vast majority of the population is self-described as “mulato,” or mixed-race. Cuba has, in fact, done good to help wash away in me many of the very basic racist assumptions and expectations that develop after 23 years in America. That said, something really weird is going on with racism in cuba. I keep asking myself, why haven´t i seen a single casa particular (independently owned bed and breakfast run out of families´ houses) owned by a black family? On top of that curiosity, many of these families- with entirely good intentions- warned me to stay out of certain neighborhoods or cities because there were so many black people, or straight warned me to stay away from black people. Classic cuba: lays its cards face-up, whether they´re good or bad, unashamed. A culture that is totally open and equally undecipherable. I just have no idea what´s going on here.
Things cubans say: well, a bus is a ¨guagua.¨ As an american, I´m called either a ¨yanqui¨ or a ¨yuma.¨ The general description of how things are, or should be (kind of like cool in America), is ¨tranquilo.¨ And by far the most oft-heard saying is ¨no es facil,¨ (it´s not easy), which cubans fittingly say in a way that makes it sound like ¨no hay facil¨ (ease doesn´t exist).
So, what conclusions am i drawing about cuba in general? well, i think i pretty much nailed it in my first email (and echoed it in my last paragraph). Cuba presents itself to you fairly openly and honestly, with everything pretty much happening in public, on the street, without much sense of privacy. And, for all of Cuba´s unabashed displays, it remains largely inexplicable. You can see almost everything, but it´s tough to begin to understand anything. Here´s some of the things i think: i stick with my idea that the basic difference is one of priorities, and that judging those priorities is rash because we are indoctrinated and partial, too. I also hold that the lack of personal freedoms is the problem with cuba´s system, and that cubans see it this way, more or less. But i don´t argue that this problem outweighs the corresponding and opposite problems in america, because of aforementioned impossibility of objectivity based on upbringing. So, where that leaves me is this: I am a little awed at the general benevolence created by cuba´s economic system (and yes, i do think it´s fundamentally related to socialism, and would slowly disband with the introduction of capitalism). I like the cuban way of life, and i also believe that is in large part a product of its socialism. Would i choose their way of life over ours? problably not; but it´s something worth thinking about, and in the end i would (and do) choose ours and then lament not having theirs, which is something.
Do Cubans want change? i´ll rephrase the comparison i just made: In the US, many many people are screwed by our economic system. Some people are very poor, and this usually means they´re uneducated, and this almost always means that they will continue to be poor. and I guess i don´t need to go into details of how capitalism and american history combine to create an omnipresent racist beast. What i´m getting at is that there are ways in which our economic system hurts all of us every day, makes our lives worse, and hurts many people cripplingly. Do you want change? you want changes, but you probably wouldn´t change the system if you could. Do the hopelessly poor want a change of economic system in America? I suspect not. It´s too much change, too extreme a reaction, and too foreign to the way of thinking and acting we´ve always known and can´t particularly change. Pretty much, i think it´s the same in cuba. People want changes, but they don´t want change. I think, to a large degree, the cuban people fear change. They know that cuba hasn´t arrived in full as a developed nation (though they are proud of the extent to which it has become developed in the last 50 years), and they know that change can mean change for the worse, especially when a poor country changes to a system that allows for the rise of few at the expense of many. And, of course, most cubans have grown up socialists, learned their country´s ideals in school from childhood and learned their sensibilities from their daily lives. Change would be jarring and foreign and violently new, and i don´t think they want that. If cuba could be more democratic without being less socialist, maybe that´s what they´d want. It´s certainly what i´d want for cuba. But these are speculations, and in reality it´s hard to get a cuban´s direct and honest opinion- espeically a critical one- because they also fear their government. And the last thing worth remembering, and maybe an easy one to forget as an American, is that Cubans, whether socialist or not, are intensely nationalistic. This revolution has been the first time in Cuban history that cubans have self-determined, and there´s a lot of pride in that. For centuries, cuba was the pawn of spanish and/or american governments, and the middle-aged generation remember fighting like hell to get america and its puppet government the fuck out (whether you see it this way or not, this is how cubans see it; in all the talking with cubans, even in the most adamantly anti-castro and anti-socialist, not one single person wistfully remembered the good old Batista days. from what i can tell, it was decidedly worse then). I try not to pity cubans or think of them as an oppressed people- in part because they have things that i never will, that i would like to have; and in part because they´re not quite an oppressed people. They´re not downtrodden, starving, hopeless. They just don´t have everything they want, and they´re too far separated from their government, and stuff doesn´t always work even when they have it, and the whole result is a culture partly imbued with a sense of personal stasis. They´re somewhere in between, and that´s the hard part about cuba. You can tell from the schizophrenic nature of my evaluations: i seesaw back and forth between lauding the accomplishments, appreciating the success, and lambasting the material and ideological failures of the revolution. And i think that´s about right. Like i said, it´s just a hard place to make sense of. outright dismissal misses the point entirely. But it´s cuba, so what “the point” actually is eludes me.
that´s all i got. back in dallas to vote on tuesday (fittingly american, right?), back to new york sometime before march 20. Now, there´s just the final frontier- literally- of getting through US Customs without arousing suspicion. we´ll see. i´m not worried, mostly because i don´t think i care anymore if i get caught (worst case scenario, they think i´m a terrorist and end up shipping me back to cuba, right?). Anyway, trip´s over, back to the real world. thanks for being e-there for me for the last month or so. these trips make me appreciate my family and friends a lot, if only there were always an ocean separating us. i do miss you guys, though, and i hope i´ll get to see everyone very soon.
later,
ben
Ok,
first thing´s first: i just logged on to the internet, checked the new york times, and found out that Fidel Castro resigned this morning. I´m generally shocked, have not yet spoken to any cubans about it, have not heard a thing, have no idea what to think. I can´t remember being so speechless about an issue or event. I have no idea. i have no idea. i can´t believe i´m right here right now, and have no expectations- what should i expect? anyway, about 10 days left, so we´ll see. at the very least, i know how to pick em.
Anyway, i think that least email was kind of a dud, but this trip has finally started kicking into gear. I´ve got a lot to say in this one, and i´m gonna say it all now, so if you want to read it all in one sitting, you should go pee now. Hard to say, but this could end up an all-timer. By the way, holy crap. castro resigned today, and i´m in cuba right now. holy crap. i could write holy crap 47 times and still feel like writing it again.
So, i´ll start from when i left off, Valentine´s Day in Santiago. I should have considered that cuba would make a big deal out of Valentine´s Day, but it just never occurred to me. Anyway, the big central square on which Santiago is centered was converted into a public dance space, and huge paper hearts were placed all over the ground. it was nice. Then i realized that the huge paper hearts were covered in something; and then i realized that the huge paper hearts were covered in condoms; and then i realized that this was all set up for a city-wide highschool dance. One of those ¨wouldn´t happen in america¨ moments. I don´t remember condom displays at greenhill dances.
So, the next day i took a bus to Holguin, in northeastern Cuba, and then biked 33km to Gibara, a small fishing town on the north coast, surrounded by mesa-like mogotes (mountainous limestone formations). It´s a really pretty, quiet place. i liked it a lot. I spent the afternoon walking along the seaside boulevard, watching the most unearthly beautiful sunset i´ve ever seen. As the sun went down, the wind really picked up. I considered this, and thought ¨hmm.¨
Some side notes: first of all, i should have noted this a couple emails ago, but my spanish has improved immensely- especially my comprehension skills. I mostly can understand cubans now, and can have decently real conversations. My speaking skills are still a little slow and stupid, but my speaking skills in english are a little slow and stupid, so that´s ok.
Say what you will about communism, defend it or attack it, but one Cuban social experiment has unequivocally failed: the longstanding theory that sharing a two-lane highway between bicycles, horse-drawn carts, and automobiles, would be extraordinarily easy, has finally been disproven. It is, in fact, extraordinarily difficult. The corollary that potholes would help has also gone down in flames. back to the drawing board.
Back to the plot. I spent a night in Gibara, the small fishing town on the north coast of cuba, and the next day biked to Playa Caletones, a remote beach with no hotels about 20km west of Gibara. This ride was great. It was along the coast, so there were no hills, and i could watch the ocean and smell the sea water. lizards scampered across the road in front of me, there were no cars to jockey with, and i knew there was a beach in my future. The wind was a bit strong (again, i thought ¨hmm,¨) but despite this and an increasingly unpaved road, this was shaping into my favorite biking day.
And then the road got less paved. and then the road was just rocks. and then i had a flat tire. dammit. I had started to actually believe i would make it the whole 5 weeks without a flat- and i probably would have if i´d been smart enough to not ride a fully-loaded bike on rocks- but now i had to fix it. As i walked along the road looking for a shady place to patch the tire, i passed a big family- about 7 people- and they decided they had to help me. This was very cuban. basically, they refused to let me fix the tire, did it all for me, and were incredibly friendly about it. they were great. i gave them some tire patches and food in payment, which i think they had planned on receiving. Anyway, back on the road, and eventually to Playa Caletones. about halfway there, i passed a big windmill power station, and i thought ¨hmm.¨
Playa Caletones was a really small, really beautiful beach with almost no other tourists. The people who lived there sold lunches, and they were fine with me camping on the beach. Incidentally, Caletones was the closest i´ve ever seen to my fantasy living environment- a small group of closely-connected, well-educated people living on a beautiful beach where it´s always warm and every afternoon is free. Anyway, i took one of my trademark exploratory walks on the beach, where you find the farthest point you can see on the coastline and then walk beyond it, and that was fun. When i got back it was almost sundown, and i started setting up my tent. And then all my collective hmms came crashing down on me. The wind started blowing really hard around sunset, just as it had in Gibara the night before. and, as it turns out, a tent in heavy wind is really just a huge kite that you´re trying to sleep in. I slept intermittently.
I´ve neglected noting the best use of X as Y for the past couple weeks, so here are my three favorite i´ve seen: 1) a giant, dried palm leaf as a sort of warm-weather, downhill snowboard; 2) i watched, rapt, as an 8-year-old used a big stick to prod at the loose wires of a streetlight in Gibara. I was amazed at his double success of actually turning the streetlight on, and not dying in the process; 3) horse-drawn bicycle. envy, i was guilty of envy.
So, after ¨sleeping¨ on the beach in Caletones, i biked about 50km back to Holguin the next afternoon. Being a tricksy, enterprising young capitalist, i realized that if i took an overnight bus to Trinidad and then slept in the morning, i wouldn´t have to pay for the night of sleeping. i decided that the $25 was well worth the blow to my personal hygeine (hadn´t showered in about 48 hours, in which time i´d slept at the beach, swam in the ocean, and biked all afternoon. i was pretty disgusting.) anyway, i took the overnight to Trinidad, and didn´t get too much sleep. As it turns out, sandwiching 4-5 hours of biking between two nights of what can at best be called intermittent sleep constitutes a considerable challenge to the entire organism. I recovered, but i don´t think i´ll try it again.
So that was yesterday, and now i´m in Trinidad, and i really like it here. Trinidad is a really, really old town that has been preserved down to the cobblestone streets. it´s on a bay on the south-central coast of cuba, on the foothills of the Sierra Escambray (i know, i said the same thing about Santiago, but that was wrong; Santiago is on the foothills of the Sierra Maestra) and it´s really pretty. Tons of tourists, and therefore tons of really aggressive jineteros and jineteras, but is somehow still surprisingly peaceful. And it´s beautiful. i like it.
Trinidad at night is interesting. The scene is almost like a music festival- in about a 4 block stretch, there are a ton of open-air venues, all with great music, and the music is free. so you just walk around listening all night. Like i said, there are tons of tourists, but they´re not the silly-hat tourists like in La Habana. Because Trinidad is about 10km away from one of cuba´s nicest beach resorts, the tourists here are the beach-vacation, all-inclusive resort type tourists. They´re partiers, the type of toursists who come to Cuba to drink rum and smoke cigars, dance with the locals (whereas the silly-hat tourists seem to come for no reason other than to walk around in silly hats)- they´ll have a great time, but they won´t learn anything. I think Dallas, as much as i love it, has a lot of people like this, so i feel strangely comfortable among these tourists. Also, even if they are kind of terrible in principle, they´re nice and very fun people, and their lack of inhibitions do make for a good scene. Musically, it means that the musicians in Trinidad seem to be better than other places, more virtuosic, better sound systems, etc. I prefer the personality of Santiago´s music scene, where dancers and musicians spur each other on, the venues are intimate and personal, and instruments are acoustic instead of amplified. But trinidad´s alright too, and there´s free live, high-quality music all over until about midnight, at which point the music continues at a small price.
Something has happened this trip. At some point, i stopped peeing standing up. I don´t know exactly when this happened, and i don´t know exactly why this happened; but it happened, and i´m pretty much ok with it.
And, while we´re on the subject, and since my bowels have made themselves a subplot of this trip, i´ll update. Things have become very strange in this department. Thing is, i had to take a whole lot of Immodium AD over a 48-hour period in order to prevent any trouble during the beach and bus nights. i think i kind of overdosed. Anyway, i can´t really figure out what´s going on now, but i´ve learned that opposites can coexist, and the result is not alternation, combination, nor average. it´s just strange.
Also, here´s something else. I want to give a better picture of what my biking days are like, because they´re different than i expected. In japan, when i was walking and taking trains all day, i thought a ton. While bikes offer a lot of time to think, they´re somehow not conducive to meaningful thought processes. I end up having to think about really stupid things for really long periods of time. So, for the first part of my trip, i spent a lot of time on the bike wondering if this was the only country i´ve ever been in that doesn´t have any rollercoasters. Then i saw a very small rollercoaster, and that was done. Next, i spent about a week imagining the job of naming gas stations (every gas station here has it´s own subname, analogous to ¨Exxon: July 4, 1976¨ or ¨Texaco: Foot of the Rockies.¨ I like the idea that there´s a cuban official in an office somewhere who just spends all days coming up with these names. Anyway, that got old. Now, i´ve settled on a pretty good one: I spend my biking time imagining would it would be like if Fidel and his Revolution had somehow merged with (The Artist Formerly Known As) Prince and the Revolution (his band). Police officers would all wear purple, and we´d party like it´s 1959, but strikingly similar would be the number of phallic monuments.
Cuba does childhood right. I don´t really want to go into further detail, but know that cuba does childhood absolutely right, and better than any other culture i´ve experienced.
An update on how cubans think (obviously, with the Fidel news, this will become the major interest of the rest of my trip, but these toughts precede the news): Something worth noting is cuban nostalgia. From what everyone says, no matter their opinions on the system or current affairs, things were much, much better here before the Soviet Union collapsed. This makes sense, since cuba had a ton of foreign aid then, and it seems like there was a really significant difference in the quality of life. Everyone says it, so i believe it. Something else i´ve been following (and obviously will now focus on) is how cubans feel about Fidel. I think most genuinely feel very strongly about him in a positive way. This also makes sense. He did a lot for this country, and most Cubans have grown up with him as a national, cultural hero. We´ll see, but i think that a ton of people here really do love him, and have very personal, very special feelings towards him- not that they think he´s faltless, but he´s very special to them. a sort of national father figure. cubans usually don´t call him ¨Fidel¨ or even ¨el comandante,¨ but ¨mi comandante.¨ they don´t like the situation right now, but most of them don´t seem to blame him, or maybe even socialism (this part´s hard to get a read on, though)- it´s just a bad economy right now, the double-currency system is a disaster, and the embargo makes it impossible to stand back up. I expect that rhetoric not to change in the next week.
Yesterday, after i slept all morning, and finally showered, I spent the day walking around Trinidad. all the building are from the 1700´s, it´s pretty crazy. I walked up a big hill to the ruins of an old Spanish hospital, and then kept walking to the top of the mountain where i could see the whole city. While up there, i heard some amazing music coming from town. It was all drums and chanting, and it was incredibly complex rhythmic layers. Really amazing. I knew where it was coming from, and i knew that the people in that neighborhood were voracious jineteros, so i almost didn´t go. But the music was just too closely related to some of my own interests, so i had to go. best decision of the trip.
As it turned out, the music was part of a Santeria ritual, and i was welcomed to watch and take part. It wasn´t a tourist thing, or a money thing (though everyone asked for money and stuff), it was just in someone´s house and a neighborhood thing. I was really lucky to find it, though i think i will fail miserably in trying to describe what i saw.
There were three or four men against the wall with drums, and, like i said, the rhythms were very intricately layered, and very polyrhythmic. it was kind of mind-blowing musically. a huge group, everyone in the neighborhood, was lined along the walls, and in the middle were two men. One was the musical leader, the ¨call¨of the call and response chants. He changed the words every once in a while, and the group wuold follow. The other man was, for lack of better words, possessed by a saint. He was shirtless, and dancing; his eyes were half-closed and he had a serene smile on his face the whole time. He never said a word. Sometimes he would do things, for example: stick his finger in honey, and then in someone´s mouth; spit the cuban version of everclear, aguardiente, around the room; pick up a small dog from the doorway and shake it around violently; fall down; rub his head against other people´s heads; swing a stick around wildly, use it to grab at people, sometimes hit people with it unintentionally; put his hat on other peoples´ heads, or, alternatively, use his hat to throw fruit around the room and then catch it when the fruit flew back towards him. Anyway, lots of stuff, obviously undecipherable to you and me. The interesting thing, though, was that it seemed equally undecipherable to the cubans there. They watched with general interest, curiosity, and mild fear. They seemed to have no idea what he´d do next, or the meaning of what he was doing now. My guess is that it was an improvised symbology, which is actually really interesting if you think about it. Anyway, it was also interesting that, because the cubans there had plenty of experience in santeria but seemed to not really know what was going on in a way similar to my not knowing, very little actually separated me from the participants. They believed more strongly, but maybe only because they understood what they were supposed to believe. Whatever i saw, i did believe it in a general way, i just didn´t have an explanation for it like they did. Anyway, i thought that was interesting.
The ¨possessed¨ man would pick someone, and center his actions on that person. People picked were often, at first, reluctant, laughing, shying away. Eventually they would come into the center, dance. Things would happen- honey in mouth, stick to head, face covered in some sort of white paste, and the picked person would start going into a trance. These were full-on trances, with very wild dancing, lack of bodily control, and crazy eyes. Once entranced, the picked person would start doing things that seemed very random- running down the street with a pail of water, for example- but with utter confidence and sense of purpose. At one point, the possessed man was making prophecies (though he couldn´t speak, so he had to sign everything). Anyway, i´m explaining what happened without communicating anything of the emotional experience. I can´t- i don´t really understand what it was, and i have very limited internet time, and am incapable of communicating it anyway. But it was incredible, and i didn´t stay on the outside as an emotionless observer. It was impossible not to get involved, even if just because of the music and general excitement. I don´t know, it was incredible. Musically, i won´t expect anything to compare for at least a year.
Ok, that´s what i´ve got. I feel really bad taking up this much time with people waiting in line to use the internet. so, this email could be better, but i gotta let it go. Tomorrow i´ll bike to Playa Ancon, the aforementioned really nice beach resort. Thursday i´ll bike 85km to Cienfuegos, and then i´ll have about a week to get back to La Habana. Not sure exactly what the plan is for that, we´ll see. Could do all bike, but that wouldn´t be fun. Probably a combination of bike and bus, and i´ll probably have to skip both The Bay of Pigs and the site of Che Guevara´s tomb (both just too far out of the way).
my friend brennan sent me a really good idea for the title of the book i write about this trip, i think it´s worth sharing. ¨I Ride, Rulers Resign: What I Accomplished in Three Weeks that the CIA Couldn´t in 49 years.¨ I do what i can.
Viva _____,
ben
hey,
So, when i last wrote i was minutes from taking off on bike to Viñales, rougly 200km away. Why did i think i could bike across a country? I mean, i can; but why in the world did i think i could? biking is hard. and biking 40 miles is not like biking columbia to the sheep’s meadow in central park (2 miles) times 20. That’s what i had figured, but it just doesn’t work that way; i should have considered exponents. It’s hot (especially in cuba, especially in the afternoon), you’ve got 60 lbs of baggage hanging off your bike, and there’s always more uphill than downhill. Every day at about noon or 1pm, i reach a point where everything pisses me off: i’m mad at myself for trying to bike without any training or experience; i’m mad at the people who wrote my “biking across cuba” book for not finding flatter roads; i’m mad at anyone who has the nerve to pass me, in any kind of vehicle (especially these european biking tourgroups who pay to have all their bags carried in a bus, get juice and food whenever they want, and can choose to get off the bike and on the bus whenever they want- actually they’re very nice people, and sometimes they give me some juice, but it’s still frustrating); and i’m mad at Fidel for allowing his highways to have potholes. Anyway, biking distance is hard.
The first day i planned to go about 86 km, and it was a disaster. i fell in the first 20 minutes- though, to be fair, it was on the Malecon, la habana´s seaside highway. i didn´t realize that there was algae growing in the puddle i rode over, making it pretty much 0 friction and literally impossible to bike over. anyway, my ego took the brunt of the fall. I got up and continued on Cuba’s interstate highway, focused on my 86-km goal. But i’d started at noon, and it starts getting really hot at noon, so within an hour i was pushing my bike along the totally flat road- that familiar “uh oh, where am i gonna sleep tonight” feeling from my japan trip crept in, and then it was pretty much hopeless. in the first four hours, i made it like 25km, and had completely given up any hope of biking all the way to vinales- ever. I ended the day after sunset, in Guanajay, something like 50km from where i´d started. I slept 13 hours, and the woman at the casa i stayed in thought i was dead. Before going to sleep, i read a little of my book. In the first paragraph, i came upon the following words: ¨because no battle is ever won he said. they are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is the illusion of philosophers and fools.¨ yup, pretty much.
For some reason, i continued the next day- though, as was true the day before, i didn´t start until noon. This is just plain stupid, and i can’t defend it. Anyway, this day was easier than the previous, and i made it another 50km in only about 4 hours, all the way to Las Terrazas. Las Terrazas is a tourist spot, nature oriented, and i camped next to Los Baños de San Juan, cuba´s biggest and most popular swimming hole. There were some other english-speakers camping there, which was nice after two days of learning the hard way. I spent another day in Las Terrazas, hiked up a very steep and not very sure-footed ¨trail¨ to a monument to Che Guevara on top of a mountain, swam in the swimming hole, tried to rest some. It was nice. Anyway, from this point on i was much more capable on the bike, and i learned a couple things to help: 1) start early (way before noon), then stop in the early afternoon and rest for like 30 minutes to an hour, then rest every once in a while until 2 or 3pm, then go for the rest of the day; 2) no backpack. no backpack. everything gets strapped to the bike. no backpack; 3) do not be ashamed of using your lowest gears, ever; 4) never neglect to put sunscreen on the back of your hands; 5) wear the silly spandex bike shorts, your ass will thank you later. So, i’m learning, and have significantly improved.
A good time for a side note: Cuba is a rural, agricultural country. Outside the cities, it´s all farmland and small towns. And in every one of these small towns, farm animals run rampant. Dogs, chickens, pigs, horses, cows, goats, running wild everywhere. No one has fenced-in yards, so even the dogs just run all over the town. And, aside from getting chased by a few dogs while on my bike, i’ve mostly enjoyed this dynamic. I’ve learned the following: pigs are the greatest; goats, in their best moments, will occassionally surpass pigs, but on average are less cool than you expect them to be; and I hate roosters. Did you know that roosters don’t only crow at sunup? They crow all day, and all night- and when one of them crows, they all start crowing- all day, and all night. Some of my most ridiculous moments on this trip have been spent lying awake in bed as every animal on Old McDonald’s farm made its “with a blank-blank” sound here, there, everywhere.
By the way, do you know what’s absolutely terrifying if you’ve never seen it before? A rooster being chased. The cacophony, accompanied by chaotic flurry of speckled feathers streaking throught the air at eyel level, is truly something to be reckoned with. For sheer sonic catastrophe, though, nothing beats a live pig being carried in a sack against its own will.
Anyway, i biked the next day to San Diego de Los Banos, a nice little town with some natural springs. And, on my fifth day (fourth day of biking), after a long afternoon of pushing my bike up ridiculous hills, I coasted into Vinales. Vinales is a really good place- the word “special” might apply. As you climb the mountains towards Vinales Valley, Cuba’s ever-present palm trees, without disappearing entirely, cede ground to tall, thin pines, and mogotes- huge mountainous limestone formations erratically shaped like camels humps and topped with scraggly palms and pines- sprout out of the ground all around you. Aside from the mogotes, and the hiking trails and caves they offer, Vinales is Cuba’s most fertile region, growing some of the best coffee (even i liked the coffee i had here), tobacco, and fruit on the island. My casa in Vinales was the home of a really wonderful family, who welcomed me immediately and showed me a lot about cuban life.
Another side note: Cubans absolutely suck with car horns. For some reason, they think that have to honk every time they pass anyone. And i really hate horn honking, and some of the horns on these 50-year-old cars are really loud and abrassive. They seem to honk with no emotion, warning, or message involved. It’s purely abstract, animalistic expressionism. I imagine the thought process as follows: “I am a human, and behold there is another human in proximity. As I pass, I will give in to my urge to express my very human-ness, and I express it thusly: Beep.” It’s a lot like, well, like a rooster crowing. Anyway, in my weaker moments, when I’ve been biking 4 hours already, the sun is just getting to its strongest and most debillitating, i’m in the middle of a steep uphill climb, and a truck waits until it’s directly beside me to lay on the horn, i respond with my own, more verbal expression. It just makes me so mad. It makes me want to…use political muscle to prevent their country from receiving foreign aid for 50 years.
So, my first day in Vinales I decided to go find a cave not often visited by toursists. I walked through tobacco and coffee fields for a couple hours, and finally found the cave. walked around in it, swam in the river to cool off, and then started heading home- when i heard a huge roar from a crowd in the distance. I was pretty sure this had to be a cockfight, and i was pretty sure i had to go find it. I followed the sound until I came to a barbed wire fence, and thereby a decision. It was a hastle, but this happened to be superbowl sunday, and spectator sports were in order, so i did what any red, white, and blue blooded American would do- I army crawled under the barbed wire and found me a cockfight.
Technically illegal but generally allowed, Cuban cockfights are an all-out sinfest. Hundreds of people gather around the permanently-built, open-air arena; bets reach hundreds of pesos and more (months of salary to a Cuban); vendors sell food, drink, cigars, even cockfight-logo apparel; rum flows like the blood from battered roosters’ heads; side rings host craps games on the peripheries. The capitalist urge rears its debaucherous head. The whole scene is just a spectacle.
scary: biking past a full-grown, free-roaming bull with no other humans in sight.
Anyway, i stayed at the cockfight a while, watched some birds rough each other up (no actual deaths while i was there), drank some rum, and made my way home. The next day I biked 20km to Gran Caverna Santo Tomas, the biggest cave system in Latin America, where i climbed and stumbled through a 2-hour tour that made it clear that there’s no Cuban translation for “liability.” By the way, for music people: i think that the Loft Scene of the 2010’s should be the Cave Scene. trusts me, this is a good idea.
The next day i rested, and then the following day i took a bus to Cayo Jutias, a really beautiful cay with a beach. no complaints. Then i did an 85km day to Bahia Honda, spent the night, and biked 100km yesterday, back into La Habana (to those counting, that’s twice as much as i did my first day, so i’m getting better).
And now for a brief update on the big question: what is it like in Cuba, and how do you evaluate it? Well, the jineteros/jineteras (hustlers/whores/in-betweens) are not nearly as much of a problem outside the city- which was really nice. It’s still impossible to avoid the have/have-not dynamic in every single interaction with a cuban, though. I can say the following: they don’t have as much as they want here. Outside the city, there’s no hot water, and electricity is inconsistent. The mother of the family i stayed with in Vinales is a doctor, and she makes 240 pesos a month, about $10. The father is a farmer, which is really hard work for even less pay. Their 8-year-old daughter is really smart, but she’s had 3 different teachers in the past year because people would rather work in tourism (where they can get the tourists money) than teach. It’s just not great.
That said, there is another side to the argument: No matter how little cubans have, they will always have enough. No one has to worry about starving, or education, or healthcare. That’s true, and it’s significantly different than the way we live. Also, and one of the greatest things about this system in my mind, it’s true that cuban communities are stronger than ours can possibly be. i believe this. Like i said in my last email, everyone knows everyone in cuban communities, and everyone relies on everyone for help, goods, services. The network is huge, profound, and a vital part of cuban life. It’s evident all the time- people are in and out of each other’s houses at will, people are yelling to each other as they pass in cars and bikes, and any time you or they need a service, they go find a friend who knows someone who knows someone. I’ve never seen a tighter community, and it’s this way in every town in cuba (that i’ve seen). It really is made this way by the system, and by the lack of luxuries, and i think it’s something valuable- something i lament not having grown up with. In this sense, the question actually does become one of priorities- which would you rather have, the cuban community and assurances of education, food, healthcare, or the american emphasis on the power and possibilities of the individual.
But that all becomes a mute point for me because it’s so clear that cubans don’t choose to live this way, and that many wouldn’t if they did have the choice. At the very least, the cubans i’ve been able to talk with openly have expressed two frustrations consistently: there is no freedom of speech or press, and they hate this; and they hate the dual-currency system, in which cubans use worthless pesos and tourists use Convertibles more valuable than the US dollar (this system creates instant stratification, is the basis for the distasteful tourist/cuban dynamic i talked about, and detracts from any occupational incentives outside the tourist field). There just isn’t much opportunity here to better your situation, and when the strong federal presence limits your freedom to even complain, or to accurately know what’s going on in your country and the world, the best analogy becomes a prison. You’ll never starve, you’ll always have a place to sleep, and there’s some comfort in the community that develops, but you don’t live this way because you want to, and you’ll never be able to live differently. Like i said, i see value in the contrasting priorities that america and cuba base themselves on; the issue to me is choice, and an individual and national level.
Next (tomorrow or monday) i’ll go by bus (bringing the bike with me) all the way to the eastern end of Cuba, to Santiago de Cuba. Santiago is supposed to be a cool city, with a lot of music history and revolutionary history too. Not sure where i’ll go after that, maybe to the northeastern Holguin area, where it’s supposedly laid back and there are beaches. Eventually, i’ll get a bus from somewhere to Trinidad, and then spend some time biking in central cuba (cienfuegos, and then maybe north). Might try camping a little more then. It’s been really hard to camp for a couple reasons: the cuban network (you stay in a casa, and then they want you to stay with their friends in the next city you’re going to, and you feel bad saying no), and the fact that all the land here is farmland, so there aren’t good places to camp. More than anything, though, it’s hard to camp renegade-style when your bowels aren’t under control. and mine are not.
to not end on that note, and to bring the email full circle, i’ll end with another quote- one that i’ve seen on countless billboards while biking and one that, after reading the first quote, seems to be constantly mocking me:
“Hasta La Victoria Siempre”
later,
ben
Hey,
I´m happy to report that the internet works in La Habana today, and i decided i should just write this email before i go out of touch. Interestingly, in my search for internet yesterday i discovered that cuba has a fully functional and very popular intranet for sending emails between cubans. I guess what happens in virtual cuba stays in virtual cuba.
So, this email is pretty single-minded, and deals with the main issue i´ve had so far in cuba, which is basically a money thing. In order to not be boring, i´ve interjected occassionally with unrelated observations that might be more entertaining, and then returned to the main line of thought. It´s long, but you won´t hear from me for at least 8-10 days, so you can read it over the course of a week if you want.
So, La Habana. This really is a beautiful and unique looking city. It´s a lot to take in, and more to describe. So i won´t. you have the internet, you can look up pictures. What is worth mentioning, though, is the activity in this city. The streets are as active as New York´s, but in new york all the activity is transportation- getting to your destination, getting to work, going to do this or that. In La Habana, the street is the destination, and whatever you´re going to do, you´ll do it out in the street. And everything that people do is done publicly. I like that. I´ll put it this way- I´ve always claimed that you can measure a city by the occupancy of its stoops. By this rule, Habana wins. Everyone is out all day, sitting on stoops, playing dominoes, playing baseball in the street, sipping rum (everyone here seems to sip rum all day, and the rum here is really strong), generally yelling. It´s a constant block party. On top of this, Habana seems to have taken stooping to new heights with new techniques. Most ground’floor homes here have their doors open at all times, and their windows have no panes or curtains. Habaneros almost always have their living room in the very front of the house, so the stoop is effectively extended into the living room. In essence, when you´re sitting on your couch half-naked watching TV, you´re still stooping. This is amazing to me. As a result, i spent a half hour standing on the street with a huge group of Cubans watching Thriller on the tv in someone´s living room. It was great, I love Michael Jackson. Anyway, this livingroom/stoop thing is pretty much unstoppable. I feel like i just witnessed the first dunk in the history of basketball. The game has changed.
Ok, so by all this you can infer that Cuban culture is very open and very, well, communal. True. Very different from Japan, where i spent all my energy trying to understand what the hell was going on because the culture is so subtle and inscrutable to the outsider. So here´s the first irony- much more than Japan, my obstacle in Cuba is linguistic.
My spanish speaking skill are just bad right now, and while my comprehension was great in Mexico, Cubans speak a totally different dialect. It´s way faster, with about half the words cut short. I catch about 3 percent of the words i hear. Sometimes it just sounds like a series of vowels. So, while the culture is incredibly inviting and explicitly accessible when ou walk around, I can´t take part in anything because my Spanish isn´t good enough. bummer.
And this is where it because a lot tougher- the jineteros. These are basically hustlers who want to get some money out of you. But whereas beggars in new york beg or perform, and vendors in Mexico border towns sell chiclets gum, jineteros sell friendship. They offer to talk with you, take you to good bars, introduce you to cuban girls, etc- with the goal of getting a couple free drinks, a commission on the girl you buy, and a spare dollar or two before you leave. The problem is all-pervasive. It´s nearly impossible to meet Habaneros without them asking for money. When i went to a shabbat service at Habana´s synagogue, dropping off a bag of medical goods and hoping to plug myself into a community quick, i was followed part-way home by a couple congregation members who wanted spare change. Dealing with this all day is incredibly deflating.
But it makes sense. Cubans make about $15 a month. Their currency is about 1/25 of a dollar, but the currency tourists use (yes, Cuba has a separate currency for tourists) is actually worth more than the US dollar. Goods sold for the tourist currency aren´t sold for the Cuban people´s currency. So if a Cuban can get just $1 off a tourist, he´s increased his monthly earnings by about 7 percent, and has given himself and/or his family access to some goods and services otherwise unavailable to Cubans (because they´re only sold for tourist currency). So you can´t really blame them- the opportunity is just too great. But here´s the thing- it sucks to have people befriend you because you´re rich, especially 25 times a day. And especially when you´re travelling alone and need to make friends. And especially when you can´t really communicate with them, and are therefore immediately targeted. And then they act really disappointed in you when you won´t buy them anything or give them money. It just feels terrible.
A game i´m playing while in Cuba- The Best Use of X as Y. Kids are really good at this here, using all sorts of crap to make balls, baseball bats, even skateboards. But so far the winner is the use of a telephone handle and cord as a dog leash.
So, jineteros. my solution is simple, if equally distasteful- i´m teaching myself to place monetary value on every human relationship. If a guy comes up to me with bullshit like ¨My country is your country! we are friends¨ that´s worth $0. If he actually treats me like a person and not a tourist, that´s worth a drink. Sometimes it´s worth a drink just to practice hearing the Cuban dialect. Anyway, that´s how i have to think about it now, because i can´t afford to give everyone money, and i´ll regret letting this discomfort prevent me from meeting cubans. And it´s had some success- one night i bought a group a bottle of rum, and we sat around all night singing Hotel California and We Are the World. One of the guys showed me his apartment, and- i think genuinely- offered to show me around when i come back to habana.
The good Marxist, by the way, would note that this is not a failure of the Cuban system, but a result of the depression caused by almost complete lack of foreign aid (ie, the US embargo), which necessitates reliance on tourism for national income and thereby creates an unavoidable stratification that threatens the socialist republic. The good Marxist would probably be partially right about that, but either way the irony of this trip is as follows; as a visitor to a communist country, I am forced more than ever to view human relationships in terms of capital.
Why do tourists wear silly hats? Why do tourists wear silly hats? i don´t understand this, and it kills me.
Back to jineteros. On a related note, here´s a game that Habana likes to play. How many times can a man be offered sex without caving? So far, the count´s at about 75, 000, and Cuban women are ridiculously hot, so i kindof hate this game. Just as jineteros are neither beggars nor purely your friend, jineteras are neither prostitutes nor your girlfriend, or even a regular one night stand. Some explanation is in order. First of all, Cuba has a very openly and aggressively sexual culture. From what i can tell, there just aren´t a lot of sexual taboos here, and there´s really no sense of shame, or even a very strict moral code, accompanying sex. It´s just a fun thing to do. So, women here are generally pretty aggressive about sex, and if you´re foreign, the thought process is something like ¨well, if i go with him i can get free drinks, eat dinner at a restaurant, and go dancing, and then i get to have sex.¨ So, though prostitution is also rampant, the jinetera thing is more like a sugar daddy relationship. Which, obviously, i´m not comfortable with. But it is a pretty awkward thing, because they´re so hot. One of my Hotel California crew was basically a jinetera, and she was totally cool. She just likes finding foreign guys because it gives her a chance to do some cool stuff she can´t otherwise afford. Anyway, you see how this have/have-not dynamic colors every single interaction.
So, as you can tell, i´ve spent most of my time either dealing with or thinking about jineteros/jineteras. it really bothers me. I hope it´s something i can get over within a couple weeks, so i can go ahead and meet some people.
Remember how impressed i was that Hiroshima took a ¨turn the other cheek¨approach, incriminating no one and focusing on education and prevention? Cuba really went a different direction on that front. In the Museo de la Revolucion, there is a ¨hall of cretins¨with ridiculous caricatures of recent US presidents, and plaques reading things like ¨Ronald Reagan- thank you, cretin, for making our revolution stronger.¨
Anyway. Music really is everywhere here, and it´s cool. Whenever there´s music happening, a crowd always forms. And, generally, if a crowd forms music will end up happening. I went to a rumba concert, and it started pouring. All the musicians left with their instruments. While i was huddling under an overhang with about 20 cubans, an all-inclusive singing and clapping session broke out, with each individual taking a turn at what sounded like improvised singing, and the rest of the group echoing in chorus. it was fun. There´s always music blaring from apartments, and kids walking down the street tend to sing at the top of their lungs. Between all this and the unique and changing economic situation here, Cuba is definitely the place to study ethnomusicology.
Note to academics- Cuba is also the place for a sociologist to study networking. In a society where you can never get quite enough of anything, can´t find basic goods and services, and are rationed below your needs, people make do through each other. Everyone seems to know everyone here, and the more people you know the more opportunity you have to better your situation. It´s clear that human networks are the sources of goods, food, and services on a daily basis here. Not my field of study, but someone (Dan Wang or Jon Wegener) ought to look into it.
Interestingly, my sandals are not the only american flag apparel i´ve seen here. I´ve actually seen a good number of cubans wearing american flag clothing, and it got me to thinking. If this implied any sort of political, ideological, or even cultural statement, the government here would squash it. It therefore must carry no statement. That means that people here are wearing the american flag for purely aesthetic reasons- it looks cool, or is cool. in other words, it´s a brand. Is this a new way of measuring a country´s global dominance- by the extent to which its symbol can be totally dissociated from it and made purely aesthetic? Has any other country in the history of the world reached this level during its existence?
Ok, that´s all. I´m now going to get on my bike and go to Soroa, which is about 85km from Habana. That´s somewhere between 40 and 200 miles, but i´m not very good at my conversion formulas. Hopefully i´ll get to Soroa tonight, then San Diego De los Banos tomorrow, then Vinales the next day. I´ll stay in vinales a couple days, and then spend two or three days getting back to La Habana, possibly stopping at a beach on the north coast. Maybe back in Habana like 8-10 days, at which point i´ll try to check in.
later,
ben
