Cuba is a trip. A journey into the past. Farther back than the polished sparkle of Chevy’s kept alive through three generations of a family. Beyond the ubiquitous horse and carriage of the Paseo de Marti or the peddle-powered cabs with men hard at work in 35 degree heat to earn a few dollars. Before Castro’s revolution which sits astride the people: Spanish, mulatto, African, Mestizo, Creole and Indian; before the arrival of a slave powered sugarocracy, the theft of the art of tobacco from the indigenous people, the subsequent removal of most traces of the indigenous inhabitants through the immolation of it’s chieftains, the multiple rebellions and subsequent quashings, and the machinations of men from France and Britain, Spain and the United States, straight back to the first voyage of Columbus in 1492. To the “discovery” of the New World. To the ruin and rape of the largest island in the Caribbean Sea.
Cuba is what happens when a rapacious oligarchy clothed in the colours of The Revolution hiding behind the folds of it’s flag, inserts it’s rostrum into the body of it’s host for sustenance. It is shops, dusty, dimly lit; with goods, out of date: Hardly enough to fill a tenth of an aisle at your local drugstore. A vibrant people reduced to working several lines of pursuit for their livelihood while the wealth of this land (sugar, tobacco, sand, sea, metals, forest, oil, jazz, baseball) are expropriated for the few. It is the crumbling of structures put up by the Spanish and British with no sense of the preservation of a collective history. It is, perhaps, a purposeful forgetting in favour of the garishly large monuments to the Castro Revolution.
If the Cuban News Agency is to be believed, the Revolution is still fully in progress even in this year fifty-six since it’s inception. Sustaining a Revolution for almost 60 years is not an easy task. It calls for a bogey man worthy of David and Goliath. It calls for Uncle Sam, who serves the purpose well.
Blogger, Yoani Sanchez has written, “The wall serves not only to defend oneself… it allows one to control what happens within it,” reads Travels with Herodotus, and it’s painful that sixty years later it continues to be a reality in so many places.”
In contrast to the presence of the state apparatus: police, the military, informants, checkpoints, customs, currency controls, censorship, absolute media control, to name a few, is the dynamic inventiveness of the average Cuban. Forced to earn (officially) a pittance and spend a fortune for the staples of life, Cubans take to the underground economy which has been nudged, winked and fanned into existence by the Revolución.
An electrician-cum-laboratory technologist needs to drive a taxi to sustain a household of three. A doctor trained in Cuba with a reported salary of $20-30 US dollars per month must rush to the hotel rooms of bloated tourists in order to make ends meet. Women just barely out of their teens use the only resource valuable enough to warrant a living wage - their beauty. A beauty borne of more than 522 years of genetic blending, stirred by a passion seemingly present only in the tropic of Cuba.
So what’s to love about Cuba? The food (one): cheap and delicious; The drink (two) plentiful in its many and variegated forms; The bon vivant people (three); hellos involve a kiss on the right cheek (four), always; The weather (five): mostly warm but duck the hurricanes; History (six) and plenty of it, visible to the naked eye everywhere; the beauty of the people (seven); hardly any Internet (eight): trust me it’s a plus….leave your devices in the safe in your room; walking around at 1 a.m. with nary a fear (nine); lastly and (tenthly) the natural beauty of the countryside, lush, tropical, humid…in a word, paradisiacal. Snap, click, done.
Cuba is what happens when a rapacious oligarchy clothed in the colours of The Revolution hiding behind the folds of it’s flag, inserts it’s rostrum into the body of it’s host for sustenance. It is shops, dusty, dimly lit; with goods, out of date: Hardly enough to fill a tenth of an aisle at your local drugstore. A vibrant people reduced to working several lines of pursuit for their livelihood while the wealth of this land (sugar, tobacco, sand, sea, metals, forest, oil, jazz, baseball) are expropriated for the few. It is the crumbling of structures put up by the Spanish and British with no sense of the preservation of a collective history. It is, perhaps, a purposeful forgetting in favour of the garishly large monuments to the Castro Revolution.
If the Cuban News Agency is to be believed, the Revolution is still fully in progress even in this year fifty-six since it’s inception. Sustaining a Revolution for almost 60 years is not an easy task. It calls for a bogey man worthy of David and Goliath. It calls for Uncle Sam, who serves the purpose well.
Blogger, Yoani Sanchez has written, “The wall serves not only to defend oneself… it allows one to control what happens within it,” reads Travels with Herodotus, and it’s painful that sixty years later it continues to be a reality in so many places.”
In contrast to the presence of the state apparatus: police, the military, informants, checkpoints, customs, currency controls, censorship, absolute media control, to name a few, is the dynamic inventiveness of the average Cuban. Forced to earn (officially) a pittance and spend a fortune for the staples of life, Cubans take to the underground economy which has been nudged, winked and fanned into existence by the Revolución.
An electrician-cum-laboratory technologist needs to drive a taxi to sustain a household of three. A doctor trained in Cuba with a reported salary of $20-30 US dollars per month must rush to the hotel rooms of bloated tourists in order to make ends meet. Women just barely out of their teens use the only resource valuable enough to warrant a living wage - their beauty. A beauty borne of more than 522 years of genetic blending, stirred by a passion seemingly present only in the tropic of Cuba.
So what’s to love about Cuba? The food (one): cheap and delicious; The drink (two) plentiful in its many and variegated forms; The bon vivant people (three); hellos involve a kiss on the right cheek (four), always; The weather (five): mostly warm but duck the hurricanes; History (six) and plenty of it, visible to the naked eye everywhere; the beauty of the people (seven); hardly any Internet (eight): trust me it’s a plus….leave your devices in the safe in your room; walking around at 1 a.m. with nary a fear (nine); lastly and (tenthly) the natural beauty of the countryside, lush, tropical, humid…in a word, paradisiacal. Snap, click, done.
