I’ve touched Cuba. I’ve smoked Cuba: Part 1

A mindfuck.

It’s been exactly two months since I left the island – a perpetually smoldering cigar, surrounded by tepid waters and demagogic winds attempting to stifle it, whose thick tobacco just will not cease to choke its smoker. I think it’s about time I reflect. A month spent in the Caribbean melting pot, mostly in La Habana, has rendered me more informed, yet less capiched. But opinionated, as always, I still am. This is not a summary of the current state of affairs, rather the naïve perceptions of a slow-thinking fast talker.

At first arrival, on a sullen Sunday afternoon, my expectations were simultaneously affirmed and denied. The well-maintained highway and its newer surroundings gave me an empty, deserted, yet wealthy impression. A few revolutionary billboards sprinkled along the route seemed to be the only clear indication that I was in the communist heart of the western hemisphere. This was not the first time I would be misled. In Vedado, a suburb of La Habana – still heavily-populated and close to the center, the evening’s rain gave way to an eerie silence as I slowly slammed my first real shot of café Cubano on the balcony of an early Soviet-era building, in which my first casa particular (essentially, a bed & breakfast) was located. The owners were warm and welcoming, but obviously guarded (a type of interaction I would assume as normal with Cubanos), and their apartment clean and comfortable, less sparse than I expected. After a discussion of the surface differences (for we could not delve deep) between my home and theirs, which seemed surrealistically scripted, I retired to my bedroom, overwhelmed but relaxed. I was reminded of the former East Berlin, memories of my childhood emerging to be compared to the present day.

A few days later I moved to another Casa, at the edge of the center of the city, right next to the betraying alma mater statue of La Universidad de La Habana, her back to her students, her arms stretched out over her graduates’ desolate pastures. This is where I would spend my remaining weeks. In an apartment much more attuned to my expectations of what one in Cuba should look like, I was taken care of by chain-smoking motherly characters of a world built on love. ‘Mi amor’ became my nom de guerre (for I was at war with none other than my own eyes and mind). ‘Mira’ would signal my daily reality check. From here I would discover that what you see is not what you get. Each peeling façade, dressed by concealing vines, envelopes the verdant immortality found deep behind its walls – its courtyards and parks and hidden rooms all but glimpses into souls otherwise imperceptible.

To find what I didn’t know I was looking for, I avoided English speakers and hotels and as many establishments selling in Cuban convertible pesos (CUC – a currency, in my opinion, devised solely to fuck over tourists) as I could. This, at first, left me lonely, confused, and eventually somewhat malnourished but comfortably budgeted. However, I was seeing, as much as a blind man could, what the ‘real’ Cuba is. I rode the “Yank Tank” collective taxis, went to see new foreign films at the cinema for mere cents, ate my daily ration of salchichas and pizzas de queso, and stumbled into as many hole-in-the-walls as I could find. After one of my delicious daily breakfasts of fresh fruits, eggs, warm bread and homemade jam, I ventured to find where these items were sold. All I could find were a few small markets. The grocery stores seemed empty of everything but cans of mayonnaise. Somehow, I never did understand how, the inventivo Cubanos know how to find everything they need, if they have the money. And this is when this nation of contrasts (for as a self-defined egalitarian society, contrast deserves just as much representation as uniformity) began to fuck my mind continuously, until my head ached too much to think, and submitted to simply accepting. Maybe, I thought, this is why la Revolución has lasted so long.

…to be continued.