“When you’re walking, you appreciate life in the moment, you experience it as its happening, when you’re in the car, you are losing time…” our Cuban companion Sewler explained to me as I complained about how far we’d walked on our first warm night in la Habana, still not arriving at the street we wanted to go. Of course we had managed to be picked up by a couple of Cuban guys, but given that in a way we had come up to them and not the other way around, it felt adventurous (or at least I told myself). Sewler was right, walking is enjoyable in Havana.
The people-watching experience is of a superb quality in Havana. To sit on the side of a street somewhere between the Old City and near the Barrio Chino area is to watch people (lots of tourists) from dozens of different countries passing by as well as see Cubans with numerous ways and expressions of life. It is at first occasionally difficult to tell who is Cuban and who is a tourist, mostly because I seem to witness a different way to be Cuban at every turn.
A few days later I figure it out, you can tell a Cuban apart from a tourist by the way they walk around, with a comfort in themselves and their body. A sort of disinterest in tourists even though I don’t know how many people from other places are filling the streets of Havana. It is with this confidence that you can spot a Cuban walking through the street. It does inevitably rubs off on everyone here visiting. The more time seeps by the more I absorb a feeling of acceptance with myself.
Cuba is rich in its awareness of itself, through art, education, and even the culture and interaction it seems to me. You might not notice this, however, if you are too busy taking in the paradoxes and contradictions, the lack of material wealth and the simultaneous appreciation of life. You might not understand unless you speak to a Cuban that it’s a deliberate way of being resulting from both cultural and economic influences. The culture of Cuba feels like a conscious attempt at being alive and enjoying time with others. The politics and economics of Cuba of course are a part of this, and also a complex topic for another time. It seemed to me that people in Cuba are very purposeful in the way they interact, they do not ignore each other or certain realities the way Americans do, nor is everything a performance.
I immediately see a recognition in most people’s eyes when I tell them where I am from. We speak to an old man in a book shop on our first day and he tells us about the history of Andalusia and the influence it has on Cuban culture; when I tell him I am from Morocco or Maruecos. A Spanish tourist walks in and asks the man for a book on the economy, there are none. “Graciath,” the tourist says with a lisp that only a Spaniard could manage. My friend Sarah makes a joke about it and the old man laughs, immediately taking a liking to her, and us. He gives us a hug and says ‘I love you’ as we walk out. Somehow I felt I understood the intimate yet informal feeling behind the unexpected phrase.
A few strolls down busy narrow streets later and we saw a poet, with a “Poem for 1CUC/Poema for a tipp” sign. Sarah saw the longing in my eyes and pulled me towards this man, mustache turning up at the tips, tapping away on a beat-up, metal typewriter, white paint peeling off to reveal blue and rust beneath. When he was requested to write a poem by these American women for their friend back in the U.S., he jammed a piece of folded paper in and quickly wrote lines as they described her character.
I saw people slow down in front of the sign, eyes light up, squint, most absorbed the idea and sauntered off, and a few got a little closer, still curious. After a while, I spoke to him and he showed me the collection of poems he had already written. The first one grasped the feeling of adventure I crave, describing Vinales, a town to the west of Havana in a valley of luscious wild green. The poem was in English with a few Spanish words splashed in, and the word ‘elefants’. I decided I would take this poem in exchange for 1 CUC. Sarah asked why I didn’t request a new poem, and I said because I wanted something which he had written with his voice and not for someone. I found out that he was from Germany, travelling the world by selling poetry or other panhandling, and only travels by sea, getting on ships by asking if he can work with the crew. He was trying to get to Mexico next.
We sat by him on that wall for a couple hours watching people, a pastime we share with Cubans. At one point he wrote a poem about in-between-ness and sitting on the side of the street watching people go by while we were sitting by the side of the street watching people go by and showed it to me. It was a great coming together of thought, time, and space, bringing a meditative awareness to the moment which I have come to feel might be a mark of Cuban life. There is that kind of magic in the air in la Habana, where you find the art of being.
On our way back from the Malecon one night, a long boardwalk where people play music, chill, dance, and drink at night, we were heading to Yorquiris’ house and we heard a gato yelping loudly across the street. Sewler crossed the street to go look and we followed him. The cat was stuck under a grate, screaming for its life, and drenched in whatever sewage water it had managed to fall into. At first we tried to lift the grate, but it would not come away easily. Still something came over us to save this cat and we all began frantically pulling at the grate trying to pry it open. It became evident to me that the grate, which was coming out of the building wall, was not going to budge, but Sarah and Sewler seemed determined to get it open somehow. We worked on it until somehow it came away and Sewler jumped in to the hole, grabbed the cat, and brought it out with him. I thought it would scramble away in a panic but it just stood there, eyes wide open in shock, shivering in place. It was at the same time that we were trying to put the grate back, that some of the tile on the building which was being held up by the grate fell away from the building and went down into the hole. It only struck me as we were walking away, Sarah with the cat in her arms, that the tile could have fallen down on Sewler. It was brave of him to go down there.
We went to a beach twice on our trip, one near la Habana called playa Santa Maria 10 minutes outside the city. The first thing I did was run up to the sea, and say hi to the bouncing particles of water rushing up to hug my feet and welcome me back like the nayirrah waheed poem “how does the sea remember me. every time.” It always feels like coming home, or finding something you lost, bumping into an old friend, whenever I am at the beach, or the edge of a continent as my friend Miriam likes to say. We stayed at the beach until the sun started going down, then we packed our stuff. On the way into the city we rode in the back of a taxi-truck, I looked out at the life passing by and I realized in that moment that travelling is my true state of contentment, which I seem to forget all the time. That even when it’s not all joyful boundless adventure, I am and would still be content with it.
Being in Cuba for less than a week, I learned that it is not simply a “step back in time” or like going in a “time machine to the 50’s” as numerous American travel blogs will offer, as if the culture and people just happened to be left by the side of the ever-accelerating road of economic development and now live in a time behind every one else. First, this makes the assumption that all of human progress is linear, and second that the U.S. is at the forefront of that linear movement (both wrong). Rather, there is so much to learn from Cuba, especially with, and not in spite of, its complexity and contradictions. It is not a mistake but a very prominent example in understanding how to live, and I want to learn more.
OrangeSunaa 