PROPAGANDA pt 1

Here are some pictures of things that you don’t see so much in the USA, or at least not in this form. I guess it’s ‘propaganda’ in the American sense, though in Cuba the word is used for advertisements for consumer goods, which don’t really exist in Cuba.

Monument to the Cuban Five in Viñales

signs at paseo y linea

pharmacy on 23, la rampa

G y 13

bus-waiting in casablanca

santiago, serendipity

baseball stadium in la habana

Getting Around in Cuba

Here begins a series of picture-posts of Cuba, since a lot of pics couldn’t load on the slow Cuban internet, part of a longer series of retrospective posts on Cuba. Maybe I will complain about America some more in the middle of this series, we’ll see. 

Coco taxis - mostly tourist fare; once we bargained with a really spunky coco taxi driver who asked us if we had caramelos

fancy máquina

shitty máquina

campesino in horsecart

a moving guagua in havana, they are normally this full or more

FREEDOM BUS, sent from some church or other type of do-gooders in the US

electric train - the 'hershey train' - from havana to matanzas; most likely 50+ years old

empty pilot's cockpit of train

inside of the train; as you can see, seats were super comfy

normal vehicles in santiago

tourist cars waiting outside capitolio - on the sides are painted the words 'rentar una fantasia'

plane santiago-havana

open back camioneta, hitchhiking

floor of the camioneta, covered in frutabomba

horse- taxi, one peso per person

cienfuegos, cleanest most put together city in cuba, the 'pearl' they call it

Fish

I was walking on the malecón, actually on it, not just along it, and it was wet, like the waves had come over at some point earlier that night. Some people were looking at me, but I decided not to let it bother me. The sea was a little feisty.

I saw a fish on the malecón. It must have been put there by a wave. It was red, and dead. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. For some reason it seemed like it would be wrong to just leave it right there. For a second I wanted to throw it back into the ocean (I would like to think I would have, if it were alive still), then I decided that that would be useless. Then I had a very strong urge to pick it up and take it with me, I didn’t really know why, but I had nothing with me but my bare hands. For a while, I struggled with my ability to suppress that natural girly gore response, and I wanted to do it just to prove to myself that I would be able to do it. It seemed like if I could do this—pick up the fish and take it home—it would prove once and for all that there was nothing I could do. I walked across the street to some vendors and asked for a plastic bag. None of them had one, or were willing to give me one, because this is Cuba, and no one gives things away. I had no money, nothing on me at all. I struggled for a while longer, trying to decide whether it would be worth it to go pull the chinita card and try to get a bag from one of the male vendors. I saw a trash can. There were some plastic bags in it, and also a box. I rummaged around a little. It must have looked pretty strange. But the plastic bag was full of gunk, and then it came over me that the only reason I would want to take the fish home would be to show one of my friends, who would appreciate it. Everyone else in the world would be confused and a little disgusted. What would I do with the fish afterwards? I couldn’t cook it or anything, no, the only reason would be to prove to myself and this friend that I could do it. Maybe he would laugh a little. I decided it wasn’t worth it.

That night, I sat out on the porch and played a little guitar, and talked to the night guard, who we call Papa because his hair is gray, and who is missing a lot of his teeth, so is impossible to understand. Then we danced a little salsa right out there, which was really nice. Papa asked me to call him when I was back in the states to tell him how my life was going and play some guitar for him. I don’t know if I will, its pretty expensive, and really I’ve only talked to him a few times. He’s a night guard by night and a construction worker by day. He lives alone, has a 20 year old daughter studying gastronomy and about to get married, and he really wants to travel to the USA just to see what life is like over there. But he wouldn’t want to stay there, he says, just to see.

baseball and film festival

The 31^st annual International Festival of New Latin American Films started two nights ago in Havana, and we went to the inauguration, where we heard Chucho Valdéz play piano and this famous woman sang, and then an old man gave an extremely long speech and then a very strange Argentinean film was played, <<Los secretos de sus ojos>>. Today someone told me that apparently that film is supposed to win the festival. Personally, I thought it was a little too much, but these are my impressions from it:

-Argentinean accents are obnoxious. They sound like they are trying to speak Italian.

-The camera angles were very strange. I was impressed, however, by their effect, even if I felt it was trying a little too hard at times. Somehow the frames managed to convey to me an image of the world where loneliness and monsters reigned, even before the movie was explicitly about these things. In the beginning of the film, when things still looked like it could just be a normal love story, I started to feel a terribleness welling up inside me—a knowledge of the world as terrible—and by the end of the film, I realized that this was intentional. I guess that’s a pretty impressive feat.

-Too much. It turned out to be a monster story inside a love story inside a detective story inside an age story inside a love story. Meta to the gazillionth power, too long, I thought it would end about ten times but there would be another plot twist and after all that revelation about monstrosity and loneliness the message was simple and trite: time doesn’t kill love. Of course, after 25 years and 2.5 tortuous hours of those twists, murders, and sadness, the two people who truly love each other from the start of the movie get together. Now what’s the point of that untruth?

—

Yesterday I went to a Cuban baseball game—Industriales (Havana’s team) against Holguin (visiting team). It cost 1 peso (about 5 cents), the stadium was relatively empty (it was a big stadium), but the people who were there were pretty emotionally invested. There were two groups of people with clankers and trumpets who would play music like a little cheer squad. When good things happened some people who get up and start shaking their asses. Everyone was very supportive of the team, in a way that felt like family, even though Industriales lost 7-8.

The Tiradores on Avenida G

While I was away on my hitchhiking trip, one of the American study abroad students got hit by some flying sperm on Avenida G.

 

In the past few weeks, Cuba had started to lose some of its magical socialist utopia vibe. For the majority of the past three months, I constantly gushed about the wonderful things about this country that were so unexpected and backwards from the rest of the world (for ex. Cuba’s two selling points education and healthcare), and one of them was safety. Every time I walked home alone with my laptop on my back at midnight (clearly a muggable foreigner), I marveled at the low crime rates and public safety. In no other capital city in the world would I feel so safe walking alone at night as in Havana.

 

About three weeks ago, this bubble of safety popped a little. One of the girls in our program was robbed at knifepoint a block away from our house. It was 2:30am, she was alone, and there aren’t really streetlights in our area. She didn’t lose too much of great value (except for a Marx-Engels reader!) and was fine, but we were all a little shaken up by the news, and started being more careful about things like that.

 

Other things started to happen too. Another girl got hit by a car on her way to school. (She was bruised but okay). Two girls got roofied at a club (turns out they had willingly accepted drugs, but hadn’t known they were roofies—they were okay too, no worries). Anyways, the point is, although everyone was mostly fine after all these incidents, they happened pretty close to each other in time-space, and it seemed like for a while that crazy things were just happening to the American study abroad students.

 

And then this poor girl got hit by flying sperm on her way to class.

 

Let me explain. There is a big sprawling avenue that leads to the Art and Letters Faculty of the University of Havana called Avenida de los presidentes, or Avenida G. It’s got a big grassy middle section, and there’s a point right before it gets to the university where there’s a rotunda/oval thing with a monument/statue in the middle, and the cars drive around it. By the sidewalk, there are cliffs with trees and buildings growing off of it, about 20 feet tall. This area—where the road curves so it’s hard to see the oncoming cars (and thus dangerous to walk in the street) and the sidewalk comes right to the edge of the cliffs—is staked out by some men who stand behind trees or bushes and masturbate to the women walking by underneath. Often, passing the area, one hears hisses or whistles, and if one is inexperienced enough to turn her head, she will see one of these sick men, grinning at her and yanking their thing.

 

We had known about them for a while, but until the incident with the American girl we always thought they were just sickos who got off in public. Turns out, they have an even more specific aim—their public masturbation is actually a game of target shooting. We told the story to one of the Cuban women who work in our house. She was unsurprised. Apparently most habaneros know about them and their special spot. They’re called “tiradores” (shooters/throwers) and they pay off the cops so that they can play their yank and shoot game in peace.

 

Although I laughed for a week about this, it’s a real threat. Every time I walk to Spanish class and pass that place, I make sure to walk as far from the cliffs as I possibly can, even if it means walking in the middle of the street. For some reason, the idea of getting hit by a car is much more pleasant than that of being hit by some flying sperm.

Alternativos

Last night I went to the first festival of alternative music in Cuba; at a hip hop concert in the Pabellón a week or so ago we had met this guy with a head full of white silvery mohawk/dreads who is an artistic director of concerts and shit, and all into the alternative scene, who told us about it, because he was directing it.

First: alternative music means something different in Cuba than back in the States. It means anything that is not salsa or reggaetón (or merengue or bachata or son or afrocuban/Caribbean in any way). This includes hip hop, rap, rock, emo, metal, reggae, house, electronica. For example, the guy we met at that hip hop concert looked kind of like a punker (he was old too, his hair was naturally white) and we started to talk about music, and he started to trash reggaeton, so I asked him what he thought of the hip hop group that was playing (because in my mind hip hop and reggaeton are similar, both induce a lot of ass-shaking), and he said it was great, you know, alternativo.

Second: the alternative scene is pretty small in Cuba, so all these people hang out in the same crowd. This seems a little incongruous and weird to me (in a positive, kind of funny way, of course) because generally rockers, hip-hoppers, and electronickers give off pretty different vibes, and here they all group themselves together into one—alternativos—and hang out together. Cool, I think, but once the scene gets bigger, it will probably not last. They mostly seem to be unified in their vehement hatred of reggaeton (and indifference to salsa).

Third: Alternativos also call themselves “underground” sometimes. I think this is because 1) they are a little anti-establishment, they have only recently started to be recognized as an art form by the government (the Cuban government is a heavy sponsor of culture and art, and does a surprising wonderful job for a Communist regime), and sometimes the lyrics and messages in music are a little controversial and say bad things about the system; and 2) most of the rest of Cuba is pretty conformist culture-wise, everyone dances salsa and listens to reggaeton/other Latiny islandy things, dresses in a similar style, so these people are pretty anti-conformist too, and you can recognize them with just one look, dreads and afros and random strange articles of clothing worn is a strange way are pretty common.

Anyways this concert was an award ceremony of sorts, for up and coming alternative artists who had submitted works in different categories of alternative music. It was pretty shoddy and put together (it’s Cuba), and there were probably not more than 100 people in the audience, but maybe it was historic (?). Some parts of it were pretty entertaining, at least. My friend’s favorite act was this metal group called Hypnosis who were wearing all red and black and all had long hair down to their butts (blonde or black, one girl had braids that made her look medusa-like) and they kept on head banging very seriously, so that all their hair would cover their face, anyways it looked pretty funny and you could tell they were all really into it and gave it their all. My favorite act was a hiphop/rapper called La Rueda who was this short and skinny little mulatto who had a huge beard and looked a little Arab (maybe because of the beard, maybe because he actually was) and he was also wearing this turban, and his acceptance speech was pretty bomb, and he rapped about discrimination and sabor while hopping around like a maniac, so much that he lost his turban and long dreads down to his butt came tumbling out, swinging around the stage. The best part was that he had two accomplices too, who were all very weird too, turban wearing, jumping around and doing flips and one of them kept on shouting the lyrics in the main guys ears with him (he wasn’t miked, so I can’t imagine it was for anything more than show) and it was just so entertaining because here were these weird guys hopping around the stage like crazy 4 year olds on speed, shouting about people discriminating against other people to a pretty thumping beat.

After the show we went to talk to our white mohawk-dreaded friend and congratulated him, and he was like oh man so many things went wrong and we reassured him that it was great, even though you could obviously tell that things had gone wrong. Yeah alternativos!

Hitchhiking pictures!

 

the first truck we climbed on

 

standing at the front of the back of the truck, feeling like the kings of the world

the bottom of the truck--why we couldn't sit down (it was covered in papaya)

 

a little cafeteria in santa clara - city of che

cienfuegos, prettiest, cleanest, least broken down city in cuba

top of a beautiful abandoned mansion with a gorgeous view of the city in cienfuegos. i climbed that tower!

sunset at cienfuegos

 

 

 

 

 

Making Bottle

That’s what they call hitchhiking in this country. I guess it makes a little more sense in Spanish—hacer botella—well, grammatically at least.

 

I think the term originates from back when people used to have bottles in their cars for hitchhikers to put tips in. Haciendo or cogiendo botella in Cuba is a legitimate, government sponsored mode of transportation, because there is generally a shortage of transportation in this country, and extra space not being used in cars seems like a good thing to take advantage of. Although many people just stand on the side of the road holding out their hands or some small bills (usually no more than $1), outside of every major city there is an “amarillo” stand, where guys in yellow outfits run out into the middle of the highway and hold out cardboard signs that say PARE (stop), and shuffle people into cars/trucks/buses based on destination. I say it is government sponsored because government owned vehicles are required by law to stop and take travelers free of charge if they have the space (this does not always happen, bribes happen for line cutting and things like that).

 

Anyways, the reason I’m saying all this stuff about traveling in bottle is that I did it this weekend with two friends, we hitchhiked Cuban style all the way from Havana to the beautiful cities of Santa Clara and Cienfuegos in the center of the island and back—about 600 kilometers total, all for less than $2 each (it could have been less, too, but we were generous).

 

This is what happened:

 

Asked people how to get to an Amarillo stop in Havana. Got there, bumbled around a little stupidly (our first time!). Waited in the hot hot sun, I thought about how I should have packed my spf65 sunscreen instead of the 15.

 

Finally, after an hour or two of tired, impatient waiting (we’d been trying to get out of Havana for about 4 hours now) we hopped onto a bus that was going in the general direction we wanted to go. We got dropped off under a bridge about half an hour later, still closer to Havana than anything else. Waited. The good thing, though, was that there were a lot of Cubans with us in the same position, and though they weren’t ecstatic about all the cars driving past without stopping they didn’t seem too perturbed or antsy about the situation. I start to climb up the bridge to pass the time, and then lo and behold, just as I climb down, a truck stops, and the Cuban friend we made while waiting is waving frantically at us to get on. I climb on, or rather, I step on the wheel and then some men who are already up pull me over the side of the truck (it was pretty tall, and there were no foot holds), and then watch as my friend who is halfway up gets thrown off as the truck starts to drive away. Luckily, everyone starts to scream “Espérate!” so the truck stops again and then he gets on.

 

Our first camioneta! This is an open backed truck, you know, the old kind that normally carries boxes of things to sell. Ours had apparently been transporting large amounts of papaya before the humans got on, because the floor was covered in slippery black seeds and red pulp. Anyways, even though we couldn’t sit, my friend had almost died, I was getting severely sun/wind burned, and the truck looked like it was one pothole away from falling into pieces (not to mention a few oxygen particles away from crumbling), we felt like the kings of the world, because there we were, cruising down the national highway with all these Cubans on this tall truck, the wind blowing our hair in this majestic way, definitively leaving Havana for real, finally. I had seen something like this in “Guantanamera,” a Cuban movie, and thought it was pretty novel, and now there I was, doing it myself. I felt pretty cool.

 

Got dropped off at Jaguey, had dinner. In Jaguey there were tons of Chinese people (from China, a pretty rare sight in Cuba based on all the stares I get in the streets) for some reason (we walked into a restaurant and literally everyone inside was Chinese, and I burst out laughing then scuttled away) and I awkwardly avoided them. For some reason, my gutsiness turns off whenever I’m faced with large groups of Asians. I need to work on that.

 

Went to the side of the highway to try to get to Cienfuegos. By that time, it was dark, and we were a little worried. Luckily, however, everyone was stopping (this didn’t happen the other time) which was a good sign, even though no one wanted to go to Cienfuegos. Finally, we hopped onto a truck going to Santa Clara, which is a big city close to Cienfuegos that we considered going to, but didn’t seem as cool.

 

The second camioneta ride was one of the best parts of the entire trip. It was pitch black by the time we got on, and the Cuban national highway doesn’t have lights on it, so it was really really black. I used my backpack as a pillow and leaned back (no papaya gunk this time, just a lot of dirt). The sky was beautiful, llenísima de estrellas, with a little bright sliver of moon. I had never seen so many stars in my life. There were also some navy officers on the truck, and their outfits were billowing romantically in the wind.

 

Santa Clara: saw the Che museum and mausoleum. Rode in our first peso-horse carriage, and thought it was novel, but the next day we took two more. Like other things that seem novel, it was just one of those things about transportation that are pretty normal in Cuba.

 

Went to Cienfuegos. Indulged in having money and dished out $5 each for a taxi over there, but it was worth it, I think, because we got there in probably 1/5 of the time it would have taken. Also, in the United States, sometimes I dish out $5 for Boloco burritos.

 

Cienfuegos: extremely clean and orderly and pretty and nice. Felt not like Cuba, but somewhere else in Latin America, except for things were extraordinarily cheap. We got an illegal casa particular for $20 for the three of us, which was a great deal, especially because usually they make 3 people get two rooms. We did have to sleep 3 on a bed, however, which was not so nice. Luckily, went to a club that night and didn’t sleep too much. The club felt extremely un-Cuban as well, filled with people who looked like they had money, and no one was trying to hustle us. The best part of Cienfuegos was when we climbed up to this mirador which was a beautiful old crumbling mansion with a really tall tower and you could see the entire city and bay and it was so beautiful it felt like the entire trip was worth it just for being able to run around up there. Also there was a time when we climbed to the roof of our casa at night and sat up there talking, which was nice too.

 

Bottled our way back. Same old camioneta and Amarillo shit, even stopped in Jaguey for lunch again (ate at the same place, it was the only one with food), saw and avoided some Asians, got back to Havana, tanned, dirty, bruised, but alive and happy, and feeling pretty happy about ourselves.

Socialist slump, church, cemetery, and explosions

 

Yesterday I went through what we call jokingly in the house a “socialist slump.” For the first time in my time here, I’ve had to do real, serious work that stresses me out—I’m writing an essay for my Marxist-Leninist philosophy class, for a professor I respect a lot, who I’ve been meeting with outside of class, who I really want to impress. Also, maybe this essay will end up being the prologue to my thesis or something (translated to English, of course). The point of all this is that I’m a little academically stressed for the first time, and suddenly long hypocritically for the comforts and convenience of capitalism. Just two days ago I was yelling at a friend about how sick and disgusting the dual economy was, and how sick sick sick it was for tourists to come to Cuba and only use the expensive goods that are completely inaccessible to most Cubans. But yesterday all I wanted to do was dish out some CUC for some salad, or even better, to walk a block to a 24 hour CVS and buy some chocolate, cheese crackers, and beef jerky with my debit card, and then go to a library and spread my shit out on a wooden table and nibble on processed, exploited-labor food while writing my essay on overthrowing capitalism.

 

Today I am mostly over that, but filled with tons of other explosive, irrational emotions. The weather has been strange, it’s been chilly (I’m wearing pants!) but not rainy, and I feel very unable to express or understand myself. This morning I went to a church service at the crazy Methodist church that I had gone to where I saw people speaking in tongues, but this was a normal service. I had written down some things last weekend in Santiago that I wanted to remind myself to do or think, and I tried to read them over but they didn’t make any sense to me anymore. Anyways, one of them was to go to church, and since that was one of the only really concrete ones I decided to do it, and hoped that in the middle of the action I would remember why I wrote it down in that frenzy of self-whatever. The service was pretty good, in a cultural experience sort of way, because there was a lot of music and singing and dancing, and it was Cuban music (you know, salsa-like stuff, Son-based), people spilling out into the steps and standing room only, and it was just a big party in Church, people were shouting “Cristo! Cristo!” and punching their arms into the air. And then the singing stopped and they brought some American pastors/missionaries up, apparently they had been in Cuba before the revolution, preaching to the yanquis who were living in Vedado at that time until Fidel kicked them out, and now had somehow managed to come back. They started talking in English, with drawls, and there was a lady translating (poorly, and her voice was unpleasant) and they were saying nothing—literally NOTHING, and then they started to speak in broken awful gringo Spanish (he forgot the word for Tuesday) and told a silly joke about Chinese tourists, and I couldn’t stand it anymore and left.

 

Then I watched some American TV show (Madmen), and I’ve also been reading the New Yorker because my roommate’s mother came illegally and brought thousands of New Yorkers, and we’ve all been craving reading things in English /hearing about the world outside of Cuba for a while. Then I went to a really spooky cemetery nearby with famous people buried in it with my boy and it was very spooky because it seemed like a graveyard of a graveyard. All the stones and mausoleums were so beautiful, with wonderfully crafted sculptures and reliefs that impressed me (that is, they moved me), but everything was more or less falling apart, the tops of the gravestones were falling apart, lots of the doors to the mausoleums were broken, and some of the graves too, so that you could see inside of them. We found one where there were tons of bones and some dentures inside, and I talked the boy out of stealing a bone. Also, in each grave they put entire families, stacking them one on top of another, and we saw a hearse come in and then some people took off the top of a grave and lowered a coffin in and put the top back on. Around the entire graveyard there was a yellow wall and then the city, which means some crumbling buildings with ghostlike clothes hanging out on the balcony. Like I said, it seemed like a graveyard of a graveyard, like we were walking through some type of ruin or movie set. And then we played around and did our homework under a tree and then went home. Listen, it was all very strange, and I can’t really express it. I think the wind’s blowing in something weird. At dinner I thought I would explode. Now I am watching Madmen with a friend, succumbing to capitalism and the world I know how to maneuver, and can succeed in overwhelming by only knowing how to maneuver it, without actually understanding it.

 

Conclusion: I feel a little like Satan’s got me.

Santiago pictures

self explanatory

one of the posters at the poster artist's house

metal body parts left at the cathedral of caridad del cobre, by people who are praying for healing of those partsjosé martí mausoleum