Cuba Trip

To Cuba, with love.

There was no amount of research I or my family could have done prior to stepping off the plane in Cuba. Our flight to Cuba took off from the Ft. Lauderdale airport at 8AM and touched down in Cuba at 8:45. Ninety miles and a flight not even long enough for complimentary beverages transformed us to a third world country, in the blink of an eye.

The flight started its descent as I gazed out the window just in time to catch the moment the clear, blue sea stopped and the atopic brown and green landmass started. Brown dirt roads weaved through the land, with no grid, rhyme or reason. Smoke stacks in the distance drew my eyes, they were the tallest landforms in sight, with thick orange-brown smoke billowing into the atmosphere. The terrain seemed to be jungle green in some areas, and completely barren in others, showing human impact. The non natural footprint on Cuban land became more and more prevalent as the descent brought us close to a city-scape. No more green from here on out, simply slums.

 

Stepping off the plane onto ground interrupted with tectonic cracks pouring with weeds, the Havana airport loomed before us, a soviet style building from the forties. A passenger next to us told us to “switch our clocks to Island time.” This was a reminder to be patient for the long waiting periods between getting our bags, going through Cuban customs, transferring our US dollars to Cuban dollars. The airport could have been a ‘smoking allowed’ building. It wasn’t, but people took their smoke breaks in twenty minute increments, standing right where the inside of the building meets the outside, with the doors wide open suctioning the smoke in to the stagnant air of the airport. After those mutinous tasks of customs, money and baggage were completed, we stepped outside onto Cuban land, into a whole different world.

 

System overload. Stimulation at a level eleven out of ten, colors erupted from every surface. Textures competed for living space. Everything in sight was begging for attention. Four people, within ten seconds of walking out the doors, have offered us a “Taxi!!!!!!” We were told ahead of time, some of these people aren’t allowed to do so and shouldn’t be taken up on that offer. People were everywhere, swarming the direct outside area of the airport like flies. Some were waiting for family members to arrive off of the plane. Most were Cubans wanting tourist money in the form of a taxi drive into the town of Havana. The airport had a small parking lot, half empty, half filled with cars from the early forties and fifties. I did not believe my eyes- the cars were all different bright colors, in magnificent shape, and transforming the scene to one in the fifties. Any manmade structure was crippled with decay, with paint chipped off, weeds growing in the cracks, and oftentimes dilapidated completely. A pack of stray dogs traveled, seven sickly canines strong, meandered throughout  crowds of people, slyly stealing scraps. Six out of every ten people were smoking cigarettes, throwing the burning butts onto the ground, as they continued to smoke into the atmosphere. I did a tap dance stepping on them to put them out– what if a dog stepped on it. Cubans wore clothes that offered little differentiation between them. No brands, no styles that vered far off from the standard: for boys, light-weight button up shirts or wife-beaters and dirty blue jeans. For females, all outifts were variations on the next, yet all were looking to be noticed: bright colored cotton leggings and tank tops, arms decorated with thick faux gold chains, charms and rings. Nails were decorated, neck-lines were plummeting. Being a female traveler, it was within five minutes that I got a sense of the attention towards women in the society.

 

We hopped into a cab. I would have felt more familiar with the scene if I were seeing in black and white, as if I were in a movie from the fifties. The car had no seatbelts. It belched diesel fuel into the atmosphere in puffs of black smoke. The drive from the airport into Havana consisted of lots of honking, cutting people off, quick maneuvers around broken-down cars, completely stopped in the middle of the busy street with a man laying on his back with a toolset, cars zooming inches from his face at 50 mph. The buildings on the left and right of the road were not clear in their purpose, because all looked like similar variations of each other: brightly painted, delapadated and all somehow connected to the next building through a makeshift construction job. I noticed a school, gated, with an attendant guarding the door. Inside were teenage girls wearing matching uniforms: cotton white polo shirts and blue skirts that covered only what was absolutely necessary. We drove past a stretch of government buildings, extremely covered, guarded with soldiers militantly standing at the gate openings. The cubans skin tones ranged from very dark, like that of Sub Saharan Africans, and light caramel, like that of Hispanic Americans. Some men and women, I noticed, were wearing only white: white hair turbans, white shirts, white shawls, white pants or skirts and white shoes. I learned later on that a religion called Santeria was rooted in a combination of Catholicism and African religion. They wore all white only in the first year of adopting the religion, and then they could wear whatever they want.

We arrived at our destination, in the center of Old Havana. Old Havana is the tourist destination of Cuba, because of its time-warping illusion. Past the oddity of seeing the streets filled with cars from the fifties, the buildings show no sign of western culture whatsoever. The businesses observed in Old Havana had no names on signs, but were small closet-sized units on the street level of buildings from the Spanish era, their ornamentation hinting at a very rich and prosperous past life. Three, four, five stories high? It was hard to tell. The streets were extremely narrow, built during  a time where it was only necessary for a horse and carriage to make it through. Now they are covered with people like flees, taxi workers riding bikes with carriages for tourists, and cars. If the streets were one way or two way, it was a differentiation unclear to me. Thankfully our taxi driver navigated it semi seamlessly, and if a car has to pass another car, one of them ended up honking profusely and the other ended up on the sidewalk, inches away from the business-fronts. People absolutely everywhere. The stimulation and energy overload reminded me of Bourbon Street in Louisiana, and also Las Vegas.

I heard taxi driver, in broken english, ask my parents where they are from. “Chicago,” my dad said. The taxi driver tilted his head and furrowed his brows, confused. A few seconds later, “Ah!! Al Capone!” Both the taxi driver and my parents chuckled at his only mental association with Chicago. We later learned that because of the casinos in Cuba, and the extremely short travel time, before the USA embargo on Cuba in 1959, many wealthy mafia men had close and intricate ties with Cuba.

 

Dodging people, horses and carriages, bikers and other cars, our taxi driver took us down the narrowest road we had been on yet, intently studied the address my mom gave him, and then came to a halt in the middle of the street. He pointed to a dilapidated green door amidst a palette of urban chaos, and told us “this it!” We were staying in a “Casa Particular,” which means it is a private home owned by a Cuban, that now is used to house tourists. My mom looked at the address and then the door again, obviously confused as to how the taxi driver brought us here, being that there was no marking on the door to imply what address it was, whatsoever. The taxi left after his payment. I reached for the door knob, and before coming into contact with it, it swung open inwardly. Our host was observing our arrival from the balcony above, and opened the door with a rope along the stairwell connected from the doorknob, to the fourth level. When the door was completely open, we were faced with an extremely narrow and extremely long stretch of stairs. At the top, perhaps two hundred stairs up, we could see a smiling Cuban man waving and inviting us up. We climbed the stairs- marble steps and marble tiles decorated the walls. Back in the day, this place was extremely ornate and boastful of wealth. Reaching the top of the steps, we were greeted extremely warmly with handshakes from our host. Senior Mazarono. He had an elaborate goofy smile and laughed at almost everything we said. His english was very broken, but was better than the taxi drivers. He welcomed us in. The apartment used to be a single family home back in the day, clearly a very wealthy family. Now, the large unit is broken into five or six smaller living spaces, with boards patching makeshift walls in between spaces. The floor changed height as we clearly stepped between areas renovated at different time eras, or not renovated at all. At one area of the patchwork display, a wooden board revealed the sky. A conglomeration of different colors and textures, my eyes didn’t know where to look. Everything called our attention.