The colors on this rock are vibrantly decaying. The salt air and the wind, combined with years of neglect out of a lack of resources have made for a strangely beautiful and surreal urban landscape here. The music gets into me, even without my attention it moves me magically and with ease. Sitting at one of Hemmingway's favorite spots where Old Man and the Sea took form, I am irresistbly rocking on my stool to a little trio covering Buena Vista Social Club's music, while a German tourist next to me buys cigars at ridiculously overpriced tourist rates.
I can't help but smile at the beautiful weirdness that Cuba is. I've visited some beautiful places and loved a lot of cultures around the world. Cuba though, has my heart in a new way. Far from an ideal place to live, or even visit, it's magic moves me in profoundly intoxicating ways. It's not easy to get things here, and some days I hope I can drink enough water as it seems the stores are always running out of bottled water. The people, by some standards, are poor, but no one is starving or without a place to live. Most people are actually plump enough to look like they'd last a while if they needed to. Obesity isn't uncommon and though much of that comes from poor food, it also speaks to the fact that there is indeed enough food to get fat on! So would I say people here are really poor? No, but I'm looking at poverty perhaps thru a different lens than most do. When I was in India, I never thought of them as poor either. Cash poor? Yes, indeed. Resource poor? Perhaps. Yet what I see in Cuba isn't so much poverty as it is a lack of and poor distribution of available resources.
What they are lacking in money is balanced by what they have in community and family. At nite, the streets are lit up and every porch hosts several people talking, sitting in their rockers chatting about the life they are sharing. Passers by shout out at their friends and neighbors as they go by, and it's now become my custom as I walk by my friend Ishmael's home to shout out "Shmael" and by Jesus's home "Oya Jesus." In less than one month I feel local, and in fact the first night I was here I felt more at home than I usually do in my own hometown.
