Cuba libre!

I have removed myself to the hallway while my roommate talks to her boyfriend on Skype. Our hotel has a sitting area that overlooks an indoor patio and coy pond, and it’s a nice change of scenery from the four empty walls of our room. All of the walls in our room are white, but they’re slightly different colors of white. Now that I’ve been here a while, I realize it’s completely possible that the painters ran out of white paint three different times.

Today was our third day of classes at ISA. Bruce’s classes, Modern Cuba and The Socialist Experiment, each meet for six hours per week. Modern Cuba will focus on Cuba from the 1959 until now. The Socialist Experiment will focus on the same time period, but will consist almost entirely of qualitative field research. We’re also taking a class on Cuban art and culture from a professor at ISA. That class has only met once, and the professor’s accent is so thick that we couldn’t really understand what she was saying. I’ve been exposed to island dialects before—usually people drop their S’s and D’s and speak very quickly. Cubans, however, seem to have no use for any consonant in the Spanish alphabet and prefer to swallow all of them. What comes out of their mouths are slurs of blended vowels that I’m only starting to understand. My hope is that now that we’re interacting with normal Cubans (instead of people working in the tourist industry), we’ll start to understand more. Maybe then the art and culture class will be more enjoyable.

The fourth class we’re taking here is Spanish. On Tuesday, we took a placement exam to determine which professor we’ll work with while we’re here. There are seven other girls in the top level with me, and I can tell we’re going to have a lot of fun together. Our professor, who is also a woman, is really excited about having all muchachas. We spent all of today’s three-hour class talking. She gave us advice about what to do and what not to do while we’re here, and told us she’s willing to teach us whatever we want to learn over the next three months. She asked us classic getting-to-know-you questions, like, “What’s your favorite color?” and, “What’s your favorite way to spend free time?” She found out I sing and said she’d talk to some of the tenors at ISA about arranging a recital. Spanish might be the best class I take in Cuba.

While our academic pursuits dominate our schedules, we’ve found the time for salsa lessons. This week we’ve had group dance class on the rooftop patio at Bruce’s house (he’s renting a private room about ten minutes from the hotel). Lessons are 2.50 CUC per hour (about 2.75 USD, I think) which is about 25% of what I would pay at home. I’m a horrible dancer at home but have made great progress here! We have two more group lessons left, and then we move on to dancing with individual partners—Bruce says we’ll pair up with Cuban students from ISA and have permanent practice partners for the rest of the semester. Does this remind anyone else of Dirty Dancing?

Overall, our experience with ISA thus far has been good. However, we all seem to have one complaint in common—we feel very separated from the Cuban students at our school. We aren’t allowed to take classes with them. Our class with Bruce is in “la aula especial” (the special classroom) of the Artes Plasticos department. (Our classroom is special because it’s the only one with air conditioning.) The Artes Plasticos department is under construction, so very few students pass through the area we use. There’s not actually room for three Spanish classes on campus, so every morning two of our Spanish groups (including mine) walk to an empty office building fifteen minutes away from ISA to have class. We eat at an international student cafeteria with a fence around it because the directors of ISA think “we won’t like the food” served in the Cuban students’ cafeteria. Instead of staying in dorms on campus, we’re staying at a ritzy hotel across the street. Cubans aren’t even allowed to come upstairs. Our existence is very strange.

Outside of ISA, we are perceived and treated as tourists. Like I explained in my last entry, Cuba currently uses two currencies, the CUC and the Cuban Peso. If you look like a gringo, you’re expected to pay for everything in CUCs, and prices are always inflated. We’re getting tired of explaining to people (especially vendors, cab drivers, waiters, etc.) that we’re students, not tourists. As students, we’re allowed to pay the same prices as Cubans for basically everything. It’s illegal to charge us more. That doesn’t stop people from trying.

Here’s an example: Last week in Santiago, four of us went out to dinner to a restaurant that had received excellent reviews in the Lonely Planet guide. What was most attractive about the place was that we could pay in Pesos, so it was guaranteed to be cheap. When we arrived at the restaurant, we sat down and were given menus. The prices listed on the menus were in Pesos, just as we had expected. Before we could order, though, the waiter took the menus away from us. He said the prices listed were only for Cubans, not for tourists. As tourists, we would have to pay in CUCs, which would indubitably be much more expensive than we had planned. After we argued with him for a bit, he went to talk to his boss. He eventually came back and announced that we could, in fact, pay in Cuban Pesos and presented us with the menu again. The prices were indeed in Cuban pesos, but they were significantly higher than they had been on the first menu. We decided to play their game and order anyways—dinner was still going to be really cheap. In the end, we paid 126 Cuban Pesos (less than six CUCs; probably about eight USD) for four orders of arroz con pollo, three salads, and four beers. I don’t really know what they would have charged us in CUCs, but I imagine it would have been much more expensive—probably close to what we would have paid in the U.S.

In a few days we should receive our student IDs. The ID cards will effectively make us Cuban citizens. When someone tries to overcharge us, all we’ll have to do is produce the ID and say, “Mira amigo, soy cubana,” (“Hey look, bud, I’m Cuban,”) and they’ll have no choice but to accept Pesos from us. So there.

On a completely different and perhaps more exciting note, we have a trip pet. On the way to lunch on our first day of class, my friend Laura found a tiny puppy trying to cross the street all by itself. She picked her up and brought her to lunch with us. After the meal we went back to look for the rest of the litter and Mom, but we couldn’t find any other dogs anywhere. The puppy came to school with us, and now she lives clandestinely in Laura’s hotel room. We don’t know what the long-term plan is for la perrita, but we couldn’t very well leave her wandering around the street by her self. She can’t be more than four or five weeks old.

This weekend should be fun—supposedly the students at ISA are having a party, and we’re invited. I’m excited to get to know some of them.

More later!

---

---