Cuba: Reflections on rain, food, and revolution.

Every day we have class from 1:30 to 3:00pm. Every day we file into our classroom, take our seats, and listen to experts talk about various, hopefully interesting topics. Every day at approximately 2:54pm, great gusts of wind blow through the hallways. They slam the windows and doors shut, waking up those who didn’t order coffee after lunch and trapping us inside our classrooms. Loose leaves of notebook paper fly from our desks and fall to the floor, generally right in front of our speaker’s feet. We awkwardly scramble to pick them up, return to our chairs, and try to atone for our carelessness by paying attention for the last few minutes of class.

And then it starts to rain.

Rain? No big deal, I’m from Seattle. Rain and I are old buddies. Right? Wrong. I wish I could come up with a lyrical, beautiful way to describe the amount of water that falls from the sky every day at 3:00pm, but I’m afraid I used up all my poetic energy on the first paragraph of this entry. It rains cats and dogs like you have never seen. Last Monday it rained so hard that our professor refused to let us leave the building until 4:00pm. She thought we would either drown or be struck by lightening. If anyone can figure out how to get a care package to Cuba, I would really appreciate an inflatable raft. A pocket-size one would be especially nice.

Aside from the daily rain, school is going well. I have to produce three papers/projects while I’m here, and I’m starting to get excited about them. Our papers for our Modern Cuba class can be about any aspect of revolutionary Cuba, and I think I’m going to write mine about the two-currency system and the dilemmas it has created. For our art and culture class, I think I’ll write about female singers in Cuba. (That should be especially interesting, because we are expected to collect information in interviews and at events. Hopefully I’ll get to meet some really talented women.) My third project is for my Socialist Experiment class, and it’s supposed to be a photo-journalism type project about a revolutionary contradiction. I’m leaning towards writing mine about paladares, the private restaurants people run out of their homes in order to earn the extra money they need to survive.

I am a fairly regular patron of one of the neighborhood paladares. We started going to Antonio’s house a few weeks ago. He and the various women cooking in his kitchen provide anyone who can pay 1 Convertible Peso (about 1.20 USD) with meals of chicken, steak, or pork. Everything comes with bananas, avocado, rice and beans, and yucca. Fresh-squeezed guava juice costs 2 Cuban pesos, or about 14 cents USD. We don’t have meals at the hotel on Fridays or Saturdays, so most of us end up down the block at Antonio’s. His food is pretty good, especially relatively speaking.

Generally, Cuban food is not exciting at all. Supposedly, Cubans tell jokes such as, “What are the three biggest failures of the Revolution? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Cuban food is usually lacking in sauces and spices and always comes with rice. Rice, rice, rice. Rice is everywhere. Rice cereal for breakfast. Rice and black beans for lunch. Rice and red beans for dinner. Rice pudding for dessert. It’s simple but filling, I suppose.

Being here has reminded me of what a luxury good food is. As an American, I’m accustomed to rich, flavorful, attractively presented food. At many of my favorite restaurants at home, food preparation is an art, and the finished product is beautiful to eat. It’s easy to forget that in its primary and most basic capacity, food is sustenance. Here, expensive meats and fancy spices are simply not accessible to everyday citizens, who are rationed enough of the essentials to last ten days of each month and left responsible for purchasing the rest with their very small salaries.

Every morning and evening we eat at the hotel buffet. The food is all-you-can-eat, and usually very satisfying. In the morning, one of the chefs cooks eggs to order at the end of the buffet. In the evenings, ice cream and cake and flan cover the dessert table. Every time I walk into the dining room, I can’t help but feel strange about being there. Hotel meals are included in our tuition, but I’ve been told that breakfast costs about eight Convertible Pesos. Dinner is likely more expensive. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out twice a day, we eat meals that would cost the average Cuban a third of his monthly salary. How do we justify that? How does Fidel justify that?

The tourism industry has created contradictions outside the dining room as well. More than one Cuban has candidly told me that as a foreigner, I have more rights in this country than citizens. My status is augmented by my race and hair color. As a foreigner, I have the right to purchase a car in Cuba, rent a hotel room, and come and go as I please. Cubans do not. As a person with light skin, I can walk into any hotel or restaurant without being hassled by the staff or walk around downtown without being stopped by the police. Darker-skinned people can expect to be stopped wherever they go. One of the goals of the Revolution was to free Cuba from its dependence on tourists from imperialist nations, but tourism has developed significantly since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992. The tourist industry is now a major money-maker for Cuba, and tourists enjoy a status superior to that of Cubans. Foreigners eat plenty of satisfying and nutritious food, drink bottled water, enjoy clean and sandy hotel beaches, and ride around the country in air-conditioned buses. Cubans are rationed and can’t afford vegetables, drink unsafe tap water, go to dirty beaches with more cement than sand, and make constant repairs to their ancient American cars. I don’t understand how more people don’t resent us.

In the interest of publishing something, I’m going to wrap this entry up. It’s been a long time since I posted something, so I think I’ll call it quits for now. There’s more coming soon—I promise it won’t take me as long next time around.

I hope all is well back at home in the land of imperialism. Feel free to comment or e-mail me!

P.S. Posting photos on here takes too long, so I've saved everything in a Picasa album titled "La Isla Prohibida." You can view them by visiting http://picasaweb.google.com/elhenke.

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