The Passport Diaries Pt. 3: Last Dance in Havana
[Apologies for my infrequent posting, there are but 3 terminals (3 seems to be the max per establishment) in this hotel and it has filled up with guests recently. There was also a full day's outage Monday.]
People who know me really well (and how many do?) may have heard me mentioned that I dislike the idea of budget travel while a student, a remark generally directed at the multiplicity of Eurotrips done by students on both sides of the Atlantic. I have my reasons. It is the ultimate irony, then, to find myself on jsut such a trip, stuck, for a good week or possibly more. Some suggestions if you should find yourself on these:
Make local friends who can make sense of the place for you.
Get great travelling comapnions who would definitely pass the ‘airport test’
Find travel writing that will amplify your experience in the city.
Avoid War. (What?)
I have just completed Eugene Robinson’s excellent Last Dance in Havana: The Final Days of Fidel and the Start of the New Cuban Revolution. (Free Press: NY 2004)
‘Avoid War’ was one of a list of recommendations after Gene had his fortunes read by a Cuban babalawo, a priest of the local form of the Yoruba religion, originally from Nigeria but everywhere in Cuba. Among this apparently random list of commandments (“You may not betray anyone”, “Be obedient”, “Beware of haemorrhoids”) were two that bear a strange relevance to myself and a closefriend/adoptive brother: “Take special care with documents” and “Be especially careful on staircases”.
I cant remember if I’ve ever read travel writing like this, but for my presumptive first this was an excellent pick. The book is divided into several chapters with different aspects of the music and dance scene in La Habana as the setting for a general insight into Cuban Life and Castro’s Cuba. I had almost begun to enjoy my confinement here until I read about how a longtime communist stalwart was hauled up for trying to make ends meet in the darkest hours of Cuba’s periodo especial, or how boat hijackers in 2003 were shot within days of their failed attempt – never mind fair trial.
This isn’t Kansas anymore, and I shouldn’t treat it as such.
The reader benefits from the writer’s experience having been to Havana countless times over many years, his levels of access and relationships that could only have been developed over time (with US fugitives and the hottest rap groups), and the words he puts the experience of places. Describing the Plaza de la Revolucion, Fidel’s greatest stage, he writes:
“The whole thing is impressive but spooky, one of thoese too-grand public spaces built on the monumental scale rather than the human, a tropical Tiananmen where the individual is but a tiny flyspeck on the vast, featureless plain of the Big Idea.”
I remember standing where he stood and eloquently summing up the feeling as: “I feel so small!”
A good read.
It doesn’t escape me that my writing here could be monitored. But I don’t particularly feel, think, or write anything threatening to the revolucion.
Just being, living, breathing, writing, watching here is an experience.
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