Update 3

Dear friends,   I’m on my last full day in Cuba.  The last six weeks have ebbed by and I have spent the last few days doing a little gifting to my friends and family here, making pies, and enjoying good company.  Last night I watched the sunset from the roof of my cousins building near La Plaza de la Revolucion, with homemade rum in hand and a pile of fresh fruit aside, all provided by their abuelo Eduardo (who is quite purely Cuban with cigar in-hand, his own little rooftop farm and brewery, and of course a history of cutting sugarcane practically alongside Ché).

I am both sad to leave and excited to return to the US of A.  The most difficult part of the journey home is leaving behind family and knowing that visits are excruciatingly hard for financial and political reasons.   And so, I hope you are staying well and warm.  I will do my best to bring a little sun home. besos.

Update 2

Hola de Cuba,   I am still exploring and adventuring in La Habana, but I’m hoping to make it out to a beach in the next week or so.  My Spanish is slowly improving and I’m beginning to learn the unmarked bus system and roads.  This week I made it out to see the house my grandparents lived in which has unceremoniously been turned into government offices, so I can’t say I saw much more than the outside.  Saturday I met some distant cousins, but since in Cuba family is family, it was a wonderful homecoming to get to know them and a little bit of their lives.

I have two weeks left here in Habana, and I imagine coming home will be something of a culture shock.  But if all goes as planned I will return to Cuba in January as a volunteer.  We’ll see, I’m still working out the details of visas and organizations.  Thank you to everyone who has emailed.  I apologize for not writing back but the internet access is spotty and expensive.  But don’t stop writing, I read every bit of it.

Below are three anecdotes I wrote for you all: 1) The one and only extraordinary jaba! (said like hava), 2) The visitor and the toilet, and 3) The toilet paper deliberation.  Read them in any order you like. I hope they make you smile and give you a little glimpse of my life here. Besitos.

The one and only extraordinary jaba! (pronounced hava)

The jaba is an ingenious little invention of which you probably have a whole pile unused and stuffed in a cabinet somewhere.  However, in Cuba you would be lost without them.  It is probably the most important tool for food and cooking because you put everything into it… bread, sliced fruit, rice, sugar, pineapple, raw meat, your lunch, beans, cooked spaghetti, loose salt, grated cheese… not to mention its various other uses in all manner of shopping and portaging.  In fact, you could just about name anything, and it goes right into the jaba, which you know as… the generic plastic grocery bag. 

Now when I say you put your bread in the bag I don’t mean that you put in the nicely packaged bag of bread, I mean that you bring your own previously used bag and the lady in the bakery takes your money with the same hand that she grabs your unpackaged “flautin de pan” off the shelf like a can soup and than shoves it straight into your bag.  I won’t pretend I wasn’t shocked the first time I watched a line of people do this, but when none of them seemed the least bit surprised nor appalled that this lady was handing their bread like a fishmonger, I got in line, opened my jaba, and made like a Cuban.  I have now seen just about everything put directly into a jaba, last week I even saw a woman stuff 6 stacked slices of pizza into one.  And although there is Tupperware here in Cuba, there is no cardboard to-go boxes, plastic wrap, wax paper, ziplock bags, or aluminum foil…and so as you can imagine the jaba stands in for practically all of the uses we have for these things.  And at the end of the day, the jaba is your trash bag too.  To me the most surprising part of food in a plastic grocery bag is the lack of concern for germs and or contamination – a fear which controls a lot of US habits.  BUT the Cubans don’t seem to be suffering any jaba health problems and so… Viva la jaba extraordinaria!

The visitor and the toilet

Monday morning, 7:30am, I stumble towards the bathroom switching on the lights and the music on my laptop for a little sound privacy.  Upon reaching the bathroom, I glance blurrily into the black toilet bowl…where it seems to me something isn’t quite right. Now due to the color of the porcelain, and my state of mind it was somewhat difficult to see what was there so I leaned forward.  Upon a closer examination I realized whatever it was seemed to have fur and was definitely alive as it began attempting to climb out.  This is about the point when I realized I had a rat in my toilet.  Now I have heard urban legends about things like this, but never in my life did I expect to find a furry visitor in the toilet… thank God I didn’t sit down.  I’m slightly embarrassed to say I tried flushing the toilet in an attempt to make the problem disappear without really having to solve it.  However, the poor rat only went round and round swimming and struggling, but definitely not going down… or course this only made me feel horribly guilty for making him needlessly suffer, not to mention what would have befallen him if he had actually gone back down into a pipe somewhere.

So, I watched him little longer to make sure he wasn’t going anywhere, as I had no desire to have a wet rat running around my apartment, then I got dressed and found Maladies, the girl who manages the house.  Maladies shrieked an “Ay díos mio!” and offered to get Jorge, the man who is fixing the other bathroom, but I was afraid he would want to kill it, and feeling pity for the poor thing half drown and struggling, I couldn’t allow it. So I asked for a broom and a bucket and with a little difficulty, shrieks from Maladies over my shoulder, and squeaks from the rat, I took him outside and put him in a spot where I figured he would have time to recover without being exterminated by a passerby. Needless to say for me, it was quite a way to start the week… although… I imagine popping up in someone’s toilet is not a swell way to set out on the right foot either. 

Cuba is full of unusual problems and so spontaneous solutions are the state of life here.  From what I have seen it makes the average Cuban quite inventive.

the toilet paper deliberation

And last but not least...  About two weeks ago a very mysterious thing happened.  All of the toilet paper in Cuba disappeared.  You couldn’t find it in any shops and it simply doesn’t exist in public bathrooms here…well rarely it does, but not without a lady who hands you only a square or two for peso.  And so, I spent two weeks looking in every window I passed and regularly checking the local ferreterria (which is the closest thing to a walmart that exists here), but no tamale.  Every time I used a bathroom, I was dying to ask someone how they were dealing with this problem, as I was desperately saving napkins or using newspaper.  However, no one else really seemed to notice. –As a side note, I believe I’ve learned that Cubans don’t see TP as a necessity here, as they are quite resourceful with whatever is at hand (no pun intended. Really none)–

Finally one day, I was buying some pasta, beans, and ice cream from the ferreterria and there it was, a mountain of TP…stacked from ceiling to floor in a 12x12ft square and wrapped in plastic.  So I asked the cashier if I could buy some, and she directed me to a different section of the store (in this type of store there are various sections each with its own cashier stations and security).  When I walked in, I saw three times as much TP, again stacked ceiling to floor and wrapped in plastic.  This is the point where I knew it would be too easy to just walk up to one of these piles and attempt to take a roll or two to the counter… and sure enough there it was a line of more then 10 people waiting just to enter yet another section where you could purchase the toilet paper.  So…what could I do, as they say here “I made the tail” (stood in line) –ice  cream melting and all.  When I finally got inside this section of the store, I stood in another 15-person line of people with packages of toilet paper.  Here I waited for another 15-20 min to purchase my long awaited, but not over priced TP.  And this is the point to which I would like to bring attention. 

If there were a toilet paper shortage in the US, I think everyone who had more than three rolls would be out in the streets scalping the rest of the world for $10 and $20 rolls of TP.  The rest of us would probably be calling our congressmen and writing letters to senators.  All the same, TP would suddenly become ridiculously expensive and only people with money to burn would buy it. However, here in Cuba, it may disappear, but when it finally arrives it will cost the same as it did before the shortage and thus everyone will more or less have the same access to it as they did before it disappeared.  For me this illustrates a very simple economic truth.  In a restriction-free business economy, every person exploits their resources to gain capital.  Thus if you have toilet paper and someone else needs it, you raise the price as high as you can, regardless of the ability of the average public to pay.  As long as someone can pay, you win.  Unless you are the guy who can’t pay, and than you buy a lot of hand sanitizer or an extra newspaper.  Simple right, supply and demand.In contrast, in a system which is highly regulated, you may not have everything you want at the time when you want it, but when it arrives you will have equal access to it. Thus everyone has to be creative, resourceful, and learn how to live without.  But, at least no one will get rich off selling you overpriced TP, nor will anyone go broke trying to keep their ass clean.  In this type of system, everyone shares in the commodities of the county.

From the land of long lines and lovely people

Hola,  I finally made it to Cuba!!! (not to mention legally).  I have been here almost three weeks and I am currently staying in a house near Barrio Chine (Chinatown) in Centro Habana.  The neighborhood is not exactly the Upper Westside, but it is much more economic.  Originally I was staying in the fifth story of a building overlooking the ocean, two historic monuments (El Castillo de San Salvador and Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña), and Prado and El Malecon (very popular social walkways).  The owner of that place fed me fresh fruit and eggs every morning and meat and salad every evening (at the rate of $6 a meal)… some of these things are hard to come by, and because of the hurricane somewhat expensive for Cuban wages.  But it was still a little pricey for my budget, and so, I moved to a place which is less expensive and has a kitchen…and this Sunday night was my very first night cooking in Cuba.  Oooo, and Tuesday I learned how to make a knock you on your ass flan!  Everyone has been laughing at me this week because I’m having to learn how to cook and clean all over again due to the difference of tools and customs here.  Everything here revolves around a different logic.  Cubans are incredibly resourceful and conservative in the manner in which they do just about everything…they reuse a lot that we just throw away.  The only thing they are not conservative with is what they consider trash.  To me, this is actually a really odd thing: a Cuban, when finished with a wrapper, be it candy, cookie, cracker, or paper from a peanut vender, then proceeds to drop, throw, discard, or abandon the trash most anywhere, but a trash can.  There are, however, a lot of street cleaning jobs.

So a little background:  I was very lucky to be connected to an amazing group of people here in Centro Habana.  They belong to a church that has ensured my safety and comfort, whether it be through food or camaraderie, from the moment I arrived.  They have helped me through the processes of figuring out how visas work and how to study here.  They are also helping me to figure out how to get an internship here.  This is no small thing, as the processes here are somewhat complicated and confusing for an American.  However, I have been blessed to be here and to have people who treat me like family.

Outside of this group of people, I am usually very careful.  In the streets, men hiss and smooch to get any woman’s attention and it seems that everyone wants to sell you something or get with you.  These are some of the side effects of being surrounded by intensive tourism.  Of course not all Cubans behave this way in the street, but when you are trying not to make eye contact with the noisy part of the street, it’s hard to notice anyone else.  Still I have had no real problems, except for being lost a little here and there.  Well…and of course the realization that finding a position in Agriculture without having any solid contacts or at least a friend of a friend is near impossible.  Still I have not stopped looking, as the people here are teaching me nothing is impossible through God.

As a final note:  I know that last statement is shocking as most of you who have know me the last few years do not know me to be very religious nor outwardly spiritual.  However, I used to be, and when I began this process, my desire to be in Cuba was so great that I prayed out of desperation for God to help me get a license to study here.  I expected I would have to fight for this permission, but it arrived within a month of the application.  And then, when I was scrambling to make plans to come, my plans fell through, and it looked as though I would end up in Cuba without a place to stay or any real contacts.  Doing anything without contacts in Cuba is difficult and expensive, but two days later my mother coincidently happened upon a contact through her church which brought me into an amazingly generous and honest group of people.  Since that time, this group of people has bent over backwards for me.  Throughout these last two weeks, I have seen how they live in much difficulty and with a fraction of what the below average US citizen has, and yet they continually treat me as if I were they sister or daughter.  They give me their time, they feed me till I have to refuse, they teach me, and they labor to understand my broken Spanish, and all with patience, joy, and humility.  Never have I experienced such humble hospitality except in my own home, and yet everyday here I am surrounded by the love and the teachings of Christ carried out with compassion despite the economic conditions.  It is for this reason, although I have no idea how this whole thing will turnout, that I am unable to deny divine presence in their actions and in my path in Cuba.  Once again, greetings from Cuba!