Cuba Day 1: Introspection

Dear Reader,

Greetings from Havana, Cuba!
Last week I booked an impromptu flight to Cuba. This morning I took it. I'll be joined happily by Big Mike on Friday and joined begrudgingly by Dickie on Saturday. But until then I explore Cuba alone.

I'm spending the night here in Havana before driving South tomorrow morning to the small sugarcane town of Trinidad. On Friday, the crew will meet up back in Havana, where we'll fritter around until flying back home on Tuesday.  The theme for the solo leg of my trip will be introspection. The last time my roommates left me alone for a week, I lost my marbles and started printing rapper puns on pillowcases. I'm hoping a focus on introspection will keep my marbles in tact while I venture alone for four days. 

So here goes... Cuba: so close to the States but so different. The trade embargo has made the 90 miles separating Cuba and Florida feel like a chasm, deep and wide. This is obvious to anyone once in Havana, where '57 Chevy's rule the streets and wifi is mostly unavailable. But the careful observer (me) notices the outdated character of the country long before the wheels even touch down in Cuba -- the immigration form they pass out on the plane says it all. Cuba, it seems, requires first-time visitors to announce their arrival in song. How charmingly outdated!
 

I must have done something right, because with a scowl and a nod, the customs agent granted me access to CUBA!

 After the applause died down, I shared a cab with two Americans to downtown Havana. I checked in to my Airbnb then left to explore the ocean-side boardwalk, peeling my eyes for food, cerveza, and above all, introspection. I found a lovely outdoor restaurant whose waiter said that, today being Valentine's Day, they had a lobster special I may be interested in. "I'll take it" I told him, knowing that nothing is more introspective than Valentine's lobster alone. A closer look at the menu prompted my first introspection, denoted henceforth with parentheses.
 
(...Ordering solo Valentine's lobster is sad, but what kind of menu advertises solo Valentine's lobster? I wonder if lonelies are a highly profitable segment...)  To kick things off I ordered one of their cocktails -- the one the restaurant was famous for -- carefully avoiding blended drinks as the ice and water here isn't safe to drink. (...Can Cubans drink the water here? Do they know I can't? Do they think that's strange? I suspect they do think it weird -- what would you think if Germans got diarrhea if they ate something mundane like Wonder Bread when they came to America?...)

My drink came out chock full of ice. Time was ticking. As the ice melted, it was slowly poisoning my carefully crafted cocktail. Thinking quickly, I slammed the damn thing at lightning speed, unfortunately catching my waiter's eye as I did do. No quicker had he set my drink down than it was gone. He gave me a look saying (probably in Spanish), "I know we cater to lonelies but get a grip."

My lobster came with a choice of light or dark beer. I wasn't in the mood for something Guiness-like so I chose the light. The waiter came back with a frosted mug and my beer. Hand behind his back, he presented the beer, explaining its Cuban origins. He cracked the beer and served it with vigor, shaking the beer out of its can as if it were a Shakeweight. After the dust settled, I had the foamiest beer of my life. "Enjoy" the waiter said, before returning to the kitchen, presumably to shake up some beer cans for the next customer.
 

 I capped off my meal with the dark beer option, which is clearly the same as the light beer option, before retiring home to rest up for an early trip to Trinidad tomorrow. 
 ^ in case you missed it, that's the dark beer  -__-


* Writing from my iPhone -- please excuse any sloppiness

Cuba Day 2: Trinidad

Two honks. "Amigo!"   My taxi driver waved up to me on the balcony.

Yesterday I arranged for a shared "taxi collectivo" to take me to Trinidad. Because the collectivos didn't know, when I booked, who I would be sharing a ride with, and because I don't have phone service, my driver told me to just wait outside my apartment from 8-9am and somebody would pick me up eventually. This manual Uber Pool has no GPS tracking and no messaging system. "Different world," I didn't say aloud to myself, but might have had I known then that I'd be writing about it now.

I jumped into the '50s 6-seater -- it was old but so very sweet, much like an over-ripened banana. The engine fired. Its diesel fumes reminded me of my dad's old pickup. As did the seats, which were black and overly squishy, like an over-ripened banana. I was sandwiched in the back seat between two Italians who were nice if not prickly. To my right, Matteo had shaved his arms, though not recently. His tricep stubble was irritating my naturally hairless shoulders. Up front sat a German couple who, after meeting on Tinder just a few months ago, was now traveling the world. (Mila, if you're reading this, that could have been us!)

 

Along the ride, the Germans gave me lots of tips for what to see in Havana. I never worked up the courage to ask them if Wonder Bread gives them diarrhea.  They told me the $50 I paid for the four hour, door-to-door taxi was far too much even though it seemed like a good deal to me. (... I guess I'm just not used to haggling for everything. Should I be haggling more in the United States? At what point in a country's development does haggling fall out of vogue?...)

 As I was dozing off the car came to a sudden stop, a maneuver I thought impossible for these old American yank tanks. An elderly woman was selling bananas on the side of the highway and our driver apparently loves bananas. He shared the delicious bunch with the whole car and we were quickly back on our way.  Once in Trinidad I moseyed about for a bit and then caught a ride to the picturesque Ancon Beach. A lot of Speedos, I noticed, astutely, and stripped down to my skivvies so as to blend in with the locals.



The ocean was surprisingly warm. I took a sip. "Soy Cuba!" I didn't exclaim, as the Cuban waters coursed through my veins.  I spent the rest of the day reading The Old Man and the Sea, delighting in the fact that the waters Hemingway wrote about were somewhere inside of me, like a perfectly-ripened, roadside banana. My mojito dried up as the sun set between two cans of trash.  



My rumbling stomach reminded me that I had eaten just once since arriving in Cuba. Maybe that was for the best -- I don't know the Spanish to ask if it's okay to flush toilet paper down the drain. (There are garbage cans next to many of the toilets, but I'm too scared to peek inside to see if it's supposed to be for toilet tissue.)

 The taxi I caught back to town picked up, without explanation, many many hitchhikers before dropping me off in town. There, I found an outdoor restaurant playing good music and serving bad pork, and settled in for the evening.