As has been exhaustively documented, the actual Landing In Cuba was hellish, but it’s been pretty smooth sailing since then. Our local friend Jenn arranged a driver to pick us up at the airport, which was helpful. We’d been able to keep in touch with him and our airbnb host for our casa particular, so despite being three hours late (only being three hours late counting as some sort of miracle), the transition from airport to apartment was clean and easy.

The Apartment

The apartment itself is, dare I say it, the nicest apartment we’ve had so for. OK, out of four, but still. We’re starting to appreciate little things. There are nightstands on both sides of the bed. We still needed to pick up a few extra hangers, but there were more hangers here than we’ve found so far. We have two little comfortable sofas (our last apartment, in CDMX, only had dining chairs for seating). We have our first full size refrigerator since we started. Which is bittersweet, since there’s very little to put in it. There’s adequate drawer storage in both living area and bedroom, so it was easy to move in. The bed didn’t come with a hair shirt (the bed in CDMX was so hard we actually bought a mattress pad). There are multiple lights in the living room, so we can control whether we have mood lighting or confession lighting. Which is, I suppose, a mood.

It also doesn’t hurt that the apartment is pretty cute.

The Neighborhood

The neighborhood we’re in is called Vedado, which is a pretty urban area in Habana. We’re a short cab ride to the historic center, Habana Vieja, but we’re less than a ten minute walk to the ocean and the Malecón. Which is as lovely as the pictures you’ve seen suggest.

One surprise about the Malecón, and the city itself, is how little street vending there is. If this were Mexico, the Malecón would be pavéd with carts peddling hand food. There are a few small carts with some packaged snacks and hand bagged popcorn, but no one, anywhere in the city, has the equivalent of taco carts. Instead, people have converted the doors and windows of their apartments into little tiendas, behind which they sell whatever products they can find.

It’s possible that the Habana government doesn’t like street vendors and ensures there aren’t any, but I suspect it’s primarily the economics of having to create a cart that can be used for cooking and load it up with perishable product that has kept street vending from flourishing.

The Old Cars Are A Real Thing

One of the joys of the Malecón is watching the cars drive by. The pictures you’ve seen are accurate. There are old Chevys and Studebakers (some barely held together, some cherried), Soviet-era Ladas, little two-person tuk-tuks shaped like eggs, pedicabs… What there aren’t are a lot of cars. The streets are actually a little sparse, especially given that Habana is a capital city. It’s also an island, so getting cars here is complicated. And embargo. And gas shortages. It’s kind of calm, until you realize that there aren’t actually enough cars, for either locals or tourists. We’ve walked home several times when a taxi would have been preferable, because we couldn’t find one. Ask me about the 3.5 mile walk home from a bank. Or better, don’t. I’d rather not remember.

I Scream…

As we were in Oaxaca, we’re only a few blocks from a major ice cream venue. I’d love for that to have been clever planning, so we could guarantee it going forward, but it’s just been dumb luck. The Coppelia is a state-run enterprise (two bowls of vanilla, which was the only flavor on the menu, was $20 CUP, about 12¢) that’s also an architectural marvel in its own right.

The Coppelia is on Calle 23, one of the main drags in Vedado. At our end of 23, the sidewalk is an art installation, with a series of square terrazzo tiles featuring both abstract and representational designs. They were created in 1965 for an art show, El Salon de Mayo, which was curated by, among others, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, and Joan Miró. A total of 180 mosaics were created. Many of them have started decaying, like the rest of Habana, but they’re still beautiful, and a reminder that art has long been central to the city’s self image. A total of 180 were created, although we haven’t done an exhaustive inventory. Here are some greatest hits.

Shopping

Part of settling in wherever we land is figuring out the mercados, so we know where to get supplies. I have a whole post on the shopping experience here, which is actually just a dressed up political screed, but the mercado situation here has been problematic. In Mexico, it just meant visiting the local mercados to find the ones best suited to different needs. This one is super close, but has a shitty selection. Only for emergency tomatoes. This one has the best selection, but it’s a taxi ride away. This one is the best balance of selection and distance.

In Habana, the challenge has been finding them at all. Our host pointed us to a few, one we found from a recommendation on the street, and the best ones we’ve just stumbled across. It took us two weeks into a four week stay before we finally felt like we’ve figured it out. Of course, having found the best mercados doesn’t mean they have anything. Cooking here is like that great Onion piece about Taco Bell’s new menu item: Taco Bell’s Five Ingredients Combined In Totally New Way. Some nights, beans and rice, some nights rice and beans. Along with onions, bell peppers, and… maybe something else.

All of this is made more challenging by our complete absence of social capital. Meaning, the knowledge about how things get done and the ability to get them done. To be fair, the US is the only place where we have any social capital, but its absence wasn’t so acutely felt in Mexico. Nor will it be in most other places, I think. That’s because while we lack social capital, we have actual capital. Even though we’re living off just Social Security, we still have more than enough income to be comfortable outside the US. In the absence of social capital, money can solve a lot of problems, even if not as efficiently or cheaply as someone with local knowledge.

But in Cuba we not only lack social capital, our actual money doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t create products in the mercados, or gasoline for taxis. In many cases, there are items that are available but really expensive, and our money can fix that. But much of the time, the goods simply don’t exist on the open market. A non-stick skillet. Eggs. Avocados.

That’s where the social capital becomes so important. You know a guy who knows a guy. You have excess milk which you barter for someone’s excess salt. You have a friend visiting from another country, and you ask them to bring a bottle of olive oil.

We don’t know a guy. So all that’s available to us is what we can find in the shops on our own. It’s both a little grim and a lot instructive. Like those educational programs that make local officials get through a couple of days like poor people, with no cars or money. You come out the other side with a perspective you didn’t have going in.

At Least It’s Not Barthalona

One thing we were warned about was that proficiency in Mexican Spanish wouldn’t help us in Cuba. We were told that it was a distinct dialect, not unlike Southern English in the US. It seemed at first that it was mostly a vocabulary issue. They just use different words.

For example, 500 in Mexico is “cinco cientos.” In Cuba it’s “quiniento.” What’s truly weird is that when I hear “quiniento” and repeat back “cinco cientos” to make sure I heard properly, I get blank stares. Even though the literal meaning of the word “cinco” is five and “cientos” is “hundred.”

We’d attributed most of our troubles understanding Spanish here to the vocabulary issues, until I heard someone very distinctly pronounce the word for school, escuela, as eh-kwela. No s. That’s when I realized it’s not just the vocabulary. It’s also the accent. Just one more way in which Cuba left us feeling ill equipped.

Architecture

The city has a very strange vibe to it, like you were looking at it through a scrim. On the one hand, there are a lot of buildings which have seen brighter days, as there just isn’t enough money in the economy to maintain the infrastructure. On the other hand, you can see, like an echo, the beauty these structures had when built. And that’s across all the eras represented here.

There are grand old Colonial buildings, with elegant, decaying facades and rusted ironwork, breathtaking Deco and Nouveau masterpieces, and sleek mid-Century marvels, with sweeping curves and surprising rectilinear flourishes, slowly being reclaimed by the land. It’s like the post-apocalyptic love child of New Orleans and Miami. “The deadciv left their empty structures behind, after The Collapse. We occupy them, but no longer know how to operate their ancient technologies.”

To be fair, there are also buildings that have been pretty thoroughly maintained and restored, although these seem to be primarily pre-Revolution colonial buildings. Many have been repurposed as hospitals, government buildings, and museums.

Colonial

Deco

Mid-Century

Monumental

Nouveau

The Pitch

As a visitor, sidewalk touts are the least fun thing here. 100% of the time, as soon as someone asks “Where are you from” in English, we know it’s going to end in a request for cash. It’s so disappointing. It starts as a friendly conversation (everyone here seems to have one or more relatives in the US, or at least claims to), pivots to an offer to walk with us and point out local landmarks, and then, when we finally peel ourselves away (if nothing else, Dorothy only has so many steps she can take comfortably until she gets the hip replacement), comes the begging.

I get it. We have more than they do. And we’re trying to spread out what we are able to spend as liberally as possible, in tiendas and restaurants, taxis and mercados. But knowing that every streetside interaction is just a pretext has hardened us in ways we’d prefer to avoid. We are suspicious and closed instead of generous and open.

It’s not like we’ve never encountered beggars before. But the pitch tends to be pretty straightforward: “Will you give me some money?” And we often do. We’re neither hardhearted nor blind to the broader issues that lead to begging. But hiding the pitch under the guise of a friendly interaction makes it worse, not better. Perhaps it’s an approach we’ll see in other places, but so far it’s been uniquely Cuban. It’s dishonest, a little bit creepy, and way too long. And no, I do not want to be led to a bar where I can hear a local band perform Guantanamera. Ever.

Look, Ma! I’m An Anthropologist!

We’re only in Cuba for a month, which is a very short stay for us. We’re blocked from access to the US banking system while here, so we had to mule in whatever cash we’d need. Projecting that amount beyond a month just felt too risky. Running out of money would be… bad.

But that still appears to be a pretty long stay for visitors. Everyone we’ve spoken to is surprised that we’re here for a whole month, as opposed to a week’s vacation, or even less. Despite the brevity of our visit, I feel more like a local here than I did in five months in Mexico. Because all those dollars we imported don’t protect us from the same scarcity that impacts the Cuban people on a daily basis. Their scarcity is our scarcity, too. We are, obviously, buffered from the worst of it, because it’s not our long-term reality. But our day-to-day reality isn’t that far off. Gasoline shortages mean that we walk. Food shortages mean that we scramble to put together a meal. It’s just dressup, because we get to leave after a month, but the sensation is real. This is an economic war zone, with all the privation and resilience that implies, and we’ve never experienced anything like it. It makes me feel less like a tourist and more like the mutant offspring of a political scientist and an anthropologist, decoding the local folkways for an academic journal. Or a blog.

Dorothy said that White Guilt is what happens when your White Privilege won’t fix something. I don’t know that I feel guilty, but I do feel angry. Plain and simple, the shortages here are caused by the US embargo, and it’s hard not to be pretty pissed about our government’s follies. While we’re here, though, the Cuban’s we’ve met have welcomed us with open arms and open hearts, despite the unprecedented level of fuckery the US government has rained down on them. This is a special place.