On the other hand, we may be new to Chicago, but it’s still fundamentally our culture. It’s less a foreign locale than a new neighborhood, so it’s not clear to me what I might have to say, other than, “Hey! Cool new neighborhood, amiright?” It just doesn’t feel like I have anything interesting to say about Chicago.

As it happened, I was having this very conversation with my sister, Nef, and my niece, Amber, as we walked to a downtown protest about Trump sending ICE and troops to Chicago. Spoiler: the demonstrators were opposed. I basically laid out the argument above, to have them push back that they thought the blog was about something else entirely. I don’t remember what, exactly, as I was confused as to whether I was supposed to be offended that someone else was defining my intentions as a writer or chagrined that I didn’t seem to be doing what I thought I was doing. Regardless, their contention was that their interpretation of the blog’s focus permitted plenty of Chicago reportage.

Then we got to the corner of Michigan Avenue and Ida B. Wells Drive, the gathering spot for the protest, and I realized that they were right. Maybe not regarding my objectives in blogging, but they were certainly correct that Chicago would offer ample blogging opportunities. Looking at the crowd gathered there, I felt as much confusion as to what the natives were doing as I did in any of the more credibly “foreign” places we’ve visited. I was pleasantly surprised to discover how comfortable I felt now that I was baffled. It’s the place I’ve been living the past couple of years, and it feels like home.

As with everywhere else we’ve been, I was struggling to understand the purpose, meaning, and intention of what I was seeing. It just wasn’t clear what we were there to do. Protest, sure, I got that part, but to what end? The desired outcome of this activity wasn’t at all obvious to me.

Which is not to shit all over protests and demonstrations. They’re all we have. But they’re inherently performative, which is why I’ve never attended one before. They’re about expressing anger and outrage, and while I’m certain that expression feels cathartic, it’s not going to directly lead to anything changing. Unless we deploy the Kathmandu method, which didn’t seem to be on the menu. Absent that, which I’m also certain was cathartic, the best a protest can do is let people know that other people are outraged. And if enough people know that enough other people are outraged, A Change Is Gonna Come, I guess. It all feels very abstract.

This particular protest also felt super chill. As this was Baby’s First Protest, Amber prepped me on the walk over, letting me know that I would be seeing more police than I had ever seen in my life.

Or not.

This was about it. There was no presence at all at the plaza, and maybe a couple of bike cops at each intersection on the march, clearly meant to manage traffic rather than keep the peace. No riot shields in phalanxes, no truncheons at the ready, no water cannons poised to gently nudge miscreants back to the path of righteousness. Just… traffic control.

It was, if I’m being honest, a little bit of a letdown.

I think maybe it was because, in an alignment unlikely to reoccur, the cops and protestors were on the same side. Nobody wanted a massive ICE presence or troop deployment. The citizens because, “How dare you?” and the cops because, “Hey! Brutalizing Chicago’s citizens is our thing! Stay in your lane.” Still, the absence of water cannons and beatings was probably a net positive. However it came about.

The result was a vibe more Lollapalooza than Watts Riots. There was marching and chanting of slogans and waving of signs. One of the chants sounded like “Trump loves donuts,” which, sadly, it was not. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t have a bullhorn, as that’s certainly the chant I’d have led. So many great reasons for me to not have a bullhorn.

The signs, however, were 100% the highlight of the experience. If you’ve been following along, you know that we always document entertaining examples of local graphic design, and this place was a hotbed, from hand scrawled to elaborately printed. Many of them were clever and funny, but quite a few seemed not fully on point. While the ostensible purpose of the gathering was to protest the Trump administration’s plans to send the military to Chicago to assist ICE deportation efforts, the signage reflected a less focused umbrage.

And there were a ton of signs that just seemed hilariously off the mark. Calls to release the Epstein files. An earnest young woman carrying a handmade sign with the reproductive rights slogan, “Keep Your Hands Off Our Bodies.” An obviously unassailable sentiment, just not particularly related to the stated purpose of the demonstration. And this:

OK.

But my favorite was this:

I apologize for truncating the sign. The full quote is, “First off, fuck your bitch and the clique you claim.” At the time I thought, well, you’re just angry, aren’t you? Not sure about what, but that’s not a happy sentiment. Then I looked it up, and it’s a lyric from a famous 2Pac dis track, Hit ‘Em Up, and that rabbit hole left me more confused than when I thought it was just random.

Hit ‘Em Up is about the West Coast/East Coast beef that eventually took 2Pac’s life, among others. He specifically called out East Coast rappers such as the Notorious B.I.G, Diddy, and Mobb Deep. For being, you know, bad people. And suggesting that the appropriate response to their badness was to fuck they bitches, to be followed by stabbing and shooting. Not of the bitches, of the bad people. Bitches are for fucking, not stabbing and shooting. Go down that path and soon enough you’ll run out of bitches to fuck. No one wants that.

Anyway. A measured, thoughtful, reasonable position. Hard to argue.

But harder to find the thread that connects the quote to the event. Is it a metaphor? Are we 2Pac, and is the Trump administration East Coast rappers? Are we supposed to fuck they bitches? Before stabbing and shooting? If that’s the intention, does the sign carrier understand that we die in the end?

This was more targeted to the rationale of the gathering, but so telegraphic I had to decode it for our group.

I can’t begin to tell you how I knew this, but the sign refers to Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which defines the requirement for soldiers to follow orders, but provides an affirmative defense for failing to do so if the order was illegal. That’s a subtle, perfectly targeted argument that, maybe, could have been made a tad more obvious.

And these are just funny.

I’m glad I went, because we brought the Trump administration to its knees, and about damn time he faced the consequences of collective action. Next up: climate change. Or vaccines. Or tariffs. Or extrajudicial killings.

No wonder those signs were stuffed.

We failed to account for two things. At least. The first was that if we were committed to “traveling until it was no longer fun,” what that really meant is that we were playing a game of chicken with our mental health. Neither of us would want to be the first to admit defeat, so one of us would wind up going way past not fun and straight into meltdown. Not good.

The second thing we’d failed to account for was that we’d be spending every waking moment together, sharing exactly the same experiences, and with no one to talk to except the occasional Zoom friend. That was an entirely more claustrophobic effect than we’d anticipated. Also not good.

That’s why we picked up an apartment in Chicago last year and spent six months in the US settling into it. We figured it would act as an escape valve, allowing us to go home when things got to be too much on the road. Our plan was for nine months of travel and three months in Chicago. What could possibly go wrong?

This lifestyle requires sacrifices but also, obviously, confers benefits. The problem Dorothy and I have had since Day One is that those sacrifices and benefits impact us asymmetrically. Dorothy values more highly what she’s had to give up than I value what I’ve lost, and I value what’s been gained more than she does. So, good for me, but that means that this whole endeavor has been built on the back of Dorothy’s goodwill. Which is almost infinite. But not quite.

The things Dorothy has had to give up, friendship, community, meaningful work, are things she’s no longer comfortable living without. I, on the other hand, deeply miss my weekly board game night. But I’m coping.

We’d said at the beginning that when the pressures of travel became too great that we’d still leave Chicago for three months over winter. We’d have to be physically unable to leave the apartment before fleeing Chicago’s winter was off the table. So that’s what we’re going to do.

Well, that’s what Dorothy’s going to do. We’ll go somewhere together each winter, but I will travel solo for another chunk of the year. I’m not sure how long or on what cadence, but that’s the plan. If I like traveling alone at all. Dorothy and I have been together 50 years, so I’ve never been alone. I may not like it, or it may be a refreshing smack in the face. It will certainly stretch my skills, as I’ve never had to feed myself before. And I probably won’t notice that something is wrong with me until a limb falls off.

I know for a fact that I’ll find solo traveling inferior to traveling with Dorothy. But I also know that I’ll find solo traveling superior to sitting in Chicago nine months of the year, so I’ll take what I can get. Honestly, I think at this point we’ll both benefit from not sharing every moment together. It’s… a lot.

One of the ways we’ve made fifty years as a couple is by being willing to throw everything in the air and start over. Circumstances change, but most people are way too slow to recognize that different circumstances require different responses. Different input, different output. That’s all that’s going on now, so it’s a thing we’re supremely comfortable doing. We’ll figure it out and get it right.

The current plan is to return to the US in September, after Indonesia. Then I’ll leave around the first of the year (two months in Thailand?), and join up with Dorothy and my sister, Nef, in Uzbekistan for a month. They’ll go back and I’ll keep going (Malaysia & Sri Lanka?) for another couple of months. That will reset the calendar for our snowbird cadence, and I’ll know by the following year what I can handle for solo travel.

Or not. Between now and whenever is then, something else may change that forces another pivot. It’s what we do.

Taken in total, Vietnam’s economic system feels like Western capitalism with some of the Darwinian struggle for survival shaved off. It’s tough to argue that that’s an inherently bad thing. You can debate the particulars, but it hardly seems like a system that threatens our way of life.

Where capital C Communism is felt most strongly here is in the political system, rather than the economic structure, and in a post-colonial nationalism that is the primary justification for that political system. Much like in Cuba, the single-party system is a bulwark against Western fuckery. That’s not a convenient justification, that’s a fact. Multiple political parties would permit dark money to flow in from Western actors who have an economic stake in a compliant government. We may not be blockading Vietnam, as we are Cuba, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t fuck it in a heartbeat if we could.

Economically, the difference between the US and Vietnam is a values-based fork in the capitalist road. We favor rugged individualism, and we’re happy to let you die to prove the point, while Vietnam favors the collective good. That’s on Vietnam’s side of the ledger, in my book. But what about the distinctions between our multi-party free-for-all and Vietnam’s authoritarian one-party rule? It’s not clear that we win that duel, either.

The purported virtues of our system are: transparency – the ability to see and understand how our government functions and makes decisions; accountability – a free press that exposes our government’s failings, allowing voters to hold politicians responsible for their actions; and competition – a marketplace of ideas that allows debate and an informed electorate.

That all seems positively quaint now, doesn’t it? Transparency and accountability have always been in conflict, with government trying to shield its inner workings from prying eyes. That’s been turned up to 11 lately, but it’s hardly new. And we seem out of the habit of holding politicians accountable for their sins. As for the marketplace of ideas, there hasn’t been any genuine conflict since FDR, with both Democrats and Republicans alike faithfully representing the donor class. An oligarchy that cosplays as a Free Market is still an oligarchy.

So how about the evils of Communism? Vietnam’s government criminalizes dissent and has no free press. It is notably corrupt, both at the petty greasing-palms level and at the senior abuse-of-power level. And it makes decisions that have broad impact without input or oversight.

We’ve had the luxury here, as we did in Cuba, of having more access to locals than in many of our destinations. We’ve been able to have pretty frank conversations with our host’s daughter, An Binh, and our guide in Lan Ha Bay, Ryan. An Binh and her mother have been by twice to cook us traditional meals, and on their second visit we asked An Binh if she was comfortable discussing her government. She was.

We asked her about the whole notion of dissent or disagreement, and she seemed genuinely puzzled. Her position was that her government was responsibly acting in its citizen’s interest, so there was no need to disagree or protest. The government passed the laws and it was every citizen’s duty to obey them. Failing to do so is, and she had to look the word up to make sure she got the right English word, reactionary.

There’s a number of ways to look at that belief. You could claim that “Vietnam is just an obedient culture,” but a) there’s no metric you could use to validate that statement, and b) it’s pretty fucking reductive. Like “China has been ruled by emperors for centuries, they’re used to being told what to do.” Kind of insulting, so I’m not inclined to go there. It would be like claiming that the current situation in the US is because “we’re just a lawless culture.” Maybe, kinda, but also, shut the fuck up.

You could claim that it’s the result of lifelong educational indoctrination, and the use of the specific term “reactionary” gets you at least part of the way to that explanation. But it’s not like we don’t use our educational system to indoctrinate the young with specific values. In fact, we fight over what those values should be all the time.

You could chalk it up to a genuine credulousness, but that doesn’t square with the rest of An Binh. She’s a bright, articulate young woman with a good head on her shoulders. I’m hesitant to lob “credulous” in her direction.

Which leaves one with, à la Occam’s Razor, that she was expressing a genuine, considered belief. I’m inclined towards this explanation, as we pushed back gently, explaining that US politicians often acted in self-interest, rather than for the good of their citizens, and that’s why we needed a free press and the right to protest.

We also asked about urban renewal and relocation. Some of the denser parts of the cities lack adequate public services and can only be brought up to safe, modern standards through demolition and rebuilding. Residents get relocated, and we asked An Binh about the tradeoff between the individual right to stay with their communities vs. the state’s right to rebuild according to plan. She explained that in those situations families were compensated, and if you thought your compensation was unfair you could petition for an increase, and even be represented by a lawyer.

But at no point did An Binh question the right of the state to take actions it deems fit for the greater good. And, again, we do the exact same thing. Eminent domain.

Our other data point was our Lan Ha Bay guide, Ryan. We had a discussion with him about the government’s mandated changes to the historic floating village way of life. He was less “everything they do is for our benefit” and more “they make the rules, what are you gonna do?” There’s a little daylight between his position and An Binh’s, but certainly not enough to drive a protest through. We suspect the difference is that Ryan, as a member of the floating village community, has felt the impact of the state’s decisions in ways decidedly less abstract than An Binh, who’s college educated and solidly middle class.

When you look at the scoreboard it’s hard to give a definitive W to the US of A. We have a theoretically vibrant information economy, whose openness makes it prone to propaganda and exploitation. Vietnam has state-owned media that serves as an organ for government propaganda. If that’s not a tie, it’s 51-49 for the US.

Vietnam jails protesters and dissenters, and we practice extraordinary rendition on the street. That’s just a straight-up tie. And, “Yeah, but we just started” is a pretty lame defense.

Economically, we have late-stage capitalism’s death grip on our institutions, while Vietnam has a centrally planned economy. I think that’s a point for the visitors. Also a point, I think, for their stronger commitment to their social safety net. Their system has holes, but so does ours.

Vietnam is noted for its corruption. Thank goodness that never happens in the US. Tie.

Vietnam has single-party rule and the US has multiple parties. But do we? Really? Sure, right now there’s a bigger gap between the Anarchist Party and the Institutionalist Party than we normally enjoy, but over the last almost 100 years they’ve oscillated mildly around an agreed upon middle. If it’s not an actual tie, it’s another 51-49 win for the US.

That scoreboard just isn’t the smackdown we’ve been promised in the Manichean struggle of Light over Dark. It’s just another system, another way of solving problems, the political manifestation of a difference in values.

At the end of the day, while I actually prefer Vietnam’s values over ours, I’m not sure I’d want to live under Vietnam’s system. But I also don’t want to live under ours, as currently configured. The benefits of free speech, a free press, and the right to assemble and protest may seem a little abstract these days, but they’re also the tools we’ll use to put out democracy’s dumpster fire. So I’m kind of attached to them.

I also wouldn’t care to live under a monarchy or a theocracy. But we’ve spent time in both, and they each have something to offer, to teach us about how different approaches can lead to solutions that seem out of our reach. It’s not like demonizing the other has gotten us anywhere useful. Perhaps it’s time to listen instead.

All Things Ho

The story of Communism in Vietnam is the story of Ho Chi Minh. Unlike Castro, who was pushed to Communism by American fuckery, Ho was dyed in the wool. The precursor to the current CPV (Communist Party of Vietnam) was Uncle Ho’s Indochinese Communist Party, which he founded in 1930. A unified Vietnam with a Communist structure was his lifelong dream. He died in 1969, just a few years short of that dream being realized when Sài Gòn fell and the Americans fled in 1975.

Ho is still a revered figure here, for his tenacity in ousting the Japanese, French, and Americans, but also for his humble lifestyle and his teachings. More Ataturk than Pol Pot. No one refers to Uncle Stalin. Unless Stalin was their actual uncle.

I’m not an apologist for brutality. In Vietnam’s case, both North and South engaged in repression, assassination, and ruthlessness. Ho’s struggle was both a revolution and a traditional war. Eggs were broken, and I’m not arguing that the tasty omelet made it all worthwhile. Today, Vietnam is notable for both repression and corruption, not exactly a Denver Omelet of governance.

But the founder of this state is beloved. Maybe nostalgically, as an avatar of a morally simpler time, when independence was an inarguably worthwhile goal that hadn’t yet metastasized into a self-perpetuating regime. Still, it’s pretty tough to walk through a revolution without atrocities clinging to your pants, so you have to give Uncle Ho credit where it’s due. He’s a legit father-of-our-country hero to the Vietnamese people.

Visiting With Uncle

All unbeknownst, we happen to be in Vietnam during the Reunification Day celebration. And not just any Reunification Day, but the 50th anniversary. Sài Gòn fell on 30 April, 1975. They celebrate, as would I, the anniversary of us running away. On top of that, the very next day, 1 May, is International Worker’s Day. We were expecting they’d pull out all the stops for a multi-day holiday. Posters all over the city strongly suggested a shindig.

Which happened. In Ho Chi Minh City. That’s where all the military parades and spectacles took place.

Hà Nội, not so much. A fifteen minute fireworks show on 27 April, and a list of all the cool cultural exhibitions in the city, none of which were staged especially for the holiday. We felt a little gypped, Hà Nội being the capital and all. Admittedly, it’s the celebration of Ho Chi Minh City/Sài Gòn falling, but that was kind of the North’s handiwork.

This was as close as we got to a parade. Which is nothing to sniff at. I just think it would have been enhanced with a phalanx of tanks and soldiers. So sue me.

It was especially disappointing after working so hard to get to Cuba for International Worker’s Day in 2023 only to have the parade cancelled due to gas shortages. Whatever. We were in Ho’s home town, and we’d make the most of it. His mausoleum, the Ho Chi Minh Museum, and the restored stilt house that he lived in are all located together in a lovely park. If there weren’t going to be parades, we’d pay our respects in person.

As it happens, the grounds are really beautiful, which is a good thing, as both the mausoleum and museum were closed. The museum because we went on a Monday and we’re stupid. The mausoleum is also closed on Mondays, but we asked, and it wasn’t going to be open Tuesday, either. We’d read that Uncle is shipped to Russia for a couple of months every year to have his oil changed and tires rotated before going back on display, and that’s what we think was going on.

At least Uncle’s residence, the stilt house, was open. We would not leave empty handed.

The residence is gorgeous. Beautiful hardwood construction, open and airy and light, with the pond right beside it. I’d live in that house in a heartbeat.

The grounds also included the Presidential Palace. I’m not sure if that was also closed on Monday or if it’s just not open to the public, but it was off limits while we were there. There are gardens, all ridiculously well manicured, food stalls, and souvenir shops dotted about. We saw this in one of the gift shops, which briefly inspired in us a desire to be grandparents. I think it’s gone now. But seriously. How could you not crave a small creature to wear one of these?

The other highlight was a series of cartoons explaining the concept of karma. This one was labeled #4, and we saw another labeled #1, so we’re guessing that there were two other pentaptychs (look it up) that we missed. Here’s a full set for you. We’ll start with positive karma.

Here’s the vastly more entertaining negative karma.

I hope you enjoyed that. Vote for your favorites in the comments.

And that’s everything you need to know about both Communism and Buddhism. You are entirely welcome.

I think that’s a great question, because it forces us to step back and think about the meta in a way that I don’t usually. I tend to be firmly grounded in the experience and what that experience means, but I haven’t really slowed down to reflect on the big picture.

So, thanks, Whip. It forced Dorothy and I to talk through this topic and have a lively conversation, which is always welcome. On a side note, the last time Whip and I spoke he shared his list of five things he’s learned from world travel, and there was zero overlap in our lists, which I thought was interesting. Beyond that I don’t recall the specifics, because they weren’t about me.

#1) It’s The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine

Empires rise and fall, and so will ours.

Our accidental Cradle of Civilization Tour has provided some unexpected perspective. We’ve been wading through the ruins of successive empires, each of which was certain it would last forever. Hittites gave way to Phoenicians, who were crushed by the Romans, who also outlasted the Greeks, but were superseded by the Byzantines, who were destroyed by the Ottomans. Who eventually became foot stools. Knee bone connected to thigh bone.

Some of those civilizations lasted over 1,000 years, although the Hittites only lasted a few hundred. But they’re all gone. Some died as wizened old codgers rattling out their last breaths and some died as teenagers. Teenagers are stupid. Many get over it, but a few get behind the wheel drunk and don’t make it home.

The US is Hittite young. Are we going to make it to adulthood or are we going to hit the ditch going 100? Right now the ditch is looking like a safe bet, but you know what? None of it matters. We rose, and if we don’t fall now we’ll fall eventually. That may sound like nihilism, but it’s not. As the Buddha said, “All things must pass.” That’s meant to anchor you in a humbling impermanence, a certain graceful sanguinity. Check.

#2) R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Everyone’s culture is beautiful and amazing.

Culture. It’s more than just a Petri dish. And it’s certainly more than lines on a map. It’s food and history and dance and race and geography and clothes and ethnicity and architecture and language and religion and traditions.

I don’t think we understood how fractal culture is. Does the US have a culture? Sure, if hamburgers are a cuisine and self-righteousness is a religion (I say yes to both). Does the South have a culture distinct from US culture? Duh. Does Louisiana have a culture distinct from Georgia? Obviously.

Dorothy and I are Californians, a place that sometimes seems devoid of culture. Rather than feeling steeped in any particular cultural identity I think we grew up thinking of ourselves as generic Americans. Then we moved to New York City, home to a substantial expat community from what seemed like every country on the planet, a concatenation of micro-cultures separated by cross streets rather than a culture of its own. Unless New York’s jacked up version of American Exceptionalism counts as culture (I say it does).

But I don’t know that we appreciated the granularity of culture until we took a road trip from St. Louis down the Mississippi to Louisiana one Christmas. It turns out that reading about the Civil War from the safe confines of California doesn’t prepare you for the place itself, where it’s still a raw, painful wound.

It wasn’t the omnipresence of memorials and museums, it was the way people spoke about their history. What felt like ancient history in high school in California was so present. I toured Edinburgh Castle some years back, and the docent was pretty clear that they’re still pissed about the Reformation, so yeah. The Civil War wasn’t that long ago.

It became hilariously obvious when we toured Vicksburg and then Natchez as we made our way south. In Vicksburg the docent waxed eloquent about the Siege of Vicksburg and how they had held out until the end, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi. He then tossed in a gratuitous observation about Natchez, their neighbors to the south who had just rolled over and surrendered at the first sign of a Union ironclad. I believe he used the expression round heeled.

Then when we toured Natchez the docent spoke admiringly of the wisdom of the city’s leaders who surrendered to the inevitable, leaving Natchez almost entirely intact, allowing us to enjoy the antebellum architecture years later. He then tossed in a gratuitous observation about Vicksburg, which had foolishly held on until the bitterest of ends, leaving the entire city in ruins. I believe he used the expression idiots.

When I mentioned what our Vicksburg guide had said, our Natchez guide laughed and said it was just a little friendly rivalry. Really? That’s not what it sounded like to me. It sounded like a long-running, unresolved argument about morality during wartime. But I’m sure it was just joshin’.

It’s not just that California has a different culture than the South, or that Mississippi has a different culture than Louisiana. It’s that Vicksburg has a different culture than Natchez. And if you zoomed in further, Natchez would most certainly look like a patchwork quilt, not a monoculture.

Maybe we weren’t Southerners, but the Civil War, however poorly taught in California high schools, was still part of our shared history, still part of American culture. When confronted with new information from the local perspective, we had a framework in place that allowed us to understand what we were hearing. Obviously, that’s been missing on our travels. Unwinding culture without any previous knowledge of our setting has been both one of our biggest challenges and our biggest joys.

The challenge is in trying to decode and unravel the various strands that make up a local culture, and the joy is in having any success in the attempt at all. Oaxaca represents one of the best examples of this. At first it seemed to be a monoculture. A distinct, specifically Oaxacan culture, but consistent in its expression. But digging a little deeper, we discovered that 16 different indigenous populations had contributed to the mélange that looked at first like a unitary “Oaxacan” culture. Some parts contributed by Zapotec, some by Mixtec, some by Mazateco…

There’s the cultural fractal again. We saw it at an even more zoomed in level in Tunisia, when I got my Berber tattoo. When we were talking about the meaning of the Berber symbols, my tattoo artist/ethnographer explained that there was no single, agreed upon codex. As she traveled the Sahara documenting tattoos, she found that the same symbol took different meanings in different tribal groups, sometimes only a few miles apart.

And that’s where the rest of the joy comes from, aside from cracking the code itself. There’s an enormous amount of joy in discovering the particulars of a given culture, the meaning and the beauty underlying specific cultural components. Why that pattern is used on ceramics. What that woven rug motif means. What that dance represents…

Here’s what matters: As important as dispassionate observation is to understanding what you’re seeing, you should never forget to let yourself get swept up in the moment. The purpose of beauty is transcendence. Which is everywhere, if you’re looking for it.

#3) Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough

How long you stay somewhere is fundamental to your experience of that place.

We’re clearly not on a tourist cadence on our travels, staying about three months on most of our stops. There are distinct benefits to that cadence, one of which is the perception that we have effectively infinite time. Every day doesn’t have to be packed with adventure. We can have an inside day, house cleaning and reading, and not feel like we’re cheating ourselves of experience. We can get a cold without it feeling like an existential threat to our FUN. It allows us to relax and just live wherever we happen to be.

“Just living” in that way also brings us closer to the normal daily rhythms of local life wherever we are. We’re never going to truly experience a place the way locals do, but we get dramatically closer in three months than we would on a ten day tourist junket. Marinating in local life, and not just slamming the tourist hot spots, is part of what makes this such a lovely, profound experience.

But I think the most salient benefit of the time we spend in each location is related to the previous point about decoding culture. That process requires moving slowly, listening, researching, processing… It takes time to figure out how the puzzle pieces fit together. We were in Mexico for over four months before I could plausibly explain the differences in shopping patterns between Mexico and the US.

Three months isn’t enough to make us hardcore experts on local culture, prepared to write a book on the subject. Unless a blog is just a very slow book. But it’s enough to tease out some interesting connections and get a deeper understanding of a place than is possible on a tourist cadence.

#4) War! What’s It Good For? Lining Colonialist’s Pockets. Uh!

Colonialism has a longer history than I thought.

I like to think that one of the privileges of being an American is the right to a blinkered, narrow view of history. We’re only 200 or so years old and we’re awesome, so nothing that happened before us could possibly matter. Right?

When I think of colonialism, which is often, I think of the ravages of the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. I knew that Western European colonialism stretched back earlier, but my familiarity was with its 18th century heyday. What I like to think of as the Golden Age of Colonialism.

Imagine my surprise, as we traveled the world and partook of different cultures, to learn that colonialism has its own rich history going back to the earliest city-states. A lack of respect for borders may be one of our innate capabilities as humans. Maybe prostitution is only the world’s second oldest profession. After fuckery.

Phoenicians colonized the North African coast in 900 BC. Greece colonized not only other city-states in modern day Greece, but also in Italy and North Africa as far back as 800 BC. By 200 BC Rome had colonized the rest of Italy, and over the next 200 years added Greece, Spain, France, Britain, a chunk of the Middle East, and whatever was left over in North Africa after they beat the shit out of the Phoenicians.

And it just keeps going. The Arabs were big time colonizers, peaking between the 8th to 12th centuries. By the 1400s the Ottomans had turned colonization into administrative performance art, allowing the Western Europeans to offer a philosophical rebuttal anchored in brutality.

And while it’s obvious, it’s worth stating that every colonist at every point throughout history engaged in slavery. I certainly thought of slavery primarily in the context of the 18th century slave trade, and not as an historical constant, but you can blame my California high school for that.

I’m not sure if it’s comforting to know that colonialism has been with us all along and isn’t just something the French made up because they’re French. But it’s certainly eye opening to confront the scars that exist, at one level or another, just about everywhere. It’s one thing to be in Morocco, where there are still people alive today who lived under French colonial rule, and another to be in Tunisia and hear Berbers refer to the predations of Arab colonizers, who conquered the region in 647.

It’s been with us forever, and it never really goes away.

#5) Land of 1000 Dances

There are different models for being successful, as both individuals and nations.

Every place we’ve been we’ve seen some component of culture or behavior or civic life that was a) different than how we do things in the US of A; b) admirable, and c) generally tied up with other things that weren’t so swell. A way of life can be something we wouldn’t want to live under (single party political rule, theocracy…) and still have positive elements.

We have seen countless examples. Here are just a few…

Same Sex Friendship

As we traveled through Muslim countries, we were shocked by the extent to which same sex friendship was expressed physically. Men hugged one another, walked hand in hand or arms around shoulders, came in close for conversation, and generally behaved in ways that would be interpreted as gay in the US. Same for women. Friends reveled in one another’s company without having to worry about policing their perimeters.

We thought hard about how states that were so hostile to homosexuality could have fostered an environment in which same sex friends felt they had license to express their feelings for one another physically. “Homosexual activity” is illegal in Morocco and Tunisia, and while there are no laws against it in Turkey, LGBTQ citizens enjoy no legal protections from discrimination.

Sadly, the only explanation we could come up with is that same-gender attraction is so taboo in those countries that no real gay couples would ever risk public displays of affection. Thus, any such displays must, by definition, be platonic.

It would be a pure delight if same sex friends in the US felt comfortable expressing their affection physically, instead of trimming their sails to avoid the appearance of homosexuality. I think it would dramatically relax our culture. But I’d hate to think that the only route to that outcome went through violent suppression of LQBTQ+ rights.

Embedding Faith In Daily Life

One of the things I hate most about the US is the centrality of religion in our culture, and how that manifests as a particularly curdled piousness and hypocrisy. We love to proudly proclaim our religious bona fides while giving the thinnest of lip service to the values upon which those religions are built. We’ll fight to the death to make sure the town square has Christmas decorations, but god help you if you expect us to exhibit actual charity, compassion, or humility.

Over 99% of the populations of Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia are Muslim. While Turkey is a secular state, Islam is the official state religion of both Morocco and Tunisia. None of these countries is run by priests, the technical definition of a theocracy, but civic life is absolutely driven by religious concerns and requirements.

And yet…

Where public expressions of faith in the US seem largely performative, the equivalent expressions in Muslim countries seem heartfelt and genuine. We found the same thing when we visited India, which also weaves deeply religious practices into daily life. These are people who are living their faith as an integral part of their lives, not sinning six days a week and begging for forgiveness on the seventh. There’s something truly beautiful and graceful about that.

I don’t want to live in a theocracy. Certainly not the one that wackjob American Christians would like to impose on me. But still, there’s something to be said for a culture that lives its values, even if those values are religious. Not a point of view I ever thought I’d understand.

There Are Valid Reasons For One-Party Rule

Cuba held many surprises, not least of which was the argument it made for the value of single-party rule. I go off at length on this subject here, but the gist is that I had thought that multiparty rule was a bedrock value, a principal of good governance. If Cuba ever converted to a multiparty system, as the US government demands that it do in order to lift the bloqueo, its grand socialist experiment would collapse. Which is, of course, exactly why we’re demanding it.

While that outcome might not seem obvious, the explanation is super simple: The moment there are multiple political parties the US would rush in to financially support the one most prone to do our bidding, turning Cuba into the US colony we have long desired. We would, through illegal means, buy the election and the government. If that sounds paranoid, you’ve never read any Cuban history, and you should. And if that sounds avoidable, I have nothing for you. That level of naiveté is unfixable.

But here’s the thing about Cuba’s single-party rule, which exists entirely to blunt the predations of the US government: it has delivered for its citizens, and, absent the bloqueo, would be thriving. Crime is low, the streets are safe, education is free through university, health care is a right, there’s low infant mortality, and there’s universal literacy. I’m not excusing the crushing of political dissent, just pointing out that Cuba isn’t the Communist hellhole we’re told it is. And to the extent that it’s an economic hellhole, that’s a thing we did to them, not a thing they did to themselves.

Would I like to live under single-party rule? Not at all, but I wouldn’t mind free education through university and universal health care. Besides, we kind of are living under single-party rule. That party is Late-Stage Capitalism, and it brooks very little dissent. But I’ve now seen a plausible argument for actual single-party rule, and I’d have thought that impossible.

Every problem we have in the US has been solved somewhere, although maybe not with methods we’d consider American. We should be able to acknowledge the benefits we see in other societies and at least make an attempt to figure out a way to import the upside while dulling the downside. Obviously, that’s hard to do while everyone’s knees are busy jerking.

At a minimum, though, we should be able to look at other places and admit that while their values might be different than ours, those values often lead to outcomes that seem out of our reach. And wonder, at least for a moment, why that is. Maybe demonizing the other doesn’t get us anywhere but a false sense of moral superiority.

Which beats all hollow actually solving any of our problems.

#6) More, More, More

Bigger Isn’t Always Better (with apologies to Dirk Diggler)

Bonus time! This is the sixth of the five things we’ve learned on our travels.

At one point I dug deep into the differences in shopping patterns between Mexico and the US. While Mexico has big box stores (Ikea, Walmart, Home Depot), they haven’t obliterated everything in their path, as they’ve done in the US. Mexico has somehow managed peaceful coexistence between large and small retail models, as opposed to the winner-take-all, late-stage capitalism death match we enjoy in the US. This has been largely true of our other destinations, as well. Carrefour’s hypermarkets haven’t obliterated local produce stores or neighborhood markets in North Africa and Turkey.

In the US, the Market insists that the opposite of Growth is Decline: if you’re not getting bigger you’re dying. But that’s kind of obviously bullshit. Success doesn’t have to be reduced down to a Manichaean binary. Success can mean Enough, instead of always manically demanding More.

Oaxaca had more eyeglass stores per square foot than I’ve seen anywhere else on the planet. How can they all be successful? By defining success differently than we do. If my store sells six pairs of eyeglasses/day and pays my rent and delivers enough profit to be comfortable, why would I have to purchase my competitors and super-size my business? Where is it written that I must get bigger?

Refusing to buy into the Market’s definition of success does more than just create a retail landscape that’s balanced between large and small businesses in a way that we can’t muster. I honestly believe it makes for a healthier citizenry. Sure, there’s a lot of hustling in those economies, but it’s not like our version of capitalism has granted us a hustle-free existence. But there’s a healthy acknowledgement, I think, that sometimes enough truly is enough. We’re certainly trying to live that way, and have been enjoying the hell out of our distinctly un-American downsizing.

Thanks, Whip!

Dorothy and I really enjoyed the conversation that led to this post, and I hope it’s been an entertaining read. If you liked it, the good parts are Dorothy’s. If not, please blame Whip. I am but a vessel.

That’s certainly how we felt about this adventure. And most of our lives. And it’s absolutely true in the broadest sense. But in the approach we’ve taken in executing this particular escapade, I think we’ve come up short.

Despite the obviously meticulous planning that made what we’re doing even possible, our entire process has been to play it by ear. Where are we going next? We’ll decide when we need to. How will we get along with limited native language skills? We’ll find out. How will we feel? TBD.

What we did know is that we’d each be giving up a lot to do this. What we didn’t know, and couldn’t, is what those losses would feel like and where the dial would land between gain and loss. We’ve both tended to be loosely tethered to place, happy to pack up and move if it seemed convenient or interesting, so we weren’t expecting the absence of home to carry so much weight. In hindsight, there’s a glaring difference between not being attached to a particular home, and not needing a home at all.

Something’s Lost But Something’s Gained…

There’s been an underlying asymmetry to this plan from the very beginning, in the sense that Dorothy and I valued very differently the things we’ve had to give up. We both gave up friends, which I think landed about evenly, probably a little harder on Dorothy, who’s less noticeably sociopathic than I am. Zoom mitigates that a little, but not entirely. Lockdown taught us that Zoom could suffice when there were no other options. And there are definitely no other options while we travel. Three months is a long time to stay somewhere as a tourist, but it’s hardly long enough to make friends.

The real downside here is less about access to our friends than that we are 100% our only companions. We’re experiencing everything together, and it’s a little claustrophobic. One of our ironclad relationship rules is that each of us should have a hobby that doesn’t involve the other. I had board game nights with my friends that Dorothy didn’t join. Dorothy had nights out with her friends that I didn’t attend. But we’re this hermetically sealed unit on our travels, and that’s not healthy. I’ve taken to going on walks by myself one day a week, but all that does for Dorothy is absent me; it doesn’t offer her anything positive in return. Not that the value of my absence should be underestimated.

We both gave up work, which hit with completely disparate impacts. Dorothy gave up satisfying other people’s demands for money, which she’d have to be a psycho to crave. But she misses work in the sense that her entire adult life has been devoted to making things with her hands, and that is largely absent. We travel with a sewing kit, and she has hemmed the curtains in our Airbnb and bought clothes for the fabric and completely recut them and reassembled them by hand. It’s what there is for her to do, and it scratches the itch at least a little. Personally, I find the faint whiff of desperation intoxicating.

I, on the other hand, haven’t enjoyed my work for the past twenty years or so, ever since I started being paid like an adult and stopped being creative. We wouldn’t have the flexibility and freedom to do what we’re doing without the financial base those twenty years built, but I can appreciate the benefits without having to gaslight myself about how much fun it was.

So I’ve happily given up a work life I’d only ever tolerated, while Dorothy is sporting a severe phantom limb where making things is concerned.

And we both gave up Home. More on that in a minute.

What have we each gained to offset our losses? Most obviously, adventure. We’re going places and doing things that are absolutely amazing. However, there’s even a little asymmetry here, as my risk calculations tend to be looser than Dorothy’s. I’m happy to just set off (my motto: What could possibly go wrong?), while Dorothy requires a little gritting of teeth (her motto: It will be fine…). I know not to push too hard and Dorothy knows to let things happen, so while this isn’t a major problem it’s definitely a source of underlying tension.

Dorothy has gained the challenge of settling us in a new place every three months. She has to figure out how to close any gaps in what the Airbnb offers, suss out the local produce and figure out how to feed us, and make sure that our home is as gracious as we can pull off under the circumstances.

The other thing we’ve probably gained is staving off dementia. One of the reasons we chose to gallivant off in the first place was because we knew it would be hard in ways that promote neuroplasticity. We can practically feel that on a daily basis. Our retirement fears were all about becoming smaller and having our lives close in on us. Disaster averted! For now.

The primary thing I’ve gained is this blog. I’ve always written a lot for work, but I’ve seldom been able to write as a pure expression of myself. I not only take pleasure in the act of writing, but the writing forces me to be thoughtful about the places we visit and the things we do, even the pictures I take. I am definitely a more engaged consumer of our experiences because of it. Of course, I could just write a pure travelogue: “We went here and saw this and then we went there and saw that.” But how profoundly uninteresting, for both me and you.

Instead, I want to write about what the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen mean. I want to understand their context, to write about things that aren’t just on the surface. That requires that I’m thinking both while we’re adventuring and while I’m writing. I’m not crafting learned dissertations, but I feel a responsibility to accurately represent what we’re seeing. That’s what made Cuba so painful. The truth underneath the surface was fucked up.

So, on balance. I gave up work I didn’t like in exchange for adventure and the blog. Dorothy gave up friends and making things and home for… adventure and housekeeping?

When we set out, the commitment we made to one another is that we’d stop when it was no longer fun. What we didn’t understand is that, at a practical level, that meant that we’d go until one of us broke. Neither of us want to pull the lever if the other is still having fun, so that means we’d each hold on until the last possible moment before cracking.

That’s an unhealthy dynamic.

We needed to figure out a safety valve, so we could reduce the pressure when necessary without having to completely throw the towel in.

Homeward Bound

As it happens, my sister, Nef, owns two apartments in her Hyde Park Chicago building. Don’t ask. There is no straightforward narrative that ends in “spare apartment.”

We’d already made arrangements to purchase the apartment from her. The idea was that we’d pick up our Final Resting Place for when we were done traveling, lock it in at today’s prices, and rent it out for a little extra income until we careened to a stop.

Since this adventure is all about being responsive and adaptive to whatever’s going on around us, we’re executing a pivot. We’re returning to the US after Tunisia, but we’re returning to truly move into the apartment. We’ll get our things out of storage, do a little renovation, and have a real home.

Our assumption had been that we couldn’t afford to maintain a home and travel, but that’s what spreadsheets are for. We’re paying for our travels out of our Social Security income, and we actually run a surplus every month, even with all of the rugs, pottery, and clothing. You can see our budget here.

We paid cash for the Chicago apartment from the proceeds of selling our St. Louis building, so it only has insurance, taxes, and HOA fees while unoccupied. That load isn’t 100% covered by our travel surplus, but it’s defrayed to the extent that the additional expense isn’t an existential threat. And once set up and furnished, we could rent it out on one of the sabbatical services and bank some profit if we wanted.

What this means is that when we’re having the conversation about where to go next, “home” is now an option. We could travel for six months of the year, nine months, or a full year at a time, as we see fit, knowing that we can tap out and recharge at any time. That will substantially extend how long we can do this. Left as we currently operate, I think we’d have an increasingly shrill year of this left, maximum. With a safety valve installed, we can do this until we’re physically unable, which had been the original plan. It never occurred to me that we’d crack mentally before we broke down physically.

Our son, Sam, is graduating with his MBA in December of this year, so we’re going to stick around for the ceremony before hitting the road again. That gives us more than six months in Chicago to settle in, learn the city, and make a home. A home we’ll be happy to come back to whenever we feel the need.

I’ll write about the move-in and renovation, and I’ll write about Chicago. But then we’ll be back in the saddle and on to more exotic destinations and more interesting blog posts.

Let your home be your mast and not your anchor. — Kahlil Gibran

Our apartment was… an apartment, and our neighborhood was kind of industrial and unattractive. We were blessed with a fonda a few blocks away that made the best tortas we’ve ever had, but that represented the neighborhood’s highlight. Honestly, we never even thought to take pictures.

We arrived a month prior, so that Dorothy had time to complete Ruby’s wedding dress and finish the alterations to Layla’s suit. The best Airbnb we found in San Diego was a 14′ Airstream parked in someone’s driveway for $2,000 for the month. Thus, Rosarito.

How much is Rosarito not a destination? When we walked through customs, the Mexican agent, looking down at our passports, asked how long we were staying. “Un mes.” And where are you staying? “Rosarito.” He looked up, startled, and said, “Rosarito?” Apparently no one has ever voluntarily chosen to go to Rosarito for that long.

It’s just south of Tijuana, but the trip to San Diego was rough. Uber to the border. A bus that goes about 100 yards in 30 minutes, but drops you off right at the US Customs entrance, avoiding the 3-4 hour pedestrian queue. The San Diego trolley, which picks up right at the border and deposits in town. Uber to Ruby’s apartment. Total elapsed time: about three hours.

That was more time and effort than we expected, but we also thought we’d be going back and forth just a few times. As it turns out, we underestimated by a wide margin. In fact, we wound up making the full round trip six times, and sleeping just eight nights in our 30 day Airbnb.

What did we wind up doing in Estados Unidos that kept us out of Mexico for all but eight nights? The Medical-Industrial complex attached itself to me and wouldn’t let go. Truthfully, sometimes it’s hard to tell shark from remora.

Soylent Green Is People!

The actual story about my condition isn’t very interesting. Old person has organ fail, harvesting ensues. Whatever. But before the speculation starts (“I didn’t even know he had a heart”), the organ in question was my gall bladder. A glorified appendix. Although I did learn, while I was in the hospital, that no one seems to have a gall bladder. I would say 80% of the folks in my ward, both patients and visitors, were walking about gall bladder-less. Who knew that every day we walk through a world of ghost gall bladders?

What is arguably of interest, though, is how the Medical-Industrial complex dealt with me, with a little cross-cultural observation thrown in, since this escapade started in Mexico. Let’s dig in, shall we?

We were visiting Dorothy’s parents in Temecula, and as I went to sleep one night, I rolled over and got a sudden sharp pain in my chest. It felt like a muscle pull, so I figured I could ride it out. By the time I figured out it wasn’t a muscle pull I was in so much pain I wasn’t rational, or I’d have awakened Dorothy and had her take me to the ER. Instead, the episode lasted about 35 minutes, and I went to sleep when it passed.

When we woke up in the morning I told Dorothy what had happened (“This is why women live longer than men”), and we set out for urgent care. My blood pressure was fine, blood labs were fine, EKG was fine, but they noticed some inflammation in my lungs. I got a diagnosis of bronchitis, a fistful of meds, and a pat on the back.

I’m pretty sure the bronchitis diagnosis was correct. I’d had a lingering cold in Guanajuato that lasted so long we were taking side bets on when the secondary infection would show up, so bronchitis tracked. But I’ve had bronchitis before, and the chest pain I’d had the night before was nothing like bronchitis. I’ve never had a heart attack, but I imagine one would feel much like what I’d enjoyed the previous evening. However, no lingering effects. No numbness or tingling. No more aphasia than previously. When the pain passed, it was over.

If you’re keeping score, this first episode was September 12th, and the urgent care visit was on the 13th. We’d only planned on visiting in Temecula for a few days, so we headed back to Rosarito after we picked up my new meds. That night I had another episode, again in bed, and thought to check my blood pressure (we’re old, so a blood pressure cuff is part of our travel self-sufficiency kit). I didn’t get it right at the onset, but it was 225/83 about ten minutes in. Pretty alarming. So, off to the ER in Rosarito.

I basically went straight from triage into the ER, where a doctor saw me right away. My blood pressure was still super high, so they gave me a medication, a prescription for high blood pressure medication to fill in the morning, and had me there for observation until my blood pressure dropped and I was stable. I think I was in and out of there in under an hour, and the entire suite of services was under $50. This was retail pricing; we’re not traveling with US-style international medical coverage (I explain how we’re managing health care while we travel here).

So back to our Airbnb, with a quick shoutout to our host. Not only did she tell us which hospital to go to, she called a cab, went with us to the hospital, and waited until we were done, just to make sure her translation services weren’t required. We haven’t had any bad hosts in the last year, and we’ve had some very good ones. But that, that was above and beyond. I’m sorry the rating system tops out at five stars.

Sitting in the apartment, waiting to calm down enough to sleep, and another episode comes on. This time I threw on the blood pressure cuff right away: 265/100-something. When I search to find out how bad that is, Google asks me how I can still type, since most of my organs are about to fail.

Back to the ER, less than an hour after I left. They take me right back in, check my blood pressure, and give me one of the meds I was supposed to start the next morning (different than what they gave me on the first visit). I hang out about 45 minutes until my blood pressure is reliably stable and they send me home again. Without, I feel compelled to note, charging me for the second visit.

The next day I had another minor episode, despite being on the blood pressure meds. It lasted under five minutes, and blood pressure was 156/83. Still bad, but better. I guess. Although it felt like if I was being properly treated I wouldn’t be having any episodes. We thought it best to be on the US side of the medical system, so we returned to Temecula. I swear, I think this is where it went off the rails. I’ll never know for sure, but I honestly believe I’d have been better off under the Mexican health care system.

This takes us to the 15th, with no more episodes and blood pressure mostly in the 110s to 130s, with a few peaks at 147 and 151. On the 16th, although still no episodes of chest pain, my blood pressure was stubbornly high, consistently in the 140s and 150s. So, off to try our luck at a US ER.

Not as smooth an experience as the Rosarito ER, but a similar outcome: a diagnosis of high blood pressure and a different medication. Thank you very kindly, you’re free to go now.

The next day, the 17th, I had two minor episodes, both of which had blood pressure readings in the 160s. Another minor episode on the 18th sent me back to the ER. They ran the same set of blood tests and EKGs they’d run before, and discovered that my liver enzymes had spiked dramatically since my visit two days earlier. And thus we had our culprit: the unassuming gall bladder.

Turns out I, and all of the medical professionals, had assumed that the high blood pressure was causing the chest pain. Rather, gallstones blocking my bile duct were causing the chest pain, and the pain was shooting my blood pressure up. Easy, by-the-books solution: they’d clear out the gallstones and remove the gall bladder to keep them from recurring. It seems that once your gall bladder starts spitting out stones it just can’t stop.

So far, so good. The reason I’m drowning y’all in so much detail, though, is because it’s the foundation on which the next part rests. Because this is where it goes south.

After explaining all this, I’m told they’ll be admitting me to the hospital for the procedures. Which seems sensible only because I don’t know how long this is going to take. I spend my first 24 hours on a gurney in a hallway, because they don’t have room for me anywhere else. Even better, food and water are withheld for that entire 24 hours, because no one can definitively answer the question as to whether it’s OK for me to eat or not. Not even fluids are provided. I can just desiccate in the hallway, if you please.

Extra fun in that first 24 hours: I had blood taken eight times. Despite the fact that I had an IV port hanging off one arm. I finally get an explanation from a nurse: some of the blood needs to be drawn directly (whatever, sure), but mostly it’s because they’re sending phlebotomists to draw blood, who aren’t licensed to access the IV port. Has to be an RN. Every time someone approached me with a needle, I demanded a nurse, so they could use the port. And I still got spiked eight times in that first 24 hours. I had the bruises for weeks.

On Day Two, they finally move me to a group ward. Kind of like a cross between sleepover camp and prison. People just keep showing up or disappearing randomly. But an actual doctor does finally pay a visit. So I ask why, if both upcoming procedures are outpatient (removing the gallstones is endoscopy and removing the gall bladder is laparoscopy), I’m in the hospital at all. I’ve been asymptomatic since checking in, so why don’t I just check out and come back for the outpatient procedures?

Up until this point, the barbarity of the care I’d been provided had seemed site specific. Sure, many hospitals are under the same staffing and space constraints, but my treatment had been specific to those circumstances. If I’d happened to have gone to a hospital without those constraints, in an imaginary world where such a place existed (like Mexico), I wouldn’t have been warehoused in a hallway without food and water.

But the doctor’s response to my seemingly reasonable question cast the whole system in a more sinister light, where my treatment represented something endemic rather than situational. His answer was, sure, I could check out. But it would be Against Medical Advice, meaning that my insurance wouldn’t cover my hospital stay (it turns out that’s not true, but it’s not clear whether that was an intentional falsehood or just the thoughtless repetition of a discredited urban myth). And good luck getting on the schedule for outpatient services. That would be weeks, at best (and don’t forget, I have a wedding to attend on October 6th). So if I actually wanted this thing done and paid for, I should sit tight in the hospital until it happened.

Which I did, because, really, what was my choice? Even so, “until it happened” took five days. I was in the hospital for five days to get two outpatient procedures. And if that wasn’t enough, my gift with purchase was a case of Covid (our first, after all this time), which I gave to both Dorothy and her elderly parents before knowing I had it. We cleared protocol with only a couple of days to spare before Ruby’s wedding.

About That Wedding…

There hasn’t been a lot of pleasure in this story so far (unless you count schadenfreude), so I’m going to take a detour before returning to my previously scheduled screed. We were in San Diego in the first place for my daughter Ruby’s wedding to her partner, Layla. It was very hard to keep our eyes on that ball during all the Sturm und Drang, but that was the actual point of our presence.

And, with apologies to my son and everyone else whose weddings I’ve attended, it was the best wedding I’ve ever attended. Bar none. Ruby and Layla are such a delightful couple, they take so much pleasure in one another’s company, it is impossible to be around them without getting a contact high. Everything about the wedding, which Ruby planned out meticulously over the previous two years (wonder where she gets that from), was perfect.

I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that I teared up during the reading of the vows. They were beautiful, heartfelt, genuine, and full of their true playful, loving spirits. We feel… I was going to say “lucky,” or “grateful.” But I think I’ll stick with “we feel.” I’m never unsurprised when it happens.

Here’s a sizzle reel of the wedding, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Don’t Worry, Be Angry…

OK. We were on fire about the medical industry. Let’s not forget why we’re here.

What stood out to me about all this was the difference between the treatment I received in Mexico vs. the US. It’s not a direct comparison, as I only got as far as the high blood pressure diagnosis in Mexico, although I’m certain if I’d stayed in that system they’d have found the gallstones. After all, my first trip to a US ER also ended with a high blood pressure diagnosis.

The Mexican system seems to be driven to maximize efficiency. My first experience with the Mexican healthcare system was for kidney stones in Oaxaca, but there was a part of that story I didn’t share at the time. The doctor had prescribed me 15 pills of one of the medications, but when I got to the pharmacy they were only available in pre-packs of ten each. So they gave me two packs, a total of 20 pills. Five more than I’d been prescribed.

The horror! No one in the healthcare system in the US would tolerate such sloppiness. To say nothing of our broader social expectations that no one should get one more thing than they’re entitled to. We spend more on the mechanisms to make sure that no one who hasn’t earned it gets safety net coverage than we would if we just approved everyone who applied. We’re just dicks.

The US system, unlike Mexico’s, is absolutely, completely, heroically indifferent to efficiency. Frankly, it seems bipolar. On the one hand, the system’s underlying values seem to be accuracy and certainty, which feels like a response to tort risk. We over prescribe, over order, and over treat, to make sure there’s no potential liability. Unnecessary tests and procedures are a major component of our overall healthcare spending (over $200 billion/year by some accounts).

On the other hand, we also under prescribe, under order, and under treat. How often have you had a health complaint effectively ignored by a provider or, at best, under explored? The answer to that depends quite a bit on who you are. White and male? Probably doesn’t happen much. Not white and male? Share your stories in the Comments.

Maybe it’s the difference between being in the hospital (over treating) and seeing your personal doctor (under treating). Maybe the incentives built into our system are in conflict with one another, and sometimes lurch one way, sometimes another. Maybe the US system is just broken in random ways.

So what happens when you value efficiency over certainty? You get pre-packs of meds and over-delivery. There’s no one in a Mexican pharmacy counting pills, filling bottles, checking insurance, printing invoices… They’re just grabbing boxes off the shelves and ringing them up. Could be turkey franks. Getting a prescription filled is near instantaneous, and involves fewer steps and highly paid professionals, so costs stay low. What’s the price of all this efficiency? Occasionally someone gets a few more pills than they’re entitled to. It’s a pretty good trade. One we’d never make in the US.

So why, with that excellent experience under my belt, did we decide to return to the US for medical care? FUD, I suppose. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Fear of the unknown: walk-in care was inexpensive in Mexico, but how much would hardcore surgical services cost out of pocket? I knew hospitalization was a $90 copay in the US and outpatient services were $320, so our financial risk was capped. Maybe a surgery that would be $20,000 retail in the US would only be $3,000 in Mexico, but that’s still way more than our plan’s copays.

Uncertainty about communication: One of the ER nurses in Rosarito was blessed with excellent English, and translated between the doctor and I. It made the visit manageable. But would that level of translation services be available at every step of the process? Even my visit with the urologist in Oaxaca was largely mediated by Google Translate. That’s a tough way to have to make important decisions.

And finally, doubt about the quality of care. This one stings, because it’s just prejudice. Tijuana is a well-known destination for US medical tourism, specifically because the quality of care and cost advantages are so compelling. Ultimately, this is the concern that brought us back to the US (the fear and uncertainty were manageable). It just feels weak. And having enjoyed five days of the best the US system has to offer, it also feels stupid.

Don’t get me wrong. The quality of the execution of the services provided to me in the US was stellar. My gall bladder is completely gone (I’m told), removed as delicately as current technology permits. But the entire infrastructure surrounding the provision of those services seems intentionally designed to inflict maximum pain and suffering. I know it wasn’t intentional in the sense that every provider I interacted with would have been delighted to have worked within a kinder context. But intentional in the sense that every decision made about the US healthcare system (funding, staffing, payments, business structures, incentives) drives inevitably to the brutality of the system we have. It’s not necessary. It’s the result of choices. We could make different choices and have a different system.

Or we could continue to insist that ours is the best of all possible healthcare systems (despite being first in cost and 75th in outcomes worldwide – looking up the ladder at you, Turkmenistan) and never explore alternative models. Some of which are as close as our southern border.

What distinguishes the Guanajuato mummies from your standard issue Egyptian mummies is that they weren’t intentionally mummified. Also, that they’re just out there hanging around, not wrapped up and hidden in sarcophagi. Like the good mummies.

There are two origin stories about the mummies, and they may both be correct. They share in common that the cemetary (panteón) started charging families annual fees, and when families couldn’t pay, or there was no family, the bodies were disinterred. To everyone’s surprise, what they found wasn’t a pile of bones, but fully mummified corpses.

In one version, the bodies were buried in above ground crypts. When they were disinterred, the dry, warm mountain air turned out to have created the perfect conditions for natural mummification. In the other version they were buried in the ground, as god intended, and the dry soil led to their mummification. A variant on this version is that many of the corpses were buried as a result of a cholera epidemic, and were buried in such haste that no one bothered with the salts that are usually used to speed decomposition and absorption.

Whatever the specifics, the result was over 100 mummies, and it’s axiomatic that any number of mummies over, say, none, is a tourist attraction. The Guanajuato mummies have been on display since 1894.

And How Does That Make You Feel?

What’s disturbing about the mummies isn’t that they’re corpses. It’s that they’re displayed as objects, not people. Of course, when they were first disinterred the panteón knew who they were. Each deadbeat had a name. Over the years, with the lax handling and the absence of give-a-fuck, their names have been lost. They’re just archetypes now: El Ahogado (The Drowned Man), La China (The Chinese Lady), La Bruja (The Witch).

Thankfully, not everyone is OK with the current state of affairs. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History has undertaken an effort to identify the remains and, when it’s possible to locate living descendants, return them to their families. Just the effort is already more dignity than they’ve been afforded since death.

It also warrants pointing out that El Museo is hardly alone in this sort of reassessment. Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, which features medical curiosities, is undertaking a critical reassessment of how it displays and contextualizes exhibits featuring human remains. Cue howls about the Woke Police.

In the meantime, the display at El Museo De Las Momias has more in common with pornography than anthropology. It’s a form of objectification that makes the viewer complicit in the act.

Trigger Warning

There’s a reason I used a photo of a mural outside the Museo for the featured image on this post, rather than an objectively more arresting photo of one of the actual mummies. Because, people, these are corpses. With hair and teeth and clothes. And eyes. *shudder* And truly horrifying expressions. They are disturbing. There is no shame in bailing. No one will know. So do not scroll any further if this is a thing you don’t want to see.

For the rest of you, fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Nothing

To

See

Here

I’d

Scroll

Back

Up

If

I

Were

You…

Still Here? Good.

The few, the brave, the foolish. Welcome, my band of brothers. To something you can never unsee. This is on you.

And… Nothing more needs to be said.

That’s never really true, is it.

I had originally written clever captions for each of the photos. There was some pretty good stuff there. Knee slappers, if you will. But I’ve deleted them. They made me feel… dirty. And not in the good way.

It felt like I was just heaping one more indignity on folks who didn’t deserve it. It felt like… a feeling. And you all know how ambivalent I am about having feelings. So if funny captions make feelings, no funny captions. Sorry. You’ll have to write your own.

The Internet

Cuba opened up to a largely uncensored internet in 2015, with private wifi becoming available in 2019. They’re still not keen on pornography, terrorism, and, curiously, satanism, but they don’t appear to limit access to news sites or prohibit the downloading of files. It’s now possible to rent a casa particular through airbnb that includes wifi. But that doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Having a wifi router in Cuba, in either a rental or your own home, is a big deal. Not everyone can get one, as there has to be a spare, dedicated phone line in your unit, and it has to be up to ETECSA (the state-owned telecom) standards for data. If you don’t meet those requirements now, it can be a long wait to have ETECSA upgrade your line. Our local friend Jenn told us it took her four years to get an upgraded line installed.

And there’s no such thing as broadband, as the connectivity is through standard copper phone lines. What’s provided is just the pipe, not the data. It’s as if Comcast provided the cable modem and Charter provided the data plan that was available through that modem. It’s just that in Cuba, both of those providers are ETECSA.

If your apartment doesn’t have a wifi router, there are public wifi hotspots. Parks and government buildings tend to have public wifi. That’s why you often see large groups hanging out in the same location in public, all of them head down on their phones. Cuban cell phone plans, provided by, natch, ETECSA, also come with some cellular data. I don’t know how much, but I do know not a lot. Locals seem to use cellular data as an emergency.

I can vouch for that. We use Google Voice, which is VOIP, so we don’t need an actual cellular service. Instead, we use a global data service, Airalo. Except Airalo doesn’t operate in Cuba. The only service we found that does is Gigsky, and the cost difference is dramatic.

With Airalo, we get 20 gigabytes of data that we can use over a six month period for $89. We don’t use anything like 20 gigs of roaming data in six months, so that works out to a very affordable $15/month each to have essentially unfettered global roaming data, which is probably cheaper than your cell plan. The Airalo plan only covers 89 countries, so there will be times when we have to pick up a more expensive plan to close the gap. This is one of those times.

Gigsky’s plan is $24 for 200 megabytes of data over two weeks. That is not a lot of data, and a lot of it gets used just by your phone doing phone things when you turn cellular data on. It’s taken me three $24 data packs to figure out how to use it. Basically like taking a camp shower: turn the water on to get wet. Turn the water off. Soap. Turn the water on. Rinse. Turn the water back off and thank your lucky stars you got a fucking shower. Ingrate.

For the phone, that looks like: turn off Cellular Data globally, for the phone. Turn off Cellular Data for every app on your phone. When you need to look something up using cellular data, turn it on for that app only, then turn it on for your phone. Look up what you need to, and then shut off Cellular Data for both phone and app right away, before your phone does something stupid behind your back.

Our other fix has been to shift to Maps.Me for local mapping, rather than Apple Maps or Google Maps. Maps.Me lets you download full country maps to your phone, so you don’t need to be connected when you’re wandering around. Mapping is probably 90% of what we use while we’re outside (Wikipedia is the other 10%), so that’s pretty much eliminated the need for cellular data.

So if wifi is only the pipe and cellular data is, at best, an emergency method, how do you get data? ETECSA sells it. By the hour. How do you buy hourly ETECSA data? At an official government ETECSA office. Hourly data can be purchased as cards with passcodes, or loaded onto a permanent account. And it’s not very expensive: $25 CUP, about 15¢, per hour.

The permanent account sounds easiest, and our host said we could open one at an ETECSA office. Except we couldn’t. We could never figure out why. Whenever we asked about opening an account, we were just told No. Sometimes with a sad head shake, sometimes without. But always No. We don’t know if they’re not permitted for foreigners or they were just somehow unavailable whenever we asked. And we’ll never know.

The cards come in two denominations: one hour and five hour. But you’re only permitted to purchase three cards at a time, whatever the denomination, so five hours is best. If they have any five hour cards at the ETECSA office. Or one hour cards. They frequently seem to have neither. But the three card limitation is per passport, so Dorothy and I have started going together, to double up.

We’d gone to our closest ETECSA office to be told they didn’t have any cards. Tomorrow? Sad head shake. But we were directed to an office about a 15 minute taxi ride away, and jumped at the opportunity. After waiting in line, because waiting in line, I got three five hour cards. And Dorothy got… two. We appeared to have gotten the last five hour cards and hightailed it out of there before the locals noticed that we’d emptied the vault.

One of the oddities of this whole system, by the way, is the manner in which connectivity is managed. We’re used to bandwidth constraints, but I think that between the slow backbone to Venezuela and the copper to the router, there isn’t enough bandwidth to carve up for meaningful measurement. Which leaves time. But weirdly, once I’ve authenticated a single client to the wifi router, any other client that logs into that router picks up the internet connection. You’d think, since they’re metering time, that it would be device-by-device. Maybe it’s a technical limitation of their router environment, and maybe it’s that multiple clients will still be sharing the same constrained bandwidth, so who cares. Either way, it’s actually nice that we can both hop online to check email and such at the same time.

How long did it take us to figure out how to (more or less) reliably get internet access? About two weeks into our four week stay. But we’re pros now, and everything works fine. Or as fine as it actually works.

Currency

As complicated as the Internet is, it’s a cakewalk compared to Cuban currency.

Until 2021, Cuba had two currencies: the Cuban Peso (CUP) and the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC). The CUC was introduced in 1994 after the collapse of the Soviet Union (the Cuban Peso had previously been pegged to the ruble), and was pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. The official exchange rate for the CUP was 25 to the US dollar. While there are many reasons for and impacts of the dual currency system, one of its effects was to create a two-tiered economy. Workers were paid in CUP, whereas foreigners used CUC, putting the value of hard currency beyond the reach of most Cubanos. Businesses with a foreign clientele thus had access to the much higher value CUC.

Curiously, the elimination of the CUC didn’t change things. The two-tiered economy still exists, it’s just enforced by prices. There are goods and services priced for the local economy, and goods and services priced for the tourist economy and those with access to the hard currency associated with the tourist economy.

Taxis are out of reach of most locals, as are most bars and restaurants, although there is cheaper street food that’s pitched towards local consumption. For the higher priced services, prices are expressed in USD or Euros, although CUP can be used (at not the most generous exchange rate). Higher end restaurants will often have menus with prices in USD, and taxis will often quote fares in USD. You can’t use USD for any official business, but it’s coin of the realm in the real world.

Making matters even more complicated, as if that was possible, is the existence of the MLC: Moneda Libremente Convertible (Freely Convertible Currency), introduced in 2019. The MLC is a payment method that uses a special credit card that can be loaded with any currency, and then used to pay for goods and services with shops that accept the MLC card. Which appears to be next to nobody.  We’ve only seen one store so far that we couldn’t purchase from because we didn’t have an MLC card. It’s not at all obvious what problem the MLC is meant to address.

Hard currency is in high demand, so while the official CUP-USD exchange rate is still 24:1, the street exchange rate is about 180:1. We’ve exchanged through our host at 170:1, which seems like a perfectly reasonable premium for not having to wander about the streets hoping not to get scammed. While the disparity between official and street exchange rates would seem to create an irresistible arbitrage opportunity, the CUP can’t be exchanged outside of Cuba, and you can’t take more than 5,000 CUP (about $30 at street rates) out of the country.

In addition, the existence of the unofficial foreign currency market has forced the Cuban government to compete. The government now exchanges most foreign currencies at about four times the “official” rate, which isn’t confusing at all. The current official unofficial rate is 120:1, which closes the gap but still leaves an attractive arbitrage opportunity, mitigated in part by the 8% fee the Cuban government charges to exchange USD. All other currencies have a 2% fee. Every dollar exchanged into the unofficial rate and back out at the official rate (which is the only way to turn CUP into USD – the unofficial market has no interest in selling its USD) would yield about a 30% return.

Honestly, I think the only thing that discourages exchange rate arbitrage tourism is the per transaction restriction of about $300 USD and the long bank lines. You could come to Cuba for a 30% return on your dollars, but that’s all you’d be doing while here. Still, I’d wager that some folks come here with that as their primary goal, regardless.

The Economy

Because only some people have access to the hard currency economy (airbnb hosts, taxi drivers, restaurateurs…), inequality is seeping into the Cuban economy. Obviously, nothing at all like the gap in the US, but it exists, and it’s a relatively new feature. It’s not a positive development, and is bound to have more severe negative consequences (e.g. higher crime…) down the road.

What largely counterbalanced the US bloqueo was the economic support of the USSR. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, that all went to shit, ushering in what was known as The Special Period. That special period involved belt tightening and rationing, at both the individual and government levels. Sadly, those conditions are largely the same today as in the 90s. The US embargo has handicapped Cuba’s ability to recover from the loss of their primary patron and trading partner.

The Cuban government turned to tourism as a source of hard currency and economic growth. Tourism is now Cuba’s largest sector, representing 10% of Cuba’s GDP (meaning that the pandemic and the hurricane that followed it hurt Cuba even more than most countries). There’s no small irony in a socialist/communist haven focusing on tourism for survival. Attracting tourists requires providing the basic necessities that the Cuban government has had trouble providing to its citizens. As much as there’s a general understanding that tourism is a huge benefit to the economy, there’s also a great deal of frustration that tourists are prioritized over citizens. It’s tough to live with a five egg/month ration, when every day you pass tourist restaurants serving omelets for breakfast. For more than you can afford.

Other than the bloqueo itself, the other major economic distortion is emigration. The US has created a fast track path for Cubans (as well as Haitians, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans) that eases the immigration process. The net effect of this policy is extractive, and is no different than the US building a mining facility in Cuba to extract some valuable resource. It’s just that the valuable resources are people and intellectual capital, and it doesn’t require getting one’s hands dirty with mines and such. It can be done very effectively and cleanly from a distance.

What happens is that young people are educated in the excellent and free Cuban educational system. When they have their degrees, they then take the knowledge and skills the Cuban government has provided them to the US, where their entry is facilitated and they can make more money. This both wastes the investment the Cuban government has made in these people’s education and brain drains Cuba, depriving the economy of the benefit of their knowledge and abilities.

Amplifying the physical brain drain is the virtual brain drain. Professionals who stay in Cuba are moving into the service economy, for access to hard currency. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers are waiting tables and driving taxis, because it pays better. It’s a perfectly rational decision, but it just adds to the factors hollowing Cuba out.

The bloqueo is strangling the Cuban economy, and has created the conditions under which the best and the brightest want to leave. This is a vicious cycle, in which poor economic conditions induce emigration, and emigration worsens economic conditions. Both ends of this fuckery circle jerk are fueled by intentional US policies.

If we were on a tourist cadence, a week or two and then move on, we could arguably survive on restaurants. But that’s not sustainable over as long as we’d like to travel, and it doesn’t sound pleasant regardless. While we can never truly be locals, the closest approximation comes when we shop in the same mercados and make food out of the same ingredients. Cooking is the great equalizer, and shopping is the common denominator.

This has never been clearer than in Cuba. Cuba’s economy is defined by scarcity, and no amount of white privilege or US dollars can turn that scarcity into abundance. Our local friend Jenn had cautioned us to bring in as much of what we’d need for the month as possible: salt, pepper, toilet paper, olive oil, dried milk, coffee, sugar… We brought in small amounts of some of those things, but not a month’s supply. Because we’re traveling with just about everything we own, we don’t have lots of unused weight allowance in our bags.

Of course, what we thought Jenn meant is that it would be hard to find these things, or expensive. We didn’t actually think it meant they just weren’t available.

Case In Point: A Humble Skillet

One of the things we do whenever we land in a new place is suss out what’s missing from the kit in our apartment and go fill the gaps. We spent over $100 on housewares in Oaxaca, which we left behind. Spread out over the almost four months we were there, it was a perfectly reasonable expense to incur for comfort and ease.

Our casa particular in La Habana is actually lovely, but there were a few missing items: a water jug large enough that we weren’t constantly filtering water, ice trays, and a skillet, as there were only two saucepans for cooking. As it turns out, we’ve yet to find a water jug or ice tray, and have just given up (although the day before we left, of course, we found the neighborhood in the Centro, between Vedado and Habana Vieja, with the housewares stores). I filter water about every other day into a constellation of small containers, and use a pair of our Ikea plastic containers to make ice. But we found a skillet at someone’s garage sale in our first few days. The challenge was that it was pretty roughly cast aluminum, and while it might be ok for sautéing vegetables, the odds of getting a fried egg out of there intact were zero.

The punch line is, those were exactly the same odds as getting eggs. Eggs are available at the government ration store, closed to us, obviously: five eggs/person/month. And while we found private stores that offered the same products as the ration shops for higher prices (rice was $7 CUP/pound/person/month at the ration shop, and $160 CUP/pound at retail), we’ve yet to find eggs that way.

So, the skillet is fine.

But the mercados do not have the abundance of choices we enjoyed in Mexico. While it was possible to have a serious discussion of the different ways that abundance and choice manifested in Mexico vs. the US, there is no comparable discussion to have about Cuba. Lot’s of stuff just isn’t here. Like eggs. And cheese. And gasoline.

If you’ve followed us so far, it’s possible that one of the things you’ve enjoyed is the relative lack of political commentary. Other than a few snarky shots at US exceptionalism. If that’s you, apologies. Please feel free to stop reading.

Because there’s no way to talk about the scarcity of goods in Cuba without acknowledging their very obvious root cause: the US embargo.

The Bloqueo

Whatever your feelings about the morality of the bloqueo, and more on that in a moment, you can’t argue that it’s been effective in its policy goals. Which have been clearly articulated as creating the conditions for regime change. The theory is that if you render the government incapable of meeting its citizen’s needs, by strangling it economically, those citizens will rise up, overthrow their government, and replace it with one we like enough to lift the bloqueo. Except that there’s zero evidence that embargoes ever lead to that result. Rather, they tend to bind people together in opposition to the outside actor and reinforce allegiance to the state that’s under attack. They have the exact opposite effect as intended.

You can see it play out in Putin’s attacks on civilians in Ukraine. Those are meant to demoralize the populace and drive them away from the government that’s brought this on them. Instead, it has created a common enemy and, if anything, drove a hardening of support for a national identity and a government that had been much weaker prior to Russia’s attacks. As a policy, those attacks have had the opposite of their intended effect.

Even more heinous, if possible, is the fact that the US embargo is directed not just at US companies, but any business, no matter where in the world it’s based. If you’re headquartered in Argentina, for example, and you do business with the US in any way, commerce with Cuba will expose you to US sanctions. The US is a much bigger market than Cuba, so multinationals have made the only choice they could. It’s not enough that America’s irrational hatred has caused so much harm to Cuba. Like an infection, the US has forced that hatred onto countries that simply don’t share it.

Unquestionably, the embargo has been a policy failure. It’s been in place for over 60 years, and we’re no closer to regime change than we were. In fact, in talking to locals here, it’s very clear that the bloqueo is considered a much bigger problem than their own government.

But it’s also been a moral failure, and profoundly so. We’re constantly asked on the street where we’re from. We’ve been taken for Canadians and Germans, but no one assumes we’re from Estados Unidos. That info is always a surprise to folks. We’ve met absolutely no hostility over that, more wonder and awe that we’d have gone to the trouble, given how hard the US government makes it for us to get here. And a shockingly consistent request, that when we get back, we please, please, please tell people what it’s like in Cuba. And how much the bloqueo is hurting them.

That pain is real, and severe. It distorts absolutely everything about life here, and is the motive force that drives daily Cuban’s behavior. And let’s be plain: we’re killing people. The bloqueo includes both medicines and the ingredients necessary to fabricate medicines. Most medical procedures that require medication, which is kind of all of them, can’t be performed now. The bloqueo also impacted Cuba’s ability to develop its COVID vaccine. This is morally indefensible. We are killing innocent Cubans as surely as if we’d put a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger ourselves.

The US government would like us to think that we’re just applying a little pressure for a reasonable policy goal (winning Florida?). But we’re not. We’re fucking over an entire nation for… nothing. For a Cold War fantasy.

Neither Hellhole Nor Paradise

Look, I’m not naive. I know that there’s a history of repression in Cuba, and I’m not going to be an apologist for the Cuban government. I’m sure it has much to answer to its citizens for. Unlike the US, where the government’s hands are completely clean. But my picture of daily life under Communism had a distinctly KGB/Stasi air that simply isn’t the case here. No one is listening to conversations and reporting Enemies of the People. No one is going to prison for 25 years for criticizing the government.

Because of Jenn, we’ve had much more contact at the conversational level with Cubans than we had with Mexicans. We’ve asked pointed questions about how things work here: the economy, small businesses, property ownership. We’ve gotten honest answers, including critiques of government policy. No one has raised any concerns about voicing their opinions.

At least in the cities we’ve visited, La Habana and Trinidad, the culture here seems very tolerant. There have been plenty of same sex couples walking around holding hands, as well as lots of mixed race couples. Although at this point in Cuba’s history, every couple is probably mixed race.

There seems to be free and relatively unfettered access to information. We’ve been using the government-provided Internet access, and nothing seems to be blocked. We’re using a VPN for security, but we can use the VPN successfully…

Crime is low, the streets are safe, education is free through university, health care is a right, there’s low infant mortality, the Avatar sequel is playing at the local cinema, and there’s universal literacy. They treat their mentally ill, rather than tossing them on the street to fend for themselves. None of those are things we can say about the US. Except for Avatar, and that’s a pretty weak win. It’s not a perfect Worker’s Paradise, but neither is it the Communist hellhole we conjure up when we’re trying to scare children. What it is instead is a plausible alternative to rapacious capitalism, and as such stands as a mortal threat to rapacious capitalists.

From a governing perspective, Cuba has clearly made a different set of tradeoffs than the US has. They’ve decided that it’s better for everyone to have enough (which they would, absent the bloqueo), and no one to go without, than to accept the kind of inequality that seems sadly endemic to the US.

And you know what? You can disagree with those priorities. Although on the ground they seem pretty rational. But that’s no excuse for trying to destroy their government and punish their people. If those kinds of philosophical differences justified an economic embargo, we’d have to sanction Finland. And just about everywhere else that doesn’t practice capitalism as if they were cosplaying Origin of the Species.

All of which makes me think that the US’s stated rationale for the embargo, regime change, is a fig leaf. We haven’t been blindly pursuing a failed policy for 60+ years. Rather, we’ve been pursuing a brutally efficient, highly successful policy: preventing a successful example of an economic system with fundamentally different values from flourishing right on our shores. Of course, our successful policy has been a humanitarian disaster, but hey! You have to break a few huevos to destroy an entire way of life.

Freedom To… What, Exactly?

Theoretically, with Cuba as with the Soviet bloc, we’re defending our freedoms from the scourge of Communism. But what exactly are the freedoms we cherish so deeply that we’re willing to export them at the point of a gun? So far as I can tell, the only meaningful freedom we have is the freedom to consume.

We have a lot of theoretical freedoms. We have freedom of speech. Until our speech triggers someone and we’re shut down, through either violence or canceling. We have freedom of assembly. Except that we tend to use that freedom to self sort. We have freedom of opportunity. On paper, but no one who’s thinking about it believes we aren’t as caste-driven as India, our national Myth of Upward Mobility notwithstanding. We have freedom of religion. But some religions are clearly better than others, and are favored by the state (and yes, I’m a disgruntled Pastafrian). We are guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Unless we choose to exercise those freedoms in ways other people find offensive, and then we run the risk of summary execution by wackjob.

The only truly unfettered freedom we enjoy is the freedom to consume. We are completely free to spend our money so that our corporate masters are momentarily distracted, and the insatiable maw of capitalism has something to chew. Like our souls.

If that sounds bitter (there’s a reason we’ve chosen to be outside the US right now), consider this: in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks we were, briefly, united as a nation. We had been assaulted, we had an enemy, and we were ready to do whatever was necessary as a nation to both avenge the attack and prevent another. It was our generation’s Pearl Harbor, which took a nation disinterested in fighting Europe’s war and forged us into a fearsome weapon for whom no sacrifice was too much to ask, no burden too great to bear.

In that moment, when the entire nation was prepared to be united in common cause, what sacrifice were we called upon to carry, what shared service were we asked to accept?

Go shopping.

How Many Parties Is Enough?

Surprisingly, this whole experience has provided an understanding of the purpose and benefits of single party rule. I’d considered multi-party democracy as a bedrock, unyielding principle of good government. But do you know what would happen if Cuba permitted multiple political parties? US money would rush in to support the party that most aligned with our priorities, and Cuba would once again become a US vassal. “Oh,” I hear you say, “Cuban laws would prohibit foreign political contributions.” Chump.

We’ve just read a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Cuba, and that history is appalling. We have been fucking with Cuba since there was a United States to fuck with Cuba. The notion that we would let Cuba be Cuba, if they’d just permit free elections, is laughable. In fact, in the law that created the embargo, one of the conditions of lifting it is that multi-party elections be permitted. As high-minded and innocent as that sounds, it would doom Cuba’s socialist way of life. Which is, of course, the entire point.

This Was Supposed To Be About Shopping

But I have to say, the Cuban people seem unbowed by all of this. Frustrated, yes, but resourceful and committed to making the best of things, however grim they might be. I can’t speak to what Cuba was like a few years ago, but in September 2021 the Cuban government legalized MSMEs (micro, small, and medium size enterprises). The landscape now is elbow-to-elbow with small businesses. From people running little tiendas through their windows to permanent garage sales of whatever people can scrounge to sell (we found our skillet and some extra hangers at one of those), small commerce is absolutely everywhere here.

There aren’t actually a lot of traditional stores here, where you walk in, browse the goods, and check out. One pattern is Cage Match Retail, where goods with price labels are displayed behind a grille or fence, usually from someone’s home. You make your selection, pay for your order, and it’s handed through to you.

The other predominant pattern is Garage Sale, where people set their goods up in front of or just inside their homes for shoppers to browse.

As a shopper, it’s created a distinct hunter-gatherer vibe. We found a bottle of vegetable oil at a little tienda, and it felt like we’d found a muskrat in one of our traps. We were positively giddy.

The whole point of this entire adventure is to feel, as much as is possible, like we’re living as locals. And the point of visiting Cuba is much like the impulse to visit the Yanomami: to see an endangered way of life before it disappears from the face of the earth forever. It’s inevitable that Cuba will open up, and that things will change as a result. For the better, hopefully, and not just so that Americans can again treat it like their slutty divorcée neighbor. Despite the distortions caused by the bloqueo, there’s something special here that I think is unique. I’m glad we’re getting to see it before it sinks beneath the waves.