Steven’s Cuba Blog

Entre Disfrutar y Compartir

Slightly over a year ago, I was sitting at a restaurant next to a busy, noisy intersection with David, near El Poblado Metro station in Medellín, Colombia. As we were ordering food, I was debating whether or not to get the Bandeja Paisa, a large, gluttunous dish that includes such light fare as grilled steak, chicharrón (fried pork rind), red beans, rice, chorizo, eggs, an arepa, sweet fried plantains and a slice of avocado. It had been a long day with lots of walking, so I felt like I could probably handle it. On the other hand, I had had a fairly large breakfast (I had made breakfast burritos), and started doubting whether I could finish it - I don’t like leaving any food on my plate. In certain cultures, it is a sign of weakness / disrespect / not being hungry. Nevertheless, when the pleasant-but-slightly-neurotic waitress came along, I went ahead and ordered it.

- Her: “Listo?”
- David: “Si, el _______.” (I forgot what he ordered, though in all likelihood it was probably something girlish and frilly).
- Her: “Y por usted?”
- Me: “Si, la bandeja paisa, por favor - qué incluye?”
- Her: “[Long list of food items]. Es muchissimo!”
- Me: “No hay problema - podemos disfrutarlo.”

She makes a strange quizzical smile, and then her giggly persona becomes even gigglier, as she smiles even wider and goes to the kitchen.

David looks at me with a puzzled expression. “Podemos disfrutarlo?”

- “Yeah, I told her we can share it since it’s lots of food.” I take a swig of my lemonade.
- “Dude, disfrutar doesn’t mean share, it means enjoy.”
- “No, you’re wrong. Disfrutar means share. I’ve been using it for years.” Another swig of lemonade.
- “No man, seriously - compartir is share. Disfrutar means enjoy. You just told her that you and I can “enjoy” the food together.”
- Me: “Nahhhhh…” … blank stare into the distance as I start to think back to all the time in my travels when I used disfrutar instead of compartir…

Cuba 2005

• Waiting for a taxi at José Martí International Airport, to a cute girl: “Would you like to enjoy a taxi together?” (Editor’s note: This turned out better than one might expect).
• Sitting down for dinner with a very warm and welcoming family in Trinidad de Cuba, to the father: “I’m really honored to enjoy everything with you and your children.”
• At a small roadside restaurant near Cienfuegos with a Cuban buddy, to the owner: “We’re going to take one entree and enjoy it.”

Mexico 2006

• To my Mexican then-girlfriend at a fancy club with all her friends: “Instead of buying drinks, wouldn’t it make more sense if we just bought a bottle and enjoyed it?”
• In Querétaro, to an elderly couple in the town square: “Do you mind if I enjoy this bench with you?”
• In Mexico City to my ex-girlfriend’s mother: “That’s a great story! Do you have any others you can enjoy with me?”

Colombia 2007

• Writing to a girl I was meeting up with for coffee: “We can head to a café and enjoy a table together.”
• Speaking over the phone to a famous medical researcher in Bogotá, setting up an interview: “I really appreciate you taking the time to let us come and enjoy in your experiences.”
• The above-mentioned restaurant.

There are many more incidents like these I’m leaving out here, either because they’re not that interesting, I don’t remember them, or I’d rather not speak about them.

I’m not sure how or when this confusion happened. I think it may have been during one of my first formal Spanish lessons somewhere around 2004. Either my teacher was wrong (highly unlikely), I heard / understood / read something the wrong way and it stuck (most probable) or my teacher was just fucking with me (quite possible).

Either way, the lesson here is clear: Spanish is a beautiful, beautiful language - except when it’s being spoken by me.

(PS - Yeah, I’m aware that mots of the pics from older entries are missing from the website. This is because they are either on Flickr which I no longer use, or they somehow got moved when I upgraded Wordpress. I’m working to rectify this).

Cubita Coffee in Montreal supermarkets

Although authentic Cubita Coffee has been available online and from certain specialty shops in Canada for a while now, over the past few weeks I’ve been seeing it crop up in pretty much every supermarket that I’ve been to in the Montreal area. At my local IGA supermarket, I saw a nice display with both the standard, ground Cuban dark roast, and a new “instant” coffee made from beans that do not come from Cuba, but from other countries such as Ecuador.

I just bought a package of each and tried it out - as expected, the standard dark roast is fantastic. Cubita dark roast is one of my favorite coffees in the world, and out of my stove-top espresso maker it tastes every bit the same as the all-important cafecitos I’d have nearly every morning whenever I’d be in Cuba. I haven’t yet made any cortadito or cafe con leche from this, but I have no reason to doubt that it’ll be just as good.

The “instant” coffee, on the other hand, was a disappointment. I’ve never been a fan of instant coffee, and this was no exception, unsurprisingly. Not only is it not made with actual Cuban beans, but it has a sort of sulfite afterfeeling which left me feeling noxious.

So, if you live in Montreal (or anywhere else in Canada, probably), and are looking for a change in pace from the usual espresso you get, stop by your local grocer and pick up a package - it’s really good coffee.

EU official in Cuba to renew ties

via the BBC:

European commissioner Louis Michel has arrived in Havana for meetings aimed at a formal resumption of co-operation between the EU and Cuba.

The two-day visit is the result of the EU agreeing to remove all sanctions against communist Cuba in June. Mr Michel will meet Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque. The European commissioner for development and humanitarian aid will also tour hurricane-damaged areas, Cuba’s Granma newspaper reports.

Rafael Correa encouraging Free Software use in Latin America

(I’m going to start posting more topics that are only tangentially or indirectly related to Cuba. It’s been over a year and a half that I haven’t returned to the island, and therefore don’t feel as qualified to write opinion pieces about it without actually being there. I do, however, want to revive this blog).

Faces of Cuba - footage and interviews from The Island

I’ve been doing some video work at home for an unrelated project, and came across some footage that I shot just over a year ago in Cuba. I wanted to use it as the beginning of a documentary about Cuba, a sort of question and answer session with everyday Cubans I’d met. It was an effort to document Cuba from the perspective of the people who live there.

As these things tend to do, it got buried behind other projects and work that I later focused on. Instead of letting the video collect dust, though, I’ve decided to put it all up here. The three posts below contain most of the footage, lightly edited.

The questions were very straightforward and apolitical - jobs, activities, plans. Dreams. The footage is mostly shot while traveling or walking around a city.

Lastly - and most importantly - I’ve decided to release all of the footage into the public domain. You can take the video, remix it, edit it, use it for your own purposes, etc. It belongs to the Public Domain. It would be cool if you could drop me an email or a comment if you do decide to use it for your own work, though - just to satisfy my curiosity.

You can download the entire clip (ignore most of the captions; they’re no longer valid) here at the Internet Archive.

Faces Of Cuba 1 - Havana, Cuba

This is the Havana chapter of the footage from “Faces of Cuba I”, a documentary which I decided not to release.

Instead, I’m putting the raw footage up into the public domain. Hopefully someone will find it useful and / or interesting.

Faces Of Cuba 2 - Trinidad de Cuba

This is the second chunk of lightly edited footage from the Faces of Cuba I reel. It is from Trinidad de Cuba and the surrounding area, just over a year ago.

It is in the public domain.

Faces Of Cuba 3 - Villa Clara

The third and last piece of footage from Faces of Cuba I. This was filmed in Villa Clara (mostly Santa Clara). It’s released into the Public Domain.

Turning the page.

Not having posted anything here in over a month - and not having posted anything of substance in longer than that - I’ve been feeling ambivalent as to how to continue writing about Cuba, which is ironic because I’ve never been short of words in the past.

I’ve already said that I love Cuba, and nearly everything about it and its people. It’s the closest place on Earth to home that I can find, yet it’s also maddening that there is so much that seems to be left undone. But I am not Cuban. I don’t live in Cuba, with all its beauty, its problems, its dreams, its hopes, and most of all, its people. Some of the most sincere, no-bullshit, and fun people I’ve ever met are in Cuba. I, however, won’t ever know what it’s like to wake up in the morning knowing that the Playas del Este are only a short bike ride from my house. I won’t know the frustrations of being a working professional, trying to improve the lot of my society… yet struggling to make ends meet, while the bartender who serves me drinks is dressed in the latest fashions. I’ll never understand the joys of being a student in a Cuban grade school, or the indignity of being stopped and having my ID checked when I’m taking my girlfriend out for the night. I won’t know how difficult it is to try to acquire a car in Santiago de Cuba, or how easy it is to just live off the land and be at peace with oneself off the coast of la Isla de la Juventud.

When I started this blog, I took an oath with myself to try and stay as non-partisan as I could. I talked about my trips, the things I’d seen and how they affected me, personally. I talked about current events, trying to keep my own feelings and opinions, and the way things appeared as filtered through the prism of my own eyes. Most of all, I wasn’t ever trying to tell Cuba’s story, but only my own, as I passed through the valleys and towns that dot the island’s landscape. Despite all this, I was treated as someone with a political agenda, on both - as if there were only two - sides of the political arena. Those on the left called me a selfish liar, a sellout and a profiteer when I’d mention things like how I had to wait in lines longer when I was mistaken for a local Cuban. I received my very first death threats - two, to be exact - shortly after returning from my first Cuban trip, a two-month bicycle odyssey that changed my life and was the reason for this blog’s existence. Both of those threats were via emails that can be tracerouted back to Miami, Florida; seems I’m not very popular on Calle Ocho.

Now, it’s been almost exactly one year to the day that I haven’t returned to Cuba. I’ve lost touch with many of the friends and colleagues I’d met - though not all - and haven’t followed Cuban developments as well as I had in the past. I do, however, have a will to continue writing and refocus my attention on Cuba and Cuban affairs. I avoided doing this over the past few months because I had something of an apprehension to writing something that seem too partisan or biased, on either side of the fence. Now that I’ve distanced myself a little from the subject matter, though, that fear has dissolved into a drive to say what I feel is right, as seen from my own eyes. Rightists will call me a communist and Leftists will call me a fascist, and you know what?

That’s just fine with me.

I think it’s amazing that a well-known writer in the Cuban exile community can make a thinly veiled suggestion that Havana should be hit with Nuclear Weapons, and not have anyone else in the media even make a mention of it. It’s also ridiculous that I cannot even invite friends in Cuba to visit me without going through a wholly unreasonable ’screening process’.

A bunch of cranky, greedy old men with bad memories and their suburb SoBe grandkids who have never even been to Cuba basically control a huge swath of the political spectrum in the most powerful country in the world. If you are are a presidential candidate in the US, you pretty much cannot win without Florida, and that means that you cannot win on an agenda that doesn’t include the continued aggression and punishment against Cuba and its people, at the behest of the aforementioned bloodthirsty villagers with torches and pitchforks. In a very real sense, as someone of Iraqi descent, I feel that Cuban-Americans share a huge deal of the responsibility for the invasion of Iraq, and the slaughter of countless innocents.

On the other hand, things inside Cuba aren’t that much better. When I was in Eastern Europe a few days ago, I felt an eerie deja vu of 80s communist or ex-communist party members dining at fine restaurants with a beautiful girl 1/3 of their age hanging off their shoulders (actually, Budapest still felt like that a little) while the real ‘proletariat’ didn’t see very much improvement in their lives during a revolution which was supposedly intended to make everybody equal. Cuba is in a very real danger of being overrun by corruption, and even if it wins that fight, the sheer amount of bureaucracy required to get the simplest permit or license is enough to put most people off from ever achieving what they set out to do in the first place.

So, we are where we are. Now what? No one knows, least of all me, but the least I can do is to continue speaking my mind and writing about Cuba - a topic that everyone seems to be an expert on and no one wants to compromise on.

Train Crash in Cuba

BBC NEWS | Americas | Many killed in Cuban train crash

At least 28 people have been killed and more than 70 injured in Cuba after a train collided with a bus at a level crossing, official media say.

The accident - which is the worst in Cuba for years - happened in Granma province in the east of the island.

Fifteen people are reported to be critically injured, and local people have been helping treat them.