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{shortcode-34e8f2b114f673286f89210f17c56443a91cd7ed}uba is a myth to too many of us. We’ve made it a fictitious island, corroding at the hands of wicked communists-in-training, rung with poverty, and spitting out young people who’ve grown to despise this place that raised them. Or, we’ve idolized it as one of the many heroic tragedies to come out on the other side of the United States’ neo-colonial factory. Either way, there’s a curious presumptuousness in the questions that roar in our throats when we think of Cuba.
We think we have an answer to their problems. We’re just waiting on the evidence to confirm our theories.
When I tell people I studied abroad in Cuba for four months, I’m met with the same perplexed and even awe-filled reaction. Most people’s bodies respond before they have the words to form a reply, and I’ve grown to believe that is emblematic of how we see Cuba. It’s as though they don’t have the language — which most of us don’t — to articulate the notion of Cuba that has been spoon-fed to us. So, a strange air of overcompensation surrounds their reaction — their curiosity pointed with pity or contempt.
When we came home in May, the questions came flooding, brazen and invasive. My Puerto Rican tío and Bolivian tía asked me first about the people. Were the conditions they lived in terrible, were they happy — could they be?
I was tasked with succinctly interpreting the nuances of life and money in Cuba. Others in my program were met with similar questions, the details of their days subsumed by the worries of their families and friends. Have you lost any weight? Do you eat enough?
Some, overhearing our conversations or listening to our stories, would interject — Did you say you were in Cuba? Wow, that’s amazing. Can I ask, are you a communist now?
These questions were often snuck in like a guilty pleasure, evidence of a craving that could not be silenced. Sometimes we could sense they felt like they shouldn’t be asking these things, like they should care about the totality of our experiences and that of the Cuban people. But the legend of Cuba seemed to swallow totality whole — leaving behind a flattened fantasy of poverty, communism, and desolation.
I don’t think we’re apathetic academics, inquisitive simply for the sake of collecting information. In fact, I believe that our fascination and bewilderment with Cuba often stems from a deep sense of compassion. We know about the blackouts, the disappearances of dissenters, the food shortages. But beyond this, we know so very little. And if we’re not careful, our tenderness can shift ever so subtly into a kind of condescension or callousness.
Kenny Daici, a senior at Brown University, studied in Cuba with me. He was one of the most adventurous and curious among us, and often, in his free time, he went out into the neighborhoods, talked with people, and asked them if he could take their picture. By the end, he was asked to curate his photographs and exhibit them in Cuba and at Brown.
While installing the exhibit at Brown, a stranger took interest in his photos. Daici told him about the exhibition, how he had lived in Havana for the spring semester, how he had taken these photographs to honor the rich cultural tradition and resiliency that whisper in the lives of Cubans on the island.
And the first question out of the stranger’s mouth was rather disquieting.
“He was like, ‘oh, were you on a mission trip?’” Daici says. “And he was very serious.”
Despite our sympathetic proclivities, sometimes we lead with pity regarding Cuba, as though it signals strong moral character or some kind of contemporary geo-political prowess. Citing the long-standing U.S. trade sanctions against Cuba, the fallacy that there is no private sector on the island, and the onslaught of political protests against the government, we can relegate the island to a destination for our commiseration.
Or, on the other hand, we scold the Cuban government and their history in some saviorist attempt to fight for the Cuban people; to squeeze their government into capitalist submission and finally free the population from the bleak lives we believe they lead.
Perhaps because the embargo is at the heart of our contemporary relationship with Cuba, we resign ourselves to only having philosophies regarding the socio-political bones of the island, rather than exploring experiences with it and its people.
I wish everyone would go to Cuba the way that I did.
Live there for months, under the care of a loving host family who, receiving a call at 5 a.m., would rearrange their entire day to drive their elderly neighbor to the hospital, since her ride canceled on her last minute due to the gas shortage. Take classes with internationally-renowned Cuban scholars, both through a program and at the University of Havana to ground yourself in the vast complications that lie at the foundation of our relationship with Cuba. Go to the Feria de Libros and purchase 25 books for less than a dollar.
Tour Trinidad with el profe, who everyone expects to stop the blackouts from robbing them of their food and their peace. Whatsapp message a taxi driver to take you to visit the medicine man, and listen as he teaches you how to cure every ailment with something growing in his garden. Learn la rueda, salsa basico, y la rumba in El Vedado, and proceed to kiss your dance partner as the sun rises over the Atlantic.
Listen to Cuban students call their professors liars and slander the revolution. Then hear their classmates call them weak, conformist, and the very reason the island is struggling. Take a car to Guantanamó, and watch your friend go door-knocking until he finds his last living relatives in Cuba. Eat níspero by the river while you wait, and have lunch at their house even though they didn’t know you were coming. Make a ritual of sitting at the Malecón to watch every sunset sink into the horizon and listen to the music the waves make as they crash against the esplanade.
Learn to understand that having much does not equate to giving much. That in fact, sometimes, being stripped down to very little materially creates unfathomable bonds of mutual aid and a resilient kind of contentment. Learn to conceptualize Cuba as more than a communist wasteland of poverty and pain.
Perhaps if I were writing to another audience, in another time, I would concede that there are insurmountable barriers to traveling to Cuba in the way that I did — a visa, justification, access to scholars and institutions providing nuanced and restorative activities, opportunities, and tours. But, when Harvard opened its doors to you, it also opened the doors to Cuba. Please, please walk through them.
The flyer for Daici’s exhibition features one of my favorite photographs in the series — a group of Cuban men, steel drums in hand, wistful and taken by the music and the sun. I’ll never forget the day this photograph was taken, as these men led us in a beautiful procession through Los Hoyos in Santiago de Cuba.
I remember when they started beating the drums and chanting the cyclical lyrics, as people began poking their heads out the window. First dancing in their homes, doing the steps from behind their windows, watching from the sidewalks, until they couldn’t hold it in anymore. They came to us, their bodies called by the conga music, and they danced. Vendors, neighbors, and families alike flooded the streets to join us. We moved by dancing, as the conga uniquely allows. And they taught us, without burden or restraint. Once strangers, they became our educators, and together we learned to move as one, in the distinctly Cuban sense.
By the end our group spanned a few blocks, the drums and chanting echoing far beyond that. I can only imagine what we would’ve looked like from above — American and Cuban together, celebrating and preserving.
I remember being afraid of two things as I left Cuba: that the language would leave me and that, as I attempted to convey the last four months to people gnawing at the bit for answers to the questions about this mythical place, I would fail to do the island justice. I was afraid I would forget; afraid that I would become just another voyeuristic traveler exploiting my unique privilege to explore this supposedly uncharted territory. And in so doing, I would make Cuba all about me — about how I had seen the light, I could solve the problem, I knew revolution in a palpable way.
So whenever I’m asked, I tell people I left Cuba with more questions than answers. I tell them about my family, about the friends I made there, about the conga and the jazz and the salsa. I tell them about the Ropa Vieja, the beach days, the electric class debates. I tell them about the art exhibits, the performance pieces, the cafecitos.
And when the other questions do come — brazen and invasive — I don’t always feel equipped to answer them. And perhaps that’s the point. I’ve learned that Cuba cannot be distilled, and it’s certainly not my job to try. Cuban people don’t need our pity, and they certainly don’t need our disdain. They need our partnership.
—Magazine writer Anya Sesay can be reached at anya.sesay@thecrimson.com. Her column “The Islands That Shape Us” explores how our personal relationships with the Caribbean are entangled with its cultural erasure.
