Viva Cuba!

hello everyone!! hope this finds all of you well and enjoying the holidays. it's been awhile and i'm seizing the holidays as a good excuse to get in touch with an update, another installment from the travelogues of susie g.

it's been over two years and i'm still battling a very serious illness. the travel bug. after a four month hiatus in d.c. to work and replenish my travel funds and see friends and family, i found my way to cuba earlier this month...that little landmass off the coast of florida that has been the subject of so much controversy. revolutions, communism, fidel castro, trade embargos, cuban missle crisis, bay of pigs invasion, guantanemo bay, elian gonzales...all random historical landmarks floating around in my head with no real context to piece them together. what's the big deal with this tiny little island anyway? so i went to see what the fuss was all about, not quite knowing what i would find or how a single female traveler would fare.

well, i'm here to tell the tale and in a nutshell, cuba is one of the most fascinating, confusing, and safe places i've ever been to. while i can't even begin to uncover the many, many layers that make cuba cuba after a ten day visit, i tried my best to get a (perhaps superficial) feel for the place...a very poor country in a difficult political situation, with a very rich culture, fascinating history, gorgeous beaches, beautiful and educated people, and incredible music...


stepping into cuba is like stepping into a 50-year time warp...horse-drawn carriages are still a common mode of public transportation and many of the cars (the very few that exist) are meticulously restored dodges and buicks from the 50s. there's not a
golden arches or walmart to be found, and instead of coca-cola ads plastered everywhere like every other latin american country i've been
to, the 45-year old revolution, fidel castro, and che guevara are celebrated from every possible billboard and building wall. internet and cellphones are hard to come by, as is anything else remotely "modern". the average monthly salary is about what you spent on dinner last night: $13.

on the other hand, they are light-years ahead in some respects. cuba boasts some of the most impressive literacy rates, education, and health care systems, accessible to everyone free of cost. the arts are venerated and alive. it's an incredibly diverse society with a healthy mix of skin colors and heritages (and somehow they all happened to get the goodlooking gene!)...european, hispanic, african...yet there appears to be absolutely no racial divide...it was the most racially integrated place i've ever seen.

Cuban school children

and the bewildering things continue...

oppression, fear, and secret police are a daily reality, yet the streets are exploding with music and dance and laughter.

the people are dirt poor, yet educated and healthy. it is one of the
safest places i've ever been to and there was hardly a single beggar
to be seen on the streets. it is perhaps safer to walk around havana
at night than my hometown of washington d.c.

Old-school fire trucks still in good working order

you could cut cuban/u.s. tensions with a knife, yet every cuban i
met was nothing but kind and generous to this americana (at least
after the disagreeable experience at customs, where i was randomly
plucked out of line and detained, questioned, and searched for almost
an hour...do i fit the counter-revolutionary profile or something?
what gives?) they love old american cars and baseball almost as much as we do and the u.s.
dollar is unofficially their primary currency.

opinions about fidel run the gamut...some think he's a legitimate
hero, mounting a valiant struggle against "the empire" (aka the united
states), while one cuban i met likened what he's done to cuba to
owell's "1984" totalitarian state. take your pick.

and then there are the little things, like why is the 24-hour burger
joint closed at 7pm on a tuesday night?

however you cut it, cuba is a beautiful country with many
wonderful and sad layers... a proud, vibrant, educated people in a
very complicated and frustrating situation that i can't even begin to
understand after just ten days. you could contemplate forever what
impact the interplay of communism, capitalism, revolutionary ideals
gone bad, and the u.s. trade embargo have on the whole situation,
what's going to happen when fidel dies, etc...but how about i leave
all that to the politicians and the historians.

The Che Guevara monument in Santa Clara

as luck would have it, it worked out to meet up with two of my good girlfriends who i taught with in antigua, tia and jackie. they were traveling with a band of other girlfriends and welcomed me right into their crew for a few days in varadero and havana, it was an absolute blast.

Good times with the girls in Varadero

At La Bodeguita del Medio, Hemingway's old haunt

Dinner with my friend Jonathan's parents. He's a friend from Cuba who defected and now lives in Antigua and hasn't seen his family in over 5 years. I smuggled some gifts and money over to them from him. Shhhhh, don't tell Bush, he might not like that...

Havana Streets

and now i somehow find myself in another very different world, in germany with my family visiting my brother and his family for the
holidays. we've been busy touring a few medieval german towns and
their famous christmas markets...huge outdoor festivals where people gorge themselves on bratwurst and fight off the cold with a few too many glasses of hot spiced red wine. we ventured to the austrian alps over christmas and i tried on my snowboard for the first time in a few years, something for which my body still hates me. and we were incredibly relieved to hear from my sister jen and her boyfriend, who are in thailand for the holidays and had a near miss with the tragic
tsunami over that way. so in the end, it was a very merry christmas
for the gaskins.

i'll return to the states in february to do some more time
as "corporate susie" (as some friends refer to my alter-persona back
in the states that funds my wanderlust). hope to see some of you then,
or before then for a few of you in europe.

always love to hear news from you guys...hope this finds each of you
well and enjoying a wonderful holiday!


more photos: http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=62x8zgbr.5j6jrkqb&x=1&y=-7fzzzk