This Thursday team Yuma took our strongest game to the Instituto Superior de Arte (el ISA). The ISA is magnificent. It stands as the Juilliard of Cuba – the most elite expressive arts school in the country. It was commissioned on Havana’s largest golf course directly after the 1958 revolution, and legend has it that the idea for its construction came to Che and Fidel as they were playing golf on the course’s recently expropriated grounds. The two of them organized five of Cuba’s top architects to each build one of its five intertwined campuses across the wide open space. Within the same decade, art was declared “unproductive” by the Communist Party and since unproductive is antonymous with revolution the entire project was stopped on a dime.
What this means today is that only two of the five schools were ever fully completed, leaving three full campuses in a state of modern ruin. After taking classes throughout the morning we decided to explore these ruins. Entire terra-cotta campuses missing little other than doors, desks and students. The place is an ethereal wonderland, and we spent the afternoon clamoring along its clay roofs and crawling in and out of its arched and abandoned halls. An adult jungle-gym. As guitar strums and wailing voices echoed through the empty campuses, we charged along the flooded corridors discovering new twists and turns to the labyrinth. This game went on for hours.
That night we were sent word of a small get-together back on campus. We tucked our wrinkled tees into our pants and made the journey back West to the ISA dormitories. There we encountered a full-blown Cuban pool party. Dozens of art students sharply spinning one another to salsa beats. With their matching speedos and modern dance majors our haggard flock had no chance of assimilating. Realizing this, we immediately crawled out of our clothing and splashed the night away with our new Cuban compañeros. The whole day was an absolute blast and by the time we finally left the ISA we were so exhausted that we could do little more than laugh when our taxi driver tried to charge each of us twenty-five times the standard fare. Quizá la próxima vez amigo.
