I did not know what Havana would look like. I imagined a warped paradise of sunshine and communism. Here we are, day four and the manifestations and clues of paradise and a failed communism surround us in a brightly-colored hodge podge.
Clouds of black diesel smoke bloom behind cars, nightclubs of mulatto women drinking with older foreign men, and the revolutionary rhetoric from everyday conversations about “since the triumph of the revolution” to the government-sponsored graffiti glorifying Che, Fidel and Martí. At a glance, Havana appears to be a random collection of various memories of its golden days, struggling to keep up and blend in with the now. Havana is a treasure with many layers that I am uncovering a bit more day by day.
Today I experienced quite a bit of the infamous contradictory nature of Cuba after a visit to the bank. As our professor exclaimed, “In Cuba there is always a system, but no one knows what it is.”
A visit to the bank to exchange money from one cuban currency to another, a seemingly simple task became painful after hours waiting inside a bank, holding the number 432 and waiting to be called.
What was so frustrating and illogical to my brain was that the bank would call numbers up completely out of order: 400 then 527, 223, 480…. What was so frustrating is we didn’t know how long we had to wait and so we stayed, continually telling ourselves that every minute more we waited was more incentive to stay and wait even longer, but we had no way to know how many people were ahead of us.
I am familiar with bureaucracy, but this was chaos.
After an hour and a half of waiting, watching other people walk in, slap people on the back and walk straight up to a teller, watching a woman unload bags full of change, and stacks upon stacks of cash (because credit and debit cards are not a thing here) we contacted a manager.
He finally just positioned us next to a teller and told us to go next. Apparently to get anything done in Cuba, it’s all about knowing the right people and having them with you at the right times – I guess there is a system in Cuba after all.