On the first weekend in March our group took a four hour bus to a small tourist town in the Pinar del Rio province called Viñales. After the previous night’s breakdance battles and cave spelunking our group woke up Sunday morning for crepes, coffee and piña slices before rallying the troops for a slow stumble through one of the area’s tobacco farms. Having never seen one of these plantations before I decided to chew one of the raw leaves in curiosity. The leaf was disgusting and left a harsh burning sap in my mouth for the following hour as we explored the sheds where freshly cut tobacco is hung to dry before it is rolled. After leaving the plantation we grabbed some fresh food downtown before boarding our bus back to Havana and falling asleep on Elliot’s shoulder.
When we finally got back to the capital we went and ate wild proportions of Mexican and Colombian food. When the group split up, a couple of us walked along the extensive stretch of sea-sprayed jetty that surrounds the city called the Malecón. As we came back towards our neighborhood we ran into an artist in his studio named Roilan. The man has produced a number of cool pieces that incorporate national symbolism into abstract expressions of daily life. One of the most interesting works showed a number wild concentric spheres that looked like two dimensional bubbles layered on top of one another. Inside of each hazy grey circle were haphazard rows of bright colors that resembled city lights through a thick fog or smog. Other pieces had roosters curled around each other, snarling as they tried to tear the other bird’s feathers from it.
As we began to talk with him about his personal life outside of his artwork he began to open up on a number of different tangents. When we explained that we were Americans he stopped all of a sudden and went back into a separate part of his house. He emerged minutes later with a manilla envelope filled with legal papers. After rifling through these he handed one over to us and asked us to help him translate it. It was a death certificate for his father with the cause of death listed as a blunt force trauma to the head. He asked us for more information, but the document’s details were sparse. He told us a little bit about his family and what his father had been doing in the U.S. Both of us were both astounded by what a wildly complex relationship the American embargo had crafted for the two of them. At the end of the night we exchanged numbers and further disbelief before moving on to the rest of the night.