So here we are, at the halfway point. It doesn’t feel at all like a halfway point because we’re all still learning and growing so much, more and more every day, but the reality is that in no time at all we’ll be home. Soon we’ll be able to have all the things we constantly talk about missing. Things like vegetables, good beer, wifi, weekend backcountry excursions, HBO, big comfy couches, friends’ basements, showers with satisfying water pressure, the opportunity to cook our own meals, whole milk, our parents, cashews, instagram, REI, Mexican food, potable tap water, walking down the street without being catcalled, Cholula, and Lou Malnati’s. But at the same time, as soon as I step off the plane in Chicago, I know that certain things will stick with me from here that I’ll never be able to reconstruct in the US. Some things I will obviously miss, some things I will be glad to have left behind me. They all have to do with the “pain in the ass that is being in Cuba” as Elliott Young would put it.
While I love it here, some things just are simply a pain in the ass. Getting on the internet, finding a legitimately nutritious meal, getting from one place to another, buying certain things like pens or tape or a backpack, can all be surprisingly difficult. Back home, you use your smartphone to locate an Office Depot or something, and if they don’t have it at whichever big box mart store you go to, you can just use Amazon and within a week, it’ll be there. As you may know, there are no stores like Walgreens in Cuba. There are stores that sell very specialized items, like lighters or liquor, but if you have a shopping list full of random items, you have to go to many different places. Often times you get halfway down the list and all you’ve heard is “no hay,” or “we don’t have it.” Does anyone know where I can get tape, by the way? There is a black market for everything here. I don’t know it very well, but there’s no point buying anything at full price, because more than likely you can find it dirt cheap elsewhere, or you can find a damn good substitute.
There’s also riding the bus. It’s awesome because riding the bus costs one peso, the equivalent of four American cents. However you can only attempt to describe embarking on the journey within a journey that is riding the P1 line in strictly sensory terms. Molecules of body odor, urine, gasoline, cologne, and oil swirl around your nostrils, sometimes all at once, sometimes you get a hint of one followed swiftly by another, and sometimes all you can smell is a mixture of the impermeably thick Cuban humidity and ever-present diesel. Sweat, unidentified moisture, the skin and clothing of other people, hair and bags contact your skin. As you dance around the small area you have claimed to maintain my balance whenever the bus lurches to a stop and starts back up again, you inevitably step on the toes of your P1 comrades, bump into body parts of people you’d rather not bump into – occasionally these people intentionally bump into you. Each time the bus stops, the breaks scream and whine at an incredible decibel, their voice cracking into two notes: a pathetic protest that they are still in use and need to be changed. You overhear conversations, today the two women in athletic gear gossiping about their friend who absolutely needs to see a psychologist, or the little girl who wants her father to take her to the aquarium, or the old woman lamenting the suicide of her son to anyone who will listen. Or the woman whose foot stuck in the door “ay mierda!” Visually speaking, P1 is a feast. People of all different ages, ethnic backgrounds, and stylistic persuasions present in one space, interacting. My favorite pastime on the bus is looking at people’s eyebrows. You can easily identify who is in high school, the boys especially, by their eyebrows. The hip trend right now among boys of this age is to tweeze the living hell out of your eyebrows until they are razor sharp and not a hair is out of place. They also shave the sides of their head and leave the middle long. I will never understand this. Outside the window, you see Vedado and Playa pass by, the gradual transition from wealthy old mansions to more modest dwellings, huge propaganda posters “Patria o Muerte!” and “La revolución es invincible!” etc. And finally for taste…hopefully you’re not tasting anything on the P1 bus line, or any bus line for that matter.