Cuba is Quirky

Few countries come colored by more expectations than Cuba. Still, I didn’t foresee the fishnet stockings on the airport security personnel. Nor the animal carcasses in the park—allegedly part of a ritual connected to the religion known as Santeria. There’s no telling what day two will bring!

Ten of us are here for a week to cycle in a few parts of the island—Bay of Pigs, Trinidad, Santa Clara, Viñales, and places in between. None of us knows much about this country. We signed up for this tour because we enjoyed each other’s company on previous trips together, on other islands.

As visitors with a guide, we’ll likely find it easy to navigate Cuba’s crumbling streets and dodge its classic cars. We have a support vehicle full of drinking water and spare innertubes. Comprehending what we see, though, may not be quite so simple. We come from near and far – U.S., Canada, Thailand, and Myanmar. 

Already I can tell that my Myanmar-tinted glasses dictate the way I look at Cuba. Trying to instantly create coherent stories about this place, I see colonial pasts, international sanctions, and human rights issues. Both countries surely provoke outsiders into strong reactions. Yet the parallels I’m hatching probably don’t mean what my snap judgments think they mean.

For example, the more we’ll learn about the Cuban state-run economy, the less we’ll likely understand it. Stopping for a rest in a small town this morning, we peeked into a ration shop that sells goods listed on the citizen ration card. Buyers pay for these goods in Cuban pesos (CUP), the national currency for everyone except tourists. At the end of the month, if the shop still stocks the item they want, Cubans can buy extra quantities of it by paying a slightly higher price than at the beginning of the month. 

If locals happen across some convertible currency (CUC), which is the only kind of money we tourists are allowed to spend, they can purchase premium goods at a premium price in the nearby CUC shop. (These products aren’t really so special—just a small cut above the basic essentials on offer in the ration store). In a third shop, which sells only fruit, a seller who wouldn’t have had the right to be in business ten years ago accepts either kind of money.

Not that people living here have money to spare, nor that people really do much of their business in shops. We’re told that salaries don’t come close to covering expenses, so that everyone “resolves” (takes the tiny little bit extra that “falls off the truck” when it happens to fall their way). Or, they get by with remittances from Florida or New Jersey (roughly one-fifth of the planet’s Cuban live in the U.S.). This will be a thought-provoking week.