While I agree with what you write, you can’t be too hard on Oso. As you know, Cuba is a touchy subject with liberals. In fact, Cuba is such a divisive subject between liberals and conservatives (…and libertarians) that I think you can pretty accurately stereotype someone’s whole political, especially economical, worldview just on one simple question, “What is your view of Cuba’s economic and political situation”?. Of course liberals are going to see Cuba much more favorably than conservatives, and conservatives much less favorably than liberals, it’s all rooted in fundamental philosophy differences (partly explained here). It’s what makes Oso a lefty and me and you righties.

Oso,

Cuba is touchy, you just might spark off an economic discussion that you might not have wanted to start this early.

Btw, you know I’m just talking shit, there is no way I’m going to talk shit about you (liberals yes, but not you). You know you my boy dawg, I just like to give you a hard time.

Oh yeah, about The Game, you hear he is fighting with 50 cent now? So of course this means the West Coast vs. East Coast feuds are back on….West SEAAAAHH FOO LIIIEEAAA MY NIAAA…Gotta stay true to my Compton roots!!!8)

I obviously offended you and really didn’t mean to. I corrected the bit about conversational spanish above and if there are any other parts you think I should edit, please let me know. I really hope that anyone who reads through this and judges what you wrote at all 1.) reads through your entire series 2.) visits Cuba for themselves.

I had no idea your Spanish was so good. Part of what threw me off is just how well you translate to English. Most people when translating Spanish into English tend to keep much of the same Spanish structure, but you do well converting it to nuanced English speech.

I’ve gotta go pick up Abogado at the airport, but I’ll respond to all your points sometime soon. Safe travels my man.

And sadly, many of your assumptions are wrong. That’s not fair and truthfully I expected more.

First off:

“It doesn’t seem like he or his wife speak conversational Spanish…”

…and you go on to say how this severly limited our exposure to the real Cubans. Why would you assume that I don´t speak Spanish? I’d say 98% of the conversations you read on my site took place in Spanish. You might want to correct that above in case people don’t make it down to this comment.

You are right when you say that an experience would be severely limited in Cuba without being able to have a conversation in Spanish. The pieces of conversation that we quote are translated to English on our site so folks back home can understand it. To me, it goes without saying, but nonetheless, if you had any doubts you could have easily asked me before posting.

I lived in Spain for nearly a year, and while I didn´t attend a great deal of language school there, you pick it up pretty quick living with a Spaniard, training in boxing gyms that had previously never seen an American walk thorugh their doors, and working landscaping with two guys who didn´t speak a lick of English (you pick up some Catalan too).

My wife lived in Spain for 5 months as well. We´re both currently doing some brush up courses in Guanajuato that I wish I could have taken before our trip to Cuba. Alas, the U.S. govt would only let us spend money in Cuba until July 15th, the day our licenses expired, so we had to push the trip forward. So while our Spanish was a little rusty, it was better than conversational. If you want references let me know .

Second:

“…they stayed in a government designated hotel near the Malecon and removed from residential neighborhoods…”

You are right. We did. But we also spent time in a suburb of Havana, Zona Playa, with a Cuban couple and various neighbors during the last few days of our trip (as you should know from our final entries). It was, in fact, a very different experience. The families we talked with in this area had a very different take on Cuba than others and undoubtedly lived a better life. Some went so far as to tell us that we shouldn’t listen to the government, nor the poorer people in the center of Havana, but instead to them as they can see both sides. I’m going to be writing more on this but haven’t yet had time. Still, our stay was not confined to a government hotel off the Malecon where we merely drank mojitos with other tourists.

You’re also absolutely right that we didn’t travel outside of Havana. Hurricane Dennis threw a monkey wrench in any plans we had to see other parts of the country. Still, I tried to report what I saw. I’ll be interested in your take of the surrounding cities, and compare that to what people in Havana had to say about the surrounding areas.

Third:

You “had a beef” with one of my statements about Cuba reminding me of a fascist state, but you lift the quote out of context. An experience from the prior day is what made this comparison seem valid as well as others. Here is an exerpt of what you left out:

At this same time [we were eating dinner in a restaurant and watching Fidel on TV] we noticed that three Cuban men about our age were handing over their IDs to a policeman directly outside the restaurant. They looked scared as they were being searched by the policeman. Three undercover cops, who had helped to arrest them chatted amongst themselves and occasionally helped with the interrogation. One of the policeman even had a video camera like he was a tourist, so I suspected that they had approached him. We watched in a depressed and helpless state as a grey van pulled up and put the three young men in and pulled off. The other patrons of the restaurant watched in shock, but no one could do anything.

Five minutes before they were hauled off, our guide from earlier in the day came to the window of the restaurant as they were about to give us our bill. We made eye contact, he gave us a quick nod, and then walked off. A few minutes after the van left and the police had left the corner we walked out onto the street.

Yes, as you note, Mexico has it’s own problems with the police which I have also experienced. But watching three young guys randomly detained and thrown into a grey police van for the crime of talking to a tourist was a new experience for me. I’ve also never been in a country where I’ve seen so many nationals stopped and asked for identification. We saw it happen all the time in Cuba. Again, Mexico has many problems with it’s policeforce, but so far with stops in Baja, Hermasillo, Navajoa, Los Mochis, Mazatlan, Guadalajara, and Guanajuato, from my point of view, there is no comparison with Havana.

Maybe you had a different experience while in the city. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Finally, as a disclaimer (and as I’m sure you know), you can’t fit every conversation and experience you have in a day into a 2000 word post. It’s just impossible. I’ve tried to cover a good deal to give people an idea of what we saw.

But I seriously debated even putting it up as I thought people might pick apart my rough notes on any given day to try to discredit what we had experienced. It would be easy to do as these notes were written daily and barely altered afterwards. We definitly learned a lot during the trip about Cuba and view it differently now than we did the first day after we left that paladar. Really, these posts only scratch the surface.

Anyway, I’ll definitely read your soon to be published posts on Cuba but this will probably be my last comment for awhile. I’m already behind on a lot of writing I want to get done, so I’m going to bow out of this one.

Have a good one…

EM,

I think informing other tourists in a supportive way of what they can do to decrease tourism’s negative impact and increase it’s positive is really helpful and that there needs to be more of it. Jorge’s got two great blogs – one in Spanish and the other in English – about tourism’s impact on Latin America. And yes …you can love the bobbo. We all do.

EMC,

You somehow managed to say everything I had wanted to in just three paragraphs. It’s so important to be able to view a person, place, and thing from multiple perspectives and understand why they differ. Especially ouselves. And I think Texas is actually a good example because, like Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia, it’s a place easy to misjudge from others’ stories and jokes before actually going there. So more than anything, I’m saying that everyone should travel to Cuba and see for themselves. Seriously … like next month.

HP,

You puttin the horns on me baby boo?

e,

So nice to hear from you again. Unfortunately, Cuba won’t be Cuba in 20 years.

CN,

I’m bound to get this story wrong so Abogado will have to correct me, but when we went to Istanbul a couple years ago we met a girl (something Thorn Tree doesn’t teach you how to do) working in the travel agency in our hostel. She asked us how we found out about the hostel we were staying at and Abogado tells her he was on ThornTree and saw some people recommending it. She said, yeah, those people were her. But I agree, if you’re intuitive enough to weed out the bullshit, it’s actually a helpful resource.

TS,

I felt extremely, extremely safe in Cuba. Some of the nicest people in the world and I’m not one to say that about the people of every country I visit (like Mexico and Peru for example)

Bobbo,

พัฒน์พงษ.

Cindylu,

I try to avoid what HP recommends to me too (The Game, for example), but that book he loaned me actually isn’t that bad. I’d give the Cuba series a try.

xolo,

While I recognize many of the problems associated with tourism, I still think it is better for people to be exposed, even if it is in a trivial way, to other cultures than not to be exposed at all…

I agree completely. Something I learned from our trip to SE Asia last fall too was that reading blogs from the country your traveling in really gives you a much much better understanding and experience. Also, I really don’t get why the U.S. doesn’t allow tourists to travel to Cuba. If more lefty Americans saw the restrictions on freedom in Cuba, they’d probably mellow out with their Socialism quite a bit. And if more Cubans saw our neat little toys (my iPod was such the hit), they’d start demanding more reforms. Like they say, “Russians didn’t want Capitalism, they wanted Levi’s.”

Julissa,

I am also completely guilty of not reading up on indigenous groups of Northern Mexico. I’ve photocopied a few essays, but they’re just laying around. Zacatecas is such a beautiful city.

Moreno,

I like your new name.

One of my fellow anthropologist friends did her dissertation research in Cuba. It was great hearing her stories – both good and bad. Not that we anthropologist can shed all our layers of ideology and bias, but I think we do get to see more than what the typical toursit gets exposed to (in our jargon: Cultural Intimacy).

People always tell me how lucky/fortunate/wonderful it is that I have done research in Italy. My response is always, “It is a nice place to visit…”

While I recognize many of the problems associated with tourism, I still think it is better for people to be exposed, even if it is in a trivial way, to other cultures than not to be exposed at all…

I still haven’t read Peter and Emily’s account of their trip in Cuba. Perhaps it’s because HP recommended I read and most of what HP recommends I completely ignore.

I realized when I was in Mazatlán that I didn’t interact with any locals and just stuck with the people I knew, my cousin, his wife, his son, and his mother-in-law. Now, I could make the arguement that the wife and mother-in-law were locals, but I still didn’t branch out. I’ve become one of those US travellers who sticks with the comfortable. Even if I did meet someone like the Mexican dancer you met, I’d still be too shy to talk to her friends (my cousins in Guanajuato thought I was really, really shy).

Anyway, I’m glad you’ve finally gotten around to posting the Cuba journals.