In Cuba, lunch comes in boxes

HAVANA, Cuba — I had done my research. I was ready for the old cars and I was ready for the Communism.

I expected crumbling buildings, cigars, indecipherable Caribbean accents, lots of Che, whistling and calls of chinita, or little Chinese girl, on the streets.

The giant billboards with Viva la Revolucion, or "the revolution lives," sprawled across them did not surprise me. Nor, really, did the ones depicting Bush’s face with some form of the word “TERRORISMO,” or terrorism.

When I saw little rum-boxes next to pineapple juice boxes in the store, I was amused, but not shocked. This was, after all, Cuba.

What I had not expected was precisely this: my unsurprise. I was prepared to be blown off my feet, to be filled with awe and wonder at every corner. I was not — certainly not for the lack of awesome and wonderful things, but rather, because these very things presented themselves to me with such an extraordinary ordinariness.

The surrealism finally sunk in at the end of my first week, while on the road from Havana to a weekend in the tobacco farmland of Vinales. I was cruising down the highway in the backseat of a maquina, a muscle car from the 1950s that must have been luxurious at one point, but was long past its heyday.

By now, the handles and the back of the front seat had long disappeared, and the bumpers looked very close to falling off, as well. The robin-blue paint was chipped, and there were some very uncomfortable loose springs in the backseat.

A little in front of us, the sparkling purple and white Bel-Air, (super souped-up because the driver had relatives in Miami), containing the rest of the group sped past a horse-drawn cart. A few minutes later, a packed, modern Metrobus imported from China drove by. Once in a while we would see army-green vehicles that looked like old military gear transformed into bizarre minibuses zoom by, completely repleto — filled.

I realized that though it did not feel so, everything that was happening around me was rather unusual. After all, this was not a Disney World ride. The horse carts, the old cars, the army vehicles were not put on the same highway for decoration or entertainment, but for economic necessity.

In Cuba, the lack of sufficient resources extends very tangibly into the transportation sector, thus, all things that effectively move and hold people are used for that purpose. The amalgamation of different vehicles is novel for a foreigner, but for Cubans it is no more than resolviendo — making things work.

More than resolviendo, however, Cubans know how to have fun. This became evident when our drivers (two, who alternated) sucked down their rum boxes while dancing to the "Charanga Habanera" blasting from the radio.

My statistical chance of death was so high by then that I had a hard time enjoying the music: There I was, sitting in a 50-year-old car literally on the verge of falling apart, driving at top speed through mountainous potholed roads, with drunken drivers shimmying at the wheel.

To top it all off, the driver kept on turning around, (note: taking his eyes completely off the road), laughing, to tell us to stop worrying. 

Of course, neither of the two times the police stopped us that weekend had anything to do with rum, while both had everything to do with us, the passengers. The first police check, the officer took one look inside the car, saw my Asian face, and asked the drivers to get out and show their IDs.

Cars that are not officially licensed (Cubataxi, Panataxi and touristy Cocotaxis) are not allowed take foreign passengers, and ones that do are heavily fined, usually many times a Cuban’s monthly salary. However, many people risk it for the extra money.

My race and our non-Cuban accents immediately gave us away. The drivers got out of the car with ‘oh-shit’ looks and started conversing rapidly with the officer. After a few minutes of nervous waiting, they came back with two girls, happy.

The girls squished into the back seat with us, one sitting on top of the other, and we drove away. Our drivers had worked out a deal with the policeman to give his girlfriend and her friend a ride to the beach, where we were headed, in exchange for overlooking the china, or Chinese girl, in the backseat. The second time we were stopped, the drivers were buddies with the officer, so everything was OK.

Miraculously, we got to the beach unscathed. I kicked off my shoes on the warm white sand and thought I could get used to living in the Caribbean. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw our drivers buying more rum.

I ran into the clear sparkling water that was warmer than any ocean I’d ever felt, and looked into the endless blue. Somewhere out there was Miami, less than 100 miles away, but a different world.

This report comes from a journalist in our Student Correspondent Corps, a GlobalPost project training the next generation of foreign correspondents while they study abroad.