NOCHE DE CUBA
Cuba was elusive in the early 90's.
Isolated on an island just a stone's throw away, I plotted and schemed to see this mysterious place. But going there would mean ire from the US embassy and a sure boot out of my job as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic.
I snuck into coup-riddled Haiti instead.
Seven years later - the itch still strong - I found another route into my dream and was introduced to Havana by the slivers of a taxicab's headlight glancing off the beauty of Spanish colonial facades in lampless, inky black streets.
The culture seemed so true to my beloved Dominican home, save for schoolchildren by the thousands marching in waves of red, white and blue to the chant of "Cuba si! Yanki no!" on a hot, hot May Day celebration.
Havana made me think of a ghost town. Peopled, yes, but buildings made for another purpose - glamour, nightlife, gambling, culture. People now live in "barbacoas" - makeshift second stories added to high-ceilinged colonial structures in the old city and named for the heat-like-an-oven spaces tenant families need to endure.
In the fields of tobacco and sugar a singularly familiar sight of machetes and mules, sweat-smeared brows and smiling faces. Joviality amidst poverty is a dichotomous thing to witness. But it is there in the Caribbean, in the faces of Aida who kept house at La Ursula or the boys who kept the drums beating at all-night voodoo quests.