Thomas A. Shakely

It’s now been two weeks since I returned from my nine day trip to Cuba. I’ve purposefully avoided writing about the island and my experiences until now. One of my greatest fears had to do with the necessary boiling down that conveyance of a thing like an alien land demands — especially one of which most Americans know very little about.

But it’s time to begin. I stayed there for nine days, and traveled there legally as a journalist. I’m working on an article or two that I’ll link to here once they’re online, but for now I’m posting some of my thoughts on Cuba, her people, infrastructure, services, and state of life.

The following is part basic impressions, part blow-by-blow description, and part diary.

The Capitolio was built in the 1920s, modeled after the U.S. Capitol, and housed the Cuban Senate and House of Representatives.

Havana

You’ll find plenty of neo-classical and art deco architecture in the capital city, and much of the city’s design is Spanish-influenced. Like much of the island, Havana has seen better days. For every building in decent repair, there are five more in very poor shape. You’ll find yourself amidst mediocre main road ways, poor alleys, dysfunctional sidewalks (often with open pipe holes, or large chunks of concrete missing), all surrounded by a generally crumbling city.

Much is made of various restoration projects going on in Havana, some funded by outside entities or governments, like the European Union. But one gets the sense of a band-aid being applied to a gunshot wound.

What I found striking about Havana was that the material poverty of the Cuban people seemed somehow more heinous here — thanks to the shadow of a once functioning city — than I imagine it feeling in a nation that has never known proper civilization.

The average Cuban earns between $15-20 per month, which is worse than many African nations. But the city is evidence of a nation that once commanded industry and wealth — little of its architecture or infrastructure would have otherwise been built — and so Havana is in many ways a bittersweet experience, for the Cuban people are truly a Christian people, but the opportunity possible for them is … limited.

Havana is home to some 2.5 million, but lacking in even a single hardware store. I don’t mean to convey a sense of the city as anything other than grand, surreal, and humbling, but the lasting impression of Havana to me is a place of great potential, a once great past, and of extreme present dysfunction.

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From the journal of a traveler who spent 17 months living off the land and with the people of Africa, and 5 years abroad, an excerpt about what it has been like for him coming back to America:

these are the sentiments you are supposed to experience when you come back from africa. reverse culture shock: economic shock. the change from poverty to wealth, i was told, is harder than the other way around, than adjusting to the difficulties and trials of life in africa. you return only to feel the people you left behind are somehow more real, more deserving of the good things we have than we are, we who so thoughtlessly have them each day and night.

that’s what you feel when you come back from africa. reverse culture shock. do i? no.

…

in part it’s been like winters in south dakota, winters where no one wants to be outdoors, out of heating, but at times you must. and at those times no matter how much you bundle up, you are going to get cold. and you are going to curse the cold and wish you were back inside and generally be fairly uncomfortable for a time. and then, at some point, you’ll have been cold for so long that it becomes the normal state of being, and while it’s still deplorable, it’s not really on the front burner of your mind, and you go on doing the rest of whatever it is you need to do outside, still remembering somewhere how nice it will be to go indoors.

and then you do, and that’s what coming back from africa has been like for me. not a culture shock–this is where i grew up, after all, and being from somewhere is a little like riding a bicycle, though if you spend long enough away it’s bound to be a little unfamiliar. you don’t forget your home. what you do forget–or what you maybe never noticed–is how nice it is to be home, like you notice it coming indoors after a half hour or more outside in the snow and wind: how nice it is to take off your coat, your shoes, shiver a little bit as the cold air shakes out of your hair and you get warm again, comfortable.

coming back to america has been a little like that for me.

Despite having never yet sailed, and having only experienced the Virgin Islands rather cursorily over the course of a week’s stay, the late William F. Buckley, Jr. managed to pull me out of life and into it’s living with his celebration of sailing, Atlantic High, first published in 1982.

For the ardent traveler, the book constitutes required reading. The following is an excerpted passage that crystallizes beautifully and viscerally the joys of shared kinship; that bonhomie, that sort of adventurist ecstasy that one feels upon the start of a new journey.

For full effect, enjoy this slowly and delicately.

The wine was poured, we were on course. The wind was from the east at about twelve knots. The sun was sinking, over there to the left, in the general direction of Puerto Rico. Suddenly the babbling stopped, almost as if we had all been following the instructions of an orchestra leader; we heard only the lap-lap of the waves, patting firmly the headstrong hull of our ketch, white-gold in the falling light, the surrounding water turned now a viridian blue, oddly diaphanous, St. Thomas receding astern. No one spoke.

It is a period, I have found, that almost always comes, choosing its own rhythmic moment – the moment when, collectively, everyone on board recognizes that a journey has truly begun. Up there, toward which we are pointing, a thousand miles away, is a tiny little coral island. The object is to reach it, to arrive there without injury to ourselves or to our vessel. No one formally proposed a toast, but looking about – at Tony, with his floppy white hat so carefully tilted to shield his sun-sensitive face from those final ultraviolet shafts; at Dick with his jaunty captain’s hat, reluctantly putting on his shirt as he yielded to the demands of lowering temperature; Van, hatless, with his light blue crew-necked sweater, squinting at that morning’s New York Times, glass in hand; Reggie carefully screwing back the holding flange on the speedometer; Christopher, snapping away with an anfractuous photographic apparatus at the setting sun – I guess that we were all thinking related thoughts.

….

Related: While aboard that voyage on the ketch Sealestial in 1979, WFB wrote for Esquire a piece on Heaven, which is both refreshing and witty. Unfortunately, it seems to have never made the transition online. You can find the essay on p. 123 of Atlantic High.