sweet havana gust

So last night Rodney brought two magazines with articles written by students who came on the program last year. One of them wrote about meeting a barber on the street and how he called his wife fat and ugly (que surpresa!) and the other one was about an evening with Ernesto on his motorcycle.

Now, being the new critical and horrible person I am, I had a few problems with the second article. For one thing, Ernesto doesn’t own a motorcycle. Secondly, she kept describing the “warm, Caribbean breeze” she felt when riding the supposed means of transportation.

As long as I’ve been in Havana, there has not been, nor do I think there will be, a “warm, Caribbean breeze.”

There is exhaust. There is pollution. There is the smell of death…dead carcasses to be exact.

I have felt no “warm, Caribbean breeze” on my walks down calle 23.

But today as I was walking to the Habana Libre to work on my papers, a woman asked in Spanish if I knew where the Farmacía was. “No, no se. Pero hay un hospital cerca de la Universidad. Lo siento! Suerte!”

It was at that moment, I felt the supposed “warm, Caribbean breeze.”

It didn’t matter that a maquina drove by, most likely contaminating my lungs with its 1957 exhaust; I breathed it in anyhow and did a little dance in my detergent-stained blue birthday dress. If someone had enough confidence in my Spanish speaking abilities to ask me a question and expect an answer, then I sure as hell have no excuse not to have the same confidence in myself.

The thing about expectations in Cuba is that this country will surely meet every expectation you never had. If you expect nothing, you get everything.

And despite my dead goat count, dead pig count and sacrificed chicken count, I feel like you have the choice to wake up here and say, “Today I will chose to smell death or feel a warm breeze.”

And I sure as hell hope a maquina drives by and blows exhaust in my face as I choose to feel that sweet, sweet Havana gust.