The Conscious Traveler: Cuba

Cuba was insane! It was the most fun place I have been outside of New York and just like New York, in Havana and the cities around it they do not sleep. During the day there's an abundance of things to do and you can be in a small neighborhood of Havana and not do the same thing twice after being there for a week doing something new every day, let alone the entire city. Add the great fighters there that I got to train with. It was the perfect fit for me.

Cuba and the Cuban People

The architecture along the north western region of the island is among some of the most beautiful architecture I have ever seen in not only the Caribbean but pretty much any place I have ever been in my life. It feels like you are walking through a romance film or an old visually striking drama. The architecture is romantic and it reflects the attitude of Cubans. The lifestyle of Cubans and the Cuban environment are inseparable. One can not exist without the other. The apartment I stayed in had 14 foot high doors, a beautiful balcony and it utilized a fascinating indoor outdoor landscape. Yet, from what I could see that contradicts this is that pretty much every Cuban is over the old style and they wish the country would modernize, but people always want what others want. Me as an American with a soft spot for nostalgia and vintage aesthetics love the look and the lay of the land in Cuba, especially Havana. To the Cubans though, this is a reflection on how far behind they feel they are when it comes to the rest of the world.

Americans want what they have and they want what we have. The cars are mostly all from the 40s-60s and the Cuban people prove that old things are still reliable if you take care of them. This bleeds into many other things that Cubans have kept well and tight because the system in the country does not allow for many new things to be manufactured or imported. Also it is very apparent that they have free healthcare from the moment the plane lands. There are many small things that hint to it. Something small I saw for instance is the amount of people wearing glasses because they needed them and Cuba has made it extremely easy to receive eye care as compared to anywhere else I've been.

Everything about the country is beautiful, the people, the sensuality and the lifestyle. This is also when I started to realize how much young Dominicans have a choke hold on caribbean culture in the past couple years. You can tell the difference between someone dressing in classic Cuban style or having been influenced by the DR and the Dembow movement. The same thing is true for my time in Haiti and also in the Bahamas as well.

I have never been to a place that was overall so sexually free and forward thinking in their mindsets. The sexuality and lack of fear to live your truth flows through that country like no other place I have seen. I felt like I was witnessing true freedom. There is an obsession with liberation that can be seen within everyone. The funny thing about it is you have no idea where someone stands on the political line. Radically left or right are not like they are in the United States. One thing I have grown to realize is that what constitutes leftist or rightist is not the same in every country. I remember learning about the Ethiopian revolution and how freedom fighters fought for a world away from Socialism and wanted a more Capitalistic social economic system. More on that as it pertains to Cuba later.

The first Friend I made while in Cuba was my friend Zaydena. I was walking around Havana on the last pair of shoes that I had while traveling and they were getting beat to the ground. I needed a new pair and fast. I walked past this hotel and asked these two guys for some directions. They called out Zaydena, who apparently did the housekeeping at the hotel to not only help me with the directions to find new shoes but also walk with me to the store. Me and Z walked around for hours looking for a pair of shoes that were my size. We went all throughout Havana and old Havana, stopping at historic sites and notable places to go during my time in Havana. Seeing how this was my first day in Cuba I really appreciated the time she took to show me around. We went to the pier and ate popcorn and she put me onto the helado hombre, for what I think is the best ice cream sandwich I have ever had, strawberry ice cream sandwiched between two snickerdoodle crackers.

Nightlife 

Nightlife there was some of the best nightlife that I have been a part of only being topped by NYC and possibly Mexico City, IYKYK. I was pushing myself to the limit to wake up, explore, train, party. I can not emphasize enough that you can have a fun time 24/7 in Havana, but also in most of the north western part of the country.  The best venue I visited while there was “Factoria Habana”  which had a huge layout with many people playing all sorts of music you can think of. It was cute because you would get a golden ticket like in “Willy Wonka" and the bartender would stamp your ticket when you ordered drinks and you would just pay when you left.

I used to try and go to Factoria once a week or so. I used to go with another friend of mine who I still talk with once in a while, Osiel. Him and his boys are a really good group to go clubbing with and if they inserted themselves into NYC nightlife they would not miss a beat. I also got a chance to go with my friend Zaydena as well and a couple more times on my own.

If you simply step outside on any given day of the week people are dancing in the streets from dusk till dawn. Salsa up and down the streets and avenues till the early morning. There is a restaurant with a dance floor on every block. One time when me and Zaydena were walking we ran into an entire salsa and mambo festival. On another occasion I was able to see an old ancient Yarobba story told in the form of dance that brought me to tears. 

Another friend of mine I made while in Cuba was at this late 70s NYC “Ballroom” type of club that was down on Neptuno. There was this giant drag show that was going on and this angelic woman came up to me, Isabel, she was a black trans woman and she knew English. We watched the show and she told me that although Havana was a very liberating place, it was still hard because she was black (of course racism doesn’t escape any corner of the planet), but outside of that she had enjoyed life in Cuba and could not imagine leaving. At that moment, talking to her and being in a type of club that hasn’t existed in the US since the 80s/90s, I know ballroom still exists in nightlife in the US, but not on the level I saw there, I felt that I was encapsulated in a time freeze from 40 years ago. It made no difference if I was in 2023 at the time or 1983. I was in a smoking-friendly nightclub with a phone that doesn’t work in this country and the dj is playing “He’s the Greatest Dancer” by Sister Sledge.

Training while in Cuba

On my first day I went out to look for a good gym to train at. I was not going to miss out on some good ole cuban fighters to help develop my skill as a fighter. I stumbled upon this boxing gym where the coach was an olympic medalist and the whole neighborhood idolized the guy and once again I can’t remember someone's name. Anyway, I trained there for about a week till I got bored with boxing and wanted to go back to doing muay thai. I found this gym hidden within a woodshop. There I found an old man. I told him “ I see you got a gym here, can I train muay thai”. He tells me oh no, no, I have a guy you can train with. He writes a name and location down for me. He told me to be at that location at that time on that day. When the day and time comes I find myself in a field to the east. A skinny bald man walks in my direction with a bag of gear and proceeds to tell me we are gonna train in the field. For the next hour I proceed to get one of the worst ass beatings I have ever got from a trainer in my life. It ended with a bruised rib cage and bloody nose. It was a very good training session but training that hard every day is absolutely not worth it. After a few days of healing up I went back to the old man and told him I'm training there instead. 

I trained at his gym for the remainder of my time there. There was this guy named Adoni that I trained with. He was on the level of some of the greatest fighters I have seen but was stuck in a place that very rarely even hosts fights let alone enough for someone to catch a glimpse of how good he is. Training there is one of the dearest experiences I hold in my Muay Thai journey. 

On one of  my last nights of training in Cuba, I went to this park to train with a random guy from the gym. It started out pretty smooth, good technical boxing, but it ended horribly when I started to outbox the guy and he got angry and gave me an over hand and because of how old his gear was his knuckles almost tore through his glove and I ended up with a black eye and concussion. I can't imagine a better way to end my time in Cuba though.  

Healthcare in Cuba

You knew this part was coming from the dreadful “bad section” of my previous newsletters. Now, if you were okay with my takes on Haiti you still have a chance to hate me for my takes on Cuba. I want you to know that I was shocked by what I would witness and what I would hear from the countrymen. Also, my short experience there has left me to completely change my mind from what it was in America. A good place to start and explain my conclusion on Cuba is to go back to one night in Oakland 

I wasn’t deep into activism in Oakland, but one thing I did participate in a couple of times was jail support night. There was this woman, Nadja,  I was dating while in Oakland and she introduced me to this ,what I would call a, pretty radical space. I had been arrested before and I knew what it felt like to be released and feel completely alone with no idea on what to do next. One evening while at the Alameda jail house a nurse was also participating. She told a story of how great Cuba’s healthcare system was. She talked about it as if America should aspire to be just like it. She spoke so highly of it that you would think she had participated in some sort of volunteer work within the healthcare system there or maybe at least visited to see for herself. It is very common in leftist space in America to talk very highly of Cuba as if it is the pinnacle of what a country can be and you often hear them admire Cuba for its socialism. This was to the point of me believing it for myself and not even questioning anything about it.

I don't want to alarm you, but everything leftist and socialist spaces have praised about Cuba is a lie. Everything that was looked at as gold is actually shit. Yes, on the surface the healthcare system looks great, for instance everyone who needs glasses has glasses. You will soon find out that is the almost full extent of the healthcare system there. One thing while traveling I realized and I believe is that you can gauge how well a country's doing in the realm of healthcare by how many amputees you see. This is a good indicator on how many resources a country has to offer to its people and how likely you are to get access to medicines like penicillin. The higher the number of amputees the lower the amount of resources the country has to offer to its people, because if you do not have the right things to treat infections you have to cut off the part of the body the infection is, to stop it from spreading. In Cuba, especially Havana, you can see easily a half dozen or more people a day and not the same person twice that have lost a limb due to these circumstances. I, by some odd chance befriended two nurses and spent a few nights hanging out with one at the hospital and saw with my own eyes how bad and outdated everything is. It made me wonder why and how leftists in America  came to the conclusion that that system is an admirable one. The health education is magnificent. Students from around the world go there to study, but in practice it was by far the worst healthcare system I have ever seen.

Now a rebuttal I have grown to hear for this by my peers is that embargoes and sanctions put onto Cuba by America have led to the issues that you see in Cuba. Now there is a truth to this and I can not downplay America and its meddling in other countries affairs, but to say that is the main cause would be a slap in the face of the Cuban people. When they themselves would tell you that it is not only the embargos put onto Cuba, but also that Cuba decides to put most of its money into things that do not help the Cuban people, but instead the Cuban government puts most of its funds into things such as tourism and alcohol and tobacco. 

Government funding has left its people to starve

Next would be the abysmal food restrictions. In Cuba you have to get to the butcher shop or market early or your family will not eat for the day because the market will run dry. The government regulates how much each store can have and how much they can sell and it is not enough to feed the people at all. What good is money if there is nothing to buy. I first handedly ran into this problem daily. It does not stop at the store either, but also the restaurant as well. Restaurants as early as 1pm have run out of food to sell because the government did not supply them with enough. The irony of it is tourist centric things are abundant. Alcohol is EVERYWHERE cigars are everywhere and for some reason you can’t get food but desserts and sweets over-saturate the options of meals you can have and obviously a doughnut is not a meal and the more expensive tourist destination restaurants always have food, but the locals can not afford to patronize such establishments. This is directly linked to the government putting more importance into tourism and saying “too bad” to its people.

Leftists ideas about Cuba are a lie

I came to the conclusion that leftists have been living a lie almost no different than conservative right wing bigots. How could so many people praise a system so broken? It has become nothing more than identity politics. Now before you say I am wrong, I do believe in community accountability and the community as a whole keeping each other afloat, but after seeing what I saw in Cuba I look at the idea of trying to overhaul the social economic system into socialism as insignificant . Here is why. Do people really think before the government puts forward policy that they don’t figure out how to back door the people and make money off of the system or to screw the people in the end? Why do people think the government would convert any aspect of itself to become socialist before they figure out a way to have some sort of gain from it? I realized something. It does not mater, socialism outside of person to person is not a good thing its not a bad thing it’s simply just another system that the government can fuck you over with. Your problems change but they do not become better. I have thought about anarchy, but I don’t know. 

A Brief Contextualization on What I Believe 

I think some form of real radical anarchism and the constant questioning and changing of power that can be done on a small scale to help the people within that community is the way to go, but of course this is a fantasy for many reasons. For one, obviously people in power will not give up the system that got them the power to begin with, but also people have such a perverse idea of what anarchism can be. The words post-apocalypse and anarchy have for some reason become synonyms. People see “Mad-Max” and “Fallout- New Vegas” when they think of anarchy, but it does not have to be that way. In fact it is not that way, these are simply Hollywood dramatizations, but a world post capitalism or socialism or any other social economic system you want to insert is such a foreign idea that even me a person writing about it can’t really picture what it means because our entire lives are born in and around these systems. And to not participate is to choose death. If you don't go to work for that company you don’t make money and you need that money to buy food, if you don’t buy the food you die. It is like this in all facets of life. If the system is capitalist or socialist or anything else it doesn’t matter, the outcome is the same, if you don’t participate you die. I am tired of hearing leftist say “we really have never seen “real” socialism or communism” because we have and just because you don't like or agree with the outcome does not mean it was not real. Just because you look at a foreign country and admire a system that everyone in said country hates does not make it a good admirable system.

My suspicion of leftism being heavily “just be the opposite” of what the other side wants to do, just like conservatism is, started while I was in California. As a leftist the more I learn about leftism the more I find bullshit in it that is no different than the right. It is very abundant when you start to introduce white queer people who use their queerness to emphasize that they are not like other white people and how they are obsessed with being a “good” white and use their queerness to hide behind the fact that a lot of the shit they do or say is problematic or just flat out wrong. Because in leftist spaces for the most part we have concluded that the problems of the world have come from the colonization of said world by Europeans we have built up this “white man is the problem” narrative and white people in these spaces don’t want to be apart of the problem so they create a lot of their identity on being this version of “alt- white” or one of the “good ones''. This is not a call out to all white queer people, but for my readers in leftist spaces, how many times have you heard the white nonbinary guy equate his “struggle” with that of a black trans woman? For my black readers in leftist spaces how many times has a cis bi white woman told you she understands the struggle of being black in the United States because she too is targeted and in alot of ways she has it harder than a black man? 

I honestly know I am a leftist, but I don’t know If I can be for socialism as a social economic practice I do think it will be no different than what we have inaction now. I believe that socialism on a small scale especially before it reaches the macro organizational level is the truth (meaning from person to person within a community) I don’t know if that is neoliberal, someone told me it is but I don’t feel neoliberal and I know for most neoliberals it is a mask to be be conservative and bigoted without the title of it. I almost feel like there should be  another option that is not yet a social economic practice or even concept yet.

A Common Ugly I Have Seen Before

Lastly, the biggest and saddest thing for me in Cuba was the child sex trade. Sex tourism in Cuba was like I have never seen anywhere. The abundance of old European men going there to have sex with children is nightmare level bad. It had almost dystopian vibes. I would see them bartering with random children on the street that look as young as 13 trying to get the best prices for the evening. I remember one day while leaving the beach, Zayden and I saw a “deal” going down across the street and she looked at me and told me “what can you do? This is Cuba''. Just sitting here and remembering seeing all those old men there for the sole purpose of having relations with a child out in the open where everyone can see, is sickening.

Overview

 I noticed when people ask me where my favorite place is that I visited I am quick to say Cuba, but when asked why I pretty much have nothing good to say about Cuba. It is beautiful and the lifestyle of the people is lovely, but there is a lot of bad stuff going on there. I think it’s me subconsciously trying to tell someone that everything they aspire the US government to be is a lie and that whether capitalist or socialist the government will screw you over it does not matter. Nice place though 10/10 recommend.