Vacation or a class? By Kim Parker

Travelling with young college students like I work with every day?

Really? I’m going to have to get a passport…

 
All these thoughts travelled through my head as I was gearing up to get ready to travel to Cuba. I was the senior, non-traditional (AKA older) student by almost 20 years in the group. Honestly, I did not mentally commit to going until about three weeks before I left.

What really weighed on my mind was, Can I do this? Not, Do I have the skills to do this? But, Do I really want to do this? Had I really become that attached to my conveniences and very organized life?

Well, apparently I had. It took a bit of soul searching to mentally prepare to go. I had travelled overseas before; actually, I had lived overseas for years, but when I was the same age (and younger) as most of the students in the group. I had tolerated other cultures; some I even relished. But it had been…

Thirty years (closer to forty, if I were truthful). I mean, this is my

vacation. Would I enjoy this? I mean, really enjoy it?

We landed in Havana on Saturday and it was cloudy and rainy on approach. Looking out the window, I remember thinking how agricultural it all looked. I mean, we were approaching Cuba’s largest city, but sometimes airports are on the outskirts of the city boundaries. We landed, got our bags, and loaded up. Then we unloaded, then reloaded luggage and us. We fit, finally…

As we passed through the neighborhoods toward the old part of Havana, I was struck by the lack of commercial advertising and billboard, if they did exist, often had messages of solidarity and seemed to hold only one governmental voice. A strange experience, I assure you. As I tried to translate them, reading them, the slogans made little sense to me. No, I could lexically translate the sentence and come up with a meaning, but it did not resonate with my Anglo-American understanding.

And that become the theme of the trip! I loved exploring things, seeing the sights, marveling over the well-kept chassis of classic cars and trying to speak to anyone willing to talk to me in my broken Spanish. The group spoke mostly English, but maybe that was just to help me be understood. When folks talked amongst themselves in Spanish, I often got lost. I could figure out what they were talking about, just not what they were really saying.

I got about half of it. And I think that was approximately the amount of understanding I gained of the culture of Cuba, rich with depth and history and struggles of its own, full of artists and musicians and poets expressing their messages in the only avenue left to them, in ambiguity and intrigue. Every time I tried to apply my frame of reference—to find similarities—I was invariably left wanting. I just didn’t have the background to share experiences. I would probably need to live there for quite a time to relate well.

Nowhere did this “getting half of it” show up more than in poetry translation in Matanzas, a city about two hours from Havana by bus. Isis Campos and I were translating the poetry of Laura Ruíz Montes. One of her poems, Cismas y secesiones, provides a possible vista of US history that is not quite right, the experience someone who wasn’t native to our culture might have. You can see familiar names and terms in the poem; those of Hopkins and Dickinson. You can probably translate the Thirteen Colonies and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. However, when I applied my own lens, the pieces of the poem didn’t fit, and I wrestled with this translation more than any other.

But what I did find were the following contrasts. Where the US emphasizes individuality, Cuba stresses community. Whether or not Cubans agreed with the politics, there wasn’t much they could say about it overtly. The US is free to litter Facebook with political opinions with impunity. Professional education in Cuba did not equate with higher-paying salaries as it often does in the US. Tourism, typically a lower-paying career in the US, wins out in Cuba as an opportunity to make a better salary. US folks fail to line up to live on tips.

The practice of one’s faith seems to also have striking contrasts. In the US, we have a church marketplace complete with marketing and advertising. If you don’t like your church, you just change it. If part of your group does not like how things are going, you just split off into a new organization, ironically, often with the same fell as the old church but you have a distinct name. In Cuba, mestiza is the theme, mixing the old with the new but preserving aspects that would drown in the US homogeny of the dominant church culture.

 

In Texas, they all look like Southern Baptist churches. In the New England, worshippers attend traditional liturgical organizations weekly, be they Christian, Jew, or Muslim. However, in that mestizaje, Santeria blends dominant Spanish Catholic culture with Afro-Caribbean polytheistic worship to create a spirituality where few would feel unwelcome.  

There were also some striking similarities. Whether or not Cubans had other choices about how they conduct their lives, they appeared to muddle through or even thrive. Quality of life appeared to scale with economic resources.

So you may wonder, Did she enjoy the trip? Of course I did! Who wouldn’t love great food, good company, wonderful art, fun activities, and great sites to see. I relaxed in the resort in Varadero, walked the beach and took pictures of the sunset. I stayed in very comfortable bed and breakfasts, spoke with great people, practiced my Spanish, and rested well. Yes, it was a vacation. Yes, I attended a class too. I went castle crawling, club hopping (just once), and danced in worship. It was fun!

So if you are older (or not), travel abroad while the opportunities are available. Even after many years of living overseas, I found myself applying my experience when I encountered something new. In that, it was unique. Not because I had not traveled to a country with limited resources before; I had lived in Madagascar and Saudi Arabia. But because this voyage came up after living a great deal.

Go. See. Enjoy. Speak. Learn. Be.