Chapter 21: Moving again

Food situation sorted out, I settled into my new casa – in a beautiful old home with super high ceilings, a patio and a big bright window that let in an almost steady stream of diesel fumes from a pretty side street that also apparently doubled as an ad-hock bus terminal. I lamented a short while on my poor luck with housing choices but decided to stick it out and accept the foibles as all being part of an authentic taste of Cuba. In my new casa – there were three generations of family living in the house –a couple in their 70-80s who owned the house –their daughter (who managed to room rentals) and their daughter’s daughter who lived upstairs with her fiancé. Occasionally a fourth generation (consisting of a 5 year old boy) popped in for babysitting and a 70 something year old substantial black woman –who always dressed in white and wore a rosary or two around her neck and all kinds of other religious jewelry - who was “like a sister” to the home owners, came over every day from across town to help with stuff around the house.

The lady of the house Carey and her “sister”/housekeeper Faila turned out to be great company. We spent a great deal of time in their kitchen together since I was cooking for myself and they were cooking for themselves. I asked Carey if she minded having foreigners around her house all the time and she said it didn’t bother her, but that it was a necessity and that you really don’t get any privacy. Then I asked her if she minded sharing her kitchen, and she said that guests almost never cook for themselves and she didn’t mind once in a while. So from then on I tried to be a bit more of a ghost in the kitchen, which can be a challenge when you are on a similar eating schedule, but we were on pretty friendly terms after a day or two and everything felt a-ok.

In all this time I managed to do nothing much at all with my time in Havana. I took a dance class, and took in an outdoor afro-Cuban music and dance performance which was amazingly cool – first with an hour of afro-Cuban traditional type dance with costumes and all, then an intermission, then all the traditional dancers and musicians came out in street clothes, complete with bling and sunglasses and alligator shoes and treated us to about 2 hours of Rumba performance – by the last half hour of the show, all the locals in the audience (about 90% of the people) were out on the floor rumbaing themselves – so the traditional folk performance somehow morphed into a giant dance party. I did a lot of waking around the Vedado area (where I was living) which is full of amazingly cool buildings, ice-cream shops, movie theaters, food markets and other cultural type things – but which is not the central attraction of this city by any means.

Traditonal Afro Cuban Dance Performance

Pimped out afrocuban rumba performance

Afrocubans having dance party following the traditional afrocuban dance performance - they definitely know how to move in Cuba

Me and John Lennon

Copellia icecream parlor - though parlor is absolutely not the right word - more like icecream complex - this is only about 1/100th of the seating capacity.

heading upstairs for more icecream at Copelia

an artistic photo of some weeds infront of the ocean

Fancy hotel in Vedado neighborhood

Patriotic photo of cuban flag from the grounds of the fancy Vedado hotel.

view of the Malecon from the top of one of the less swanky hotels in town

Inside the courtyard of a building at the University of Havana in Vedado

I took several excursions to the big agromercado which is always bustling with people and all manner of fruit and veg and beans and snacky things. I scoped out some of the cool fancy hotels with their various period type décor – I snuck up to the top of one and landed on a deserted executive floor with a balcony giving an excellent lofty view of the city. I wandered the Malecon – the seawall/highway that runs the length of the city. I cooked quite a lot – and I spent a LOT of time in the lobby of the swank Melia Cohiba Hotel down the road from my casa – using the internet and trying to wrap my head around how I was going to deal with the fact that I’d just been laid off from the job I thought I was coming home to.

I found this out on the very day that I discovered the ability to freely connect to the internet unhindered by a 10 year old computer running only internet explorer - one minute I was filled with the joy of being able to connect with the outside world, and the next I was filled with a kind of dull shock at reading that I was no longer going home to an assured income – so this put a little jar in my plans and stacked atop of a few days of enduring a few too many cat calls, I made up my mind to head for my homeland a little earlier than planned. But I wasn’t about to leave then and there, especially since my parents had decided to come down to Cuba the following week, so I decided to leave the day after my parents and take a week long stopover in Toronto from whence I would go to Montreal for a week and then return home.