Word: cubanism
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...wife would even adjust--she's too communist, he says, laughing. She would miss her friends and co-workers in Cuba too much. For her part, she told me when I visited her in Santa Clara that she always knew it would be this way: marrying a Cuban musician is like marrying a soldier or a doctor, she said. They're always on call; they're always overseas...
...afternoon with her is a long walk through the schizophrenia of the Cuban economy, still caught in the maw of the U.S. blockade and hampered by its own gross inefficiency. At an open-air market behind the capitol, mangoes, okra, guavas and limes are everywhere--and cheap. Good thing too because most Cubans earn from $15 to $25 a month and survive off the ration books that offer them sugar, rice, beans and (only for the elderly) cigars. But to get past subsistence, you need to shop at the air-conditioned hard-currency stores. That's where Damaris goes...
...vendors put pebbles in to drive up their margins. The mix today is about one part rocks, four parts beans. Damaris shrugs. "You wake up thinking about where to get breakfast, you eat breakfast thinking about where to get lunch, and on it goes," she says. "To be Cuban is to be tired...
However Cuba changes, there will be difficult times with its neighbor to the north. Even before the murderous enticement of Washington's wet-foot, dry-foot policy that rewards Cubans who survive the trip across the waters with citizenship (while denying many visa requests made through proper channels in Havana)--even before Fidel Castro--relationships have been uneasy between Cuba and the U.S., which essentially colonized the island after Spain left in 1898. There was the U.S. administrator who in the early 1900s announced plans to "whiten" the population. And the 1901 Platt Amendment, which helped carve the U.S. Naval...
Hanry (not a misspelling--just typically improvisational Cuban nomenclature) played the tres, a sort of Cuban mash-up between a lute and a guitar, in our band. He had his chance at being a foreigner, at least temporarily. It was the end of the band's last international tour, and he was offered a rich, steady gig in Munich. He says that only loyalty to the group brought him back home. But as soon as they got back, the band absconded to Mexico. Some say Hanry started drinking after that; he says he was just disgusted with the betrayals. Whatever...