100 Places in Cuba Every Woman Should Go. Conner Gorry

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100 Places in Cuba Every Woman Should Go - Conner  Gorry

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in our passive/aggressive, PC world—invigorating even—but can be frustrating to the point of tears as well, believe me. Sometimes I’m loving and hating this place at the same time.

      My Spanish was pretty shoddy when I arrived in Havana on a hotter-than-Hades afternoon in 1993 to volunteer alongside Cubans in the countryside, and I didn’t speak a word of Cuban—a Spanish vernacular unto itself. Slowly, like a five-year old learning the alphabet and butchering basic rules of grammar, I started to drop the final letters of words and incorporate the Spanglish peculiar to this island, which has been occupied militarily, culturally, and politically to some degree by the USA for centuries. Take language, for instance. Here, laundry detergent is called “Fa,” for Fab, the brand favored by Cuban housewives before the Revolution; a double in baseball is a “two base” (pronounced “tu bay”); and a beer is universally called a “lager.” Facebook, meanwhile, which is taking the island by storm, is known as “Feisbu.” Another peculiarity of the Cuban idiom is the liberal use of terms and phrases that traveled with the 1.3 million slaves forced to these shores from Nigeria, Angola, Benin, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and elsewhere; by 1841, almost 45 percent of the island’s population were enslaved blacks, complemented by another 10 percent of free blacks. A day won’t pass without you hearing “Asere! qué bolá?!” in the streets, a phrase with African roots. The equivalent of “Hey man! What’s up?,” Cubans went wild when President Obama threw it out during his historic visit to the island in March 2016.

      It’s not only the local lingo that can drive you loco. The two currency system is maddening at first but becomes second nature after a little practice—and is a great way to jump into daily life here; when you see a pineapple costs $10, that’s moneda nacional, also known as MN, pesos cubanos, and CUP (four interchangeable names for one currency; talk about confusing!). The other money, the so-called hard currency, is the Convertible Cuban Peso and has even more monikers: CUC, “kooks,” divisa, fula, caña. Many people, yours truly included, still refer to CUCs as dollars—a holdover from when USD was the hard currency used here. Plans to unify the CUC and CUP, announced more than six years ago, have yet to be realized and seem a long way off given Cuba’s perennial economic crisis. Until the ship can be righted and the currencies united, that 10 CUP pineapple costs about 35 cents CUC at the official exchange rate. Transportation is another realm wrought with frustration since schedules for local bus departures and routes are non-existent, long-distance bus tickets must be bought in person and often sell out, train travel is only for hardy folk with time to burn, and planes on domestic routes are often grounded or re-routed due to mechanical problems. Nevertheless, when you approach a Cuba trip with good will and humor, remain open to serendipity—a very real and useful travel tool here—and embrace the classic axiom, “It’s the journey, not the destination,” you’re sure to have transformative, perhaps even transcendental experiences.

      Two recent encounters drove this home and to the heart. On a brilliant sunny Havana day, Olivia walked up to me and two Cuban friends outside the arrivals area of José Martí International Airport. Traveling solo and carrying one small knapsack and a body full of tattoos, she asked if we’d be willing to share a taxi into the city center. Traveling alone, light, and on a budget, willing to approach strangers with a question and offer: Olivia was my kind of traveler. We said we would take her ourselves, but had arrived by motorcycle with sidecar and were full up. Sin problema, we told the young woman from New Orleans who had only a single hour of Cuba experience under her belt, no map or Spanish, and nowhere to stay: we’d help her figure it out. While my friend Ana got on her cell and rang up her casa particular contacts, José approached a fellow in a mint sky blue 1956 Chevrolet, asking if he was looking for a fare. Within 15 minutes, Olivia had a cheap, cool ride directly to an affordable, centrally located home where the English-speaking hosts awaited her with a frosty lager. We ran into her later that week and she told us she was having the trip of a lifetime; her story may have turned out differently were it not for her moxie.

      Shortly thereafter I met Jim, Blake, Kevin, and Jeff, four bros from New York who came to Havana on a quick whim of a trip. On Day 2, Kevin tumbled into the sea after slipping on the moss-slickened rocks at the Morro-Cabaña. He surfaced quickly, holding his iPhone above the water as his friends fished him out. They made their way back to their casa and began hunting for raw rice in which to plunge the phone overnight in an effort to salvage it—a trick that works, I’ve found. Night had fallen by this time; they didn’t know where to buy rice and no stores (let alone bodegas, where most Cubans get their rice) were open. The quartet popped into a restaurant and in broken Spanish asked one of the waiters if he would sell them some rice. A diner overheard their conversation, rose from the table where he was sharing dinner with his family, took the guys to his home, gave them some rice (refusing payment, of course), and invited them back the next day for some coffee and conversation. They were thrilled and so was I: here were four dudes whose Cuba trip could have been filled with a classic car tour, mojitos, jineteras looking for tricks on the Malecón, and getting sick on Cohibas. Instead, they embraced serendipity, solidarity, and the spirit of experiential travel. I don’t know if they ever got the iPhone working, but I know they made indelible travel memories.

      For female travelers, Cuba can be a jumble of contradictions vacillating between machismo and chivalry, honesty and grift, hordes of admirers and moments of loneliness. Solo travelers, especially, can have a hard time meeting other like-minded foreigners since connection opportunities are few and far between: the hostel concept is virtually unknown and there are no “expat” bars or hangouts like you find elsewhere. While there are Wi-Fi parks across the island where you can befriend other foreigners, many visitors prefer to embrace the off-line culture still prevalent in Cuba—especially since Donald Trump became US President. Then there’s what Rebecca Solnit calls “Manistan” in her book Men Explain Things to Me and I call “Macholandia”—a republic unto itself where men are all-knowing and too sexy for their own bad selves. As one expat friend recently observed: “There’s entirely too much testosterone on this island.” This machismo often manifests itself in sexual innuendo, regardless of age difference, race, size, origin or sexual orientation: he’s 80 and you’re 25? He’ll make a stab at it. You say you’re gay? He’ll say you’ve never had the right man. Old travel tricks are likewise ineffective: wearing a wedding ring—or even traveling with your actual husband!—won’t deter Cuban men from open propositions, brazen come-ons, and practicing the local custom of “piropos.” Loosely translated as “flirty compliments,” these run the gamut from creative to gross, fall-on-the-floor hilarious to seriously disrespectful. One of my all-time favorites was when a man pedaled by on a Flying Pigeon (1 million of these Chinese bikes were imported during the economic crash of the 1990s known as the Special Period) saying: “Your name must be Alice because looking at you sends me to Wonderland.” On the flipside, I was walking Toby in the park last week when a guy said to me: “Ay mami, put that leash and collar around my neck, let me be your dog!” Less endearing and not at all appealing. If you don’t speak Spanish, piropos are easier to pay no mind, but many times it’s just a sexually charged hissing sound—much harder to ignore. If your hackles jump at every piropo thrown your way, it can get oppressive.

      Given this scenario, it can come as a surprise at how empowered Cuban women and girls are. In some ways, the history of Cuba reads like a feminist tract, partly explaining this seeming contradiction. Machete-wielding women known as mambisas galloped into battle during the Second (and definitive) War of Independence, gaining fame for their valor and determination. Women played a definitive role throughout the Revolution as well, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the image of bearded guerrillas descending victoriously from the mountains projected by the international media. As Julia Sweig states in Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, “Behind the macho bravado that captured Cuba and the world’s attention were a host of extraordinarily brave and talented women who made survival and success possible.” Indeed, there were history-makers like Melba Hernández and Haydeé Santamaría, the only women who fought in the attack on the Moncada Barracks, the seminal event in the nascent revolution; Celia Sánchez, who took to the Sierra Maestra, rifle in hand, alongside Fidel, Che, Raúl, and the rest; and Vilma Espín, who organized forces in the city—she would go on to marry Raúl Castro and lead the charge on policy

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