Monica's Journal: back in the USSR - i mean the USA.

quote from one of my professors: "Let the U.S. lift the embargo. Then we'll see if socialism works."

so cuba was amazing. i absolutely loved it and i want to go back ASAP. but after learning some spanish.

the people are incredibly friendly. counter-intuitively, they love americans, and amazingly do not hold us responsible for the behavior of our government. the thing is, the US has won the culture war: there's american tv, american movies, and cubans want all the american junk. yet they still have the embargo, so they're all poor, and assuming all americans are rich, always ask us for money wherever we go.

there's propaganda/patriotic signs everywhere - "viva la revolucion" and whatnot. including images of che guevara and one with a cuban saying "senor imperialistos: we are abolutely not afraid of you" to a growling uncle sam.

almost all the buildings in havana, although beautiful in their day, are concrete slab construction. sadly, costs were cut by using sea sand instead of purer sand in the concrete, and the salt from the sea corrodes the steel reinforcements, which makes the buildings crumble. and if they're not falling down, they need a good coat of paint. except for the Hotel Nacional, which had tunnels built under it during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

we took a weekend trip to Trinidad (de Cuba, not and Tobago), which was a cute Spanish colonial town with mule-pulling dwellers looking all Juan Valdez. we stayed in a resort hotel that was absolutely beautiful on a peninsula there, watching the sun set on the water one night and rise on the water the next morning.

many of our professors gave us the party line, or what they knew about things, which did not always turn out to be correct. like they told us that Cuba is always willing to negotiate with the US. they didn't seem to remember that their own patriotic graffiti tells a different story.

but it was still fantastic. i brought back cigars, an english Granma, a book of photos of the revolution, rum, some Cuban chardonnay called San Cristobal, 75 pictures on my brand new HP digital camera, postcards, and two weeks of a journal.

in other news, there should be a documentary playing sometime soon on your local PBS station about gay Quaker civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. and todd's friend allison from RISD has started a great new blog with that classic layout. check that shit out.

so yeah. cuba.