Havana, Cuba
Cuba
If I start my story at the beginning, I would tell you I was born in a small town. A clique in many ways and one that in this case is a three-quarters truth. We had more than one stoplight and about an equal number of McDonald’s. In the simplest of terms, we will just disclose that I consider Cincinnati to be a ‘big city’ and let the argument rest. In this small town, lives my family now on their fourth generation and we still gather for Christmas in the house my great-grandparents built. Suffice to say we haven’t ventured far; my mother considers the fifteen minute drive one town over to get to the better stocked Walmart and the nearest shopping mall to be an adventure outside of her comfort zone which may say more about me than her. I venture out of my comfort zone in the fifteen inches my laptop screen allows. Certainly no more and roughly no less. So imagine my surprise when I hopped on a 4 a.m. plane to Cuba—well technically Atlanta then Miami then Panama and then Cuba but let us not mince words.
In reality there was slightly more planning than the will of a whim but there is a romanticism associated with the serendipitous.
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Pushing two years on the University of Cincinnati campus and I would say I am rather well-versed in the day-to-day tick and tock of a college campus. Not that I always participate but I observe and draw conclusions, an everyday Jane Goodall among the apes. I am a wallflower who seamlessly fades into the background, my preferred location. I maintained this post as we descended on the University of Havana. Our tour ended just as waves of students seemed to escape the confines of class. They congregated on the steps surrounding the Alma Mater and in the open air atriums of campus buildings, large groups mixing and merging into one mass. Their collective voices flowed through columns and over rooftops as laughter and boisterous arguments broke out. I was sitting to the side of the steps leading up to the building labeled Rectorado when my interest was piqued by one particular group of students. Originally there were three but they were shortly joined by a fourth as I watched the one young man continue his obviously passionate argument. I could not understand a single word they said but I enjoyed their small interaction none the less. It is rare to see an interaction like this in the public and physical form. Our greatest arguments of dogma and merit seem to only occur behind the Oz-the-great-and-powerful curtain of a keyboard.
To read more on my adventures in Cuba as well as to find additional original photography and insight into the differences in experience of two nations separated by a mere 100 miles, click here.