I Can Sing for You: Our Adventure in Cuba

In Matanzas, our room is quiet, except for a bird singing. Tomorrow or the next day, we will swim in the Saturn cave, go to the Coral Beach, and we will see about writing.

Cuba is different than anywhere I have traveled before. In Hanoi, I saw a family of five on a small motorcycle with a chicken, perhaps on their way to dinner. My son watched a bomb pulled out of the river, and yes, bungee corded to the back of a motorcycle and rattled off into the city.

I have been to small towns in Colombia, backpacked El Salvador and Honduras, entered Mexico illegally in a small boat in the middle of a storm. I have been to Livingstone, Guatemala, where a group of escaped enslaved people established a village cut off from the world, which you can only reach by boat. I’ve visited Beijing and Hanoi and Olafsfjord. I have been to Dubai, careful and sober, and I have been robbed at a Mexican airport at gunpoint.

But Cuba is its own song. There is always music playing. Everywhere you go, people are playing live music in their houses. Given the American embargo of Cuba, which prevents them from acquiring resources from their neighboring country, everything is falling apart. At some point, the embargo will end, and Cuba will have the support to be rebuilt, but it won’t be this Cuba. This Cuba is hard for the people who live here, but they make it work.

If you’ve ever romanticized Cuba as old cars, rum, and cigars, you are thinking about the tourist's experience, and you are missing the fact that Cubans are living in the poorest of Latin American countries. Houses, roads, sidewalks, and public buildings collapse. Children sleep on concrete and live on rice, candy, and soda.

Outside of Havana, the capital city and tourist hub, we did not find consistent Wi-Fi or cell service. We did not find well-stocked grocery stores, despite searching. Cubans spend over 70% of their income on food. There are tiny tiendas that sell candy and soda, but food insecurity leaves many families without nourishing meals. Everything is in disrepair.

In Cuba, we thought we were going to write and swim. We swam for one day. We hoped to write, but struggled. Everything felt much more challenging than I thought it was going to be. We have it easy in the States. Modern conveniences are easily accessible. We have fruit and vegetables whenever we want. Our Wi-Fi works. In Cuba, life is hard, but the people are full of passion and resilience. They play music. They make art.

On New Year’s Eve, we stay in Havana at a nice hotel with pink furniture and marble floors. They give us masks for the party, and an Afro-Cuban singer dressed all in white sways magically into the night. The car we rented is somehow not there when we go to pick it up, so we take a taxi to go to our Airbnb in Varadero. Our plan? To swim, snorkel, and write. To write in the heat at the edge of the world.

We get to our Airbnb, which is not as cool as it seemed online, the rooms dark and close. The landlord shows us around and immediately tells us there was never any Wi-Fi available. We ask where the grocery stores are. He opens the fridge, which is full of beer. He tells us that he charges $2 per beer. The only other thing we have is a bottle of rum they gave us at the fancy hotel in Havana. Rum. $20 worth of beer.

My laptop is dead in the water. Without the internet, it won’t fire up.

“What have we got?” my husband says.

“No writing,” I say. “No food, but we can get drunk and wish we were writing? We wouldn’t be the first people in Cuba to do that. Not the first people in the world. Tennessee Williams drank. Hemingway certainly did. And I can sing for you.” As I say this, the music outside our house is so loud, he has to lean in to hear me.

The next morning, we pack up and walk out to the road. Our daughter has reserved us a room in the next town for one night, and we are going to see how it is. After that, we have seven more days to figure out. What an adventure.

I feel guilty for leaving the place where I couldn’t write or sleep. My son, Stephen, would have had no problem sleeping there. In fact, he might have joined the band, picked up a guitar, played all night. But for me, if there are huge, loud parties on three sides of me until five a.m., I get tired.

If we had stayed in Varadero, we could have gone swimming and gotten drunk and not slept for ten days. But we have our crazy priorities. I want to write. Sleep.

We check into our place in Matanzas, which has conceptual Wi-Fi. This means that, in theory, they have Wi-Fi, but it only works for about fifteen minutes a day. When we first arrive, it works. We are excited! Wi-Fi! Writing! While it is working, we pay for the place for six more days. We have now paid for two places that have no stable Wi-Fi. But because this is a bigger town, the cell service is better, and the laptop fires up.

Here, there will be no walking to the beach. We are a cab ride away from the ocean, which we can’t afford. Tomorrow, we will find out how much, but if we have to choose between Mark eating and swimming, Mark gets to eat.

We walk around town and figure out how much food will cost. We will have to buy prepared food. Mark is fine with eating rice or pizza. I am fine with drinking water—ah, another problem. My water turns out to be as expensive as Mark’s food. We have already been to a couple of places hoping to see fried plantains, the Cuban food I was most excited about. No one nearby has them. Just steamed rice, thin fried chicken, and pizza.

We need to be careful with money. Go easy with food. Cuba is cut off from American banks. We have the money we came with.

But in Matanzas, our room is quiet, except for a bird singing. Tomorrow or the next day, we will swim in the Saturn cave, go to the Coral Beach, and we will see about writing.

I am blessed. Today, a man named Amed drove us here in a classic red ‘57 Chevy.

Despite the struggles of an isolated country, Cuba has light, magic, and music. Where we are sleeping has high ceilings, a blanket, nice towels, and in the morning, there will be Cuban coffee on the rooftop.

Tomorrow, we will swim, and then we will go to the coffee shop in the town square, and we will write!

I am ready for swimming. Writing. Cuban coffee. Cuban music.

In this adventure, I will polish this book, so it shines in the dark.