My Interesting Facts about Cuba

Cuba represents to The United States the girl you always loved, but she never paid attention to you. The paradise just 90 miles away from us, the land of exotic coffees and aromatic cigars, a magic place with beautiful people dancing salsa all day. This vision can be extracted from any Gabriel Garcia Marquez books; the famous Latin writer said Latin America is a mix of fantasy and reality, and he named it “Magic Realism.” And Cuba can not be understood without its streets and people’s magic realism. So, I want to tell my Cuban story, a magic-realistic story that started in the airport. You know that you are in Cuba because Cubans turn their bags and goods into plastic balls; probably they are imagining that they are traveling to another planet, or a sign that I was entering another dimension-country.
It is essential to bring a lot of cash because, as a tourist, Cuba is not cheap. Even for locals still expensive. Drinking coffee in the morning is a delicatessen that people with little money can afford; instead, low-income families drink tea with bread. Cuban coffee is famous worldwide; the Café Cubano espresso in cute little cups of different colors from yellow to blue, but not black because it carries bad luck. Anyway. I arrived in Cuba to attend a Film Festival and to start scouting locations for a documentary I am directing about a Cuban immigrant that lives in Europe. So I spent a couple of weeks with my character’s family, and they did not have coffee in their house. Changing dollars is another odyssey; my friend’s father gave me the option to go to the black market where I could get more money than the legal way; of course, he offered to help me in this adventure. After spending all my money on beers in less than a week, I discovered that he cheated me with the money, and instead, he gave me half of the official way. On a standard practice, a coffee (a dollar) is a little more than one Tourist Cuban peso, and one Cuban tourist peso is like twenty-five local Cuban pesos. It means twenty-five coffees. It is better to discover the city with locals. Drink a cup of coffee from my Cuban window dream, watching the beautiful Havana vanish because of the leak of coffee, and because the small and high windows of my house made it difficult and look like, I was living in prison. 
The first part of the festival was like a film camp in a prestigious Film School located almost two hours away from La Havana, in a rural city named San Antonio de Los Banos. In this place, filmmakers like Coppola, Kiarostami, and Tarantino walked in socks through the halls writing on the walks and interacting with young students from all over the world but not the United States because of the prohibitions on both sides. After the countryside experience, I went to La Havana, it was unique, and I had the chance to discover the luxury of the Tobacco and Sugar Cane mansions from the glorious Cuban past; those old Cuban houses remind me, in a certain way, the southern plantations houses from Louisiana. Right now, you can find ten Cuban families living in one place turned into improvised apartments by the necessity and the revolution. Cuba, like all Latin countries, has intense and hidden racism where the darkest skin is moved away to the peripheries, and nowadays, Black Cubans are not allowed to go inside specific places only for tourists; the only way to go inside of those places is if they will perform or clean the venue. I saw the same in La Paz, Bolivia, but their racism is a serious problem, especially among indigenous people, and most amazing is that there are more than 30 indigenous groups in Bolivia, and they commit racism against the other ones. In Cuba, there are no local indigenous people; according to Howard Zinn, in his book about Columbus, indigenous and progress, highlights that during the Spanish invasion, the indigenous population decreased from 250 thousand to a few thousand in less than five years. African religions are dominants, and it is normal to find ceremonies and sacrifices on both sides of the Delta where the Almendares River meets the Caribbean Ocean. 
Habana can be a thug city, and the Habaneros are always looking for options to have fun with tourists and get access to places they usually can not afford. Cuban people are amusing and like to get in trouble; I think that revelry is a Caribbean characteristic inherited from the enslaved Africans that resisted colonial oppression until now. In Cuba, you will find African dialect words mixed with Spanish words, and also Cubans like to communicate with metaphoric quotes like: 
“Cuando el dinero entra por la puerta, el amor se va por la ventana” (When money comes in through the door, love leaves through the window,) “asere conho que bola” (What’s up,)  “Ache” (can be Amen or good luck,) “Arroz con mango” (rice with mango) means confusion. “Ese huevo quiere sal” (The egg needs salt) (is a tourist that is looking for casual encounters,) and the last one “Cogelo con taikirisi” (take it with take it easy).

“Cuando el dinero entra por la puerta, el amor se va por la ventana” (When money comes in through the door, love leaves through the window,) “asere conho que bola” (What’s up,)  “Ache” (can be Amen or good luck,) “Arroz con mango” (rice with mango) means confusion. “Ese huevo quiere sal” (The egg needs salt) (is a tourist that is looking for casual encounters,) and the last one “Cogelo con taikirisi” (take it with take it easy).