frustrations

  • people are going home and i want to go home
  • before i dropped my phone in the toilet and almost flushed it down the abyss i was talking to the Brother and we had the usual fight where he accused me of being condescending and i attacked him of not giving a shit about half of society and the child is too cool for facebook so i cannot tell him that i did not mean it but was just tired and stressed and cruel and this guilt is going to give me an ulcer
  • estela is coming to london this week but i still have finals that i don’t care about and i just want to take estela too all the nice bridges and quiet cafes and drink mulled wine in a park and talk about impending adulthood and beyonce and disappointing dates and making cool things but I have to write an essay about BRITISH IMPERIALISM (of the why it failed persuasion & not the why it was the worst thing to happen in recent history persuasion) like reading about this doesn’t casually make my insides crawl at how terrible world leaders were/are and i am too done
  • looking at flights to claremont and being emotionally unprepared because my favorite people are about to graduate and leave forever and i will be the jaded af senior and i am too young for the job search hustle and bad things happen on campus and there will be new firstyears and firstyears become more optimistic and ambitious and terrifying by the year
  • ok actually going to leave internet for a while bye everyone~~

Starbucks

Starbucks is expensive in every country. I am quite amazed how the coffee tastes similar in all Starbucks regardless of the country though. There is a signature coffee scent, which I am not a big fan of but end of getting coffee there often.

The Starbucks app probably made me waste so much money because it makes you addicted to the free drink that is definitely not worth 13 drinks and also feel unnecessarily proud that you have collected those damn stars…

The internet here is often flaky but not as flaky than other coffee shops (although there are places that have GREAT wi-fi and are cheap and have good coffee). To a student living a nomadic life seeking for internet after being kicked out of the FULLY OCCUPIED UCL library, the place provides a balanced amount of frustration and hope for the internet.

I am sitting on a stool seat and for the past 30 minutes have been thinking how uncomfortable the seat is.

My butt has weakened because I have not sat down for so long.

I am afraid of returning to Claremont where my weakened butt will not be ready for senior thesis.

Or I might just get a super comfortable couch……..

 

 

 

 

I will leave Starbucks now.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia. Can you feel nostalgia for the present? For the things you have not even felt yet? For everything passes, and familiarity becomes the norm.

“‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.'”

–Hills Like White Elephants, Ernest Hemingway.

goeun’s guide to studying for exams

  1. drop your laptop dead
  2. drop your phone in the toilet
  3. drop your ambitions, hopes, goals
  4. now: study

it hailed two weeks ago but this past week, the weather here has been unbearably pleasant. i’ve been enjoying it  from libraries. finals in the UK are shit. jiwon and i speedwalked for a bit in a park this afternoon because we needed a break from studying. we passed by two men sitting on a bench, casually discussing black holes.

there’s an orphanage next to this one library apparently and sometimes i catch myself zoning out and listening to children laughing outside. i recently read a heartbreaking work of a staggering genius by dave eggers and everyone should read it.

nothing hurts. actually, the fact that i can’t rewatch beyonce’s lemonade any time i want kind of hurts but that’s it.

one more month.

 

Preparation

May 1st is Labor Day in Cuba. To celebrate the occasion, the people of Havana congregate to street Paseo and march down the street in a parade. People divide up by their work-place, carrying posters and signs representing their vocation. People also march with posters of historical Cuban figures, or of course, Fidel Castro.

While the general sentiment of the march may have been similar to the José Martí torch march that I participated on January 28th that I noted in my blog One week in, I felt a lot different in this Labor Day parade than I did in the torch march. Re-reading my old blog, I realize that I had been extremely naïve about the showcased enthusiasm that I saw at the José Martí march. I had seen it as an expression of socialism enthusiasm, but now I know that there’s a lot more complexity than just complete support; the youth, for one, is generally not very happy about the government.

My host mom told me that in the first decades of the socialist revolution, Labor Day Parades did have a lot of attraction because people wanted to go to the parade and genuinely celebrate the day of the workers. Each small block district used to rally up people to meet up in the morning, and head to the parade together. However, over time, with disillusionments and failures, interest in the parades started to fade. It got to a point that only three people would show up to some district aggregation points to go to the parade, and it got almost embarrassing. Eventually, the government altered the structure of the parade such that people would congregate by their companies and march with them, making the parade more of a custom than an actually self-motivated event.

The parade happens at 7am, for good reason, since it can already be excruciatingly hot here in Cuba at this time of year. However, since it’s so early, many people don’t feel like going. My friend Javier, who works at a biology lab, said that he really didn’t want to go, but he still had to because he didn’t want to get in trouble. Certainly, the parade seemed to showcase unenthused participants. Many people were just walking with their headphones on, without particularly paying attention to the event itself. In one case, a uniformed ministry worker was walking head down with earphones, and a nearby senior worker told him to take his earbuds out. It was somewhat of a strange thought that the parade was a celebration for the workers, but that the workers needed to get up earlier than ever, still get in uniforms and attend the parade with all their co-workers.

Although certainly many many people are still supportive of the socialist system and are thankful for it, there is definitely a good population that is not completely content with it. My program has been largely focused on showing us the official Cuban government perspective, and it took me time to get to know some Cuban youth to actually learn about the complexities of feelings people have for the state. Getting to know people better, I feel like I’ve finally started to understand the tiniest fraction of life here. I finally feel like I’m starting to settle in here.

Unfortunately, tomorrow, I’ll be taking off of this country. Normally, the Cuban semester runs until May 23rd, but our program director is leaving the country early for her daughter’s graduation (at Pitzer College!) and she did not permit us stay in Cuba without her. So instead of staying here to complete the semester, we depart early.

Ever still, I’m incredibly grateful for the experience I’ve had in Cuba. Even more, I’ve extremely lucky to have been in Havana to be in such a time of transition and see the influx of foreign entities into the country. Obama’s visit, the Rolling Stones concert, the Fast and Furious 8 filming, the Chanel fashion show – these are all unprecedented events in Cuba that had never entered the country. I’ve been in Cuba during a time of confusion and uncertainty, with hopes of the Cuban people towards a more open country on one hand, but also concerns of an imperialist capital invasion on the other. This year is probably the start of the greatest change in Cuba ever since the socialist revolution of 1959.

For now, however, Cuba’s still “frozen in time,” se paró, as my friend Wiliam likes to say. The Fast and Furious 8 filming blocked off giant blocks of main streets and caused a lot of traffic redirection, and for the first time in Cuba I experienced traffic. I had entirely forgotten that traffic was a thing; there just aren’t enough people that can afford cars. At that moment, I also realized that I’ll be shocked to ride in a modern car again on paved roads again. These last three and a half months, I’ve only been riding 60-year old cars on bumpy roads, and I’ve gotten used to just jumping up and down my seat during a máquina ride. The fact that cars can actually run smoothly – it will be something of a surprise to me.

I’m sure in the next few days, I will have so many things that I have become accustomed to here in Cuba that I forgot exists or does not exist out of this country. Some will be obvious, like smartphones or Google, but some will be less obvious, like having reliable electricity and water every day. I’ll be surprised to realize how much I’ve forgotten about an entirely different world.

La doble moneda

I’m not sure how I’ve never talked about the double currency here in Cuba. I think it goes to show how accustomed I’ve become to the absolutely strange system of having two different national currencies here in Cuba.

In Cuba, there is the Convertible Peso (CUC) that is the only currency that can be exchanged with foreign currency, and Peso Cubano (CUP, or more commonly Moneda Nacional, “national currency”) that has historically been the sole Cuban currency before the 90’s. Originally, like every other currency, there was no need for double currency in Cuba, and the Peso Cubano was the Cuban currency just like the U.S. dollar is the currency of the United States. However, after the fall of the Soviet Bloc in 1989-91, Cuba experienced a severe economic crisis during the 90’s, known as the Periodo Especial (Special Period). In order to try and alleviate the problems and invite tourism as a source of revenue, the Cuban government then decided that U.S. dollars would be an acceptable form of payment in the country.

This practice continued until the 2000’s, where this introduction of the dollar together with other economic reforms put the Cuban economy back on its feet. However, with the start of the Bush administration, relations between Cuba and the United States deteriorated rapidly, to the point that the U.S. Interests Section Building (a level lower of diplomacy than an embassy) in Havana installed an electronic billboard and started to show subversive anti-Cuban government messages. This propaganda and its disrespect towards the Cuban state infuriated Fidel Castro, and diplomatic relations crumbled to the level that the Cuban regime decided to expel the U.S. dollar from its economy. However, as the country had already been using the dollar for years, the Cuban government decided to create a new currency, the CUC, in order to dampen the effect of the disappearance of the dollar from the economy. The government took in the dollar for the CUC one for one, replacing the use of the dollar with the CUC.

The CUC was supposed to be a temporary measure to alleviate the effect of removing the U.S. dollar would have on the Cuban economy, but removing the CUC has proved difficult and still Cuba continues with its rare system of having two national currencies. Nowadays, the CUC trades with the U.S. dollar at about 1 CUC for 1.03 dollars, and at a nationally fixed rate of 1 CUC for 24 CUP. The fact that there are two currencies makes life difficult because whenever I need CUP, I need to first exchange U.S. dollars to CUC, then separately exchange CUC to CUP. Since there are no credit cards in Cuba and everything is in cash, sometimes I will need CUC, sometimes I will need CUP, and so exchanging money is a frequent necessity and a hassle that takes hours at times.

The worse part is that Cubans will generally not identify if their prices are in CUC or CUP. At first, this is a source of massive confusion: does the $3 price for the a hamburger mean $3 CUC (~$3 USD) or $3 CUP (~$0.125 USD)? (In this particular case, it turned out to be $3 CUP). Eventually with time and common sense I started to figure out what the prices are without having to ask if the prices are in CUC or CUP, but I still get tripped out sometimes when I can’t figure out if a $1 yogurt would be a small 4-cent small thing of yogurt or a $1 imported and packaged container of yogurt.

The double currency also has macroeconomic ramifications that trouble the Cuban national bank. The Cuban national bank has to print all of the following: 20 cents of a CUP coin (~0.8 USD cents), 1 CUP coin, 1 CUP bill, 3 CUP coin, 3 CUP bill, 5 CUP bill, 10 CUP bill, 20 CUP bill, 50 CUP(~2 USD) bill, 100 CUP bill, 200 CUP bill, 500 CUP bill, 1000 CUP (~41 USD) bill, 5 cent of a CUC coin (~5 cent USD), 10 cent CUC coin, 25 cent CUC coin, 50 cent CUC coin, 1 CUC coin, 1 CUC bill, 3 CUC bill, 5 CUC bill, 10 CUC bill, 20 CUC bill, 50 CUC bill, and finally the 100 CUC bill. So that’s 25 different bills and coins that have to be distributed. Naturally, this makes keeping track of the flow of money much more difficult, and trying to control of inflation and deflation a tough challenge. The fact that the government artificially sets the exchange rate between CUC and the CUP at 24:1 has also caused an unsustainable overvaluation of CUC, which could spell trouble for future Cuban trade.

The double currency also gives rise to social divisions. Tourists will mostly use CUC as their currency because it is much easier to acquire; you only have to exchange it from the foreign currency, and many hotels will have an exchange bureau inside them (that does not serve CUC-CUP exchanges).  On the other hand, the quotidian life of normal Cubans run on CUP, because their salaries are normally payed in CUP, and because if they were to use CUC they would receive an unwieldy salary of 1 CUC per day. This means that the businesses that cater to tourists will have access to CUC, while many other Cubans will not. This creates a natural divide between the people who benefit from tourism and who do not, dependent on who can use CUC and who don’t have access to it.

The Cuban government has been trying to eliminate the CUC, but it has not been easy. Unfortunately, the more time goes on, the CUC will solidify more of a role in the Cuban economy, and it will become increasingly difficult to remove. Even though I’ve gotten used to it, the double currency still has adverse effects to Cuban socioeconomics and I hope that the government can remove it sometime soon.

A different reality

Supermarkets in Cuba are nothing like what you would imagine in a capitalist country. The aisles are filled with same products of a same brand, without commercial competition. For instance, fifteen feet of shelves will be decked with the exact same ketchup from top to bottom, all produced from the same national ketchup company. Same goes for any other product, whether it be soups, ice cream, pasta, tomato juice, oil, or even pots and pans. Other unthinkable features include completely empty aisles without products, a rare and almost impossible sight to see in the closely packed shelves of Target.

Due to the lack of commercial competition, there is no need for commercials or advertisements. Not a single Coca-Cola billboard hangs on the city, and I haven’t seen a single advertisement in Cuba these past three months. Subsequently, when I recently watched a pirated CNN channel, I was shocked. The commercials! I had totally forgotten about them, and now they were so unfamiliar to me. Even when I use the internet, I mostly limit myself to e-mail service, and recently I went on the New York Times, the advertisement on the website just seemed so foreign to me. I had spent the past weeks completely devoid of commercial competition, and now confronting the advertisements seemed almost vile to me.

Technology has also been a striking point of difference to me in Cuba. Just seeing all the computers running on Windows XP or Word 2003 throws me back to memories of an older, forgotten era. As my Cuban demography professor once said, Cuba is a like a living museum, with 70-year old cars and outdated technological equipment.

It’s almost funny that in Cuba that internet is a physical place to go to. Since internet is only offered at hotspots here and there, when you say “I’m going to go use the internet,” it implies that you will physically move to an internet park where many others will sit around you trying to connect to the WiFi. And even this has been a recent addition. It’s actually quite crazy to think that Cubans didn’t have internet access until 2008, and even still it’s restricted, limited, and inconvenient.

As I do seldom have internet, the way I use my computer has entirely changed. Without the inundation of information through the net, I have to make do with I do have. My laptop has now become a word processor, only using it for reading articles or writing articles.

Growing up in the new millennia, I have rarely, if ever, had to write a letter. However, as I started to use e-mail as the main mode of correspondence here, I have for the first time started to understand the formalities of letters taught in grade school. You open letters with Dear XXX because they truly are people dear to you. You close letters with Sincerely because you’ve meant the real talk from the bottom of your heart, or Sincerely Yours because you wholeheartedly feel yourself as their friend. I believe that when you can’t communicate with people effectively, can’t hear their voice, let alone see pictures of them, it brings out a certain sensibility. A correspondence that only happens once a week carries much more weight and emotion in its five pages than would a short and unorganized Facebook chat.

Being in a place without smartphones has also been a big change to me. I had forgotten how to live liberated from technology, being able to focus on the real world instead of a virtual one. I have less distractions from being able to live presently. I have been able worry less about what people think about me on social media, and focus more on myself. Ironically, the lack of smartphones also makes event-planning much easier. Plans become much more definite, and people don’t back out as easily when they have to call a home phone in order to cancel.

Honestly, I am a little afraid to return to the technological and capitalist world that I have been bred in. I have fallen accustomed to the way of things in Cuba, and I have enjoyed the unfeigned style of life here. The peace, the sincerity of the people, the warmth – I’m already missing all these things even before I’ve left.

 

 

 

i dont know

I haven’t been here in a while, and I don’t want to go to graph theory, and I’m pretty mad at my family right now, and  it’s 4/20, and I’m missing out on a cute picnic with my friends because of class, so I decided to come on this blog about not being in Claremont and just write something because emotions spark change and action.

I’ll read Gust and Kristen and Goeun’s post soon – that’s next on my to-do list.

I just registered for classes.

I’m so mad right now

I don’t want to go back to Claremont

Santa Clara

This past weekend, I had the chance to go to the Cuban city of Santa Clara, city right in the center of both the North-South and East-West axis of the island. I went with a lot of excitement, because unlike many other study abroad students, I had not travelled much, and this was the only the second city outside of Havana I’d been to.

When I got to Santa Clara, the first thing that struck me was the lack of tourism in the city. I’d only been to Havana and Santiago de Cuba so far, the two biggest cities of Cuba that boast a large tourist population. In contrast, Santa Clara had very few tourists, perhaps because the city didn’t have much to do for foreigners. Sure, there were tourists at Che Guevara’s mausoleum/memorial/museum complex on the west end of the city, but in the city proper, very few foreigners abounded.

Despite being the regional capital of the Villa Clara province and being the 5th largest city in Cuba, Santa Clara felt a lot smaller than Havana or even Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city in Cuba. Unlike Havana, there were no máquinas to be found; rather, the main mode of transportation in the city were horse-drawn carriages. In the 21st century, in a city! People bundled in the cart attached to the horse while they paid the horse driver(?) a few pesos for a speed not too much faster than walking. In accordance with the rustic feeling, the price of living in Santa Clara was also much lower than in Havana. I thought I couldn’t get much cheaper meals than the 50 cent pizzas in Havana, but I soon found that I was wrong when I found quality 10 cent hamburgers in Santa Clara.

Santa Clara contains a population of little more than 200,000, and its size is quite tiny for a city. Only 45 minutes by foot from the city center can get you at the end of the city. Subsequently, there seemed to only be one central area in the city, a large park right in the heart of downtown. The fact that there was only one large plaza, along with its centralized location, however created a lovely park culture after sundown that I had never seen in any other city. The citizens of Santa Clara all huddled around the park for nightlife. On one side of the park, a Cuban Trova band played urging people to dance salsa spontaneously on the street, while the other side featured teenagers and university students listening to reggaeton from their speakers and drinking rum. It was such an open culture! Amidst the open music, people were just hanging out in the open space of the park. I had never seen this open park culture anywhere else in the world.

Unfortunately, however, many people seemed to want to leave Santa Clara, perhaps because of its small size and lack of opportunities. So many houses all over town had signs saying se vende, “for sale,” a sign that’s not often seen in Havana. In Santa Clara, one house next to the other was for sale, at a rate such that some houses put up signs saying that they were not selling their house and asking people not to ask them if they were. I was flabbergasted. Why were so many people so intent on selling their houses? Because they were in dire need for money? To move to Havana for better economic opportunity?

The house sales were definitely a sharp contrast to the house I was staying while I was in Santa Clara. The easiest housing for travelers in Cuba is renting a casa particular, an Airbnb-type housing situation where you pay usually about $10-15 per night for a house with breakfast. I was speaking with the host of my house, José, who summarily told me that he had another house for rent as well as his own house in addition to the one I was staying at. He has no other job than renting out apartments, and he spends his vacations in Miami or Mexico for several months at a time. What dichotomy he was from the rest of Santa Clara! While people were eager to sell their houses all around town, José was amassing them. I felt bad. Just to fulfill my selfish travel desires, I was widening the gap between the townspeople and the tourist-catering kingdom.