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 As my Cuban demography professor once said, Cuba is a like a living museum, with 70-year old cars and outdated technological equipment.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.
notclaremont 