I’m getting ready to take my first group to Cuba next week. There are a dizzying number of details to review and confirmation letters to write. I’ve been organizing, revising and reworking the itinerary, restaurants, time-line and events we will be attending. I know I’m ready. I don’t doubt my travel skills. I do wonder, though…has the country I fell in love with changed since my last visit? Now that the United States has begun the process of resuming diplomatic relations with this tiny oasis of perfection, will the feeling that it gave me have dissipated?
Will Havana feel like every other third world country I’ve visited in my lifetime? I hope not. I dream of the Havana I met and fell in love with on my first trip, in 2013. It wasn’t that long ago. I vowed to return the moment I stepped out of the airport at the Jose Marti International terminal. I was transported. My heart stopped. My senses were overwhelmed. It was like nowhere else I had ever been. It was as if time had stopped. For the first time in my life, I felt what time had done to me and what time had done to the life I lived at home. And I wasn’t so sure I liked it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for progress and innovation. But there was something so simple and perfect about a life in Havana. Life without wires and without the passage of time. I was taken aback. I was lost in my emotions. And it went on for days. With each new experience, I marveled at how a simpler life was a more authentic life.
I reawakened a sleeping giant – a desire to slow down and to take advantage of my relationship with life. That is what matters in Havana. Not what car you drive or what latest gadget Apple is developing. What matters is eating an over-ripe mango or enjoying a coffee with friends.
To see children playing out in the streets with a stick and a ball took me back to my childhood. The joy in the faces of those children was infectious. Quite different from the children I see at home, absorbed in their X-Box or iPhone. These children were PLAYING. Really playing. Laughing. Smiling. Posing for the camera. It was beautiful. It was authentic. It was real. That’s what I hope hasn’t changed. I hope that never changes. And to see adults…perched on the stoop of their apartment building at all hours of the day and night, in order to escape the oppressive heat…will that still exist? I remember peeking out the window of my first floor apartment in Chicago during my childhood. I saw adults gabbing away on the porch while the children slept inside.
I also saw that in Havana. Neighbors being neighborly. Finding reasons to gather and commune. To chat and to gossip. To get to know each other. No matter how many McDonalds’ or Pizza Hut’s assault the island (and believe me, I hope that there are none), I hope the infectiousness of the smiles of the children remain. I hope the neighbors are still outside on the stoop of their beautifully dilapidated apartment buildings. Because that is what Havana is all about, in my dreams.