On the bus from Baton Rouge to New Orleans there was a large group of Mexican men who looked like they were headed for work. Their tickets had a long list of stops – they would be riding those buses for a couple of days I reckon. Since I was standing in middle of them all I was surrounded by their conversations, and had a longing to be able to converse with them. It was a touch of regret at having not learnt a bit more Spanish while in Los Angeles.
It was shortly after landing in Havana that I realised that even had I been able to converse in Spanish, I would still be unable to communicate with the majority of Cubans. Their speech is so fast, their consonants so distorted, their syllables so often discarded, that the language sounds just about as foreign to me as Dutch. In fact, they speak Spanish much the way many Athenians speak Modern Greek. Since the streets and drivers of Havana also remind one of Athens, I suppose I feel relatively at home – perhaps about as at home as I felt when I visited Athens alone for the first time, with a level of Greek that may have nearly been acceptable in Melbourne, but in the Hellenic Capital was negligible.
My minimal Italian skills have never been more useful than they are here. I do what I did when I first conversed with Mexicans in LA – respond as best I can in Italian. Then I usually tell them I’m from Perugia, and any problem with not being fluent in Spanish don’t matter. Of course, I then miss most of what their saying but seems to put us both in a class slightly above dumb tourist.
Wielding cameras around is generally ok but frequently one gets the feeling of exploiting the people, of coming in as a wealthy tourist and capturing the plight of the country. That’s of course not our aim, but it’s hard to make people feel the contrary – that you consider their doorways, their lives, their history, to be beautiful and photogenic.
Photos: The obligatory Cuban automobile shot:
A creative, effective and aesthetic (re-)use of rebar:
We have not yet been tempted to go for a ride in a giant helmet, or ‘coco cab’:
Beautiful old signs and graphics abound:
All that’s left of the missile crisis?
Politics and propaganda galore:
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