In 2017 two friends and I went to Havana. I liked it a lot. It was very weird. When we went, Cuba had two different currencies–one for foreigners (CUC) and one for locals (CUP). (I’ve read that this has since changed.) The two currencies worked because Cuba is socialist(-ish) so prices and salaries are fixed by the government and locals could never afford what foreigners can afford. So there’s an entirely different economy set up for those of us who are tourists–we ate in old colonial mansions that had been transformed into fancy restaurants, we bought clothes at little boutiques, went to museums. At the corner store there weren’t any choices for things, just one kind of bread, one kind of pasta, one kind of pop.
It makes sense that in a country as weird as Cuba there would be this weird place called Fusterlandia. It reminded me of all of the Gaudí buildings in Spain, except weirder and less fancy. The outside part of the estate had a pool with a broken treadmill in it. Sometimes tiles were missing from the art in the wall or the floor (I think it was intentional). There was sloppy cursive writing–poems and quotes everywhere and dead-end hallways.
There were many places to stop and sit and look and we noticed a woman our age sitting quietly on a tiled bench. Did I notice her? I think I did because I remember the look on her face–so pensive it seemed sad. So quiet it seemed sad. I do know it was Becca who talked to her and somehow gathered the information that she was Italian and she had been living here for five years and was about to move back to Italy. We were all amazed. It seemed kind of amazing to live in this place as a foreigner for so long. Are you going to miss it? Becca asked something like that. She answered, I’m ready to go home. And for some reason that resonated with me. Not that I wanted to go home then or that I didn’t like it there. Just the feeling on her face–of being tired. Five years is a long time of not belonging.
Anne Foster 