Cuba

The real Cuba lies past the manicured resort and censored travel guides. Behind the tourist district, a heavy stench lingers, decades old; decaying, dripping. Shack communities with leaky tarp roofs are home to frail-thin boys and girls running around, resurrecting terra cotta clouds of dirt momentarily, before settling back down in surrender. The Government’s idea of equality for everyone is drowned by the milk being bartered in black markets. Los comandantes, military commanders, gather in the lustrous building with the pearl façade and orange marbled floors to discuss politics, their large, full bellies rising and falling as they cackle like old hyenas. Parents cook rationed meals from rationed ingredients for children rationed in dirt-floored schools; they march home singing the national anthem with their foreheads faced upward, saluting the sun. Mothers prepare arroz and frijoles negros in tarnished pots where peeling teflon adds that tangy taste to every tiny meal. The one stovetop that functions when you turn the gas exactly three notches right, keeps meals warm for a tired husband, back-burnt from the unforgiving sun’s blaze. His body engulfed daily in rivers of sweat, in tears of desperation. He plucks sugar cane leaves with swollen, cracked hands and knows that fulano de tal, some guy, spends his days reclining under the shade and getting the same pay. The island’s children lie behind barbed wires, behind beachfront inns; they wait longingly, entrenched in rusty shackles aching to sail away.