MISSIVE #8 WITH LOVE FROM ELISA IN CUBA
Seminario Evangélico de Teología, Matanzas, Cuba
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Yesterday I was sitting in a restaurant called “Ríomar: Salón de la Cubanía” on the main street of Matanzas, la Calle Del Medio. It serves lobster and shrimp, seafood which is generally forbidden to Cuban nationals and reserved for foreigners, but then again this restaurant only took convertible pesos so I suppose it was all perfectly legal. (I’d just read about this in one of the blogs in Yoani Sanchez’s book Havana Real: One woman fights to tell the truth about Cuba today, which is outlawed in this country but I am reading it in my Kindle under the covers late at night). Next to me sat two young couples, and a nursing baby. The two families made me think of my grandbabies and their mothers, Zoë and Ashley. Not that I’ve seen many Cuban infants being nursed in public, but nearly all those I’ve seen seem less fussy and calmer somehow, as do their mothers, than most of the babies I’ve observed in restaurants in the U.S. They so rarely cry or even whine, and more often than not, they are sleeping soundly in someone’s arms—not in a stroller or a baby carrier of any kind. Maybe that’s why. Cuban babies have somewhat of a special effect on me—I wonder how come? Same thing goes for Cuban kittens. J
Matanzas is starting to feel like “home,” especially now that I am living with a cat, in an apartment with something of a real kitchen, where I cook mainly cat food, and have been spending most weekends here. By the 2nd or 3rd visit to the same store, to the ETECSA (Government Telephone Company with internet access), to the movie theatre, or to the local bodega, the employees and I already share a mutual recognition.
Yesterday I also went to the Museum of the City of Matanzas and paid the $2.00 MN (moneda nacional) entrance fee, which comes out to be about a nickel. A pretty blond-haired blue-eyed older woman was assigned to follow me around. Moments later, the ticket-lady came and asked me if I was “una residente,” to which I promptly and proudly replied “Sí”, and thus avoided having to pay the tourist fee of $2.00 in convertible pesos.
I was not as lucky with the entrance fee on my first trip to a real tourist site, the famous Cuevas de Bellamar, just outside Matanzas. The tickets were $5.00 MN for nacionales. My Cuban friend bought tickets for the three of us but the guard made us all show him our ID cards. My friends nervously pulled out and opened their carnets and I had to go fish my Cuban passport out of a locker where we had already stashed our bags. The guard reprimanded me and said that “this was no good” or something to that effect, returned my ticket to me and told me to go back to the cashier and buy a new one—for $5.00 CUCs. Later, several of the others on our tour sympathized and shook their heads saying, “Nothing gets past that guy.”
My Cuban friends keep telling me to just keep silent and let them do all the talking. I’ve been trying to shut up but you know how hard that is for me. Still, I’ve been very lucky almost everywhere I’ve gone. There has always been a man or woman who has immediately and spontaneously acted as my guardian angel and helped me to find a seat on a non-tourist bus or to pay for a meal at a state-owned restaurant, or to buy anything with the national rather than the convertible currency. It is always the same story: Cuban “nationals” or “residents” pay with moneda nacional and all others pay the same price but in CUCS—which is 25 times as much! I think that after I’ve been living in Cuba for 3 months I actually have the right to obtain a residential carnet which then entitles me to pay for everything in moneda nacional as well as to receive a libreta, which is a like a rations booklet for free food.
The Cuban Pony Express
My daughter Livia’s 29th birthday was a few days ago and she emailed me:
Hi Mom,
Miraculously, the postcard that you mailed on September 9th just arrived yesterday, on my birthday.
I don’t believe in coincidences anymore, only in miracles, which after all, are all acts of God, great and small.
Have any of my other postcards arrived?
The Cuban Pony Express, as I began to explain a few letters ago, arose out of the need created by the lack of any real or reliable postal service between the United States and Cuba. It was first mentioned to me in an email from one of the many U.S. Presbyterians who will visit Cuba and perhaps also come to stay at the Seminary while I am living here. They often ask for any supplies that are requested or needed. I had been cc’d on an email between several U.S. pastors with Cuban sister churches, talking about a handful of bilingual bibles, and asking if I could use any for my students. Yes, I said, I needed about six of them for my “Inglés Teológico“students. A few emails later, I was told that the “Cuban Pony Express” would get them to me somehow sooner or later. So I asked how it worked. It means that anyone who is boarding a plane from the U.S. to Cuba is sent or given the requested item to carry in a suitcase. Upon arrival, usually at the airport in Havana, that person is then met by another person who delivers the item forward until it reaches its final destination. The bilingual bibles made it from the U.S. to Cuba within a week or so of that email, and they were promptly given to one of my students, who happened to be back in her hometown of Placetas in Central Cuba, about 200 kilometers away. It had taken only two or three ponies. Unfortunately, my student did not have enough space in her suitcase to bring the bibles back to the Seminary, so she had to leave them in Placetas.
The publisher of the Su Voz booklet which I translate every day had a dire request for more ink for the printing press. A visiting U.S. pastor from New Mexico duly took back an empty box of the ink. That was the first pony. He mailed it to the second pony, another pastor in Texas, who was at the Seminary a few days ago. But he was unable to locate the right kind of printer ink so that was another aborted delivery.
I’ve sent my own pony off today, with a gift for my granddaughter Riley’s 5th birthday, and a CD of all the photos I’ve taken. I gave them to William Kelly, who teaches ESL at the Christian Association at Penn and lives just across the river in “West Jersey”. Bill’s wife Alice had gathered and sent a list of items I’d requested (mostly for Semi and for teaching) which I joyfully and thankfully received just yesterday. I am hoping that Bill will ride that final pony all the way to my daughter Ashley’s house in Center City Philadelphia and make a special hand-delivery. Ashley recently wrote:
All is well here- the kids have been asking about you a lot lately. I tell them about the things you are doing and they know that you are "in Cuba."
So today I asked Bill to show my grandbabies a photo of the two of us here together and to try to explain to them what it means that their grandmother is “in Cuba.”
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