I recently fulfilled a long time desire to visit Cuba. Now that I've been all I want is to go back. I don't know what you may have heard or read about this place. Maybe your parents talked about it's political history with the US, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or maybe even Che'. But I don't want to talk about Cuba's past entanglements with Communist Russia or the revolution sparked by Che' and Fidel. I don't want to talk about our shameful involvement in the corrupt government of Batista.
I want to talk about what I saw and what I saw was a country and a people too beautiful to be captured on film or described by the English language. I saw open arms and smiles and selfless acts of welcome and friendship that I have never experienced before. I saw a country held in limbo between a sad and yet glamorous past and an uncertain and yet hopeful future. At times I was swept away by the living time capsule that equally surrounds you in the heart of Havana or in the simple, everyday rural life of the mountain folk in the west. It was a scene that has quite literally been played out everyday for decades without change.
So, if you are reading this and have an interest in this unique and beautiful country all I can say is this. Go. Go now and do not hesitate. Your impressions and experiences will be a reward worth any amount it takes to get there. Go and then relay to me your feelings of this lost land that time forgot, floating in the norther Caribbean.
All photo credits go to the lovely MadDawg whose eye is far more adept at capturing these impressions than my own.
