The Scribbling On The Wall

It's 2002, I'm having dinner at the Saratoga and I'm reading the scribbling on the wall beside my table. One scribble in particular caught my attention. Somebody had written, “I'm in Havana and I've never felt more alive. I feel like I can breathe.”

Why those old timers keep coming back for more

Photo by T.K. Hernández

It's 2002. I was having dinner at the Hotel Saratoga, the only '5 star' hotel in Havana, back in the day before Beyoncé booked a room. In 2002, ordinary people like me could still afford to stay at the Saratoga before it became ‘over the top’ in price. Beyoncé changed all that.

(Thanks, Beyoncé but the bartender upstairs remembers you.) You swam in the pool and they haven't changed the water since. They love you.

So, it's 2002, I'm having dinner at the Saratoga and I'm reading the scribbling on the wall beside my table. One scribble in particular caught my attention. Somebody had written, “I'm in Havana and I've never felt more alive. I feel like I can breathe.” I could have written those words myself.

Needless to say, the scribbling fascinated me. I knew exactly what the anonymous Scribbler was talking about. If my profiling skills are 'spot on,' the Scribbler was male, American, over 50, first time in Havana, traveled via a third country.

I filed this 'profile' and the Scribbler's words in a filing cabinet at the back of my brain, to be taken out some day later, I didn't know when.

Fast forward, many years later, many voyages of return to the Island. I've been meeting people whom I'll call the “old timers,” no offense to them, but what else do you call them? These are the people, like me, who keep returning, year after year to Cuba. We are the perpetual tourists.

Last year at a film festival in eastern Cuba, I started questioning everyone of these 'old timers' (the perpetual Cuban tourists) I met at the festival. It's my research. Everybody had the same answer as the Scribbler on the wall at the Saratoga. “I feel so alive,” was the answer, over and over again.

“I'm in Havana and I've never felt more alive. I feel like I can breathe.”

Photo by T.K. Hernández

Scribbling on the wall of a restaurant in Havana

This “call to return.” It's like the song of the Sirens who lure us back year after year, a perennial voyage of a homecoming to a place not actually our home. We all feel it. Alive. Living and breathing, of being “in one's own skin.”

Why do we keep coming back? We stay with our adopted families and friends now. There are days we go to bed hungry. There are days when there is no running water and there are blackouts. Despite the shortages, despite the difficulties, we still feel it, this feeling of authenticity within. This “authenticity” of existence.

So what is it? In Cuba, we never forget we're alive. We feel it. One is "always in the moment," very conscious of the passing of each rich unit of time.

Our existence is acknowledged when we are in Cuba. There is not the anonymity and invisibility of the cities and societies of “the North” from which we originate.

Cuba will teach many things but perhaps it's greatest lesson of all is this authenticity, of living in the moment, of "being present."

One woman told me she can't survive without visiting Cuba three times a year. She gets depressed if she doesn't. It's a different way of living she tells me. Cuba has taught her many things and not only, 'casino salsa' dancing. It's not just the dancing, she says, she's learned to “chill.”

And, it's the culture that's completely embedded in the society, something the Cuban Revolution consciously did in its creation of a new society and order. This embedded culture is not something 'outside,' it's a theme that is central to Cuba.

The 'old timers' will also say how much they love the Cuban people. It's the Cuban's openness, the ability to laugh at themselves, the constant telling jokes, even when something is bad.

What is found in our perpetual voyages of return to Cuba? Cuba is our teacher. It's the people, it's the music, it's the dancing. It's friends, family and love. And like the Scribbler's words so long ago on the wall of the old Saratoga, we feel like we can breathe, and we feel so alive.