“La vida de Marie empenquenece cualquier inconformidad. Entonces me pregunto si tenemos derecho a quejarnos tanto y por tan poco.”

Cuba is not a place for complainers, las personas quejosas. In la vida cubana, the only guarantee is that not a thing is guaranteed, and that’s just the way it goes. Here, fussing when something falls through is such an immense waste of energy that if you are indeed una quejosa, at the end of the day there will be nothing left of you besides the dusty city stuck to your feet.

The other day, when I was waiting for my 15 cuban peso pizza, which costs the equivalent of about 60 cents and is made out of whatever ingredients the city can throw together on a given day, I watched a boxy Russian Lada slowly roll to a stop, the motor uncooperative for whatever reason. A middle aged black women got out of the driver’s seat (the first women I’d seen actually driving a car), and, accompanied by what looked like her daughter and three thirteen or so year old boys who dropped their bikes and hightailed it to her assistance as soon as they noticed the decelerating car, nonchalantly pushed the car to the side of the road, right in front of the state owned pizza shop where I was waiting. With all of the conviction in the world, and none of the despondency which so often would accompany calling triple-A or flagging down someone who actually knew how the hell to get the motor running if the same thing happened in the US and so many other places, my heroines approached the pizza stand, bought a can of the Cuban equivalent of Sprite, sipped it in the shade for no more than two minutes, then popped open the hood of the car, tinkered with a few things, and within ten minutes were back on the road. The city is one where entropy reigns, but Cubans are always prepared, be it with knowledge, patience or a rickety umbrella, to make order out of chaos. As far as material objects go, it seems like the mentality is, if you can’t fix it, you don’t deserve to be using it.

Cubans are also a casual, comfortable people. Last Thursday, instead of showing up for Spanish class, our teacher, Maria, told us that at 2:00 we were to go to the Capitolio, a building modeled after the US capitol building, and take a bus to the Feria de Libros, the annual international book fair that has been going on for the past week or so. We were told to arrive at the book fair at 2:30, find the Jose Lezama Lima room, and listen to the surprise lecture that was scheduled to take place. So, obediently we aimed to arrive at the Capitolio at 2:00. We left ANAP, our residence at 1:50 or so, and walked down to the street where we could catch a maquina, one of the legendary pre-embargo American cars which circulate the city picking up and dropping off hitchhikers for 10 cuban pesos, the equivalent of 40 or so cents. We finally caught a couple, and all arrived at the capitolio on the later side. Then, about halfway to the overgrown castle where the fair is located, we spotted smoke and flames five or so miles in the distance. For reasons still and forever unknown, the bus driver decided to stop for about 20 minutes, not due to traffic, nor due to a mechanical problem. So we arrived at the Feria about 45 minutes late, hunted down the Jose Lezama Lima room, and found no one and nothing waiting for us, besides the fifteen or so year old staff member who was stationed in the room, but knew nothing about any lecture.

Similarly, a couple days ago, a kid in my friend Marley’s class, who was allegedly the president of the philosophy department, told her about this huge march that was scheduled for the next day. It was supposed to be a kick-off event for the two weeks of “vacation” that the third and fourth year students are about to have during the time when the first and second year university students are sent to do their “trabajo productivo,” productive work in exchange for the payment they receive from the government to compensate them for attending the University. He described it as a huge event, charged with inter-department rivalry, during which beginning at 4pm, students would march four hours to some forest in Cacagua, where there would be a huge party, and buses waiting to take students back at two or so in the morning. Sounded like quite the victorious march.

So on Wednesday we went to meet everyone at four-o-clock like he said. But of course, there was no crowd at all in the central plaza where we were “supposed to meet.” We asked numerous groups of students lingering after their classes if they knew anything about a march to Cacagua. Out of about ten people we asked, nine of them thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard, and one of them seemed to know vaguely what we were talking about, but thought that the group had met and left at three, rather than four. Then yesterday it rained, so my professor for the History of Socialism decided not to show up for class. Us “extranjeros” were the only ones who apparently hadn’t heard the news, save for a couple girls who used the encounter as an excuse to exchange bottles of homemade perfumes.



Our university acquaintances are quickly teaching us that Cuban snow days are not announced on the TV, and as best as we can, to always be prepared with knowledge, patience, or a rickety umbrella.

Coming from someone who gets a thrill out of missed connections, delayed flights, and movies that are sold out, I adore that the only thing guaranteed on the island is that nothing can be guaranteed on the island.

Except for the one uncertainty that gets to me, which is the fact that Havana is 100% out of cheese, and no one knows when somehow and somewhere it will materialize. Who knew I would spend so much time appreciating cows.