Everything is Everything: Streets of Habana Vieja (Old Havana)

Wandering around Old Havana never gets old. Early in the morning, a Cubano smokes his cigar.

Immediately outside the clean and renovated areas of Old Havana, dilapidated and gutted-out buildings are common.

Similar in design to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington DC, El Capitolio in the background is one of Havana's major landmarks.

Boys play soccer in the streets. I never saw anyone playing baseball, but soccer was played all around Cuba.

A view over Plaza Vieja from the camera obscura tower

A woman on stilts as part of a passing parade...It was striking to me how different Cuba is from other places I've traveled. Even though it's only about 90 miles from the US mainland, it seems like a whole other world. Particular striking to me was that I've never been to a country where the citizens earn so little money relative to the rest of the world, yet carry themselves with such dignity and have such access to world-class Theater, Music, Dance, Education and Healthcare.

In Plaza Vieja

"The Flower of Berlin" bread shop

A kitty roaming the streets

A view of the bay at dawn

In La Plaza de la Catedral a woman wears all white, which signifies that she is a Santeria practitioner.

Pedicab drivers waiting for passengers

At the San Francisco de la Habana Basilica...

In the Plaza de la Catedral...

This is a state-run store where locals can use their ration cards to obtain essential food. For sale there's sugar, black beans, rice, salt and a few other things that I can't read. Observe how little is on the shelf!! There were also stores primarily for tourists that contained more on the shelves, but even those stores had depressingly little available for sale, and almost all they had, except for beer and rum, was imported and surprisingly expensive. From what I understood, most employed Cubans who work for the state make between $12-$60 per month. With this salary, most items for sale in the stores were prohibitively expensive for most Cubans. And since the highest-paid state employees make no more than five times more than the lowest paid employees, Cuba may have less of a wealth disparity problem among its citizens and thus more equality. However, the wealth gap between Cubans and foreigners is gigantic. Socially, politically and ideologically, Cuba is thoroughly Communist. Cuba is certainly not a consumer society though it seemed to me that the Cubans wished to have more consumer goods.

One social difference I noticed immediately in Cuba was that Cuban society seems to be much more racially integrated than most other countries. At music venues, clubs, restaurants, bars, there seemed to always be a mix of black, brown and white Cubans. School kids walking together and groups of men hanging out on corners were of mixed skin colors and this fact was something that struck me initially when I arrived but then became so everyday that I stopped noticing it. Some might say that since the land and economic reforms following the Revolution stripped away the wealth of the Upper Class and then provided more basic necessities for the Lower Class that there is more social equality in Cuba than other places. Certainly, the poorest of the poor in Cuba have a higher quality of life (excepting political freedoms) than the poorest of the poor in other Latin American countries. But I wouldn't say that black and whites in Cuba are on completely equal footing as the nicer areas of Havana seemed to be whiter. And many of the Cubans whose formerly wealthy family members fled to other countries (primarily Miami) are white and so I would bet that the majority of remittances sent to Cubans are sent to white Cubans, thus maintaining a class difference between races. And although black Cubans do not have to fear being shot by police in the streets a Cuban did tell me that there is a disproportionate amount of blacks in the Cuban prisons.

In some instances, I may paint a rosy picture of Cuba from my experiences, because some aspects of Cuba impressed me. However, I should point out that there are some sides of Cuban society that are dark and problematic: lack of freedom of expression, no freedom of press, no opportunities for upward mobility and lack of inexpensive access to the internet to name a few.