Patria O Muerte - Cuba Rocks!!!

Note: Sorry for the massive delay in getting these pictures up online. We forgot our camera in cuba and it took months to get it sent back to the US.
Click here to view our photo album and read captions about Cuba!
http://picasaweb.google.com/tree3344/CubaTrip

For Valentine’s Day this year, Tree surprised me with a trip to Cuba, the number one destination on my travel wish list. I was also crowned The Trip Leader for this mission, marking the biggest testament of trust from Tree that I have ever received. Anyone who knows Tree knows that this passing of the torch was a very special moment in our relationship.

We spent one week on the Caribbean island from March 18th(which also happened to be our 4-year anniversary) to the 26th. It was the most profound travel experience either of us has ever had. There are many contributing factors as to why we feel this way, and hopefully our photo album can help illustrate where my words fail.

For starters, Cuba is just so different from any other country. Its history, the people, the land, the revolution and its current plight are wonderfully unique. As a general rule of travel, Tree and I try to take off our cultural glasses so that we see with objective eyes. In this case it meant that we left behind our democratic and capitalistic ideas of wealth, poverty, freedom and efficiency, and simply tried to experience Cuba independent of the U.S. propaganda spewed about Castro’s communist nation.

To give an example, one of the things we often heard about Cuba was how poor the country is. And it’s true, Cuba doesn’t have a whole lot of stuff. How could they? We have a trade embargo against them, but I have trouble calling a country with a literacy rate of 97% and an infant mortality rate slightly lower than that of the U.S. poor. ‘Poverty’ refers to the condition of not having the means to afford basic human needs such as clean water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. This doesn’t describe Cuba at all, but I know certain parts of Los Angeles that fit this definition perfectly.

Not to say that Cuba didn’t suffer greatly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the superpower that subsidized them for the first 30 years after the revolution. In order to stave off his own downward spiral and stimulate the economy, Castro began issuing licenses to families to rent out extra rooms to tourists. This limited experiment with free enterprise has turned out to be a win-win for everyone, especially us. As soon as we walked through the door of our Casa Particular, Vivian, our hostess, welcomed us with a huge

embrace. By the time we said our goodbyes a week later, we were all hugging, kissing, and crying in the street. We were family.

It is for this reason- for the passion, generosity, humor, creativity, and love of the Cuban people- that I think Cuba is the wealthiest country that I have ever been. But of course, don’t take our word for it. Go to Cuba!

STEVIE