The Exciting Conclusion of Tale´s of a Vagabond

Where were we....

After eating the massive amount of icecream we went home and changed before heading out to find a peso dinner. We walked around being pointed here and there before we were all fed up and decided to go into Old Havana via local bus, as we were all running out of money. We were herded onto a packed bus and rode for awhile before getting off when we recognized one of the many beautiful statues we had seen earlier in the day. We walked through stopping here and there for beers and checking out the menus, almost everyone refused to let us eat off the posted menu and said there was a special menu for us which always turned out to be five times as much. We were all understandably getting tired of people constantly trying to take our money because we were tourists. We stopped at a place with live music playing, tired of walking. The girls ordered chicken, I ordered shrimp. My food was terrible but I ate it quickly and angrily, sick of the same story every night. The girls chicken was cold and they did the smart thing and sent it back. We decided to leave and not bother with trying a different dish. I paid for my shrimp and we informed the waiter we were leaving. He gave us some bullshit about how the front table was French and they were loving their food, as if somehow the French know great food. We left there still hungry and wandered around trying to find something cheap, quanity over quality becoming what we had to settle for. We found a place with mediocre food and filled our bellies. We all returned home, but I decided to head out to a divey peso bar I´d seen earlier where beers were only 40 cents a piece and rum was 20 cents, wishing I had known about it in the beginning. I entered into a basically empty room and sat down at the bar with the cigar Rob had given me the night before. An old man was tending bar and he spoke good enough english and we began to converse. I was a bit weary at first, as I learned to be when conversing with Cubans, but quickly warmed up discovering that he was merely an old lonely man and enjoyed my company more then anynthing. His name was Pepe and he had just turned seventy, he had been in Cuba all his life aside from a bit of travelling he did when he was young and times were better, at least monetarily. We spoke about Cuban-American relations and he confided in me early on that he felt it was time for change in their government. I was happy to hear this and began to ask the questions that had been bothering me the previous few days. The answers he gave and the things he told me brought me to the verge of tears at times. As a retiree he makes less then six dollars a month, which is why he works in the bar, the much younger bartender was paying him an undisclosed abount to work from midnight to six in the morning so he could run off and do God knows what all night. He told me that Cuba is a country where people save money in order to purchase food... FOOD! I asked him about the government supplied rations and he said they were given but meagerly. He said in general that there is just not enough food to go around, in his words, ¨people are searching for food.´´ Which I saw first hand, shops with empty shelves, restaurants with only half the menu available. It was all very sad. He said he dreamt of the idea of private property and a country where the people who had more were the ones who worked harder to get ahead. I explained, as he already knew, that Obama is working on lifting the embargos and travel restrictions, which would surely bring cheaper products and Americans with deep pockets into Cuba. Chewing on the end of his glasses he only replied, ¨ We are all waiting...¨ I left the bar that night with a lump in my throat.

I woke up the next day depressed and ready to get back to Costa Rica, so we headed back to the travel agency. After waiting awhile to be seen we discussed the situation and told the lady we wanted to head out the following morning so we could fly out with Leo. Unfortunately there were no seats and we would have to wait until Monday. I wasn´t very happy after this and told the girls I would just see them back at the hotel and began walking along the waterfront to clear my head. I walked for a couple hours before looping back around to the hotel. I stopped at a produce market and picked up a couple avocados at thirty cents apiece. I dropped them off at the room and wandered further down our road to find this pizza shop I read about in Lonely Planet. It´s called Pizza Celina and it´s prepared on the roof of a three story building. You have to yell up your order and after about five minutes he lowers it down in a basket and you throw your money in, roughly thirty cents. It was decent, or at least seemed to be after all the crap food I had eaten in Cuba thus far. I headed home half way satisfied and took a nap. I awoke and found the girls dressed to go out. I sat down to try out one of the avocados, which wasn´t the best I ever had, but I came to realize that I could travel around Cuba for ever and never once use the expression, ¨That was the best ____ I´ve ever had.¨ The girls really wanted me to go out with them and despite being determined to stay in I obliged. After it all it was Leonora´s last night before she was off to London. We went out to a couple places and they bought me a drink. Nothing too eventfull happened aside from a really bad Brazillian soap opera playing at one place. We decided to go out to the peso bar I was at the night before for a night cap. We talked to a couple older Cubanos who were infatuated with the girls, a couple ladies came in who were friends with them. One was a cute younger girl who was the neice of the other. Leo and Maya decided to go home shortly thereafter but I decided to stay and talk to this girl. I soon realized that the aunt was forcefully trying to sell me her neice and so I made up some excuse in Spanish and rushed out of there. Getting down the street I had another random girl literally begging me to pay her for sex. As soon as I turned the corner I started running straight home. I had some weird dreams that night.

The next day it was down to Maya and I. We went top the roof pizza place for lunch and then went souveneir shopping. We went home and napped before dinner, went out and ate, and came home to watch a movie on my Ipod. We were both broke! The rest of the weekend went the same, there was a terrible rainstorm that stayed overhead the whole time which was the tail of a hurricane in Nicaragua. By that point I was actually looking forward to going to San Jose. That week was by far the most stressful and eye-opening of my trip thus far. In summary; I think that Cuba is a beautiful country, despite it´s many faults, it is full of beautiful people (especially the women) and an interesting history. Did I enjoy my time there? Sure, at least I think so. Will I come back? Definately. Would I do it differently? In many ways. The US has it´s problems and I will be among the first to point them out, but after spending time in Cuba... Well...