Via La Sonora Matancera (my translation*):
CubaSoldOUT
Geographic´s Expedition Tour “Cuba: Discovering Its People and Culture”
(Experience Cuban culture the most authentic way possible–through its people.
Meet and engage with Cuban farmers, teachers, artists, veterans and more.)They are sold — yes, soldOUT and with a waiting list — for 2012, a year that just started.
That is the case in this, the 53rd year of the Great Lie that has marked my entire life. In the airports of this deflated floating bubble that is an island without a revolutionary landscape and even less of a national disposition to evolve, there is a huge line of foreign passengers. And worse, they are determined not to miss the last act of the ludicrous tragic comedy of the 20th century’s second half. They are anxious to become part of the last conga line that will end the deteriorated costume ball that this island of cork has become in the first 12 years of the 21st century.
I understand, although it hurts, I understand. Almost. That desire to go, to explore, even if from a motor coach with a tour guide and a one-way translator: “Yes, comrade, sir, mister, yes, of course.” The yearning to touch and see this prohibited island that is almost a museum… to drink her, smoke her, smell her, to grope her like an old lover. It is the impatience of an atom, a mite, a millionth part — although it may only be a few days from an almost luxury hotel and a beach that is almost white and an ocean of foam contaminated with semen, sweat, and other effluents — that provides that extraordinary vision at the end of a telescope, almost phallic, that focuses at the tip of a tropical vagina with its perennial tumor resounding between jingling ovaries that ooze humor, literally. To be a part of the growing fibroid flooded in its own nostalgia of what it was, of what it could have been. It is a desire to feel that grafted oral cancer of so much empty laughter over its misery with rumba and the incessant drumbeat at the center of the cervix, feeling the shrieking uterine tunnel, an almost picturesque landscape with tumbling walls, almost a highway without barriers, almost carte blanche without credit. It is the uncontrolled impetus to quench oneself with the irresistible odor of a sexual sewer emanating from women that are almost attractive with asses that are almost perfect. Women who are constantly giving birth to children who are almost brass and carbon, and whose eyes throw bones to the dog that is the Malecon in order to splash instant digital photographs for the Italians, the French, the British, the Canadians, the Argentineans, the Spanish, the Texan, the New Yorker, while the tourist vagina opens and closes at a feverish pitch — zas-flash-clic-zas-clic-clic-clic. Go! Do it! Cuba is waiting for you while it splashes in a pool of rum on the floor, rum, sweet rum and añejo like the national bitterness that runs end-to-end of the cursed geography of a woman desired and purchased, abused, used…
Because that is what it is, an immoral desire to be part of an orgasmic moment before the end, which can be seen everywhere and never seems to end. It is the joyful sin of a pleasure held back, postponed for later so they can just let go, escape, to mumble apologies with moral gibberish and return with cigars, rum, and hickies on their necks so they can tell their friends at the university later about the museum, the cultural club: Yes, I was there in 2012… I fucked Cuba the grand whore before she tried to become a little lady. And man, she was expensive, but hell, she was well worth it…
That is why although it hurts, I understand it well. I never went to Cuba in any year during my ravenous desire for her, waiting in my delirious celibacy for her to change to make her mine. I, who have respected her at a distance with the prudishness and devotion of a man in love with an almost virgin, have refused to take advantage of her condition as a whore for sale. I can then understand why in the year before the almost-change right around the corner, everyone is making a line to take her marvelous and prohibited ass. Yes, although it hurts, I understand… Me, the great voyeur and teacher of dry humping in silence, waiting in silence for the orgasmic explosion from the year of Cuban change, today, the same as in the 1959, 1978, 1980, 1994, 2006…
*This post was not easy to translate, so please forgive any errors or mistranslations.
Mine you, a lot of these same people who spend thousands of dollars to breathlessly go to Cuba and who listen to the Buena Vista Social Club and Omara Portuondo and joyously dance salsa with some jinetera or pinguero in Varadero would cringe if you suggested that they go to Miami to enjoy Cuban culture that is very much alive in Miami. Many of them consider Cuban music performed by exiles as ghetto and trashy and they speak of Miami neighborhoods as if they were dark and dangerous, something akin to East L.A., yet, somehow all things emanating from fidel’s Cuba are just wonderful, the music is no longer trashy and Spanish sounds so fine and dandy in Cuba even though they hate when Spanish is spoken in Miami. And the streets of Havana, well, they aren’t ghettoized, and certainly not dark and dangerous, even they there are heaps of garbage all over the place, building collapses are daily occurrences, and blackouts happen all of the time, no, they’re just quaint, unlike the horrible streets of Miami!
I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that once they are in Cuba, they can treat Cubans like garbage and feel superior to them, while in Miami, they are forced to treat Cuban exiles as human beings?
“I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that once they are in Cuba, they can treat Cubans like garbage and feel superior to them, while in Miami, they are forced to treat Cuban exiles as human beings?”
Bingo Ray. Keep in mind these are same people who feel good knowing their tax dollars support the welfare state the keeps “minorities” in the U.S. permanently in the underclass.