CUBAN TRANSITIONS

Okay, I’ll admit it. This is my fun blog post.  At least, that’s how this blog post started out. As I roamed the small aisle in our tour bus – especially during the longer or earlier trips – I tried to get as money photos as possible with people drooling, snoring, muttering or otherwise making a fool of themselves. But as I starting writing things down and structuring this blog post, I kept thinking to myself about the phrase “sleeping through transitions” not just as an awesome blog title but also what the deeper meaning could represent.

Was there a deeper meaning to “sleeping through transitions”? I mean, I had made up the title myself in the middle of Cuba and I was so sure that I was the only person who would have EVER made such an amazing phrase, I almost thought about copyrighting it. But the more and more I formed this idea; the more I thought it could really be a term of concrete value. Think about it – during the Civil Rights Movement in the US, we created a cultural climate change. For many people their lives were impacted by this movement, this revolution of sorts. But with any revolution there are also those who fight back and stay stubbornly in their past. Post CRM, we still had racists aplenty but the fact was, our cultural climate had indeed changed – a change many hoped was for the better. I think this could be a great representation of certain people in certain cultural shifts “sleeping” through that transition; in essence, they don’t ‘get’ the transition the culture is making and instead try to brush it off, ignore it or violently push back against it. I think it’s also important for me to notate that “sleeping” can also be a mechanism for avoiding hardships in real life. An escape of sorts, if you will.

Then I had a great epiphany – could the Cuban exile population be those in Cuba who had “slept” through the cultural shifts of the Revolution? It may be stretching things a bit far and slim, but I think the analogy could work. These are people (many but not all), who prior to the Revolution were wealth or at least middle class, and had a mostly fine life under pre-Castro rule. Then, as many cultures have experienced, came a socio-political change so rapid and new that many of these people chose to willingly flee Cuba, their home, to maintain some semblance of a prior life. They had actively “slept” through the Cuban cultural transformation. And in this usage of the term sleep, I mean they’ve actively avoided participating in this new change.

I think many cultures can display these sleeping habits but I think it was particularly interesting for our group. Many of us who did fall asleep on the bus (guilty as charged) did miss some sort of transmission that others got to experience – for some it was Yoel’s lectures about this or that, for others it was beautiful scenery many of us will only see once in our lives. So, in that way, we did all sleep through transitions. But I can proudly say that I think each and every one of us engaged with a culture that was different, exciting, intense, and maybe even a bit intimidating with as much aplomb as anyone could expect. Sure, we slept, but we also actively engaged and transformed ourselves. I wouldn’t have had it any other way, would you?

And now for the part that people will HATE me for (just try to laugh at these, will ya?):

leslie!

baynardo!

EMILY!

my first photo and muse for this post!

HERE IS A LINK FOR THE REST OF THE PHOTOS

(i didn’t want to make this post too long):