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July 8, 2005
El Huracan
All day we’ve been waiting for the hurricane. Fidel and the Weather Channel have been warning us for hours, but honestly everyone is calm. All the windows in Havana are taped. In the afternoon, we went to the shwanky hotel down the street from ours to quickly get a few sandwiches para llevar before the madness began. The lobby was full of tourists, lounging and drinking mojitos. As the wind roared and the rain began, a band started to play. It was a strange scene; Titanic-like.
We waited a few hours in our hotel room on the top floor…a man who had chickens in a little coop on the rooftop next to us has completely boarded it up. The loud roaring wind has been shaking and banging the plastic balcony cover. The electricity suddenly goes out all over the city … and all at once, Fidel’s voice is silenced and it is completely dark. We make our way in the dark down to the lobby, candlelit. Calm, soft voices fill the air and it is a cozy scene…domino players, hushed Spanish, employees and guests together. A crowd is huddled outside under the hotel awning, and police with loudspeakers go by announcing that the worst of the hurricane is expected to pass at 11 pm and to get inside their houses. The door opens and closes letting in cool gusts of air into the humid sweltering room. Employees are gathered around the radio listening to quick streams of the latest updates about the hurricane.
It is a unique atmosphere. We’ve noticed that the employees of the hotel and at the state-run bars and restaurants have been rather reserved and silent towards us. Many of them are our age. Maybe they are discouraged from fraternizing with tourists in general, yet it seems uniformly and excessively so. We would love nothing more than to get to know these Cubans…to learn what their lives are like.
As we were all together hunched around the radio, Peter struck up a conversation with the young doorman and the woman who sits at the front desk. Friendly and warm and curious, they asked us where we were from, how we had skirted the embargo to get here, what we thought of Cuba. The doorman was eager to practice his English. It was interesting to note how well the jineteros spoke English, while the employees struggled. It seemed that the jineteros had everything to gain by getting close to the tourists, while the employees could possibly lose their jobs.
The hurricane hits at 11:05. I hope that Havana holds together…
(All the names of Cubans in these posts have been changed as a precautionary measure)
Posted by Emily Marie Stremel Mork at July 8, 2005 11:51 PM
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