"Kissing the Old and Bribing the Young"
I wrapped my arms around Dan and buried my face in his shoulder.
He brought his lips closer to my cheek and whispered softly…
“You smell like you’ve been kissing old people.”
I asked him, “What!? What do old people even smell like?”
“Like petrified skin sacks”, he remarked casually, “Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against old people. But they smell like decades of time has been captured between every fold and wrinkle, and when you kiss them on the cheek, these fermented pockets of time spill onto your face. Then you come to give me a sexy kiss on the lips a few minutes later, and you reek of the dawn of the ages.”
I smacked him on the shoulder, laughing and feeling just a little bit guilty at the same time. It was true that I had been kissing quite a few elderly cheeks since we arrived in Cuba. Since Dan and I don’t participate in the same recreational activities as most of our generation (heavy drinking, staying up all night partying, etc.) we had found ourselves surrounded most often by the company of our elders.
Tonight we were sitting at a table with Senor Arturo, a 75 year retired trumpet player (Although I don’t believe that musicians truly ever retire. Once a musician, always a musician, right?) Arturo’s aging lungs no longer allowed him to play his horn, so he had focused on guitar and vocals for the past decade. Tonight, we were clustered underneath the awning of the outdoor patio as he taught us the classic Cuban song, “Guantanamera.”
Arturo’s son sat between us, the youngest in the family, and yet still 20 years older than both of us. He too had played the trumpet in his youth. Together, he and his father had traveled all over Cuban with a 15 piece band, playing in hotels, bars, and concert halls. They had both studied music at the University of Camaguey, and they now lived together in the suburbs of the city and rented their spare rooms to visiting tourists to make a living. They were both named Arturo.
The two Arturo’s normally only rented their rooms for a fee that was out of our price range, but they had made an exception upon seeing the guitars we carried on our backs upon arrival. We had a small room behind the house equipped with a bathroom, refridgerator, and wall fan. It was comfortable and quiet, and we spent the evenings playing music with the family or exploring the streets of Camaguey.
The previous night, we had gone to the Provincial Theatre in the center of the Historic Distric of the city. There we saw an amazing performance by Cuba’s contemporary ballet troup. When we arrived at the tickets desk, we discovered that although Cuban’s paid 5 pesos (25 cents USD) to see the show, foreigners had to pay 5 cuc ($5 USD). We sat outside on the steps, contemplating what to do. On a budget of $15 a day including food and lodging, these tickets were just too expensive. Suddenly Dan had an idea. He pointed towards a group of Cuban teenagers standing in the ticket line, joking with eachother and snacking on small back of popcorn.
“Why don’t we ask one of them to buy our tickets for us, at the Cuban price? We can offer him 3 cuc ($3 USD) and we’d still get in for less than the price of one foreigner ticket.”
Thus began our first experience of tricking the system in Cuba. Often, prices are set differently for tourists and locals to promote segregation (there are separate bus systems, separate restaurants all depending on whether the price is in cuc or in moneda nacional). The prices also differ because of the contrast between a European or American salary and a Cuban salary. But the fact still remained – we could not afford to pay the foreigner price for this show if we still wanted to have enough money to eat breakfast and lunch the next day. So we did what the Cubans do. We figured out a way to get what we needed while paying the least amount possible. Already I am learning so much from this island’s inhabitants and their frugal ways. The vast majority of people here are honest, generous, humble and thrifty ,thrifty, thrifty. They truly know how to make a dollar stretch as far as possible.
And so would you if you lived in a place where the average salary is $20USD... per month.
In Cuban standards, our journey would have been considered extravagant. In tourist standards, it would have been considered slovenly. But we really wanted to know what it would be like to travel and live like the Cubans do as much as possible. So we went for it. We always used the cheapest mode of transportation possible, even if this meant bouncing up and down on long metal seats in the back of a converted cattle truck for two hours, or bumping through the midnight streets on the back of a bicycle rickshaw. We rarely spent more than $1 each on a meal, and we spent the evenings playing guitar under peeling roofs rather than drinking expensive rum in city clubs or hostels.
So we took what we had learned along the way, and continued on our adventure;
kissing the old, and bribing the young.
