Dreams and Going to Cuba

I love my sleep. I don’t always get as much as I’d like. In October and half of November, for example, I averaged 5.3 hours a night and I know this because one of the first things I do each morning is check my Fitbit dashboard and they email me a weekly report. The past two weeks I’m getting closer to seven hours of sleep and the only thing that forces me out of bed in the morning is a bathroom call. A couple of times I’ve been able to hop back in bed, pull my sleep mask over my eyes in an attempt to fall back into a dream I was having, like opening a book to where you placed a marker. It rarely works. Like this morning I wanted to know if I reached the shore before dark. I was swimming in the Boston harbor, dodging rowing crews and I was swimming for all I was worth, kicking up water hoping that a sweep of oars wouldn’t knock me out as they passed by. I know where the Boston part came from…another widowed blogger booked a room on the Back Bay for the week before Christmas and I loved that idea. The rowing crews came from the fact that recently, as I waited on a bridge for a red light, I saw a crew putting their boat in a storage building by the river near my house.
 

Can you believe it, 5-6 years ago our local high schools started offer the sport of rowing. Wikipedia says rowing as a sport dates back to Ancient Egyptian but I’ve always associated rowing with snotty universities where your daddy has to donate a few endowments and lawn jockeys to get you in. True or not, with dreams and their meanings the theory is it’s not the settings that matter, it’s the actions. Oh my! According to the dream dictionary, swimming means that “you are exploring aspects of your subconscious mind and emotions---it may be a sign that you are seeking some sort of emotional support” and the part about it getting dark, “signifies failure in some work that you are attempting.” The only work I’ve been failing with lately (that I know of) is knitting on the bias. I tore out almost as many rows as I knitted on my shawl before I finally got the hang of adding stitches on the ends and decreasing stitches in the middle of every other row. You’ve got to stay on your toes, count often and I’m liking the challenge so I doubt this activity played into my dream. My failure is probably more along the lines of feeling old and wishing I could find a cure for that. Old woman identity crisis going on. Nothing to see here, people, move along. Just don't hit her with your oars as you pass by.

This week I went to another travelogue about Cuba. The one I went to last year was about the specific places in Cuba the trip organizers will take their group this coming February---the cultural and educational things they’ll be doing as part of the People-to-People Program set up since the embargo was lifted. You still can’t just hop on a plane and go there as a tourist if you're a U.S. citizen. You have to be licensed to go for one of 5-6 specific purposes and keep a detailed diary while you're in Cuba. This time the travelogue speaker, an expert on Cuba, was a man who has been there over 100 times since 1999 to do humanitarian work delivering medical supplies. He’s allowed to come and go under strict licenses issued by our two governments and he had fascinating things to say about the island’s history and our country’s part in causing the climate that led to the Revolution. Hint #1: We helped the Mafia, set up shop to launder money and that made the rich richer and the poor poorer. He also said the all the tour guides in the country work for the government and you should only believe what you see with your eyes but not necessarily everything that you hear with your ears. Punishment for crimes is swift and harsh so the country is very safe for visitors. For example, killing a cow in Cuba comes with a mandatory sentence of life in prison. Beef is only for tourists, not the Cuban people.

With Fidel Castro’s recent death the speaker didn’t expect much to change in Cuba over the next two years because the man who is taking over for Fidel (until his retirement) has been unofficially running the country for the past five years. That’s also assuming Mr. Trump won’t keep his promise to undo Obama’s lifting of the embargo. The hope is that once he’s been briefed on the benefits our country foresees from the deal in terms of counteracting Cuba’s growing anti-American alliances with China and Venezuela Trump will do a flip-flop. Still, with the stroke of a presidential pen those in my travel club who signed up to go to Cuba could have their dream trip pulled out from underneath them.

I’ll never travel out of the country again---unless I get abducted by a UFO or go in my dreams---but going to travelogues enriches my life without having to pay a dime and we get free cookies and coffee as a bonus.   ©

Old Arguments and the New Cuba

Before my husband and I met, he bought an old Victorian house that had been split into four apartments that shared two bathrooms. He owned it for more years than I like to remember because it was a lot of work to keep it up and that’s not counting all the remodeling we did to add two more bathrooms teaching ourselves plumbing, electrical wiring and sheetrock application along the way. Once when we painted the outside we hired three 15-16 year old fatherless boys to help and they ended up to be factors in an infamous fight that Don and I had. They were kids from the neighborhood whose mothers---for various reasons---didn’t pay a lot of attention to them. From the time they were 9-10 years old every time Don was outside working on a piece of equipment the boys would be there watching and getting what we nicknamed their “Fifteen with Father” talks. I can’t tell you how many times ‘the three musketeers’ would be in the back of our yellow convertible being our shadows during Don’s and my early years together. The beach, carnivals, car shows, music-in-the park, the rodeo and the races---we introduced them to a lot of things they’d never done before.

Back to the Victorian house: One day we were all busy bees painting on the exterior when Don sent me to pick up lunch for the crew. When I returned, I parked the car opposite the driveway. No big deal. It was a busy city street and parking was at a premium. Later on, Don backed his truck out of that driveway and hit my car. A normal person might have apologized. A normal person might have taken in the fact that I was in a legal parking space before he started chewing me out. “Why did you park there?” he yelled. “You know you’re going to get nailed when you park opposite a driveway!” I pointed out that HE was at fault for the accident---that I wasn’t even in the car. But he still had a full head of steam and when I asked him why he was yelling he waved his arm towards the teens who were watching the exchange and shouted, “To teach these boys where not to park a vehicle!” 

“That’s just great!” I was yelling by then, too. “All you managed to teach them is it’s okay to yell at a woman for something you yourself did! Is that really the lesson you want them to learn?” And just like that, the steam left Don’s head and he got a look on his face akin to that of a little boy who’d just got caught teasing an alley cat into a frenzy. Game. Set. Match. The little woman won one for womankind when Don then told the boys that I was right and “a guy shouldn’t take his frustrations out on a woman.” Don would have made a good father. He wasn’t perfect but he was quick to admit when he was wrong and he rarely forgot that the three musketeers were like sponges who took in everything he said and did. He was a role model by default.

Change of topic: I have no plans to travel to Cuba but I went to this month’s 'We Travel' event anyway. It was one on the most interesting hours I’ve spent in a long time and before it was over I was longing to be the type of person who is adventurous enough to sign up for trips like that. One of the things I learned is that although the country has been recently opened up for travel between the U.S. and Cuba, there are many regulations and restrictions on who can go and why. People who have family there or who once lived there can go. Journalists can get in if they engage in interviews on a daily basis and average people, like those in the audience, can get in if they are take part in a program called People-to-People---cultural and educational exchanges. You have to sign a contract that you’re going to interact with the Cubans each day from nine to four and keep a journal of how much time you spent where and what you talked about. 

The company who organizes these cultural and educational exchanges schedule three-four events a day and they sound interesting. You go in groups of twenty-four and you learn about the Cubans as they learn about Americans. The interactions take place at tobacco or cocoa farms, cigar factories, Hemingway’s house, with a baseball team and the American Car Club. You visit schools and historical landmarks that go back to the days of Columbus. Art, music and dance are a big part of the exchanges, too. One thing that I thought was cool is in the cigar factories they have someone who reads the news to the workers while they work. The speaker said that travel to Cuba could close back up depending on who gets elected next time and if it doesn’t American investments into the country is going to change its character and charm. In other words, the ideal time to go is now. Sometimes I wish I was younger with a better working blander, and seeing that 'We Travel' presentation was one of those times. Oh, well, maybe in my next life…. ©