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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 27.3 (2005) 1-17



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Future Conditionala Short Time Teaching in Cuba

The Tourist

I want you to go to Cuba. Assuming you are a North American, assuming you travel not simply to acquire material things, and assuming that the melancholy of vanishing ways of life, different from your own, affects you. I have been to Cuba only twice, for a total of little more than two weeks, so these are the notes of a visitor, a theatre artist steeped in European traditions who swims in the distilled water of the avant-garde and tends to look East, at the rare moments when time is found to look in any direction other than inward.

I should open this with music, but will begin with money. On my last day in Havana, I took out cash to pay for something, something I wanted but probably did not need; I'm an American, after all. My 1923 silver dollar money clip, inherited from my father, gripped too hard, unwilling to trespass against the embargo, and so the dollar bill ripped apart, shaving off Washington's right side (we should be so lucky). George W. (the original) lay bisected on the café table. My Cuban handler and translator worriedly suggested methods of repair. A gulf between us lay on the table; I found the damaged dollar amusing, she was alarmed by the waste.

A few days earlier, two of my Cuban students had shown me a project which earned them notoriety; taking Cuban peso notes (something we tourists never handle as avatars of the dollar economy), folding them, origami style, into various shapes, and then selling these art objects for one peso, neatly translating the process of value added/surplus value. My students related to me how popular this project had been, with Habaneros crowding around to experience artistic alchemy. Until the arrival of a government arts bureaucrat. The artists were swiftly advised by concerned teachers that it would be unwise to "sell" the object to the official; it must be given for free. To sell the object would be to admit to a merchandising that must not shout its name. The Revolution still revolves, at least when officials are present.

Cuba is certainly not the conventional "shoppers paradise." But much there is for sale. In emerging from a Soviet protected socialism into the world economy, Cubans strive after dollars. While the biggest source of dollars and sugar consumption, just [End Page 1] across the water, is denied them, citizens from every other country may come here freely. The economy exists on two planes; the dollar economy of tourists and those who serve them, and the peso economy. Waitresses, taxi drivers, and hustlers have access to the dollars, and the dollar stores. Doctors, teachers, and engineers do not. Taking my handler (why do I delight in using that term?) and my translator for drinks at a tourist bar, I pay $6 for three drinks. They are horrified. They earn the equivalent of $11 a month in their jobs at the school I am teaching at. I feel rich, because they are poor, and my assurances that this expenditure is really nothing for me, that I can afford it, simply drives the dart in further. I have. You have not. Translate this for me so that I may consume it. The torn dollar is now pinned on my office bulletin board to remind me of its dialectics. The origami-peso note is displayed in my living room as art.

Now the audio score. Havana is seldom silent. Only on my final morning, waiting outside my lodging in Centro (Central Havana) at five in the morning for the taxi to José Marti International Airport, did I experience real quiet. With music, television, and shouts from the street up to apartment windows, Havana in 2004 reminds one of New York's Lower East Side in the early eighties. Is it that most of the intercoms don't work, or that Cubans simply prefer to...

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