Cuba Travel Diary, 1995 Part Three Saturday, January 28, 1995 (Havana): Wake up at 7:30AM.  Coffee with Ludovico.  Abelardo stops by to get envelopes and paper to bring to the Museum for the workshop.  Take the bike at 8:30 to the Museum.  Stop at the Havana Libra to make reservations for myself and Jacqueline at Tropicana nightclub that evening. At the Museum I set up five tables with supplies of paper, envelopes, perforated papers, and rubber stamps that have been donated by Stamp Francisco.  Gaglione has been kind enough to send me about 40 rubber stamps for use in this workshop.  Lots of kids as well as adults show up for the activity, about 80 people.  Pedro Juan Guiterrez comes and presents me with a mail art catalog he did in 1990, which was printed with the help of Peter Kustermann.  It contains the work of 127 artists from 27 countries.  Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg are there and we have a nice talk about our experiences in Cuba.  Most of the BIZ members are there.  Juan Carlos is there with his girlfriend.  Jacqueline, Carmen, Ana, Rudolfo and Camacho join in with the stamping.  Jacqueline presents me with a stampsheet she did, which I hang over my bed in Dallas upon my return. We go back to Ludovico's apartment and have some lunch.  More of that great split pea soup that I can't get enough of.  The fried plantains in it make all the difference.  Jacqueline, Abelardo, Rudolfo and his wife, are all playing with the Stamp Francisco rubber stamps that I'm leaving with them.  I leave them and bike back to the Havana Libre to pay for the Tropicana.  After people watching at the Coppelia for awhile, I do some last minute souvenir shopping at the Saturday sidewalk craft fair that I was at last week with Juan Carlos.  Cycle back to Ludovico's apartment and talk with Abelardo till I bid him and the group goodbye, and take a taxi to the Havana Libre.  This is the last time I see my new friends who have come to mean so much to me.  Despite the obvious hardships that they are undergoing:  food rationing, blackouts, unreliable public transportation, unemployment - these people are leading active lives, excited about the work they are doing.  It shows me once again that we people in more prosperous cultures take many luxuries in our lives for granted.  And the art we produce reflects this.  It is decorative and expresses no higher meaning other then our personal concerns.  For the members of Cuba's Banco de Ideas Z, art matters and expresses a social and political necessity.  It is a collaborative activity that engages members in social situations.  It saddens me greatly that I will no longer be part of them in a day-to-day manner as I have been in the past two weeks.  But I feel fortunate to have had the time with them that I was allowed. I  arrive at the hotel at 5:00PM and clean up.  Buy some rum and wait for Jacqueline, who comes over about 7:00.  We have drinks on the patio of the tenth floor room, which overlooks the campus of Havana University.  As the sun sets, torches come out to celebrate the centennial birthday of José Marti.  The students begin to march from the campus to Revolutionary Tower, about four miles away.  The torches are made of soda cans stuffed with kerosene soaked rags set atop broom sticks and tree branches.  The flashes of light make there way down the streets toward the center of the celebration.  One million people are expected to attend.  I was given a pass to be on the reviewing stand, but I have opted for this evening together with Jacqueline, who has become so important to me.  At 8:30PM , Jacqueline and I take a taxi to the Tropicana.  The show starts at 9:00 and lasts for two hours.  I is non-stop dancing, lights, costumes, singing, and spectacular headdresses.  I thought the nightclub would be indoors, but it is outdoors and the stage is surrounded by palm trees.  The night is perfect, warm with a slight breeze.  This is one of the world's great nightclubs and a Havana tradition dating back to the Thirties.  It lives up to all my expectations.  And I take back the remarks I made earlier, about wanting to die after a previous evening with Jacqueline.  I thank God, for sparing me, and allowing me another evening of bliss. Sunday, January 29, 1995 (Havana-Cancun): Sleep late.  Have room service.  Check out at 12:00.  Go shopping on the Rampa for rum and cigars.   Take the shuttle to the José Marti Airport at 2:00PM.  Get to the head of the line and get ticketed early.  Talk to some other Americans, who have been scouting scuba diving sites.  They have been to the National Museum and seen the mail art show , which they rave about.  It's a nice way to leave the country. Take the 5:45 plane on Cubana Airlines from Havana to Cancun, Mexico. I'm exhausted and looking forward to home, but it's hard to leave Cuba.  More then any of my previous trips, this one has effected me.  Abelardo, Ludovico, Ana, Sandra, Juan Carlos, Carmen, Rodolfo, Camacho and the others who have come into my life through my contact with Banco de Ida Z, have stimulated me with their commitment to art under difficult circumstances.  I feel like we shared a number of similar ideas despite the cultural gulf between us.  But my time with Jacqueline has also been a meaningful one, and an important one to me.  It's one thing to be able to connect intellectually with a group of people, another to share an emotional feeling with someone very special to you.  It just makes me feel even closer to all the people I've met on this trip.  When I will see them all again I can have no idea.  But I can't help feeling that things will change soon in Cuba.  Faster than the Cuban people realize.  Perhaps I brought some measure of hope to some I met.  I know I received much more than I expected.  During the rubber stamp workshop at the Museum I was handed a letter by a stamp designer Duhamel Xolot, who wrote, "The doors of a new world are open to me now.  I want to say thank you to all the networkers and to mail art.  I have no time to express here all I feel.  It's the way of the freedom.  It's free art.  World Art.  In the name of the artists who feel it like me, thank you very much for coming." There is change brewing.  It is being stirred now.  If I was able to play a small part, so be it.  My thoughts are not of satisfaction, but personal regret for the friends I leave behind.  Cuba is not just a country to me now, even though it is no longer the unknown markings on a map as when I arrived.  It's a place of people I've grown to respect and love.  As the plane passes over the country below, the checkered farmlands, the  rippling mountains, the turquoise sea surrounding it, and climbs into the cloud palaces racked with a golden sunset, I think I've never seen anything as beautiful as this, or felt such sadness to leave it behind. Return to Writings