Habana Oct 29th, 2007

Havana's pretty strange... around noon old men drag
80-pound stones tied to their ankles along the middle
of busy streets in Centro Habana. Nobody stares,
nobody even looks. At 5am while I'm running around
places ghostly sillouettes are dragged up hills on the
backs of trucks, their soldier uniforms flapping. Down the
street, beside a building with a huge chimney, a woman
crushes sugar cane for about 60 cents a liter. She
handles the cane like a porn star handles their cock,
just jams it into the hole. There's a transistor radio
beside the crude machine and when a song she likes
comes on she jiggles all over in a frenzy during the chorus. Over
at the boxing gym I have the Cuban National Team's
head coach drives 50 miles into town to work with me for 90 minutes.
Costs 10 bucks a session. No matter what the hell I do all I get back is: "Leedle by leedle, breen. Leedle by leedle. Tanquillo." Dicey weather means the ocean's wild and all the cars beside the Malecon have to hug the center
line 3 lanes in or else a big ass wave will heave over
and slap against their window. Or there's baseball at
night. Cactus green bleechers and olive army personal
rimming the crowd to keep everyone in order.
Tourquoise seashell texture scoreboard, some lights out, worn
billboards spouting the usual propoganda bullshit. Another morning entering a home with little black girls with amazingly intricate hair-dos
who chase after you so they can welcome you with a
kiss. Very neglected cats trickling over exposed roots
under massive trees shading people at a bus stop. Or
the ghettos, near that boxing gym mostly, where kids
stand almost naked hurling stones at nothing, eyes
peering out of barred windows while their bodies
shiver or twitch, eyes pointed at the action but not
catching much of it. Or my friend over here who showed
me his digital camera: "Deez eez ma girlfriend..." prefaces the first photo. I nodd. "Verry pretty." (not really) "Check dis out, man." He
shows me a 3 minute video of her on an operating table
having kidney stones removed. "THAT'S HER LIVER, MAN!
SHIT!" Later, when I can swallow/breath again, I ask him why
anyone would want footage of their GIRLFRIEND's liver
and bladder etc. "Because I wanna know EVERYTHING. I
love her." So I walk home with that in my pocket. Turn
it over in my head. I get to my quiet little street a
few blocks from where Castro gave a 4 hour speech to 50,000
people last week, and Pepe and Jesus Jr. are playing
catch with a tennis ball and Pepe hastles me to play
along and Jesusito laughs when I ask him how he's
doing because he thinks my Spanish is so pathetic and
funny. I make a fist at him. He makes one back and comes at me until everybody spots his dead coming home from work down the street, "HEEEEYYYYY ZZZEEEEEWWWWW!"