I have yet to feel as if I understand this country. I could not post anymore on the Matanzas trip because there is really nothing positive to say about except for the pizza and the beach. The rest of the 3 days there were utter horror. It was like a freaky Twilight episode where we were stuck on an island with Profé and he kept talking but nothing came out of his mouth and he would point at things and there would be nothing to look at. In a coconut shell.
Today we went to the Museo de Bellas Artes, the Cuban Side and it was pretty nifty. Some of the artwork was fantastic while others were portraits of very hairy women. The guide went through almost every single picture and explained it's significance and brush stroke technique and how that coincided with the year in history. Needless to say, I didn't pay attention. When I go to a museum I like to get lost in my
own little world and look at the things i like for however long i want to. this was impossible to do as Profé kept whistling at us to make sure we wouldn't stray away from the guide. As I tend to do, or in this case not do, I went on my merry way looking at the abstract paintings. Some of the most interesting were done after the revolución and they didn't seem like very happy paintings. One bore a child titled "Libre" whose head was cut off and replaced with what looked like chains to an unspecified source. I can only assume that the artist felt the freedom of the country was like a mock birth, a birth in which the child would have no head and would have the undeniable traces back to where it stemmed from. I'm not really sure what I expected of course, since I still don't understand the mindset of the people regarding the revolución. In class the other day we were talking about the characteristics of an underdeveloped nation and revolution and the major common thread between the two is the mindset of the people. If the people of a country think that they are living in an underdeveloped nation then they truly are, and in order to have a revolution you have to change the mindset of the people. This reminded me of the metaphor Madge used to describe Cuba: The monkey that is being attacked by a lion (the US
) but is still alive and kicking. That mentality must have stemmed from the revolución. The people here feel unified now as a country. They understand that there is undeniable classism but yet they don't see it that way. To them there are some who are simply more fortunate than others. they are neither better nor smarter than them, they are simply different. Like I said, it is a queer country. Not like that though.
In fact, the gay scene here, although many of our instructors have repeated to us that homophobia is a thing of the past it seems strange to me that the gay scene here is limited to an area at the melecón and a fiesta particular that changes every night of the weekend. There is also a gay beach, I think. I wasn't expecting to see guys walking down the streets holding hands or anything like that, I mean that has been recently accepted in the US and even then it is mostly in the "gay" areas. However, there is an acknowledgement here that they seem to ignore. It's like how they know that people in other countries don't have rationed food that they can barely live off of and yet they never question us about how much we eat or what our food situation is like.
I've said it once and I'll say it again, it's a rather queer country.
