The Education of Lying in Bed in Cuba

Havana, Cuba. February 2025.

A literal fever dream.

A real bed (I don’t know if particle board exists in Cuba).

Real food. Real handles on heavy old car doors.

Real people.

Real shaking. Real Sweating. Real Flu.

I went to Cuba with a company called Cuba Educational Travel doing People to People travel. It was supposed to be a cultural exchange. I had an itinerary full of music, food, and meeting students and entrepreneurs. Did I get to do any of it? Not really.

After the first dinner, my stay consisted primarily of sleeping, shivering, and looking at the ceiling and walls in my hotel room. We had no cell service and periodic weak wifi. I was impressed at my ability to suffer without the internet (that's me becoming my own hero right there, ha). Even as a kid, sick days were spent on the couch watching The Price is Right or Let's Make a Deal. Having the flu with minimal entertainment and cold showers felt like I had experienced some type of affluent spiritual retreat at a sweat lodge and came back a slightly more enlightened version of myself.

In spite of my prone and isolated position, the energy of Cuba found me anyway. Cuba is the opposite of minimalism. Like a benevolent version of the Blob (check out the 1958 Steve McQueen movie if you care), the culture seeped into and around my beautiful room.

The outside sounds slithered under the doors and through the windows. The patio doors did nothing to mute the city. The bicycle taxis, motorcycles, and car doors opening and closing were relatively constant. Car radios periodically overtook the sounds of the general commotion of the people on the street. The floor did not muffle the constant saws and hammers of construction below.

In Havana the streets seemed to die down between 12:30am-2am, and remained relatively quiet until a rooster would crow from some city block nearby around 5am.

From the outside, our hotel looked like every other crumbling building. It had no sign. There aren’t really advertisements in Cuba. I stood outside on the balcony a couple times. There was so much to see if you focused on each individual object. I tried to focus on absorbing as many details as I could when it became apparent that this would be my only sightseeing in Cuba. There was an old man who lived on the third floor across the street. He was thin and slightly hunched in his white tank top. Maybe he was smoking a cigar and maybe he had missing teeth. I don’t exactly remember, but that was his vibe. We gave each other a brief wave of acknowledgement and both returned to scoping out opposite ends of the street below. At a well-worn playground across the street, there was a tall metal slide, several metal seesaws, and a well oiled merry-go-round behind a locked gate. Below me, a baby girl wearing a pink onesie sat in the doorway downstairs and watched people walk by while clutching her cup of water.

I shuffled to the hotel kitchen once a day and wrote what beverages I took on the paper attached to the refrigerator door. I kept scribbling out the number and adding more. By the end of my stay, I bought four 7 Up’s, two Pepsi’s, and five bottles of water from the hotel, for a charge of around eleven USD. The 7 Up cans had old style pull tabs on the top to open them. These soda tabs became my souvenirs, although I'm not quite sure I was so enamored with them or what the heck I am going to do with them.

My husband went to find me food late one night. I thought he went across the hall to the kitchen to find me bread. Turns out, this guy was roaming the blocks trying to find a restaurant, which is not easy in Havana. When I realized he had been gone for over an hour, I started to low-key be concerned he was dead. I think I heard a statistic that there's only one homicide every 48 hours in Cuba. But I couldn't really determine if that was a favorable statistic when my husband was missing at midnight and my body was in a state of delirium. I was thinking about how I’d have to live with the fact that his true undying love for me ended up having him killed (a very tragic flex to have), as well as the mountain of paperwork I'd have to do to get his body out of Cuba.

Although walking the streets of Havana alone without cell service and a wad of cash (credit cards are no bueno in Cuba) could be considered questionable behavior, I think he made the right move, as he did eventually show up unharmed with some styrofoam containers of food.

Women and children walked the streets at night safely. I hadn’t eaten for almost 24 hours and could wake up at 3am hangry and ready to fight (or cry, ngl). I did appreciate his determination to stop a fight between us before my stomach started one.

My Cuban guide, Vivian, brought a tupperware full of chicken soup to my room another night for dinner. This chicken did not come from a grocery store, I guarantee it. I’ve raised chickens for years, harvested a few, and this was a fresh, non-commercially farmed chicken. Maybe it was another nitty-gritty city rooster, I don’t know and I didn’t ask. Now obviously, I'm not a food critic, but I do love eating. This soup was incredible. It was the kind of soup that could make you believe that eating for enjoyment was possible even if you were only able to stomach a few bites.

The pessimist in me would label this trip as highly disappointing with a significant amount of FOMO. She would also list the disappointing amount of garbage in the streets, people waiting in lines for gas for an entire day, reported electrical blackouts in the rural areas for six hours each day, and the extremely low average monthly wage of most Cubans.

The optimist in me would first be grateful that I had Tamiflu. Secondly, it wasn’t even the worst trip we’ve ever had. Ask me about the day I dropped my son off to nature camp and he was evacuated to Circus Circus in Reno due to a wildfire (ok that memory in hindsight was actually great since everyone and everything was safe). I'm sure I can think up a handful of disgusting Airbnb stories. Oooh, what about the time our family puked on and in between every one of the Florida Keys? Or maybe when we were stuck in airports for 24 hours on our way to Puerto Rico with a lost wheelchair? Or last year my husband was backpacking the Appalachian Trail in Georgia during Hurricane Helene? Without a doubt, the worst trip we ever had was being stranded in Port Aransas during the Great Texas Power Outage of 2021. My experience of Cuba was much better than that mess. (As an obvious side note, we are due for some non-stressful travel.)

Thirdly, my optimist would be excited that I learned about the Cuban musician Carlos Varela (and my pessimist would be equally upset that I missed him in concert on the last night of our trip).

Finally, my inner optimist would remember Vivian’s last WhatsApp text to me, “As I always say, Cuba is not a government but its people, culture, and hospitality.” TRUTH.

I did feel the presence of a benevolent blob of Cuban energy in my isolation. Honestly, besides going on vacation to eat, don’t we all really just want to FEEL the place? TO FEEL THE ENERGY? I travel to understand places and people with my body. You can understand a place with your mind via pictures and stories and history, but you never REALLY know what it’s like until you go there.

Did it suck being sick? You bet.

But the energy still made it to me.

Gracias, Cuba.