Valentine’s Day

Date of actual writing: 2-15-09

Do any of you have a holiday that you really enhoy, yet at the same time deplore the amount of commercialization that surrounds it? Celebration minus Hallmark is one of the pleasures to be found in this socialist stronghold. Valentine’s Day, or El Día de los Enamorados, is as big (if not bigger) here as in the United States, only minus the expensive cards and the CVS chocolates. Right after breakfast all of us girls received flowers from Geovannis, who both works in the building and who first introduced us to the group of guys with whom we spend so much time. All day long, no matter where you were, people would make sure to wish one another Happy Valentine’s Day. People even called the house just to say it. I thought that it was just such a nice custom, and based more truly on caring about people that V-Day in the US with the fake cards that say nothing real.

So how did we celebrate Valentine’s Day? With a costume party, of course. I love Cuba. While we came in costumes such as 50’s housewives or Romans with togas, the boys went all out with masks and facepaints. I almost forgot whether we were celebrating Valentine’s or Halloween, but it was terrific.

Terrific just like most of the time that we spend with Cubans here. Which is why my hatred of the system here grows by leaps and bounds each time that I hear about incidents such as the one that happened to some of the girls and the two boys they were hanging out with yesterday. While walking down the Malecon, heading towards the Havana book fair (a huge event in one of the Spanish fortalezas, where thousands of people cram in to buy really cheap books- I was in heaven), the police came up and started asking the two Cuban boys a bunch of questions. Eventually, they took the boys to the police station, despite the fact that the girls tried to protest. The girls took a cab and followed them to the police station, and kept questioning the police about what was happening. This included one of the police officers blatantly lying to them and said that the guys were under investigation for something. This was total BS because this was the third time the police had stopped this group of girls and guys together, although it was the first time the guys were taken to prison. The system here is so desperate to prevent interactions between tourists and Cubans that they jail people over this. It’s so frustrating and unfair- I get mad almost to the point of crying when I think of these things here. The worst part is when you think about it in general, the words criminal justice are so terribly ironic because so often no justice is to be found. I was thinking about when I used to work at HSTF and talked to some of the youth, and they used to tell me about getting stopped and searched by the police- sometimes twice in a day- just for being black. This shit happens everywhere. The world still has so far to come. That’s why, for me, the thought of bringing and child into this world is so scary- I am tormented enough by thinking about these things, why expose another human being to it?