Tonight is Monday and I am sitting in the lobby of the Melia alongside three classmates all with hopes of escaping the residencia noise and making a dent in our increasing workload. One student with his laptop, and the rest of us with journals pricier than an average Cuban’s monthly salary sit atop the plush couches, a glass of wine by our side and a background of cheap Jazz covers gloss over our ears. Over the past month the Melia has become an unexpected refuge. A place where you can run to get out of the rain, where you can buy a cup of coffee when Maria runs out, where you can use the bathroom without carrying a purse full of tissue, where you can sneak in to use the swimming pool on a hot day and where you can bring find an empty chair and a plug when those in your house are occupied by your 17 roommates. The Melia is comfortable, drinks are expensive, English whispers are constantly heard and you can sit invisibly alongside other tourists without a single thought of what’s going on outside the hotel doors. Tonight the Melia is not comfortable. One of my classmated asks us what we will miss about Cuba, the other two have trouble coming up with an answer. They talk, instead, about things they miss from home. “Ellie, will you miss things?” “Of course.” I reply, and then realize that I have to leave because if there is one thing I won’t miss, it’s the Melia.
Being a stranger in Cuba has brought to life an indistinct no-man’s land where I am everyone and no one at the same time. Walking down the street, my clothes, my skin and my swagger draw attention to the fact that I am not from here, it brings locals to my side asking for a handout and policemen that walk one step behind to protect my North American skin. It brings cab drivers eager to know my entire life story and groups of artists and scholars more than willing to share their own. In many ways our stranger-dome has given us an immediate Cuban identity but it has also allowed us to cross over untouched thresholds into hotel lands where faces circle in an out and anonymity reigns.
As I leave the Melia, I try to think about what I will miss from home. Weeks before we left for Cuba I had become more disenchanted with school, with Ann Arbor and the University than I have ever been before. “I have to get out,” I would say over and over to my roommate as waves of claustrophobia began getting stronger and stronger. People seemed too unhappy and I was ready to escape the stress and chaos that was dominating my life. Now, months later and cell phone free at last, I have trouble thinking of things that I miss from home. I miss my best friend, non-Cuban wine, my mother’s smile and the feeling my body had before drowning itself in sugary pastries, but I also know that coffee will never taste the same without a handful of sugar. I wonder what it will feel like to be back in a place where things are familiar and you don’t have to walk into the next neighborhood to find a sandwich on a Monday afternoon. When I ask people for updates on home they all say “it’s the same.” And I realize that I’ve passed stage one of the anthropologist’s homesick dilemma, no longer searching for familiarity, but afraid for when it will return.
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