Cuba: Between Past and Future
Back then, near the walls of Intourist, a schoolteacher and her best student met in search of earnings. Drunken evenings and morning hangovers saved them from dark thoughts, because at that time buying a breathalyzer in St. Petersburg was not realistic, let alone in peripheral cities.
In Cuba, everything is a little different – here they still remember Leonid Ilyich, honor the legendary Che Guevara, and believe in the inflexibility of the Comandante. But the seeds of foreign capital have already fallen on fertile soil, and like mushrooms after a June rain, luxurious hotels are rising along the coast.
Tourists from Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the USA (due to the lack of direct transportation links, Americans make a considerable detour) flock to the Island of Freedom to enjoy the explosive mixture of past and future, glamour and poverty, despair and carefree fun. Wealthy men and already elderly ladies from the Old World come here hoping to once again taste youthful passion, Hemingway fans seek 'paradise on Earth', and residents of the vast expanses of the CIS take a leap into the past.
Ten years will pass, Fidel is not immortal. The unpretentious country, dancing to the accompaniment of homemade wooden rattles, trusting, open and hospitable to everyone today, will tomorrow turn into a coy madam, obtrusively and expensively offering her services. But for now, they are just like us, only twenty years ago. Perhaps that is why Russians in Cuba are still greeted as a brotherly people, with a broad smile and an unopened bottle of rum.
But our compatriots should be more careful with this drink favored by pirates, and better yet, bring a digital breathalyzer when going to a bar, otherwise the risk is too great of waking up in the morning at the peak of perestroika. With a morning headache after a night of revelry, in bed with a not too dressed unknown female citizen.
Twenty years, a mild warm climate, fresh sea breeze, white sandy beaches, the aroma of strong Cuban coffee and real, high-quality cigars – that, perhaps, is all the significant differences between the once unified socialist reality of two countries of great Revolutions located on different continents.
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