Freedom is a question that has always occupied my mind. During my travels, this question became even more persistent. We had to wait for Cuba to have some more clear ideas.
I had intensely loved and hated Cuba at the same time. I hated their tourism industry, their two-speed lifestyle, two currencies, two kinds of humans: Cubans and tourists that could easily turn any open-minded person into a paranoid person.
When you visit Cuba with a minimum of desire to meet and experience local life, you quickly find yourself faced with a profound disillusionment. It's hard, very hard even to blend in with the crowd and live among Cubans without falling into the cliches that rule the country. The tourist will inevitably be scammed because there's no way to live in Cuba.
After hard experiments, I had ended up understanding that the country had to do things this way. What choices did they have under an economic embargo for so long? I had come to accept that the only way to experience immersion in local life was to change my perspective myself. I had to take the first step.
After a few days in Havana, some scams and false friendships, I had an experience that had completely changed my three-week stay on the island. I had met Esperanza in a large square in Havana.
Esperanza is an old lady who sells peanuts in the square. I bought her a small package at the equivalent of 2dh, and we had a long talk. She lived alone in a dilapidated building in the working-class area, Centro Habana, where I lived myself in an old and beautiful house. Despite her difficult situation, Esperanza was smiling and beautiful. She had told me that her happiness came only from her acceptance. She had no regrets or much to desire except to die with dignity.
A crazy idea followed. She was the first person I'd had such a sincere conversation with since I arrived and I had no desire to leave her. I asked her to hire me for the day. I was just going to help her sell his peanuts.
I was intrigued by what would follow. The tourists displayed a surprising disdain and lack of compassion. We barely accepted to buy peanuts worth 20 cents but we invented a thousand and one ploys to take a stolen photo of Esperanza. Why would it come to this? I had only found an explanation for this paranoia that many people end up developing because of the fake cigars they were trying to sell to them all over the city. Few tourists were able to question themselves and take responsibility for their own appetite.
Since the meeting with Esperanza, I have also changed my contact with Cubans. I explained to them at the outset that I had nothing to offer them except my friendship and they readily accepted it. It was fast and efficient and it opened the doors of the real Cuba and some paths hidden in my own conscience.
Cuba had opened my eyes to me on how to be happy and feel fulfilled and enriched just by acceptance. The acceptance of the present moment in its best and worst at the same time, the acceptance of being who they really are and to live it through simple and beautiful friendships transcending what we think we are, to bring you back to a subtle union with others.
The next day, as I was about to leave Havana, I had decided to take a walk in the streets of the city, lose myself one last time in its bustling streets, merge into the crowd and dream. And that's when it took me so hard.
Suddenly in tears, I looked inside and out. I was inside myself and observing myself from the outside as if I were emerging from a beautiful dream or nightmare. I suddenly understood what Cuba had done to me in three weeks.
This country had stripped me, with disconcerting ease and in record time, of a stability that I had painfully acquired in recent months. The country had put me in front of so many dilemmas and in such opposite moods that I could hardly remember what it meant to be balanced, calm and confident.
Cuba had made me sway, without respite and with determination, between anger and peace, joy and sorrow, wealth and poverty, communism and capitalism. But all of this will always be the presence of an energy of love in the ambient air.
I still don't know how much Cuba had changed my perception of the world, but I had learned something very important for me at the time, but still today; Freedom was in no way detached from a way of life or dropped everything as I thought it would be. Freedom couldn't do what I wanted when I wanted it to. It was certainly not an infinite journey or a nomadic life.
Cuba had taught me that freedom is, first and foremost, trying to be happy, no matter where and by what means. It was to be able to go through the days, the good and the bad, with certainty; nothing matters more than our experience of life in the present moment.
Freedom as I learned it in Cuba..."live"!