OFF TO CUBA...Stay Tuned...

(You can find some of my Cuba posts on my travel blog, El Viajero Contento.)

For the next couple of weeks I’ll likely be incommunicado here and on my travel blog, El Viajero Contento. Not because I’m nobly foreswearing all distractions digital, but because they’re being foresworn for me. I’m going to Cuba.

PHOTO: Agencia Braxil via WikiMedia Commons

Besides the assumption that access to the Internet will be all but impossible, I’m hoping to be so busy—between several hours every day of Spanish lessons, group excursions around and beyond Havana, lots of good music, food and rum, and a few adventures on my own—that I won’t have much time to post.

But I will keep a journal and take lots of photos, which I can later edit down to manageable installments and share on my blogs and Facebook.

It should be a real adventure, a solo trip to this enigmatic little country—so near (just 90 miles from the US), yet so far away for its half-century of near isolation from its anti-social northern neighbor. Besides taking another small step toward Spanish fluency, I hope to see some of city and countryside, meet some interesting people and find a unique reporting angle on the experience.

PHOTO: Pixabay

The state of the arts in Cuba / Signs of US influence that’s managed to filter into the country through visitors from other parts of the world / Where is the line to be found between “old Cuba” and the inevitable new Cuba to come? / How to experience Cuba on $80 a day. These are just a few of the themes I’m considering. I suspect others will reveal themselves as I jostle and jot around La Habana.

So please think of me; wish me a good ear for the particularities of Cuban Spanish; and pray for no more western Atlantic or Caribbean hurricanes this season. And please keep an eye here and on El Viajero Contento for a series of trip reports when I return.

Gracias y saludos…

PHOTO: Pixabay

“Cuban eyes often look close to tears. Tears never seem far away because both their pain and their joy are always so close to the surface.”
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