Over two months of waiting
Two visitors
Many fun nights
Many lovely sunny days
Too many frustrating days
Linguistic improvement
Deeper understanding of Cuban culture and accent
Various activities created and documents written
Countless times of saying NO to taxis and various other offers
Discovering my favourite spots in Havana and becoming a regular at certain places
And finally…
ONE CARNET!
So last week we were told that we had to bring certain documents to an immigration building downtown to fill out more forms and get our papers. After two months of waiting for our work documents, we were really excited to get it done. Finally!
We walked into Old Havana and asked a police officer who was standing on a street corner where the building we were looking for was. He stood, puzzled and blinking into the morning sun, thinking. He clearly had yet to drink his morning coffee. A full silent minute later, he still hadn’t answered us, so we moved on and found the building we were searching for. It happened to be situated 10m from where the policeman had been standing.
We saw a long line-up outside and asked around about where we had to go. We were ushered inside by some official looking people. A woman standing inside behind a desk stopped us as we walked by her. As we approached, she suddenly stopped doing what she had been doing (nothing) and started talking to three people who had been standing silently behind her and quickly became intensely involved in the previously non-existent conversation. After she had us wait an appropriate amount of time to make her feel like she was somehow useful, she stopped talking to her three companions and told us where the immigration office could be found. It turned out that the office we were looking for was up a gorgeous stairwell that was tiled in a Moorish fashion like in the South of Spain.
Walking up the stairs, we crossed paths with a woman dressed in a customs uniform. “Once you reach the top of the stairs, go right, then left.” She said, clearly indicating LEFT then RIGHT with her hands. We took her at her word and found the immigration office at the end of a deserted corridor.
We walked in and were immediately politely ignored by the 12 people working there. We inquired who was “ultimo” (last) and hurried up to sit down and wait for our turn. Only two people were ahead of us.
After twenty minutes of waiting, watching the employees huddling around a desk, talking about their new manicure (very important official business) and being shushed for laughing (me and E), P stood up and asked a question.
“Are you going to start seeing people soon?”
He was told that the woman who deals with immigration issues hadn’t arrived yet so we should sit and wait. We did, while wondering what the hell the rest of the people in the office we supposed to be doing if not dealing with immigration issues in this “immigration office”.
Another twenty minutes later, a woman showed up and after walking around the office saying good morning to everyone and seeming to inquire about the state of health of every single member of everyone’s family, finally sat down and pulled out some important looking files. She was then handed a manila envelope, from which she pulled out even more important looking files. She stared at them intently for no less than thirty seconds and them threw them casually in a drawer. I imagined the drawer having a label written “garbage” on it.
As it turned out, all that we had to do at this office was get our thumb fingerprinted. Mine came out looking like a smudge. It made me very self-conscious about how beautiful my fingerprint is. After each one of us went through the process of sticking our thumb onto an ink pad and pressing it onto a piece of paper, we each asked when we could come back to get our carnet. To each one of us, the woman replied that we should come back in one week to get them.
With that answer, one would assume that we could come back in one week to get our papers. Right? In Cuba, not so much…
One week later, which again happened to be a Tuesday, one of the two days per week that this office is open, we returned. Into the building we walked confidently and excitedly to pick up our papers, which would allow us to finally leave Havana and go start the project that we had come to Cuba for. We passed the woman at the desk who had told us where to go the week before. I reached the stairs, turned around to make some silly joke about the nuns in front of me and realized that I was alone. The other three were standing, talking to that woman in the middle of the hallway. I walked back to see what she had to say. Apparently, she couldn’t let them walk by because they were wearing shorts.
“I told you last week that you couldn’t wear shorts in here.” She said.
“No you didn’t” We responded in unison.
“You aren’t in Europe anymore” She pointed out.
“Clearly!”
“I can’t let you go upstairs in shorts, it’s not appropriate.”
At this point, we became frustrated seeing as she was standing there, in ¾ length pants, with her back to a group of women and men who worked in the building, ALL WEARING SHORTS!
We pointed out the flaw in her reasoning.
She calmly explained that they were all wearing work shorts, a completely different matter. Apparently my mini jean skirt was more appropriate than the jean shorts of the same length that E was wearing or the nearly ¾ length shorts that both of the boys were wearing. The woman told us off a little more and then let us walk upstairs. Our feeling was that she was annoyed that we already knew where we were going, therefore making her job useless and so she needed to say something so that we knew that she controlled the comings and goings.
We got upstairs to the office and again we were immediately politely ignored.
This time, P asked a question within the first few minutes. I was sitting in the designated waiting area (4 rows of black plastic chairs, crowded into the corner of the office) with E and M. All I saw was P asking the woman a question and her shaking her head and laughing.
UH OH.
Some minutes later, when P had gotten all of information out of the woman, he motioned for us to get up and go. In Cuba, there’s no such thing as volunteering information. You know how back home, when you ask a question, people tend to answer it and usually offer various other helpful tidbits with their answer? That doesn’t happen here. It seems like if you can get a straight answer out of someone, you’re doing pretty well. This being said, anytime we have to find something out, the conversation lasts approximately 6.7 times longer than it needs to because we have to ask the exact questions to ensure that we have extracted not only the right answers, but also all other associated answers from the person.
The answer that P got from the woman was that of course we couldn’t pick up our carnets there! They were sent off somewhere else. Obviously. Silly Canadians. Why would we think that being told to return in one week to pick up our papers meant to return in one week to pick up our papers? I could feel my hopes and dreams of leaving the city ASAP come crashing down around me. Were our papers even ready? The woman doubted it. She explained that it was likely that the fingerprints we had made last week hadn’t even been picked up yet for processing. What processing? I still don’t understand. P was told to call the other immigration office to find out if they had our papers yet.
We set out in search of a payphone. Not an easy thing to find. The first one only accepted prepaid cards. The second one had a long line-up. The third one was also a card-only phone. The fourth one was out of service. Fifth time’s a charm! The phone worked, accepted coins and had no line-up. P picked up the receiver and dialled while we held our breaths, hoping, fingers crossed that our carnets were ready. We waited…
The line was busy.
F***************
By that time a few people had lined up to call as well. After three other people had made their lengthy calls, P picked up the receiver again and dialled. We heard him saying a few words to Lourdes, the woman we had been dealing with at immigration for the past two months.
He hung up.
We waited for him to speak.
SO MUCH SUSPENSE!
“She has our carnets!”
Amazing. We were quite confused as to how they ended up with her and why she wouldn’t call us to tell us. But they were ready. She had been waiting for us to come get them. We hopped into a maquina and headed out to the part of town called Miramar. We practically ran into the immigration building. Lourdes was sitting at her desk, smiling, holding four little cards out to us. She passed them out to us. The carnets that had taken two months of Cuban bureaucrazy to get done look like library cards with our picture, thumbprint, mother and father’s first names, country of birth and some other info. Two months for a plasticized piece of paper.
After this we split up, P heading to the institute to deal with O, our local coordinator, and us heading back downtown to get some internetting done. E and I went to the bus station later that day to book tickets to Gtmo.
That little card is like a secret password, as soon as you flash it, the price drops significantly. The price for a bus ticket if you have the card is 1/10th of the price they charge foreigners. The only problem with the Cuban bus to Guantanamo is that tickets were sold out until January and our bike boxes wouldn’t fit on them. OK. Expensive bus it is! Then the only other problem was that they were full until Sunday. There was no way I could wait that long. Some bargaining from my side and some phone calls by the woman at the ViaAzul bus counter allowed me and E to fit onto a bus leaving on Thursday and the boys on a bus leaving Friday. Again, I encountered the frustration of trying to get information from them about where to go, what time and what to do about our boxes. I always have the image of wringing out a wet piece of clothing for every last drop of water. You twist the clothing as tight as possible and wring it out, letting a stream of water fall down, but you know that there’s more you can get if you could only wring it out a little more. Getting information from this employee was like that. I knew there was something I was missing. My questioning yielded information about where to show up, what time, what to do with our bikes boxes and how much more we would be charged for them.
OK.
Carnets.
Check
Bus tickets.
Check
Packing.
Almost done
The boys went to go pay for the tickets that we had reserved for them and were told to go to a different bus terminal to get their bike boxes on the bus before anyone else. Great. I knew there were a few drops of information I didn’t wring out of that woman…
So todat I am finally off to Guantanamo to start my project, halfway through my placement. I knew this internship would be challenging and frustrating and to date, it is meeting those criteria. I’m excited to begin working with the farmers and the communities. I’m excited to learn and to help where I can.
I feel confident about the activities I have adapted and designed and I believe that they are great tools to leave behind. I know that I don’t have enough time to complete everything that I had set out to do here on my placement. However, I think that if I can have a positive impact on a handful of people’s lives, it will be more than I can ask for and will be worth the past two months of waiting.
So to those of you who have followed my writing and ranting for the past while, I thank you for taking the time to read my words and I hope to have the ability to keep posting over the next two months while I’m in the campo.
Wish me luck!
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