I purchased last-minute tickets to Cuba. This was my first solo-trip. I started writing this in Miami when I was on a ten-hour layover from my long, and very cheap, journey to Havana. Without a plan for my cultural exploration in a city I hadn't visited in a decade, I approached TSA at about eight in the evening, after landing from New York. I approached the two TSA ladies, "Hey, I have a ten-hour layover, where do you think I should go?"
These two TSA ladies eyed me up and down, and with one fell swoop announced in unison, "Go to Wynwood."
In Wynwood I observed art through the windows as I ate tacos. I met a couple who was traveling to Miami right before a Carnival cruise. They were with their daughter, and I thought about my seven-year-old child who lives in the Philippines while I struggle in New York trying to be a writer.
The plane trip to Cuba was eventful, though the events were most vivid in the confines of my mind. I was having an episode in which everyone was moving in slow motion, speaking in drawls that somewhat soothed me, and had prolonged, lurking movements that devoured my attention, or whatever was left of it.
It took a few more moments of self-taught breathing techniques to hoist me back into reality. Then the cumbersome memories of the most fascinating airport romance I've had entered my mind. There was a kind man who I once met in Singapore's Changi Airport, who after a few old-fashioneds, decided that he would spend a few days discovering the bright city of Singapore with me. A few days later, we met again in Manila's Ninoy Aquino Airport, and flirted over coffee. He joked about touring the Philippines with me during the Christmas holidays, and a couple weeks later, we were holding hands in Mactan-Cebu International Airport saying tearful goodbyes. These were the days in my late twenties when adventure still pursued me in the most unusual spaces.
Yearning for this same sense of adventure, I designed my trip to Cuba to be an exploratory, self-excavating, soul-searching visit. This meant that I would avoid the comforts that I traditionally availed to cushion my visits to countries outside the United States. No travel companions. No commercial hotels. No tourist guides. No Tripadvisor or Airbnb activities. I would not institutionalize myself in an exchange program because I was reeling from my Fulbright rejection. I would do Cuba alone, I said, in the company of my own thoughts.
At some point in my journey I noticed alcohol and dancing was more readily available than food. When I briefly visited Cine-Teatro Miramar, a local invited me to view the space. Visiting a new country invites your consciousness to use existing cultural frameworks within you in order to make sense of the current place you are exploring. Given Cuban and Filipino shared histories, I naturally compared everything to the Philippines. In the Philippines, access to air conditioning is a luxury that is only of second importance to the readily available and diverse food. In Cuba, it's the opposite. It's as if cooler air was more normal than the availability of food. I pondered this almost extensively. Throughout my stay, I was always feeling the discomfort of hunger and unsatisfied cravings because there was not much food to choose from. You know when the flight attendant asks you "chicken or beef?" as the only two options? It's like that in pretty much most restaurants reserved for locals.
On the flight back to New York, when the flight attendant only offered food for purchase, ravenous as I was, I simply declined. The hunger I felt transposed itself to the tip of my pen, and I spent the next few hours in the sky writing the script of my dreams.
As my luggage appeared in the baggage claim carousel, a large crack presented itself on my carry-on. I quickly opened the luggage to find everything unscathed.
And I laughed.
Elaine Joy Edaya Degale is a Black-Filipina writer who spends her time between New York City and the Philippines. Her work has been featured in Positively Filipino and in short films in the Asian American Film Lab. She graduated from Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College.
