Category: Children

Hard times in Cuba? or Guatemala?

Everyone is telling me that I will be arriving in Cuba for a time of great change and not all of those changes for the good, depending on who you are talking to.  The Cubans apparently are going to go through some tough times as the paternal arm of communism untangles itself and they are left with …….. who knows?  Rations are going, enterprise is arriving, property can be bought and sold and a lot more tourists will be coming they say.  But in the meantime I think your average Cuban will have to suffer to move forward and that does not always seem fair.

Meanwhile in Guatemala the elections are approaching and I realise once more how rightwing this part of the world is.  It seems incredibly possible that they could elect rightwing candidates involved in the genocide of the 80s and there is lots of finger pointing from the right to people who were involved with the guerrilla, as if it is an automatic given that to be involved in the guerrilla makes you more dysfunctional than the people involved with the genocide.  Otto Perez Molina you know what you did in the name of God we have film footage!  When I talk about what I call the rightwing here, they are the kind of people that make Margaret Thatcher look like a pussy cat.  I do not think that even she would have wanted to kill a trade unionist.  Maybe bop them over the head with her handbag if she got the chance but I don´t think she would have been up for massacring a few mining villages up North where I am from, even though they gave her a big headache and did not go easily into a future of mass unemployment and social deprivation.  But I digress …….

When I mention that I am going to live in Cuba, a lot of Guatemalans (most of my friends excluded) have a reaction that I am beginning to find of sociological interest.  It is a kind of trigger response.  The very mention of Cuba seems to make them nervous.  It is as if they have to justify their country´s inability to move out of its poverty and narco violence and corruption by pointing out how great it is that they can buy what they want in the ever increasing shopping malls in Guatemala city or in the pretty tourist shops and delis of Antigua.  How they are free and can fly wherever they want.  (I do correct them on this one though as now any Cuban can leave Cuba for a holiday but like most Guatemalans they don´t have the money).  Anyway, these people don´t seem to have a clue how most of their country lives and that maternal mortality, malnutrition and domestic violence and murder rates are all on the up to name a few social problems.   But evidently as long as the richer people can buy what they want and even fly to Miami to do it, that makes all the other things ok, because they are free to consume.  But right now in Cuba nobody is starving, Guatemala however has a child malnutrition problem that is worse than a lot of African countries.

I begin to think about it a lot this week in the last balmy days before the rains arrive watching the fireflys play in the back garden.  Thinking am I one of those people?  Selfish and happy to live in a bubble.  I have to admit I do like shopping (but in the markets and boutiques of Europe looking for a steal or something entirely unique that I will treasure all my life …… rather than in Gap or Target or Dolce Gabana).  As long as I can buy my nice things for me and my family am I happy to live in a country blighted by violence and poverty?  Can I ignore the realities of Guatemalan society, as long as I surround myself with good people and beautiful things and fine wine?  Issues such as gendercide and chronic malnutrition.  A people who have grown stunted for generations due to the slavery and apartheid they find themselves born into.  It is their fault they should have less children.  It is their fault they don´t know how to eat properly.  It is their fault for getting involved with the rebels. I have heard it all!  I am still baffled as to how people can be starving in a country like this where everything grows.  But one thing I am sure about ……..it is not their fault.

But in the end what can I do?  I have 3 little ones to bring up and that overwhelms me most days.  But I can try to always be informed, know the truth, try to see other people´s arguments and make sure that my children know the truth about both their countries and their adopted ones.  Just keep learning I suppose.

I am not sure why, but certain people from the US think that they are the oracle of world opinion, as they quite clearly are not ………. just go and read some Chomsky, Democracy Now or Consortium news or any quality European paper and you can see that a lot of us have different opinions and we are not crazy foaming at the mouth commies or fundamentalist ragheads (a popular term for Arabs in the US).  A rich surburban gringo in Antigua told me with such authority that Cuba has been a disaster since they kicked the US out.  By that I suppose he meant the Mafia, Batista and the CIA.  And don´t get me started on the weird and shameful existence of Guantanamo.  I am just relieved that there are no longer British prisoners there but Obama´s promise to close it is still pending.  And Cuba has human rights issues!!!

I don´t profess to be an expert in geopolitics and certainly not in the unique and fascinating history of Cuba but I think there is one thing that I will never stop thinking. For better or for worse, Cuba is an ideological miracle and still is.  How the hell did the CIA never manage to poison Fidel?  Just that is a miracle.  I know the Miami Cubans and a large part of US population won´t agree with me but not sure I care!  In fact I have never met people so full of hate as the Miami Cubans.  That can´t be good for them or anybody.  And unfortunately their bad taste and bad humour does get transmitted back to Cuba along with an extra layer of white trash mentality born in the USA.

And yes I am packing carefully for our move to Cuba and I am slightly nervous about being in a no consumer zone but I hope I can survive happily without faceless shopping malls, guns on every street corner, apartheid, darkened car windows, suited bodyguards, awful cable TV with more advertisements than programmes, schools like prisons with gun toting armed guards at the gates …….and all the rest which goes with a narco capitalist state.

I can only promise the Cuban people that I will try to understand and not to judge them when I am living as a guest in their country as they are put through yet another sociological challenge.  Good Luck Cuba!  I will write about and record your hardships and your happiness and your apparently famous ability to resolver.

 

 

Saskia La Cubanita

If ever there was a girl born to go and live in Cuba it is my little Saskia.

All my children enjoy music and dancing like their parents but she has taken this love to an extreme.  She lives for music, even when nobody is paying her any attention.

I knew I was in trouble months ago when she used to gyrate to the liquidiser in the morning when I was making her breakfast.  A random passing motorbike could get her going, that´s how desperate she was to find a beat.  When she went to her first Piñata she was fascinated when everybody sang Happy Birthday.  She only likes watching TV when there is musical accompaniment.  Do you remember that Abba Sang Thank you for the Music?  (go on course you do!)  There is a line in it about describing how one of the Swedish popsters could dance before they could walk and sing before they could talk.  Well that´s my daughter, she really could dance before she could walk.  And now that she can walk she wants to walk right off and find out where the party is ……….

Apart from the fact that she is only 14 months old and can dance Reggaeton with the best of them, she has other things about her that remind me of Cuba.  She is always hot hot hot, in fact a little bit sweaty sometimes.  She wants to hang out in the calle as much as possible and often is found banging on the front gate of the house or standing next to the car waiting to be whisked off to hang out in the streets.  When I take her walking around Antigua in the mornings she shouts across streets to complete strangers waving at them like old friends.  She has a certain confidence and languidness that reminds of the Caribbean, saying hey boy I got all the time I want to hang out in the streets looking good and shaking my hips.

 

Hanging out in the Calle

 

 

So we will dance in Cuba Saskia and I.  We will find our groove or in my case get back my groove.  Although I find any excuse to get up and dance here in Antigua it is not something that has been in my life as much as in my London, Paris, Barcelona days.  In fact the last time I got up and danced here, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, a bunch of middle aged po-faced tourists staring at me as though I had just been let out of some hardcore rehab centre, which sometimes isn’t far from the truth.  I need dance rehab!!  Every year my husband runs the film festival here in Guatemala and always has great bands and DJs and I am sure I am beginning to get a reputation as his crazy wife who makes everyone dance.  I can take a while to get those Guatemalans on the dance floor but I am sure I won´t have this problem in Habana!

I wanna be in the calle

But back to Saskia my Cubanita.  She also loves to talk like many Cuban although right now it is some wonderful language of her own peppered with a lot of Mamas.  And she does enjoy food like a Cuban with the enthusiasm of someone who is not sure when they will next be able to get hold of a mango or an avocado or anything right now!

They say children open a lot of doors in Cuba.  I think my Saskia will be banging on doors looking for the party.  I am just glad that we are not in Cuba 10 years later because the way she dances I might have been leaving Habana an abuelita!  (note 1)

But one thing is sure.  Saskia will be the Cubanita of the family a walking, talking, dancing doll giving it back as good as she gets.  And maybe, just maybe her Mama too!

note 1 abuelita is a grandma.

 

Living on a Beach not on Facebook

The beach in CubaThe Beach in Cuba

 

When asked about our move to Cuba my sons always respond with ………… our house will be right on the beach!  People even react to me in a similar way especially when they see the photos.  It is believed to be some kind of Nirvana living right on the beach and my cynical side (whom I am trying to keep under wraps more and more) says yeah great but that wears off in a couple of weeks …… and I won´t have internet.  If a psychic had told me 10 years ago that I would be living in a house on the Caribbean with my Guatemalan husband and 3 children I would have asked for my money back or paid them more (not quite sure).  Now that I am thinking about it, I did visit a psychic once when I was living in Hong Kong and contrary to my cynical self, really enjoyed it as well as finding it quite useful.

In Hong Kong in 97 post handover days,  I didn´t live on the beach but right on top of the Peak looking down over the city.  It was a turning point in my life. I was with the wrong man, still doing the wrong job and living in what I called (at the time) the armpit of capitalism. Most of the Hong King Chinese made it quite clear that they were more interested in money than making friends with me, and I longed for the Europe I had left behind.  I ended up hanging out with (cocaine-fuelled) British journalists, French ex pats working in wine and fashion, and an eclectic selection of artists with their Asian girlfriends.  I refused to hang out with the bankers that my ex knew.  It was a strange year that unhinged me slightly, mainly to do with the toxic relationship I was in.  Anyway, one day I found myself catching the ferry to one of the islands to visit a psychic.  What have I got to lose I thought?  She was not a little chinese woman as I expected but an Australian about the same age as my mother and actually, bizarrely looking a little bit like my mother.  I spent 3 hours with this woman and was intrigued that she seemed to know a lot about me.  She was quite radical and told me that I  had to change my man, my job, my country.  Quite risky really as for all she knew I had just started a new life with said man.  I caught the ferry back to Hong Kong island feeling calm and cleansed and changed on the way to go and see The Opera, La Boheme.  Needless to say that all things she warned me about did change, it was hard to get on that plane alone back to London, apply to go back to University and put myself through a masters, buy my own flat, keep away from more destructive men, start a new career and then  further down the line, get on a plane to Guatemala.  But I did it.

I feel as though I am at another turning point in my life right now and I want to seize this moment too!  Yes I know I will be back to dial up connection internet, no skype or much facebook, no supermarkets, no shopping malls …… but I have to see this as a good thing.  I know I need to take my life to another spiritual level for myself and my family and yes maybe my lifelong goal of trying to meditate will happen in Cuba sitting in my garden listening to the waves.  Or maybe I´ll just turn into a cigar smoking, rum drinking, bar dancing lush ………….. hmmm.  Or maybe something inbetween.

A message just arrived to remind me of what is good about facebook, a friend from another great turning point in my life; in Buenos Aires, when I was discovering that I was going to be a mother.  It was Marianita who I woke up to show my pregnancy test, it was she I dragged to a health food restaurant to sit and contemplate in a trance-like state my soon to be changing life.  Special times in a special city.  One day I will write about my first wonderful month of motherhood in a city that opened its arms to me and my little panza.

Anyway so far as to say that I will not have much time to waste on facebook, maybe one day a week I will check in.  I just tried to trim down my friends list (harder than I thought) remembering that we do still have those old fashioned communications called emails and I will have this secret blog ………….

My Unbearable Lightness of Being in Guatemala

I had no specific plans to emigrate from my country and if I did, in my daydreams, it was to my neighbouring countries of France or Spain that I pictured myself setting up home.   I had lived or spent enough time in these countries already, enough to feel comfortable with their culture and lifestyle and more importantly, comfortable with the fact that they knew my culture the good and the bad.  I always imagined that I would stay close enough to my country so that phonecalls and quick trips home for family occasions and weddings and laughs would never be a problem.  But following my philosophy of serendipity I always had a sneaky suspicion that I would not be living in suburban England. And also, maybe more importantly my biggest fear was boredom, of ending up like Lucy Jordan of Marianne Faithful´s famous song.  That awful feeling that you would just get to a certain age and realise that you hadn´t lived and done all the things you wanted.  I had already achieved many of Lucy´s missed dreams including driving through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in my hair . (see note 1)

When I set off for Antigua Guatemala for a 6 month break I had no idea that I was making such a huge step into a completely new life on a new continent.  (check out the archives on this site and you can see how I arrived).  For me the geographical isolation was also a huge physical and cultural barrier in this part of the world.  Two huge oceans separate this continent from the rest of the world.    On my other travels I always felt that I was connected by land and small sea hops from London to Beijing, Paris to Cape Town, Yorkshire to Afghanistan.  Here on this continent it is easy to forget that other continents exist, especially with the empirical mass culture exporters who live right above us.  In Guatemala, such a small country, you can swim in both the Atlantic and the Pacific in the same day, if you set your mind to it or own a helicopter!

Now after nearly 8 years here, who am I?  I gave birth to 3 children, learnt the language and the cultural issues, tried to make sense of the society whilst recognising the history, stopped being Jo (at times) and became Josefina or Doña Jose, my Spanish speaking alter ego!

I know that I will never know how it feels to be Guatemalan but my affection and acceptance of the country that gave me my husband and my children and the last 8 years of my life has been part of a long and interesting journey.

It has not been easy and I missed my country and my continent so much it hurt at the beginning, like a physical pain.  I missed the OLD WORLD, the British sense of humour, the great music that enters your psyche like osmosis, cricket, pubs, Sunday newspapers, delicious apples, the best cheese (700 of them!), from the gritty working classes to the eccentric aristocrat I missed them all.  I got tired of people talking to me every day of dollars, estados and gringos.  I was frustrated that people knew very little or nothing about my culture even the ones that should.  Generally people here view us as all the same.  We are all gringos, white people from the North.  I rarely get any acknowledgement of my own culture.  A poor muslim peasant knows more about Britain than a rich Latina.  How could I explain that this gringa felt more comfortable with an educated Iranian or Bosnian than someone from Idaho who looks just like her.

But I am who I am ……. a foreign mother who does not know if she will ever live in her home country again.  What does that mean?  How do I instill my children with the Britishness that made me who I am?  These days the two older ones speak less and less English to each other as they always used to (mother tongue), their apron strings are now more elastic and Spanish is the language.  Last year I only managed a trip home with my baby girl and left my two boys for two weeks.  They missed out on their little month of immersion in all things British.  Which can be anything from Bagpuss (note 4) to the use of the word bollocks!

I did not flee into exile from my country like my husband and his family but I live in serendipity exile never-the-less and the feeling is similar.  I have never been a mother anywhere else and I will always be grateful for the kindness and acceptance that I have received from the ordinary people of Guatemala.  Will I find it  difficult to be a mother anywhere else now?  Or does the emigre mother live in a different bubble of multi-culturalism which at times feels as though I don´t belong anywhere anymore ……….. just the unbearable lightness of being. (see Note 2)

As the last weeks of my adventure here in Guate are dwindling I wonder how I will live without the volcanoes, the sweet kind humble people, radiant colours of the flowers, the fun of market day and our nanny who symbolically represents to me and my family the best of everything this beautiful and troubled country has to offer. (see note 3)

So Cuba here we come, I hope now I have learnt how to move as an emigre to see the best in the cultures that I immerse myself in.  As my husband said all those years ago (in a wise and reassuring moment) when I shared by deepest fears about leaving Europe.

You are not losing your world you are gaining another.

My family and I will be enjoying a few weeks in my old world this summer with family and friends before heading to a fast-changing Cuba for four years.

Note 1 The Ballard of Lucy Jordan was one of my mother´s favourite Marianne Faithful songs and I listened to it with her as a teenager and the lyrics never left me.  A surburban housewife full of regrets for the things she never did.  I don´t think my mother felt like Lucy Jordan but maybe all of us mothers have Lucy Jordan days!   I was determined to never feel as trapped as she did.

Note 2 I read Milan Kundera´s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being at an early age and at the time I felt the power of his writing and began to understand the importance of identity for people forced to change their lives due to ideological or geographical issues.  One of the characters ends up in California looking out to the Pacific and feeling not the freedom but the unbearable lightness of being as she thinks about her old world and the people that inhabited it.

Note 3 I will be writing more about Juju ………..

Note 4 Bagpuss is classic BBC children´s TV from the 70s