Category: Cuba

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

 

Unexpected post about the Royal Wedding – Feeling homesick in Guatemala

I did not expect to be writing a post about my own country quite so soon especially not one about the Royal Family but when I got up this morning and put on the TV to catch up on the news, I had totally forgotten that Prince William was marrying the beautiful Kate the commoner (I love that expression, only used in relation to royalty, just like gentil only used in relation to Jews). I have to admit I felt rather tearful watching it all and I had to stop and try to think why.

I do not consider myself a royalist or a republican in fact INDIFFERENT in capital letters would be the category that I would put myself in.  I realised that the fascination for our Royal Family that was all over the world was good for our tourist coffers if not for our image as a modern democracy!

I think I just felt homesick and sad that my children and I were not there to enjoy and remember what is essentially a great big party with a truly British sense of irony whether you spend most of it slagging off the Royals and making fun of them or watching on adoringly …….. that is our prerogative.  Yes we are a modern democracy that still has a House of Lords and  a Monarchy and that is ridiculous, but I like the fact that we are ridiculous.

In this time of celebrity culture I think I would prefer to watch this wedding more than J-Lo´s or Tom Cruise´s.  A New York friend was surprised that I was watching it and said ¨ohh that is so tacky¨.  A British Royal Wedding can be many things to many people but tacky no, we leave that to the Hollywood stars they do it so well.

SO what would I be doing if I was home.  I noticed that there was the usual alternative Royal Wedding Party in Shoreditch my old stamping ground in the Bohemian multi-cultural Eastend but I have to say the party in Hyde Park looked pretty good!  Lots of great British picnics and lots of bottles of champagne being passed around.  And even though I am a socialist I am a champagne socialist!  The weather was good, London looked beautiful and so did Kate and her dress and for a moment I felt as though I was watching Shrek with my kids and the sadness of the real world melted away.

The Syrian Ambassador was disinvited.  Tony Blair didn´t receive an invitation (cool, slimy little toerag) but Margaret Thatcher did (very uncool).  Victoria Beckham managed to get in there hanging on the arm of her husband (very uncool as she is TACKY).

Nico asked me.  Is that what you did when you married Papa?  I didn´t like to tell him that we had never had the time or the inclination as I sat there staring at the screen wondering if I could wear that dress like a pathetic teenage girl!

I wonder how many people watched the Royal Wedding in Cuba?  Not many I suppose!  I wonder who watched it here in Guatemala?  My nanny Juju just arrived full of questions.  She liked the dress too!

 

Welcome to Serendipity or Madness – Leaving Guatemala heading to Cuba

I promised I would start posting after Semana Santa and here I am.  My site is not quite finished but not far off, so no more procrastinating.

Just to summarise how I got to this stage.  All the stuff you see in the archives here is everything I have written since I arrived in Guatemala nearly 8 years ago, apart from the endless emails of course.  So if you want to know more about me and my journey to where I am now, dip into the archives.  A lot of it was written to family and friends including great Aunts and 8 year old nieces etc.

Last year I started blogging with a group of people and it was a bit of a disaster for various reasons not worth going into here.  But in those early days of blogging I did not have a clue what I was doing, and still don´t really, but at least now I have been reading other people´s blogs and have spent a few months thinking about what I want to achieve by blogging.

So in my research into other blogs I had lots of fun but did not find many blogs about people like me, emigrant mothers who took a cross cultural walk on the wild side.  There are endless blogs about people skipping off to a new life on paradise islands and making dream holiday destinations their home a bit like all those endless TV shows in the UK.  They are usually doing this with a partner who is from their own culture so they can sit and moan together if things do go wrong.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy I say to those bloggers but good for you for working out how to have the easy life and pulling it off.  Maybe I will visit you one day in paradise.

Also the other kind of blog which seems to involve moaning about your adopted country.  A lot of these, white folks in the brown world being a little bit too superior for my liking.  I even found foreigners blogging in my own country, Americans lamenting about the lack of Tex Mex food, the lack of shopping malls and how tomato ketchup does not taste the same in the UK.  I´ll keep my comments to myself on this particular topic!

I even read an awful blog set up by a horrible American (who is now in prison) who just seemed to spend all his time slagging off Guatemala, the country which had actually given him and his family refuge from the FBI for a couple of years.  Some people are never grateful!

So I promise that I will not spend too much time moaning or criticising Guatemala or Cuba but will try to share my feelings with you as I discover things good and bad.  I am a qualified social psychologist so I try to approach things in an investigative manner.  There is always a reason why people behave as they do.  The interesting thing is to peel back the layers of the onion to find out why.  This way I am always learning and thinking about research topics for when I do return to work!

I am a mother of 3 children but I promise to veer away from the endless cutsey Hello magazine indulgent posts about my children.  But you shall be hearing about them, the good and the bad!  Paulo, Nico and Saskia, my gorgeous little hybrids.

I am not very whizzy with most things technical but I´ll try to get better at putting the odd link to something interesting.

I promise to try to see the world with the sense of humour that my culture is famous for but at the same time I may need to share the important stuff with you too.  Why? because I do care about the world and the mess we seem to have got it into!