Good Things That Are Happening in Cuba

By Nike

HAVANA TIMES – I was inspired to write this article for you, the readers of Havana Times, to tell you that not everything in my country is bad.

Before I start talking about the good people I’ve come across lately, let me share a small joy: yesterday Mother Nature blessed us with rain, and today all the ponds, cisterns, swimming pools, and even the buckets in my neighborhood were full of frog eggs. That hadn’t happened in a long time. I had even begun to think the frogs had become extinct in my town, where they used to be so abundant.

When my neighbor next door saw that his swimming pool was full of frog eggs, he nearly had a heart attack, so he called me to ask what he should do. I explained that I had scooped mine up with a strainer and put them in a bucket to save them. I don’t know if my method convinced him, because he barely looked at me before walking away.

But back to what I wanted to talk about: the good people I met this summer.

Since I live so close to the sea, we went to the coast several times. There I met a young man from Santiago de Cuba who had recently moved to our town and was taking his three-year-old daughter to swim in the tidal pools. I had brought some mangoes from our yard for a snack and gave one to the little girl. She ate it with great pleasure, and her father thanked me. He’s very talkative—being Cuban, after all. He told me about his job, and we talked about life in Cuba and how to survive. Since they’re new in town, I pointed out some stores where things are cheaper. Because we happened to run into each other by the sea several times, we’ve developed a nice friendship.

One day, on my way home from the beach, I stopped at a store where I wanted to buy two pounds of sugar. I ran into my friend from Santiago again. He was buying a soft drink, and before leaving, he paid for my sugar. I was astonished and told him it wasn’t necessary, but he practically ran out of the store, saying, “Don’t worry about it. Enjoy it.”

Those are the beautiful things good Cubans do, the kind of gestures that have always existed and that keep this country going. I thanked him, and the next day I brought him an avocado for his family.

There’s a custom on the beaches in my town that hasn’t disappeared: everyone, or almost everyone, says good morning when they arrive. This summer I met a couple who were always at the beach with a twelve-year-old boy. They are visual artists, and one of them will soon be exhibiting his work in Guanabacoa. They ride their bicycles all the way from there, and we’ve become friends. We share snacks and talk about the fish and the moray eels, which are like fish but have no fins or scales and live along this part of the coast. They fly kites and spend almost the whole day enjoying the sea and the summer.

I went out looking for food for my cats, and the only thing available was ground chicken, very expensive at 600 pesos a pound and half-thawed because of the long power outages. I got to the pier just as a fisherman was heading out on his Styrofoam catamaran, and I asked him, “Do you have any bait left over? It’s for my kitty.” And the young man gave me four sardines! My cat was saved, that’s his favorite food.

A neighbor takes care of a friend’s garden. She gives him avocados and mangoes when they’re in season. That’s all he’ll accept, because he loves fruit, but he refuses to take money for the gardening. He’s been doing it for years. Sometimes she comes home from work and, surprise!, finds all the plants in her garden neatly tended.

My sister works in Centro Habana. Every day she gets to work thanks to kindhearted drivers who give her a ride. She and many other women and men are able to get to their jobs because of these acts of kindness. There are good days and bad days, and sometimes they even drive her all the way to her front door. Once, a neighbor stopped at a traffic light and kept calling out to her because she hadn’t seen him. He shouted and waved his arms until she finally noticed him and ran over to get into his pickup truck.

A young man from the neighborhood had an accident. He ended up with a broken wrist and his arm in a cast. He had to travel all the way to East Havana to a polyclinic for physical therapy, taking advantage of the fact that the electricity isn’t shut off there. Since he works at a motorcycle stand, one of his friends offered to drive him there every day without charging him a cent.

I have many more stories about the good Cubans who still live here on this land, where not everything is bad.

Read more from Nike’s diary here on Havana Times.