cuba marimba!

ok. so perhaps i am a year older and about 5 shades darker as i'm writing this. but damn, i'm so farking happy! i just spent a week by the beach, letting my shrivelled pasty white body absorb as much sun, breathing as much carribean air and enjoying life in peaceful bliss in Cuba.

Contrary to what people think, Cuba is hardly the decrepit and dangerous place that the word "Communism" connotes. Yes, yes, you do get the abandoned factory buildings and remnants of "Revolucion!" painted in red in outdated style on walls, but the country has managed to sustain itself pretty well. I would know, because i myself stayed in one of those resorts by the beach run by the government for tourists, mostly catering to americans and canadians looking to escape the cold winter. Needless to say, i was a little disappointed to find that i had cable TV with CNN and Coca Cola and that it was not going to be the gungho holiday i had hoped for, filled with last minute revolutions and the Red Guards in my face.

Cuba was surprisingly idyllic. i was living on Santa Lucia beach next to Nuevitas Bay, 22km of beautiul white sands and turqoise blue crystal waters. it was the home of the 2nd largest coral reef after the Australian Great Barrier Reef and also home to the largest colony of pink Flamingos in Latin America. The closest thing i got to revolution was the mass of people gathered next to my resort for their daily fiesta. Booming reggaeton, reggaeton mixes of David Guetta's "Love dont let me go" and Cuban salsa was heard day and night, peaking at it's loudest at 4am. Apparently there had been a week long Carnaval there, and i attempted to go down a few times but found myself unable to keep up to the Cuban stamina.

Mojitos, Cuba Libres and many days later, i somehow found the motivation to move my ass away from the beach to explore the vicinty. I took a boat ride out on to Nuevitas Bay, and snokeled seeing some of the most beautiful corals and fishes ever. The reef was well and alive, looking very healthy indeed. i had wanted to go diving but unfortunately, due to some screw ups in the recent global weather system, it was too cloudy (and even cold at one point) to do that (the truth was hat last time i went diving i remembered taking half an hour to get into the damn wet suit which kept sticking to my skin) I also managed to catch sight of some of those pink flamingos, they were really cute walking in single file all the time.

One of the days, i went down to the city of Camaguey, supposedly well known for being a labyrinth town because it was built to defile pirates who rampaged the city in the 18th century. Now before you get any ideas about this being some Pirates of the Caribbean getaway, it's really not. The whole place was rather decrepit and oozes the general charm of a 1940s-50s village town. while i was there i got to see the typical cuban postcard scenarios of old men wearing fedora hats, chatting on the side walks and smoking their pipes, beautiful tan cuban women selling fruit by her door step and children running around everywhere. it's like people never go to work here (heck, they dont have to) and perhaps that is what makes them some of the smiliest people in the world.

late in the afternoon, i stopped for coffee at a place called Music square and had some fried bananas while listening to musicians jam to "quizas, quizas, quizas". at some point this old guy stood up and went there and started singing along and he had an awesome voice (he was funny too)!! damn it must be in their blood to be able to sing. i was soooo happy. i live for cuban music.

i wanted to go down to Havana, but unfortunately the east-west (i was in the west) route was not safe for a girl and the only way was to fly there for US 600. that was way out of my budget, so looks like i'm set to return!

a clarification

I feel a need to clarify my last post, which upon review looks crude and harsh. It lacks the refinement of an enlightened truth. let me reiterate. there is no such thing as "love". in the last post, i labelled it a "vague feeling people get before they bed each other". So how do i explain platonic love, romantic love etc? firstly, i think it is neccessary to clarify that love between friends is out of the question here, since i am pondering this in relation to marriage. the second instance holds the crux of this argument - romantic love is sexual.

Some people say sex is the expression of love, but i think "love" is an expression of sex. It's another displacment in a civilized, repressed order. oops. there i go with the old man Freud again. I dont think he literally meant that humans are driven by sex, i think what he actually meant to say was that humans are driven by the politics of it. the invisible ties of power, intimacy and emotion that drive the act of it. Not the carnal intercourse alone. the act alone is a displacement of some sort of hidden aggression that has to emerge because of it's repression. I dont think humans have a natural instinct to "love" but instead to "possess, gain authority over, dominate". Parental love is another matter although if you think about it a large part of a parent's duty is precisely the latter. You love your friend because you have them, and they are yours to keep.

There is the other school that believes that to love is to submit, and be possessed. I used to belong to that school. But the stark realization fell upon me that you cannot submit unless someone wants to dominate, since "love" involves 2 parties. So you find that someone, and you play a delicate game of balancing the power struggle. But it doesnt matter who submits to who, because objectively speaking the nature of the relationship is the same. the politics played out in sexual terms does not change.

So back to the idea that romantic love is always sexual. let me clarify for those in denial. there is no such thing as non-sexual romantic love. The concept only came about when Christianity took over the world and non-sexual love was used to explain God's benevolent love to mankind. Anything with sexual connotations came to be "impure, bad, evil" only after the coming of Christianity and subsequently polarized is the notion of love. That one should "strive" for the opposite of impure love is yet another Christian conception. Nobody said that was truly the case or the nature of man. So this notion of "love" as we know it, is merely another artificial construct and really masks what is a sexual bond of politics between two people.

Anyway, if you take my words literally, you're really a dimwit. i'm expressing the phenomenon we call "love" as that mysterious bond between two people, the undercurrent of all undercurrents driving their actions. I'm not saying we shouldn't love. What i AM saying though, is that we should not expect "love" to happen or be there, which in that sense, makes us humans much less disillusioned when we don't encounter the disappointment.

a proclamation (warning: violence ahead)

I don't believe in love anymore!!! It's crazy but when i was writing in my journal trying to figure out my views on marriage i realised something quite serious. I realised that 'love' is just a pathetic word that we use in the English language to describe the vague feeling humans get before they get into bed with each other. And then, why do they get married, we ask. It's after the slow, agonizaing realisation that they had wasted so many years of their life on this word "love", which doesn't exist except the repetitive proclamations of it, that they need to affirm the presence of it by signing a paper, wearing a ring and performing a ceremony. It all fits into Foucault's theory of power, where 'power' only exists through signs of it's representations. Taking that same theory, we apply it to love and we realise, that actually 'love' which is supposed to be another form of power, really doesn't exist at all on it's own but is yet another artificial construct.

my friend Joanne says that i'm obessed with this thing called love. it's only because i wanted to understand how it's held us for centuries, and because i felt that too few people have questioned it objectively. if you thought about it alot, you'd be labbelled a Romantic, but that also comes with emotional attachment. That was what i used to be until i managed to get rid of the emotional part and think about it objectively. and strangely, i feel librated more than depressed about the prospect of it all.

I'm not saying one should not still have companions and for lack of better term, lovers. I'm just saying that we should not expect that there is this thing called 'love'. If you have been with your partner for many years, it's probably something else like circumstances, or self motivated determination in the name of 'love' to justify it all.

Hope this isn't too much a blow.

counting down the days...

I am well aware how long it has been since i've written here. To tell the truth, i have been evading the thought of thinking about my life especially since writing about it would require some form of understanding. The new year kicked off in blazing cold, and i also find myself a little frozen. All the passion, all the heat...where did it go? it's almost as if i have nothing to complain even. Just mere muted resignation.

In any case i've accepted my situation and if anything this year i'm learning to let go. it's the feeling Sylvia Plath mentioned in that bloody A level text i studied about letting it all "fall away from me". That young posessive 18-year old i once was could barely understand how that was possible and dismissed the poet as a traitor immediately. I kept asking myself, if you love life so much, why let it go? How could you betray your lover?

But the years of seasoning have taught me but one thing, and it is that if you love something, the ultimate act of sacrifice IS letting it go. It's not a question of being noble. It's a question of preservation, of knowing enough, appreciating and preserving the memory at it's most beautiful. At a distance, the thing itself seems so much more beautiful. I have had a few personal relinquishes so far this year, and parted ways with many a thing I had considered to be precious to me. The fear and reluctance turned into utmost liberation, as I shed the baggage that was unknowingly heavy.

In short, I leave with a quote from Virginia Woolf who loved life more than anyone - enough to die for it:

"To live life for what it is, to know it for what it is, to love it for what it is, and then to put it away."