Gabriela & Havana dreams.

January 2, 2012

I met Gabi 12 years ago, on the communist island of Cuba. We were on a study abroad program and we were playing the role of student at the University of Havana: eating 50-cent meals of rice and beans in the school cafeteria; riding around in old 1950′s Chevys; dancing to music in the streets and dropping our s’es when we spoke Spanish. We lived in a white marble mansion-estate called Villa Eulalia and we had had high ceilings, hard beds and cold showers. We stayed out late and found music in unexpected places and stood in line after line after line. Nothing in Cuba went as planned and everything was unorganized and our teachers smoked cigarettes in the classroom as they taught us about Marx and Trotsky. And over the past decade, we have not seen each other enough, but when we do, it is as if no time has passed. Now I am a mama and my boys love her like an auntie and someday they will appreciate our stories about rum and Fidel and communist marches. And if we are lucky, maybe someday we will find ourselves together again, in the Cuba that we loved so well. We would go find that pizza place in Cuban chinatown, we would take the big pink bus across the city, and I think that if we tried, we could stay out dancing all night, just like we did when we were 22…