In Cuba, lunch comes in boxes

Old American cars are part of the charm of Cuba. (Gracie Jin/GlobalPost)

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HAVANA, Cuba — I had done my research. I was ready for the old cars and I was ready for the Communism.

I expected crumbling buildings, cigars, indecipherable Caribbean accents, lots of Che, whistling and calls of chinita, or little Chinese girl, on the streets.

The giant billboards with Viva la Revolucion, or "the revolution lives," sprawled across them did not surprise me. Nor, really, did the ones depicting Bush’s face with some form of the word “TERRORISMO,” or terrorism.

When I saw little rum-boxes next to pineapple juice boxes in the store, I was amused, but not shocked. This was, after all, Cuba.

What I had not expected was precisely this: my unsurprise. I was prepared to be blown off my feet, to be filled with awe and wonder at every corner. I was not — certainly not for the lack of awesome and wonderful things, but rather, because these very things presented themselves to me with such an extraordinary ordinariness.

The surrealism finally sunk in at the end of my first week, while on the road from Havana to a weekend in the tobacco farmland of Vinales. I was cruising down the highway in the backseat of a maquina, a muscle car from the 1950s that must have been luxurious at one point, but was long past its heyday.

By now, the handles and the back of the front seat had long disappeared, and the bumpers looked very close to falling off, as well. The robin-blue paint was chipped, and there were some very uncomfortable loose springs in the backseat.

A little in front of us, the sparkling purple and white Bel-Air, (super souped-up because the driver had relatives in Miami), containing the rest of the group sped past a horse-drawn cart. A few minutes later, a packed, modern Metrobus imported from China drove by. Once in a while we would see army-green vehicles that looked like old military gear transformed into bizarre minibuses zoom by, completely repleto — filled.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/study-abroad/090924/dont-worry-be-happy