
Half of My Heart
By Sonya Xu · Havana, Cuba
A time capsule. A time capsule filled with 1960s American Chevys, cigars, and Hemingway. We, as Americans, romanticize Cuba as this mysterious place, far different from anything we can imagine in our daily lives. I did it too, but categorizing Havana into these staples is simply an injustice to its vibrant culture and heritage. And I knew this wouldn’t be a fair assumption of Cuba the second I landed in Santa Clara with my sister and a single backpack.
Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece la palma
The plane teemed with laughter, clapping, and enthusiastic singing until it was time to disembark. En este momento, conocí que esta es MI aventura.

Our first city of exploration was Havana, three hours away from Santa Clara. We got in a taxi with two men, Juan and Ricky. I became friends with them as they cracked jokes in Spanish and broken English. I learned that English isn’t taught in schools; they had taught themselves over the years as they taxied around English speaking tourists like us.
“Necesito cambiar dinero,” I told them. I need to exchange money. In plenty of international airports, foreign exchange stations are a couple of feet away from baggage claim; however, this proved to be a much harder feat in Cuba. In fact, it’s practically impossible to withdraw Cuban Pesos Convertibles (CUC) with American debit or credit cards. I needed to improvise.
Juan brought us to a neighborhood in Santana where one of his “cousins” lived. Right then and there in the back of a taxi cab, I negotiated my first ever trade deal. In my head, I silently prayed that $300 would last us the next five days because I had no idea where else I would get money.
The taxi was old, probably from the eighties, run down, but it wasn’t like the cars you see in pictures. It lacked air conditioning (it was almost a hundred degrees) but was filled instead with stories and dreams of two pairs of strangers, which was more than I could have ever asked for.
Once we arrived in Havana, we bid farewell to our new friends but soon made new ones with our casa particular (homestay) owner.
In Havana, we didn’t have a plan. This was an anomaly for my sister and I who usually planned our trips down to the hour. So, we wandered.
And we wandered to the capital which was a few minutes from our temporary home in Old Havana. It was an exact, paradoxical reflection of the American capital. Colorful cars lined the front, waiting to take tourists around. But unlike the perfectly manicured lawns, a block away from the Cuban capital was a building overgrown with vines. There was not enough funding to finish the building, a reality check that Cuba isn’t a perfectly wrapped gift box.
We wandered on, past hand painted communist slogans along walls and buildings about Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. They served as reminders to the people of the hard fought revolution and their leaders. A revolution that was in the past, but definitely not forgotten and an integral part of Cuban people’s identities.

We stopped by a local convenience store for a break from the sweltering sun. We got some strange looks. Our cameras clearly implied we were tourists. There were only two types of soda. They weren’t even Coke or Pepsi, but simply one that resembles coke and another that tasted like Sprite. I was speechless as I thought about the single government owned company that controls the soda industry. At the same time, there was something beautiful about this simplicity of not having twenty options to choose from.
We passed an art studio and wandered in. The bright colors reminded me of a Warhol print. A child was outside selling fruits and vegetables. Their colors paralleled those we had just seen in the studio.

There was a line that extended outside one of the stalls on the side of the road. People were patiently standing, a basket in one hand and a paper fan in the other. Later on, I learned that on certain days of the week, citizens waited in line at stores with baskets for eggs. On other days, they took empty water jugs to get oil. Cuba, indeed, still uses ration coupons.
There was even a line outside of Coppelia, a state run ice cream parlor. Castro loved ice cream. In fact, he had his ambassador to Canada ship him 28 cartons of ice cream from America. Because of our budget constraint, we opted out on the ice cream for the day.
We hopped on a bicycle taxi who took us to the National Hotel. Pictures of Chinese politicians, Winston Churchill, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, and Jimmy Carter lined the wall, serving as black and white reminders that Cuba’s rich history was more than simply the Bay of Pigs or the Cuban Missile Crisis that we learn about in American history class. We ate our dinner on the patio along the shore and watched the sun sink into the waves in a warm embrace.
Cuba was more than my grand adventure. It was a test of my Spanish speaking abilities and a way to challenge myself in an environment entirely out of my comfort zone. And Havana is more than rum, cigars, and baseball. It has a heart of its own, and it has half of mine.
Para siempre, Havana tiene mi corazón.
This article was published in the Spring 2018 issue, Budget Travel.
About the writer
Sonya Xu is from Dallas, Texas. Her favorite cities are Lucerne, Switzerland and Amsterdam, Netherlands.
About Guac
Guac is an award-winning travel publication run by an interdisciplinary group of students at Cornell University. We aim to inspire our readers to celebrate cultural diversity and view the world with an open mind through delivering unique stories from people around the world.
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