Vinales, Cuba

February, 2015

Cuba is an Easter egg, pastel and promising. It has a rhythm and a beat and cold beers. Cuba is endless sunshine and the chatter of cheap diesel engines. There is money for locals and different money for the Canadians that come to sleep with the locals.

The old white men that drag themselves down the streets in the afternoon are thirsty and hungry and so they get drunk and when it is dark enough, they sway angrily on the open air dance floors and the heavy salt air dampens their sour breaths. They shuffle from one thick foam heel to the other and think about their arch-support.

Beautiful black men glide just above the floor and leave sandy contrails in their wake like the heavy metal discs on shuffleboard tables in Midwestern bars. Drums and strings and staccato voices punctuate their Caucasian failures.

The bright orange flare of a match blurs the peckish stars that peek in through the open roof. The night grows old and slow and the tired Canadians take the beautiful people back to their rented houses near the ocean.