Putting the "Mata" in Matanzas: Chapter 1

The following is the first installment in a series of entries regarding the 4-day trip to Matanzas.

A couple weeks ago we decided that it would be fun to assign Harry Potter characters to the people present in our Cuban lives. We successfully found matches for quite a few, including (but not limited to):
Dr. Retamar (Head of Casa) - Professor Albus Dumbledore
Maria - Professor Minerva McGonagall
Chino - Sirius Black
Professor Víctor Fowler - Professor Mad-Eye Moody
Gerardo - Arthur Weasley
Sonya - George Weasley
Courtney - Fred Weasley
Steph - Ginny Weasley
Professor Brown - Remus Lupin
Chelsea - Hermione Granger
Me - Nymphadora Tonks

There are others, to be sure, though some are less flattering comparisons than others. Why do I mention this? Well, because the past weekend has been spent in Matanzas, a province to the east of La Habana province. All of us were looking forward to this trip, not realizing what a logistical nightmare we had ahead of us. You see, the man who organized the trip is much like the character Cornelius Fudge (with a little bit of Professor Lockhart mixed in too).

Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic, is, above all, a politician. Prominent among his talents is the ability to convince himself that a problem may be solved by avoiding its acknowledgement. Also impressive is his raw determination in the ignoring of the wants and needs of all other human beings beyond his own.

Our trip to Matanzas began on Thursday afternoon. Piling onto a tour/short bus, we delighted in the possibility of a couple hours' relaxation whilst listening to our iPods. With only a commute on foot each day, we all look forward to trips in buses that afford us some time to listen to music and simply watch what passes our windows. Along with the short bus, however, we found that a funny little man in a Canadian Tuxedo accompanied us. Sporting an unfortunate face which makes me think of that line from the short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," in which one of the characters is described as having a face "as honest as a grapefruit."

This man had a face as honest as a grapefruit.

He also had a microphone.

Silently we all began to grieve the loss of those precious, music-listening hours we had looked forward to all week, and resigned ourselves to hearing about the José Martí shrine, the history of the revolution, the national plant (La Palma Real), the national bird (I have chosen not to remember its name on principle), and the meaning of the different colors of the license plates on Cuban cars. Abandoning social decorum, most of us put our headphones on after about twenty minutes, drowning out the monologue.

At the end of the bus ride, we were walking toward the hotel when Sonya asked our Cornelius Fudge a simple question.

Sonya: So what is the room situation?
Fudge: Huh?
Sonya: Are we being assigned rooms?
Fudge: Uhh, well, uhh, uhh.. they're double. Double.
Sonya: Well, yeah, but I mean, who are we rooming with? Is that assigned?
Fudge: Uhh, umm... make sure you room with someone you like!

This did not answer the question. This merely avoided it. This was the first indication that our leader had not a clue what he was talking about, and wasn't ready to admit this.

Okay, I lied. This certainly was not the first indication, but it IS the first indication that I can remember in detail enough to recount.

So, we go to our rooms. Steph and I ended up rooming together after we figured out that we were allowed to choose with whom we were staying. Good. Then when it was time for dinner, we all met down in the lobby. There's a cute stray dog that stays in the lobby area, and I named her Eloise because of this. I was petting Eloise when Cornelius Fudge came up to me, saying, "This dog try to sniff your butt, too?" presumably in reference to the dog we had seen the day before that did, in fact, sniff people's butts. This is because it was a dog, and that's what dogs do. But this comment was shocking, and I chose not to reply.

Dinner was interesting. There were several courses (of mediocre Cuban food) and flowers on the table for an extra flourish. Following the meal was a Cabaret performance featuring underfed Cubans shimmying on stage half-naked. It was all very sad, and rather depressing. It was also a little creepy. (Oh, and the MC was wearing a hat with a Jamaican pot leaf on it.) All of this was outside, and we found out the next day that the temperature had been 45 degrees, and we certainly did not have winter coats (the majority of us with only flipflops to wear, for example). For several hours we had to sit outside to watch this show. The best part? The dinner and show cost so much money that, even though we had been told previously that dinner would be included in the price of the trip, no other dinners were now to be paid for. Fudge had blown the entire budget on an excessively extravagant meal, leaving us to pay for our own dinners for the rest of the trip (and, of course, did not even own up to this fact). The rest of the evening was relatively uneventful, or seemed to be from my perspective as I struggled to stay away and keep from shivering too hard while the dance show went on. I heard later the Fudge had tried to pocket the complementary bottle of rum for himself.

TO BE CONTINUED.