I grabbed any magazine that didn’t have a new member of the Trump administration caricatured on the cover and fled to the airport, unaware of the lasting impact traveling sans technology would have on me. Cuba — for all its achievements in health care, agriculture and pissing off every U.S. president since JFK — has one of the lowest internet access rates in the world. For American telecommunications carriers, it’s even worse: There’s virtually no cellphone service and U.S. banks are verboten, no credit or debit cards allowed. Traveling to Cuba is strictly off-the-grid, like visiting a small tourist attraction in the 1970s.
In retrospect, the giddy trading of maps and guidebooks among friends and art-world colleagues* planning their own trips should have been a clue that we were returning to a mode of travel rendered obsolete by satellite, Waze and unrelenting connectivity. We were traveling back in time — to an era of asking for directions, of trusting our guts rather than an app, of intimately understanding the evolution of a city by walking its streets from historic and cobbled to new and paved, then back again.
First attempt: finding our AirBnB. Our instructions were clear: Give our cab driver the number for Adnan, our host; he would provide the address and directions. A flurry of phone calls later, none of which we participated in, we were greeted at the house with kisses and beers by young friends of our host. Within an hour of setting foot on Havana soil, we’d experienced the obstacle-toppling ingenuity of the Cuban communications system. Settling in, our days unfolded leisurely. Without countless digital reminders or even a clock (waking to roosters instead), we quickly became more attuned to our surroundings and the rhythm of our days. No longer tied to our phones, we chatted in broken Spanish with Gisele, who arrived every day to prepare breakfast.
Havana is an exercise in the here and now: there is no satellite-beamed BBC or CNN in the upper reaches of a bar. I saw no newspaper stands, witnessed no magazines being hawked. Music, not news, blared from every convertible and crowded stoop we passed.
Our days were spent in thoroughly analog sensory overload: crumbling mansions, women lounging in the doorways of empty stores, thoroughfares teeming with ancient cars.
At a rooftop bar buffeted by a tropical storm, we drank Cuba Libres and talked until the bar closed. Settling up and tipsily descending the circular stairs, we wondered how we had missed seeing 100 or so people, including the entire restaurant staff, leave. There’s nary an Instagram post to remind us of the fun we had, no photo of our grilled octopus, no Valencia-filtered selfie to commemorate our first night in Havana.
Slowly but surely, we replaced our unease over the state of affairs at home with our newly uncovered knowledge of Cuba. Daily, by walking just a few blocks away from throngs of tourists, we experienced the same disorienting sensation: having Havana to ourselves, experiencing cane sugar sodas and $4 meals. We enjoyed long lunches, longer walks, and the forgotten joy of meandering and uninterrupted conversations.
Days later, visiting Fusterlandia, a wonderfully kaleidoscopic neighborhood covered entirely in bright, intricate mosaics, we spent the early morning in full-on tourist mode, then wandered the neighborhood, where a skinny workhorse stood in the sun and we watched women pull cakes out of a neighborhood oven open to the street.
A short walk and a million worlds away, we whiled away the rest of the afternoon drinking beer at a sushi restaurant atop a swaying marina. A perfect day that will forever go undocumented; the social media platform hasn’t been invented yet that could properly evoke this delicious restaurant on top of a garbage-clogged river, reachable only by rotting planks of salvaged wood. Neither Vine nor Periscope will ever be able to capture our thrill of hitching a 50 peso collectivo ride, a shared taxi full of weary workers heading home for the day.
So rarely are we able to fully immerse ourselves in experiences of our own doing any more. We go where others like us have visited, our entertainment and travel decisions filtered through the recommendations of people we’ve never met.
I experienced Cuba with all my senses, decisions made in the moment — walking to the point of exhaustion, thirsty in the tropical sun, soaking in one wondrous image after another. The sound of music and conversation wafting out of open windows — in a language so unfamiliar to me — never failed to thrill.
Even smell, perhaps that most unused of all our senses, came into play. Quite frankly, Havana, one of the most astonishingly beautiful cities in the world, stinks. It smells of sewage, animals, sweat, and diesel — and I miss it horribly.
*Margaret Murray is manager of donor development at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.
This article appears in Jul 6-13, 2017.