January 24th

Unfortunately, Castro spoke at 8AM, about an hour earlier than we headed down to the anti-Bush rally. When asking people when El Comandante was to speak, you discover one of the peculiarities of Cubans – often times you’ll get two or three different answers that you’ll have to ask numerous people until you have a consensus. In this case, several people said he had already spoken; others said he would speak later in the day. We confirmed that he had already spoken, but we joked that he wouldn’t have finished in an hour, as his speeches are typically three hours long or more. The rally itself was both impressive and trite – there were thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people participating, with representatives from other Latin American countries yet at the same time it was an obligatory march for Cuban citizens, with hundreds of buses lining the inner city streets that had bussed in students and workers from across the nation. We walked up the Malecon until we were stopped by some officials and told we couldn’t go further, so we were unintentionally forced to march in the rally, hoping no international cameras caught our picture. One of the best chants during the march was “Bush Fascista / Suportan terrorista”. Through the entire thing, different groups and people could be heard denouncing Bush, from military officials to children yelling “Viva Fidel! Viva la revolucion!” To show support, paper Cuban flags had been handed out, and at one point a small kid handed me about six flags that he had collected. After awhile it appeared that it would be mostly the same type of speeches and chants for the rest of the day, so we went back to the hotelito to escape the heat and get some food.

Once again, asking people where to go for certain things can be unsuccessful. We asked the sweet old security guard at our dorm where we could eat, and he told us of a place around the corner and down two blocks. It turned out that it was another Ditu stand, where I swore after my first trip there that I’d never go back. So we trekked on, asking others where we could find a quick lunch. A lot of the people couldn’t answer because they were from out of town and were just waiting for their bus drivers to come back. Finally, after another twenty minutes of extraneous walking we found a Pan.com, a local chain that plays on the ubiquitous internet domain. Once again, they were out of pizza, despite the fact I had seen several Cubans walking from the general direction of the restaurant minutes before with pizza.

After lunch, I started feeling light headed, so I came back to my bed and took a nap. This nap was interrupted by the immediate need to diarrhea like crazy. As a double whammy, while I was on the toilet, the need to throw up hit me. So I did, into the trashcan. And I did so again two more times that day. So from about one or two in the afternoon until the next morning, I was sleeping or dead in the bathroom. Kind of anticlimactic.