Snarky Behavior

I just uploaded Creative Suite 3 on my crappy Sony Vaio and it’s struggling worse than I used to in the pull-up competition of the physical fitness challenge at Rancho San Joaquin Intermediate.
In an effort to size down on physical memory I decided to clear off some of the photos I’ve accumulated over the years by uploading them to Picasa. I think I like Flickr better but I’m a Google whore.

Anyway, I ran across some artwork (if you can call it that) that I had designed in Microsoft Paint during one of my classes in Cuba. The class was on US/Cuba historical tensions and my professor, Esteban Morales, was a card-carrying member of the Communist party. He taught us (as fact) that Lyndon Johnson was in on the Kennedy assassination, which was coordinated by the Cuban mafia. As evidence, he showed us Oliver Stone’s JFK. No, really. He did.

Anyway, it brought back some great memories to see these crappy “paintings.” Each has a unique back story, which I’ll try to briefly retell.

“La guagua” (the bus) P-1 (pronounced el Peh Uno) was the bain of my existence for 4 months of my life. I rode it at least twice a day to get to class and back. Imagine riding standing-room only (barely) in a bus with no air-conditioning, late August with 95% humidity. Just a fantastic smell.

A solid 60-70% of the students on my program (myself included) were pick-pocketed on this bus. A good 90% of the girls on the trip were exposed to a phallic member, and at least 2 girls were masturbated on. That’s why the blonde is frowning.

For reference, here’s the real P-1. (Pretty good, eh?):

Don Conejo (Sir Crab) was the name of a local beach bar that we would frequent. I mean really, I could’ve easily turned this into a t-shirt. Too bad there’s no money to be made in Cuba.

Here’s the group at Don Conejo. I am wearing a ridiculously small shirt featuring a young Elian Gonzales, which I obtained by trading the shirt off my back with some guy in the street:

This is pretty self-explanatory. Feral dogs are running around all over Cuba, and they’re gross. Examples 1 and 2 below: 1) was a schizo with open wounds all over it that would frequently sneak into the university library and bark at nobody in particular. 2) was somewhat of a local legend, and could be found here, there and everywhere around downtown Havana.

Schizo Dog (Example 1)

Pathetic Dog (example 2)

Los Tres Comandantes

The three commanders of the Cuban Revolution: from left, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos. It’s interesting that you see propaganda artwork of Che (and to a lesser extent, Cienfuegos) EVERYWHERE in Cuba, but you won’t see a single statue of Fidel. In fact, the below is the only public image I remember seeing of him. I wonder if he’ll ever get a chance to be celebrated?
Here is a pretty bomb public artwork featuring Che, and me visiting his tomb:

At first glance I couldn’t remember why I would create something as mean-spirited as this. Then I remembered: I created this sometime during a week’s span, at about the three-month mark, when I really got sick of Cuba’s shit. Not to be confused with homesickness: I just got sick of things always breaking down, constantly having to deal with shadiness, and the general lack of logic that deeply sickens the socialist system there.

This piece embodies my frustration. Americans get accused of being self-obsessed and ignorant of world issues, but Cubans take their own self-obsession to a higher plane. Imagine if the US were an island, had a state-controlled media, a national curriculum and no access to the internet. Kind of like Bush’s wet dream.

Jose Marti is Cuba’s founding father, akin to Benjamin Franklin in the US. Well, imagine if there were busts of Benjamin Franklin on every street corner, and people constantly quoting his almanac like it were scripture. You’d be a little sick of him, yes? That’s how I felt about Marti at this point in time.

Here’s a bust of Marti going up near my apartment. Notice how it takes 7 guys standing around to install it properly. Gotta love socialism:

No words for this one. Did I mention how cheap rum is in Cuba?

This might be my personal favorite of the batch. During our stay, the majority of the boys in the program stayed at a hostel called El Hotel Icemar. It was some kind of twisted frathouse. On the top floor lived this Argentine old-man who used to stagger home drunk at all hours of the night with a cigar in his mouth, making fun of all of us for not getting laid, and warning us to watch out for tranny prostitutes.

There are tons of fantastic stories that came out of “The Ice House,” but I think my favorite is when we came home from a jazz club and started beat-boxing. My friend Pete eventually broke out the guitar and jammed on the spot an amazing song while in his underwear, the refrain of which was: “Oh come on sing it out loud! I’m higher than a cloud! When I fall down, when I fall down, in the Iiiiiiiiiiice House!” He improvised the stanzas and it was just one of those moments that felt too spontaneous to ever happen without a script.

Here’s Pete singing, me falling down in the Ice House (out front, actually), and some random rastafarian who crashed on our front porch at 4am.

This was created by my friend Marcus (featured in the above photo of the rastafarian) after he caught wind of my creative project. I can’t really speak to his art, but I will suggest it has some Squid and the Whale influence to it, and I think the dove is yellow because otherwise you couldn’t see it on the white background. And canaries don’t bring peace.

Vinales

Vinales was without question the most beautiful part of Cuba that I visited. It is a valley and tobacco growing region that is just picturesque (see below photo taken by my friend Sylvia):

I hope someday I’m able to return to this gorgeous island and relive some of these fantastic memories.