The first thing we do is head off to find Henry's Party girls, whom he spent long nights with at the Lido's rooftop bar on our last trip here two years ago, arguing politics while brushing up against them under the table. He was captivated by the fact that they didn't want to talk to a Yanqui. We go to their old apartment, but instead find a roomful of chemistry students celebrating the end of the school term.
Parties, like everything else in Cuba, are reduced to very basic variations-- rum or aguardiente de cana (cheap, black market rum), water or lemonade, beans or rice and beans. Socializing is pretty much interchangeable too, in the sense that if you go looking for someone and they're not in, you still spend an hour or so jabbering away with whoever happens to answer the door. And in the sense that you generally arrive at the same conclusion no matter who you talk to:
THAT EVERYTHING IS FUCKED
(the years in which it first got fucked vary,
of course).
Discussions about economics or politics in Cuba are constrained by a shortage of new information, though. It's not just that there's so little published and reported; there's also not very much going on. Even with the government doing radical things like allowing farmers to sell their crops in the cities, and even with all the emigration from the island, so little changes that conversation suffers from a lack of variety.
