This photo was taken after a long wild crazy fun day of jeep off roading...and jeep "pushing".
Its difficult and at times frustrating to imagine living the actual "Cuban way" of life
until you are stuck on a hot jungle highway pushing your friends that just ran out of gas!
Cuba's national sport is hitchhiking.
We sipped REAL coconut milk from REAL coconuts during this bumper-to-bumper
ordeal...I told our tourguide Guai, that up on our side of the world coconuts are available,
but come wrapped in plastic and the milks been replaced with water...as the milk is then sold in tin cans. He coudln't understand this complex chain of coconut events.
He thought our world was the good life and that his world was poor and empty.
I spoke to him all day and let him in on the real life we live...and how his was in fact better.
We went to a coffee plantation to have lunch and I mentioned how our meats/chicken etc is loaded with chemicals and are raised in tiny cages after farm chickens, roosters and turkeys ran past my feet. I told him that they would be "organic-free-range" because they were allowed to roam and to have a good life.
I then said that his life was pure, healthy & simple.
He let us know that the lunchtime banana's were straight off the trees on the farm.
I then told him that ours are shipped bright green before they can ripen on the tree.
His eyes bugged out in disgust...I am not sure he feels the same way about us tourists anymore
and or where we come from. I tried to let him know how it really is, and that it isnt all its cracked up to be in his mind. I also wished that we could have taken him home to Canada to be "free?!" to be the biologist he studied to become and not a tourguide trying to survive within Castro's regime.
We then wondered how he would feel about seeing both worlds like we had and letting him choose which is actually better...or the ripest.
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