Hitchhiking in Cuba
I’ve been offline for the past couple weeks. Not just the web, but pretty much all sorts of printed and broadcast media. Other than a couple short episodes checking email, today is the first time in 10 days I’ve had an hour just to sit down and read, surf the web, trawl my netvibes page. And it makes me appreciate both (connected and unconnected) states more. You understand and appreciate better what the world has to offer. Time is also a good editor. At any given time, I generally have half a dozen or more posts unpublished in draft form; and generally only one or two of these is fit to publish a month later. Sometimes this is because the subject matter is time sensitive, but mostly it’s because, well it is just not good enough: not interesting, incomplete, ill thought out. There is a school of thought however that would say that the essence of (good) blogging is in its raw, provisional, stream-of-conciousness elements, and so to edit is to over-engineer, is to short-circuit the wise crowd editor so to speak. Perhaps there is some truth in that.
A little while back, the Economist started publishing weekly correspondent’s diaries from various locations around the world. It has become one of my favorite reads on the web. Catching up this morning, I came across the Havana diary. And having just read JP’s thinking about communities and blogs post, one observation stood out:
Widespread hitch-hiking is made necessary by Cuba’s poverty. It is made possible by Cuba’s lack of crime. Every strain of society takes to the road here―old women, young men, old men, young women, youthful karate teams. Hitching doesn’t have the tinge of film-noir-ish danger that it does now in the West. Cuba’s low crime rate is not just a matter of statistics. (I couldn’t find, and wouldn’t trust, official statistics, but it is far, far lower than anywhere else in the region.) It fundamentally changes the way people can live their lives. People are afraid to walk the streets of Guatemala City at night; the rich hire guards and live behind gates. In Cuba the default approach to strangers is not one of fear but of guarded friendliness.
We’ve lost the ability to hitch-hike in America; driving around Cuba reminds me of how much we’ve lost. It’s a wonderful thing to talk to strangers about their lives. And because I’m already doing them a favour by giving them a ride, it’s one of the few places where they won’t ask me for money. Instead, they’ll want to return the favour. I had dinner at one hitch-hiker’s house; another wanted to show me around his village.
Well blogging for me is like hitchhiking in Cuba.
And perhaps that is why it has proven to be such a powerful medium. Not just for the digital generation, but across generations. It reminds us of how much we’ve lost. Replacing the communities of physical proximity, with dematerialized communities of the mind and spirit.
It’s not nirvana. The 18,000+ spam comments akismet has helped me filter are testament to the flawed reality of online communities, but - at least for now - this evil has not destroyed the foundations upon which the blogosphere is built. Can we have our cake and eat it? Can we have communities without crime? without enforced poverty? without communist ideology? Worth trying for. Hop in.
December 23rd, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Your point about hitch-hiking in Cuba is very well taken. Clearly it would be completely unsafe for young people or women to hitch-hike in the United States, but it’s totally normal and completely safe in Cuba. I’ve spent many months there and driven to many parts of the island. People are out hitching everywhere. Sometimes they stick their hands out with money in them, sometimes they just stand or sit by the side of the road. Everyone knows that people are looking for a ride. And it’s not just young people, but doctors, soldiers, all sorts of people, are using this way of getting around.
When I was a college kid, I hitched frequently, and went thousands of miles during those years. But those were the more hopeful sixties. Who would do that now? One year, I remember it well: 1967, I hitched from Madison, Wisconsin where I was in school, together with my girfriend, all the way to Montreal to visit the Cuban pavillion at the Expo 67 world’s fair.
They’re working hard in Cuba now, with their economy picking up, to improve the public transportation system, but it has a good long way to go and people will be hitching for quite some time, I think.
My father and his parents lived in Cuba from 1939 to 1942, and that’s where my own interest in the country comes from. I run a Yahoo news group focusing on Cuba for those who want to know more about the country.
Thanks for your comment and blog.
Walter Lippmann, CubaNews
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/