Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
A Prison, a Paradise
FROM
The New York Times Magazine
O
N THE PLANE
, something odd but also vaguely magical-seeming happened: namely, nobody
knewwhattimeitwas.Rightbeforewelanded,theflightattendantmadeanannouncement,in
EnglishandSpanish,thatalthoughdaylight-savingtimerecentlywentintoeffectintheStates,
theislanddidn'tobservethatcustom.Asaresult,wehadcaughtup—ourtimehadpassedinto
sync with Cuban time. You will not need to change your watches. Then, moments later, she
came on again and apologized. She had been wrong, she said. The time in Cuba was differ-
ent. She didn't specify how many hours ahead. At that point, people around us looked at one
another. How could the airline not know what time it is where we're going? Another flight at-
tendant,hurryingdowntheaisle,saidloudly,“IjusttalkedtosomeactualCubans,intheback,
and they say it'll be the same time.” That settled it: we would be landing in ignorance. We
knew our phones weren't going to work because they were tied to a U.S. company that didn't
operate on the island.
Thesix-year-oldsatbetweenus,lookingbackandforthatourfaces.“Issomethingwrong?”
she asked.
“No,” my wife, Mariana, said, “just funny.” But to me she did the eyebrows up and down.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, “just—into the zone.”
Mi esposa
travels to Cuba every so many years, to do movie-related research (she's a film-
studies professor) and to visit her mother's family, a dwindling number of which, as death
and emigration have surpassed the birthrate, still live in the same small inland town, a dusty,
colonial-looking agricultural town, not a place anyone's heard of. To them, even after half
a century, it's the
querencia
, an untranslatable Spanish word that means something like “the
place where you are your most authentic self.” They won't go on about Cuba around you in
a magic-realist way. Nor do they dream of trying to reclaim their land when the Castros die.
Destiny settled their branch of the family not in Florida, where, if you're Cuban American,
your nostalgia and anger (and sense of community) are continually stoked, but in Carolina del
Norte,wherenobodycares.Theytendtobefairlylaid-backaboutpolitics.Buttheirmemories
stitch helplessly back to and through that town over generations, back to the ur-ancestors who
came from a small village in the Canary Islands.
My wife's 91-year-old Cuban grandmother, who lives with us much of the time, once drew
for me on top of a white cake box a map of their hometown. It started out like something you
