Thu, 5 Jun 2003 07:21:58 -0700 (PDT)
Cuban self gratification

Pornography! Bad or Good? This is the topic of my thesis.

Cuba does not allow pornography. So, what do the people do here ... they masterbate in public while looking at tourists. In my 3.5 weeks here, I am personally aware of 3 seperate incidents of public masterbation. First, there was a swiss girl (Anuk) who was studying on the Malecon (the street along the water). The malecon has a sort of wall that drops down about 7 feet to the waters edge, and it is about 3 feet higher than the street, and about 3 feet wide. You can hop over the wall, and walk on the water side, as there is sort of a concrete breaker all along the waters edge. Typially people sit on the wall to relax, or study, or to hang out in the evenings. She thought that she had found a nice quite place to study as she was sitting on the wall, and she (for once) wasn´t being bothered by any cubans, when she noticed a cuban guy standing on the lower side of the wall (beside the water) staring up at her and masterbating .... she basically told the guy to fuck off, and he kept on doing it ... she just got up and left.

Then there was another swiss girl (Alexa -- the one that had the car accident). She was in the shower, and the phone was ringing at her house. The neighbours were calling to tell her family that there was a guy sitting on a rooftop that was materbating and staring at the window into her shower! Again, he didn´t stop, even when they were looking at him.

Finally, two nights ago, I walked a girl home, and we were kissing in front of her house, and there was a cuban guy sitting there watching us. He was staring at us and masterbating. I didn´t really care, and neither did she, so we just kept kissing.

I believe that Europeans (at least the ones I have met) are much less uptight than north americans. All of the girls just laughed about the above situations. I belive that many north american chicks would have been pretty pissed off.

Also, again a cuban tried to rip me off. I went into the store in the Habana Libre hotel (one of¨the ¨nicest¨ in Havana), and bought a water for a dollar, gave the chick a $20 ... she rang it in as a $10, and tried to give my $9 change. I was getting ready to flip out, and I told her that I gave her a twenty, and she just calmly gave my the other $10 without saying anything except something like ¨oh , I didn´t realize¨.

Also, there is an American chick now staying in the house I am living in. Americans outside of the United States are fish out of water. Every American (2 american girls) that I have met here has their mouth on rapid-fire ... they just can´t shut up ... It is actually pretty annoying. And they truly believe that the world revolves around them. I had a semi argument with this new american chick at lunch time yesterday ... she started going on about some program where you study at sea that ¨everybody knows about, how come you don´t¨ ... I almost lost it on her. I ripped into her a little bit with something like ¨you think that because you have that in the US, that we should know about it in other countries¨. After that she started going on about how Mexican spanish is so dirty, which is actually the opposite to what I have experienced ... so we then argued about that for a bit. I realize that it is difficult to extrapolate to 300 million people based on a sample of 2, but I won´t let that stop me.