Cuba and the election and newspapers

It was a surreal experience to be in Cuba for the recent election.  A friend said as we left for Cuba "Make sure you get a newspaper the day after the election!".  I said that to our tour group the day before the election and someone said "Have you seen any newspapers lying around?".  In fact, there are none.  We saw one newspaper our entire trip, "Granma", published by the government.  It is named after the boat used by the revolutionaries in the 50s.


The morning after the election Rod went to look for one outside the hotel with no luck.  Fortunately all of our tour colleagues were like minded and the guide knew that there would be different group energy that day.  We were distracted by the results, still going through the stages of anger, denial, and bargaining.  None of us got to acceptance that first day.  In fact some of us, started with a mojito at noon and finished with a margarita at 10:30 PM.

We toured Old Havana that morning and at about 10:30 we saw someone with a paper and asked him where he had gotten it.   Judy ran into hotels asking but none were to be found.  A man pointed down a street and about 20 minutes later we spotted someone selling them so we all bought one.  We stopped mid tour and our guide Yuni and our SIL Judy read the paper to us, translating from Spanish.  The article was below the fold and pretty generic.  Since Cubans don't have cable TV and this is the only newspaper we saw you can only imagine what Cubans, and the rest of the world for that matter,  think of us.

Yuni reading Granma

Judy reading Granma

After the fact, we realized that we were standing right in front of a Mosque while we were reading the news.  Many Cubans came up to us that day expressing their condolences.  One professor said at the end of his lecture "We should be able to vote in your election because you have some much influence over our Country".  He has a point.

Plaque of the Mosque