Why are all the books gone, part 267... :)

I’m apologizing in advance for being bitter while writing my blog post, but I did create a text barrier for those who would like to skip my rant/explanation of the Cuban system of reading assignments. Enjoy! :)

--Begin Bitter Rant / Explanation--

Seeing as I have been reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as of late, I figured that perhaps my books would magically manifest themselves in my room of their own volition. Alas, no. I received two books in class from the professor (yay socialist book system!!!) for my Sociologia del Trabajo class, but my other two classes have sent us students off to find books “de maneras individuales” (by our individual means). This phrase means, “I have no idea where you can find these books, but get creative!” We have to read these books for class, yet we are unsure if and when they will be available. It is incredible to me how much I take for granted buying books in the states!! It’s so easy!!! I walk into the Coop, check isbns, head to Amazon, and I’m done! Here, the process involves the professor listing off some articles or books one needs to or should read, walking to one of twenty local bookstores, finding that the bookstore does not carry the title (after extensive searching or asking a worker there), repeating the process five times, not finding any books, then giving up and walking home. The only Amazon here exists in my mind, as a dense forest of barriers that I have to clear before obtaining the resources I need.

The good thing about being a foreigner, however, is that I have access to internet. Internet means access to websites, and websites mean access to articles, snippets from books, etc. I wonder how many of the Cuban students survive sans internet or even computers!!! I am in awe of how resourceful and sharing people are down here – in class, the professor collects everyone’s flash drives (lots of students at UHavana have these), and uploads copies of the articles for them onto their flash drives, or finds some other means to distribute copies. There is a shortage of paper in Cuba, too, so there aren’t handouts of anything – the syllabus, book lists, and class schedule are given out orally. All my classes are literally two classes in one – whatever the course title is plus an advanced Spanish listening class.

--End Bitter Rant / Explanation--

I’m starting to get better at understanding the Cuban accent, though. When I first went to classes last week, I understood MAYBE 40 percent of the lectures in class. Now, I’m sitting at the front of the class, and I was able to understand perhaps 90 percent of the lectures that had previously been a blur of speech. I also banged out three double-sided pages of semi-comprehendible notes in Spanish today (NOTES in SPANISH!!!), which I am really quite proud of!!!

In addition to that, Diane and I visited the UHavana library, where we used an old-school card catalog to look up our books for class, then filled out two little slips of paper full of information on the book we were looking for. We handed it to a library worker, who took the slip of paper and placed it on a metal clip hanging from a balcony on the second floor. Then a girl came to the balcony and pulled up the string and removed my slip from the clip, and went to go look for the book I requested. None of the students are allowed to go into the stacks to look for their own books, so requests have to be filled out, you have to leave behind some form of identification (a copy of your passport or your student ID, which I don’t have yet) while you take the book out, and you can’t leave the library with the book. When they retrieve the book, they call out your name to pick it up at the desk. The entire process (for one book) took about twenty minutes. In the interim, Diane and I had been looking at some ancient wooden display cases of ecological books, in which a poster was displayed, saying, “ask your librarian for information about internet access!” We just laughed and mused at the irony of Cuban society for a while.

In addition to the craziness that was today, there was a robbery that occurred at ANAP last night, in which two of the girls on the second floor had their computers, cameras, and some money stolen from their rooms. Somebody had apparently sneaked upstairs through the open emergency exit in the back (there is always a guard in front, but only sometimes in the back of ANAP) around 12:00 midnight, and had gone to the unlocked, unoccupied room with the lights off to steal the Sarah Lawrence girls’ computers. The first floor, where I’m living, has more foot traffic, and my roommates and I are very careful about always keeping the door locked, but it’s still very disturbing to think that people are entering into this “secure” building without us knowing. Most high-profile buildings filled with foreigners have intense security systems, but our building is quite high-profile as a US study abroad student haven, and we don’t have a technology system to support a security system like theirs. I’m pretty neurotic about this type of thing already, but now I’m super neurotic. To think that for the next three months, I constantly have to be vigilant of all my belongings does NOT make me comfortable, but perhaps it’s a good thing, in the sense that I won’t ever let my guard down – inside or outside the house I’m living in. It’s just really tiring, when to think that back home in the woods I’m relatively free from danger…