Cuba Trip

I´m going to Cuba!!! (September 1st to October 3rd). Amanda and I just got back from a weekend in La Sierra Pobre (the Poor Mountains), which is located about an hour outside of Madrid, where we attended a pre-departure meeting of Sodepaz (http://www.sodepaz.es/), the NGO with which we will be travelling to Cuba. It was a lot of fun. There were people from all over Spain who will be travelling this summer, in various groups, to Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Palestine.

Sodepaz is an NGO that focuses on international cooperation and solidaridy. This means that they're not a charity, nor are they politically aligned. They do, however, encourage a closer, more open look at some of the regimes we traditionally approach (at least in the main-stream media) with a (usually negative) pre-formed opinion or bias, such as that of Fidel Castro in Cuba. With this goal in mind, Sodepaz organizes trips to, usually under developed, countries in order to come closer to understanding the reality lived by the people in those places. Some of these trips involve working in some sort of project that the NGO is developing in that country, others, like the trip to Cuba, focus on education (ours) and making connections, as well as more traditional-style tourism. We will be travelling in a small group, meeting-up with academic groups, citizens groups, members of the Communist Party, as well as visiting various projects being developed by Sodepaz and their partners, such as CubaSolar, a group that is installing solar panels on rural doctors offices, or to an agricultural school in the countryside.

The idea of the, supposedly mandatory, meeting this weekend near Madrid was to get to know the organization, learn a few things about the country we're going to visit, and meet the people we´ll be going with. Unfortunately the other 4 people in our group didn´t come, so Amanda and I had to do the touchy-feely team-building drills in pairs. We—among other stunning achievements—successfully climbed a tree (working in-tandem) and developed a strong sense of team membership, as well muscling-out some impressive group dynamics. We also threw some tennis balls around in a circle, demonstrating impressive coordination, and applied face paint while detailing our deepest travelling fears. Anyway, we met lots of cool people (from other groups)—that was the only real drawback of the weekend: that we didn´t get to meet the other members of the group we´ll be going with—,enjoyed the tropical-themed mojito disco, and left the weekend pretty pumped: the trip sounds AWESOME. It's 21 days (traevlling with the SODEPAZ group). We start in Santiago and wend our way through the island, finishing in Habana, then we´re going to stay on another 10 days or so wandering around on our own.