An updated perspective

There is nothing like traveling to give your compass a tune up. I’m not talking only about the actual, physical compass but about your overall direction and the principles that you use to guide you in your life. And if the traveling happens to be somewhere that is very different than your every day life, then the bigger the jolt your compass gets. My first activity of the year was to get one of

those big jolts in life when I returned to my birthplace after a 50-year absence.

Not that I had any memory of my last visit when I was only two years old, this was more as if I was visiting for the very first time. But, I had heard so much about Cuba from my parents and the media, that I definitely had some preconceived ideas of what I was going to encounter.

To start, the visit felt as if we were breaking our own family rules as we had always hoped to return to a renewed Cuba some time after it had undergone a change from years of being ruled by one dominating figure. But given that none of us are planning to live forever, we had to make the visit happen before all of my Dad’s siblings disappear. As it was, one sister is 95 years old but with a bad case of Alzheimer’s disease which was not expected to recognize my Dad. The only other living sibling was a 93 year-old sister that lives near the family home site but at that advanced age it would be too much of a gamble to wait until the political picture changes.

So the trip happened. The culture shock was experienced. The meeting of so many “new” family members occurred. And now I’m in the process of reviewing the pictures, digesting the information, and getting over seeing first-hand the conditions that our family lives just a few miles South of where I live, which minus well be in another galaxy for all practical purposes. To write about our experiences in Cuba would take a book not a blog, but I’m sure that having that experience now in my system, its going to color my writing from now on.