All of the way through just half of the sheet.

by Nathan Heath (United States of America)

A leap into the unknown Cuba

It was finally cooling off. I had been in Haiti for four months now. Like many of my copatriate expatriates, I had arrived in Haiti to work for an NGO in the midst of a whirlwind of personal transitions. Newly graduated. Recently single. Funemployed. I was heartbroken and lost upon arrival. The summer heat really didn't help. The work did. It was meaningful and seemingly without end. As the Haitian heat gave way to a slightly less hot winter, I was giving way to a significantly less productive burnout. That is when Callan left. He had come to volunteer and quickly settled in among the long-timers. We were not close, and people came and went all of the time. So I had no expectation that his departure would be the most significant of all of those who came and went through our rust-red metal gates. On his last morning, while I was avoiding the start of the day, I politely asked what his next adventure would be. He was taking a bus across the Dominican Republic and flying on to Cuba from there. Despite there being less than 100 miles of water between them, there were no direct flights to Cuba from Haiti at the time. He had no guidebook, no agenda, no hotel reservations. Just a ticket and a scrap of paper in his shirt pocket. Three hours and a frustrating meeting later, I bumped into him loading onto a moto-taxi. With nothing but envy in my heart I wished him luck and offered to trade places with him. In what was a truly Callan response, he pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket and ripped it half. He said he would be there at noon every day for three days and then never again. He tapped the driver and rode off through the gate, our security guard closing it behind him. He had handed me a scrap of paper with nothing but a handwritten street address on it. Just a building number. Nothing more. That evening I spent most of what little money I had on a ticket to Havana. It was one of only two flights that week that made it there without connecting through the US. Some Bush-era policies made it less than convenient for Americans to get to Cuba. I was to fly through Panama and had 40ish minutes to make my connection. Thirty-two hours after receiving my scrap of paper, I was attempting to check into my flight from Port-au-Prince. The gate agent looked at my ticket, asked for my visas, and my first obstacle was underway. I had no visa. Not to Panama. And not to Cuba. He was not impressed. He informed me that were he to send me to either country without a visa, and were they to turn me around, that the airline would have to fly me back and that the expense would be taken from his paycheck. Twenty-five minutes later, after promising to pay my way back and staging a sit-in, he gave me my boarding pass if I promised to leave him alone. I thought I had made it. And then my flight was 25 min late taking off. Two and a half hours later I busted off of that plane and raced through the terminal to see my plane already boarding. I hesitated for just a moment before jumping in line to see the gate agent checking the visas of those boarding. It was the end of the line. That is when I noticed a second gate agent eyeing me. He cocked his head at me, asking if I had a visa without a word. I shook my head. He then nodded to a person across the room and walked away. I was immediately approached by an Asian guy in just a t-shirt and jeans. He held out what appeared to me to be a Cuban visa and simply said, "twenty." I haded him twenty dollars and he strolled away. They let me board the plane without a real look at the visa, giving me two hours and forty minutes to wonder what the Cuban government did to travels with fake visas.