ナショナルジオグラフィックのインスタグラム(natgeo) - 5月8日 02時16分

Photo by @dguttenfelder, words by Cynthia Gorney both aboard the first American cruise ship in four decades to sail to Cuba.

What exactly was placed on the tourist dollar market, that day three years ago when Jorge decided that at the age of 54 he would abandon civil engineering to begin driving a Santiago cab? A friend had urged this, a repellant idea at first, you take your university-pedigreed self out to the airport or port terminal and stand around with the other men, murmuring “Taxi? Guide?” and hoping something about your dignified bearing makes the tourists pick you. But Jorge’s engineer salary was paid by the state, in the national currency meant to circulate just among Cubans. The tourists pay their fares in the other Cuban currency, the one they buy with their dollars or Euros at kiosks like this; those convertible pesos are worth 25 times the national ones. In Santiago, on Cuba’s southeastern tip, heroic revolutionary stories are literally engraved into the walls. This place and its surrounding mountains were the “cuna,” one is told, the cradle, of the 1950s battles to wrest power away from U.S. businesses and the wealthiest classes of Cubans. It would be easy to imagine that hauling tourists around in his old Lada sedan now makes Jorge wince when he repeats the cuna narrative—but no. Here are the professions of his children: internist, psychologist, economist, lawyer. All fully educated for free, Jorge says; the revolution gave them that. All working in Cuba. He swears their generation will figure out how to absorb American tourism, and eventually American private investment, without dismantling Cuba into a place of servility or socialism nostalgia. “We’re too proud for that,” he said. “Our own values can resist what is coming. It’s worth the risk.” -Cynthia Gorney

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