Real Cuba blends old and new

Editor’s note: This semester, The Pitt News will run a bi-weekly travel article, written by… Editor’s note: This semester, The Pitt News will run a bi-weekly travel article, written by correspondent Jonathan Check from aboard Semester at Sea’s S S. Universe Explorer. The articles will run in Friday’s news section.

Longitude: 59 degrees. Latitude: 15 degrees; 151 miles from Martinique; traveling at 16 1/2 knots; 2,506 miles to Brazil, 81 degrees, sunny skies — Where do you find the real Cuba? In the live Salsa music wafting forth from the open-air bars of Old Havana? In the optimistic rhetoric of a young Cuban student? In the dirty side streets, or the living rooms of bootleg cigar dealers?

It’s been three days since we left the island. Yesterday morning, students had their first opportunity to reflect on the experience in “Core” class, the required daily forum that serves as a group geography lesson and discussion session.

Core, which meets every day that the boat is at sea, brings the entire student body together for an hour and 15 minutes for a seminar on the relevant cultural and social issues facing the countries the students are visiting. Guest lecturers from the shipboard community fill in the blanks with other pertinent information. By the time the ship docks in port, students are virtual experts on the country — if they’ve been paying attention, of course.

The last few minutes of Core are reserved for questions and comments. Yesterday’s section brought revealing reactions from the student body. Comment after comment, the sentiments were generally the same: confusion and uncertainty regarding a country that seemed both deeply beautiful and deeply troubling.

While everyone enjoyed the music, dancing, cigars and Cuban hospitality, no one denied sensing tones of despair lurking behind the touristy facade of Old Havana. It is a place filled with paradoxes that are difficult for middle-class, first-world Westerners to swallow: a place where your cab driver could be a doctor, and where a tourist’s bar bill could be worth more than a local’s monthly pay check.

In short, here in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, we are all reeling from our first taste of culture shock.

“That is the price you pay for going on Semester at Sea,” joked Professor Donald Gogniat, the ship instructor for Core.

Gogniat, an administrator from Pennsylvania State University who received his doctoratein cultural geography at Pitt, was pleased by the reactions to what was certainly a challenging first port-of-call.

“Confusion is a wonderful thing,” he said. “When you’re confused, it means you’re thinking. I love that.”

While he said he is pleased with the enthusiasm of the students, he hopes they keep the class in perspective and remember why they’re here.

“People are concerned about their grades, but they are also worried about their grades,” he said. Gogniat hopes that students will study hard because they genuinely want to learn about the culture and issues facing the countries to which they are traveling — not simply to get by.

The ultimate A-grade for the students, he insisted with excitement, will be the day that a Semester at Sea kid can rub elbows with the locals and make real connections based on their newly learned knowledge.

“To be able to sit down in a coffeehouse and have a conversation [with a native], to know this stuff like that,” he said. “It’s gonna be tremendous.”

Now, out on the high seas and en route to Salvador, Brazil, Semester at Sea students are starting to adjust to this profoundly different pace of life, where activities are (naturally) confined and the overall sense of reality recedes as the S.S. Universe Explorer moves farther away from land — and our home countries.

“Is today Saturday? Or Sunday?” asked Melissa Terry, a junior from Concordia University in Montreal, as she surfed the wireless Web from her laptop. Her question is no jest; class days on Semester at Sea are marked as either “A” or “B” days, so the typical monikers for the days of the week just aren’t important here.

Terry described the atmosphere as an “extraordinarily relaxed blur,” and indeed, life seems to mirror the ebb and flow of the ocean waves. Take a walk around the ship and you’ll encounter chaise-lounge readers, pick-up games of chess, and quiet conversations over strawberry smoothies. But the most popular afternoon activity seems to be sunbathing, as is evidenced by the scores of oily bodies spattered like parched sea otters across the sun deck.

And that’s exactly where Terry is headed — once she finishes up her add-drop meeting. She’s number 167 in the line for the registrar, and though there are still 40 more people in front of her, she seems perfectly content to upload and name her digital pictures — taken in Cuba — while she waits to be called.

There are worse places to stand in line.

Jonathan Check, former Senior Staff Writer, is now the Foreign Correspondent for the Pitt News. While he has no concept of life back in the States, he has heard two dirty rumors: that the Eagles are not in the Super Bowl, and that Larry Fitzgerald is going pro. He believes neither of these things. E-mail him at