Issue link: http://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25065
A week into our visit people started to change. Takuji Masuda and CR Stecyk's peculiar rituals began at dawn with a habitual surf in the countryside. Their evenings were spent indexing with sons of diplomats and daughters of the revolution. The expatriate wastrels lurking in the old Hemingway haunts like the Floridita and the Ambos Mundos referred to them as "the fellow travelers." Tempers drifted past the standards of politeness in the tropical heat. CR in particular stressed when the jinotero spoke of CIA planes dropping bales of coca from the clouds. Extreme significance was attri buted to the deployment of AK47-brandishing military in the vicinity. Unsuspected strangers hid amidst the flora in his mind. CR was weary in a fashion that could be only partially explained away by the maladies that plague him. Lurgy, blackwater fever, dysentery ... he spoke of them as old friends, relati ng, "If I wasn't sick, then I wouldn't know I was back in the tropics." Takuji said little beyond the periodic abstract tracts concerning techno philosophy. Both kept council with Luis, the driver, respecting him for his past service to the revolution. Under his watchfu l eye, they ventured into EI Comandante's sculpture studio, through Abel Exposito Diaz's walk-i n humidor at La Casa Habano, to the national opera, and into and out of myriad bastions of the party faithful. Ninety miles across the water in Babylon, CR's work is represented in the Smithsonian National Gallery. Here is a person who's legally not on the island at all. He carries no money, equipment, or gear, somehow getting by on the Swiss foundation grant which sent him here. The mandatory $250,000 fine and decade in jail hanging over his head adds to his wariness. He scrupulously avoids any monetary exchange to avoid any vestige of "trading with the enemy." At nights he wanders off to drink ron with Maestro Korda, the documentarian who shot the ubiquitous portrait of Che. Takuji is a mystery to the locals. University professors are taken aback when he proposes that rocks, "by definition are capable of theoretically abstract thought constructs." On the professional long board circuit he's internationally ranked, but here such distinctions are meaningless. His forays into the waves are watched with astonished suspicion by the country folk who, politically, are more ideologically rigorous than the dollar-tainted denizens of Old Habana. The pair initiate contact with an assortment of artists who arduously labor in the 43