She ordered tacos. I ordered chicken on a stick.
There were five of us. Three dudes, a lady, and a girl. We sat at a small table in a tiny cafe in a dilapidated building on a dirty street in Havana, Cuba.
“She speaks six languages,” the mother said about her daughter.
“How old are you,” I asked the girl.
“16,” she mumbled.
Last weekend two buddies and I went to Cuba. I have been stuck trying to figure out the premise for my next book so I figured why not go where Hemingway wrote?
A bar in Cuba.
I have never read a Hemingway book. Too boring. However, I like that dude. He was nuts.
I like people who are nuts. He won the Nobel Prize, was in two plane crashes, wrote shirtless, and drank 16 double rum daiquiris with grapefruit juice and no sugar every day in a bar called the Floridita in Havana, Cuba.
So, I headed to the Floridita in Havana, Cuba.
We arrived in Cuba on Thursday. From the looks of things, I don’t think communism is working. The people are tired. The cats are starving. The cars are 100 years old.
Everything is worn out.
On Friday, we met the girl and her mother for lunch. They told us about their hardships. The mother has been a tour guide for decades. The daughter learned six languages by watching cartoons. They were desperate for better lives. No money, no future, no hope.
“How can we help?” we asked.
She explained they needed someone in the United States to sponsor them for two years. If they could find someone they could move to America. A little red tape here, a little red tape there. Blah, blah, blah.
“What if we sponsored you guys?” We asked.
“I would sell everything and we would move to Florida,” she sighed.
Well, what the hell. Let’s sponsor them. Whatever that means.
“We will sponsor you,” we said.
Silence.
The mother fought tears but they came anyway. She looked at her daughter trying to stay strong. The daughter looked at her mother with a tiny smile and tears in her eyes. I looked at both of them with tears in my eyes. Garrett and Lee had tears in their eyes. Just a big ol’ table of cry babies.
We got it together and I asked the daughter if she knew of any tattoo places. She said she had seen one around the corner.
“Will you go with me to find it,” I asked her.
“Ok,” she smiled.
I had a plan to commemorate our lunch, one of the most powerful lunches I had ever had. I needed her help. Little did she know.
We found the place. A small apartment on the 2nd floor of a run-down building. A Cuban guy answered the door.
“What should I get,” I asked the daughter.
Her eyes got big and nervous.
“Oh no, I don’t know,” she said in better English than I speak.
“Sure you do. What do you think?” I smiled.
She said something to the tattoo artist in Spanish. He drew it. I got it. Now I have to make sure that girl makes it to the United States where she can achieve all her dreams.
As he was giving me the tattoo, he tried to ease the pain by suggesting I think of something else to relax.
“Sure, but it still hurts!” I said half-jokingly.
Then he paused, looked up at me, and said something so powerful, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Once he finished, I immediately headed to the bar where Hemingway used to write. It was packed. I squeezed into the corner where Hemingway used to stand and pulled out a piece of paper. I wrote what he said to me…
“It’s because you are alive.”
We feel pain because we are alive. We feel love because we are alive. We hurt and we rejoice because we are alive.
We write books, start businesses, fall in love, swim in oceans, and dance in the shower because we are alive. We help others, travel to Cuba, get tattoos, and drink shitty daiquiris because we are alive.
We live because we are alive.
The first sentence of my next book is going to be…
It’s because you are alive….
Trey