For Sean, who loved it as much as I did.

notes

Necropolis de Cristobal Colon: established in 1876, now with more than one million corpses occupying 800,000 graves, spread over 140 acres (57 ha).

Review: you should go. Repeatedly.

riff

I love cemeteries. I love everything about them. This particular cemetery, partly kept-up, largely falling apart, Communist-era monuments built around/upon Imperialist ones—emptied crypts—graves of martyrs—repatriated bones and excavated coffins—it’s just filthy with history and I wallow in it.

Can’t help myself; inflict some of the history—Cuba and Havana’s beauty, drama, tragedy—on the children.

They don’t appreciate it.

Cinder: “Trust Mom to make a fun trip to a cemetery depressing.”

Flora: “Don’t listen. Do what I do. Nod, smile every once in a while, and keep on looking for headless angels.”

why I’m going to hell

I am raising irreligious children on purpose: if they ever decide to find god(s), religion, dogma, idealogy, I want them to do it as thinking, resilient adults and not impressionable, malleable “I’ll believe what you tell me because you are big and I am little” larval humans. I am doing this on purpose.

Sometimes, I forget… that what I’m doing leaves certain… shall we say… holes in their cultural education.

Ender: “Ugh, Mom, look, there’s an ugly skinny man hanging on that lamp post. And one over there. Why is that?”

Flora: “God, Ender, don’t you know anything? That’s Jesus Christ. And he’s sort of a zombie—he died but then came back to life… Mom explained it to me once.”

Apparently, really, really badly.

(Yes. I know what it looks like. Why do you think Cinder took the photo?)

outtake

As we pass a grave surrounded by a swarm of flies:

Cinder: “Well, somebody wasn’t cremated…”

*

LANDED here for the first time? Let me catch you up:

Series 1 of Postcards from Cuba is now fully live. Check out the annotated table of contents for a tour, or, if you prefer, hop over to the chronological table of contents.

And if you like what you read/hear/see, please consider expressing your delight by making a contribution:

You: Why?

Jane: Because you’ve always wanted to be a patron of the arts, and you know that artists can’t pay for groceries with exposure.

You: How much?

Jane: Buy me a cup of coffee, a Cuba Libre, or a Cuban cigar.

You: That’s all?

Jane: My avarice is happy to match your affluence. But I get $1 in royalties for each copy my other self sells of a traditionally published book. It is impossible to disappoint me.

xoxo

“Jane”

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