Forget it, Kevin… It’s Crazy-Town

Yesterday a running friend posted onto Facebook this intriguing event.

Havana Marathon Tour

I have to admit, I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba. In college, the very last final exam I took for my undergraduate degree was a written exam using the infamous collegiate “blue book” composition pads. It was for a Cuban history class. I was a good student and legitimately interested in the subject matter. But despite my best efforts, I never cracked how to write to this professor’s tests. In the end, I wrote a long essay on the slave trade and sugar plantations of colonial Cuba seguing into the rise of Communism. It was a detailed but rambling essay as I was trying to show I knew the material but was failing to synthesize it into a cogent analysis. To be fair, it was a three-hour exam and not an opportunity to write the definitive history of this island 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

Somewhere around the 2, 2.5 hour mark I realized I had severely underestimated my skill set and underplayed my “shotgun” factoid plan to respond to this guy’s exam questions. So I did what I have done a few times before during an exam that’s going badly… I wrote a postscript essay on why my exam answers went awry. This strategy netted me a 3 on the AP Calculus exam wherein I wrote essays explaining why I couldn’t remember the formula for the series I needed to derive my answers but that if I had access to my textbook I could look up this formula or that concept to enable me to do so. At that stage I could still recall the math verbiage and could if not bluff my way through the process of solving the problem before me, I could at least explain how I might go about getting the information to get to the solution. I think the examiner grading my paper saw that in the moment I had a plan for solving math equations presented, I had the means of finding the answers I needed even if I couldn’t do it at that exact moment. As a result, they must have felt I understood the theory if not the practice. Sadly, I’ve long since lost all my math skills.

That is all backstory to my ploy for the Cuban history exam. I wrote a letter to the professor explaining how I had in sports parlance taken a swing and missed badly — I “whiffed” as the kids tauntingly might say. I explained to him the backstory I was trying to convey in my scattershot preceding pages of the blue book, effectively reiterating the facts and figures I had in my head without again synthesizing much of a new analysis. I admitted as such saying I had written more of a book report than rising to a thought provoking insight of an original book. But I also truthfully told the professor how much I enjoyed the class as a whole and had learned a lot about this neighbor to our south. In the end, the guy gave me a solid B, the only B I ever got in college.

Perhaps some things never change. If ever there were an example of the sloppy focus of my writing for final exams in my school career, 20+ years later we see I’m still a chaotic mess when it comes to making a point. I’ll circle back therefore to the Havana Marathon that prompted this in the first place.

I’d love to do this event. I’d love to visit Havana and see the town, especially since the change in political thought on isolating Cuba means more and more Americans will have a chance to see the place in the coming years. It will change. I suspect this is one of the last opportunities to see it before the floodgates truly open.

Literally days before I saw this I had just signed up for a series of runs with Mainly Marathons out in the Southwestern United States (unimaginatively but efficiently descriptively named the Southwest Series). This six day series ends on November 19th in Needles, CA. The Havana Marathon is on November 20th. With a bit of air travel luck, in some weird way I could logistically fly to the country and run the event. But the tour packages don’t dovetail with my calendar. I was a little bummed and gave serious consideration to dropping out of a races with Mainly Marathons to head to Cuba. But my frugal DNA (or perhaps cheapskate DNA) forbids me to walk away from Mainly Marathon’s $90 a race entry fee. On top of that, I saw what the tour group was charging for this little jaunt into Cuba:

Havana Tour Prices

With the flight package that’s over $900 per day. And two of those days are really just travel days. That’s a helluva lot of money for a country in economic turmoil. One could argue that Cuban communism learned the secrets of supply and demand economics awfully quickly.

I briefly looked into what might be involved for me to go run the event without the assistance of a seemingly overpriced tour group.  I got as far as googling, “travel from the USA to Cuba” before getting lost in the bureaucratic morass and couldn’t make head or tails of what the requirements were for Americans looking to visit the island nation.  I thought I understood the American plan to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba and what it meant for tourism.  But after scrolling through a few pages of rules and regulations and rigmarole, I’m more confused than ever.

Some day I’ll run the streets of Havana and see Cuba for myself.  Perhaps I should write the various consulates an essay explaining what I’m trying to do.  In the meantime, I’ll save my money; looks like I may need it.