Tourists in Cuba – Confluence

Stumbling in the sweltering dark
the flash from my phone illuminates
a shadow slipping through my shadow
a lizard
stuck-still, closed-mouth smiling
body curved, a question mark
challenging me.

I tip-toe around the intruder
inch towards the bathroom
but the flash caught two shadows
mocking me in the corner.

A black beetle
the size of a peso and
the lizard still there
preparing to salsa to a rhythm
I couldn’t hear.

In that moment
I didn’t know who I despised more:
the native bug who would crawl over my territory or
the lizard who would Congo-line up the dancehall of my legs.
I know
I’m being dramatic but
they know
they shouldn’t be here
on this resort
that’s lush with the uninhabited tangles of green dollars
rum gleaming in barrels like treasure
bundles of cacao so rich
the Atlantic
beats itself shapeless

my local tour guide even told me
the land is seasick with the cloying sweetness
of a land reliant on sugar
that’s so White
it never leaves.

Seems like everyone’s a poet here!

But don’t they know
a proper vacation needs the foreign
pushed outside in front of a pink sun-faded dilapidated building
next to a Caribbean blue ’50s convertible with
cigars propped in-between their lips
so I can capture them
in a photo?

The lizard swallowed the beetle whole

and the whole of me sighed in relief
one less primitive pest
but the lizard was set
on staying where it was
I swore the thing would’ve devoured me.

Wouldn’t you be afraid of something
that makes a home out of someone’s
vacation?

“I wrote ‘Tourist in Cuba’ while staying at our hotel/cabins in Baracoa, Cuba, with the Americas Scholars. It was around 6:00 a.m. when I woke up to watch the sunrise, over by the cove. As I was getting ready to go out, I saw a beetle by my dresser—which I ignored and then I saw a lizard next to the beetle—which startled me. When the lizard ate the beetle, and slurped up the last leg, I knew it was time for me to leave and start my morning. But after realizing I made a natural part of life seem unnatural by thinking they shouldn’t be here, I couldn’t help but apply this to the context of being in Cuba, on a privileged trip, where we are the strangers in this country. What also fascinated me were the ideas of beauty and how one captures beauty when one is abroad, opposed to when one is home. I thought of how nature morphs into a product of consumerism, and even desolation becomes fascinating and attractive in a way. But overall, even though this poem has to do with tourism, I wanted to sneak in the root causes of colonization (especially in the Caribbean): the sense of entitlement, racial supremacy, and the underlying misperceived fear. Thus I take all of these contentious themes by embedding them in a self-entitled tourist on vacation.”—Michael Frazier