Ride to Church in Little Havana

Back in January, Brent and I went to Florida to present a paper we had co-authored together at a conference on school choice.   The conference was in Ft. Lauderdale, where neither of us had ever been before.   Once we had moved heaven and earth (read = enlisted the help of about 5.7 adults to take care of our kids for   a few days), we were off.

It was weird to be at an academic conference with Brent.   I’m not sure I liked it.   ;)   Brent makes fun of me because I like to keep the different pieces of my life all in separate, tidy little boxes.   I don’t like thing to mix.   For example, I don’t like for “church friends” and “work friends” to mix.   Likewise, it’s not my favorite to have to manage being with Brent’s family and my family at the same time.   So, it was weird to have my personal life (i.e., Brent) colliding with my work life.  

We attended the minimum number of conference sessions as we could without feeling guilty.   (This was fairly easy since none of the trip costs for me were reimbursed.)   We quickly decided that we would see one movie per night that we were there.   We love movies and the one sad theater in our town doesn’t get lots of movies.   Thus, we saw Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook, and Argo–all movies which we had missed at our local theater.  

One afternoon, once we’d attended enough of the conference to assuage my guilt, we headed out in the car for Little Havana, in Miami.   I asked around before going and–of the people I talked to who had been there before–no one was impressed.   Still, I wanted to go.   I got my MA in Spanish and taught Spanish at the high school and college levels, so Little Havana was a visit-worthy thing for me.   Brent was along for the ride.  

I don’t know what all those other people were talking about:   Little Havana was cool!   I had a list of some places I definitely wanted to see while there (including the little branch/ward building), but mostly I just wanted to park and walk up and down Calle Ocho, which is the street that runs through the area where lots of Cubans began settling when they came to Miami.   That area is also significant for Cubans that left Cuba during the Mariel Boatlift in 1980.   I also wanted to see the Little Havana Paseo de las Estrellas (Walk of the Stars)–I wanted to see the stars of Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, and others.   I wanted to see the memorial to the Cubans who died in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.   But mostly–I wanted to see Domino Park.   I’d read about it in miscellaneous works of fiction, in poetry, and in memoirs.   I also wanted to eat some kind of interesting Cuban food.

We wrapped up by finding the branch/ward building, which was one block away from Calle Ocho in a squat, white building that the church must’ve purchased from someone else (because it did not look at all like a church).

It was a beautiful day.   I loved it all.

Someday I’d love to visit Cuba.