Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The nomads (who had become somewhat less than nomadic since Stalin’s forced collectivization) could not have been more welcoming. We sat in their yurt and peppered them with questions. One mentioned that his perceptions of Iran were based on that country’s provision of roads and hospitals in the area, while his impressions of the United States were drawn largely from episodes of Baywatch, the foreign program most often broadcast there. He had decided on this basis that Iran was good and America was decadent and evil. Since Kazakhstan is a large and oil-rich country and was then newly independent, I thought this was momentous information. When I got home, I wrote it up and submitted the piece to an editor I knew at the New Republic. He called me back almost immediately and said, “Oddly enough, this is the second proposal I’ve had this week about Kazakhstan’s prejudice in favor of Iran. Something must really be going on there.” I sheepishly called Christian, who acknowledged that he, too, had submitted the story of our day out.

Traveling with my parents when I was younger, I had absorbed the touristic notion that a visitor should come to observe a society, not to engage with it. As a journalist, I quickly became aware of the narrowness of that precept. When I visited a new place, I was usually on the receiving end of enormous generosity from the people I met there, and I didn’t see how I could fail to reciprocate. In 1992, a friend and I were in a car crash in Zimbabwe. Our front tire had blown out on a dirt road, and our car had landed upside down in a thick jungle. We had to get our jalopy back to South Africa. We had been camping and had with us ten days’ worth of food as well as many bags of mealie meal, a corn-derived staple of the local diet that we had planned to share with locals if we needed to stay with them. There was no point taking it all back with us. So just after sunrise, we pulled off the road near a collection of particularly shoddy rondavels, and I climbed a steep bank. Several people were rubbing their hands for warmth around a thin fire, and I handed them ten bags of groceries and basked for a moment in their astonishment. Travel entails help both to and from strangers.

I became increasingly concerned with this question of engagement and reciprocity. Any new relationship is disruptive on both sides. Rather than avoiding and minimizing this disruption, I began trying to open myself to it. Sometimes the engagement was profound; often, it was happenstance. While I was good at fitting in under anomalous circumstances, I had to acknowledge my differences and accept that others noticed them, too. You can’t fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.

Because Castro had for many years insisted that Cuba was atheist, then allowed his country to be more moderately secular, and finally met with the Pope in 1996, the celebration of Christmas was still tentative when I visited Havana in 1997. Over the preceding decades, New Year’s Eve had become something of a family-centered celebration to make up for Christmas; now, people were just beginning to ponder the notion of more ebullient festivity, and I decided to act on that emergent vigor. Friends and I found an apartment in Old Havana, in a pretty rough area but with twenty-foot ceilings, decorative columns, detailed cornice moldings, and a balcony looking out over the ancient buildings across the street. If you want to get to know a strange country quickly and deeply, there’s nothing like organizing a party. At Cuban parties, the dancing starts when the party starts. A gorgeous black lesbian ballerina named Marleni led me to the center of the room. “Music is the most important thing there is for me,” she confided. “It makes me feel things.” We were feeling things anyway: six Brits, two Americans, and thirty or so Cubans (diplomats, doctors, artists, television personalities, foundation directors, musicians, hustlers, students), all gathered to celebrate our various ideas of a new beginning. We soon lost our self-consciousness—the mojitos were very helpful—and at midnight, we leaned over the balcony and poured buckets of water into the street to wash away the old year and welcome in the new. Everyone in the nearby houses was doing the same thing, though some people had only sherry glasses and others had barrels of rainwater; someone even poured out a mojito. We loaded a heaping plate of food and a drink to leave outside for the Santeria gods. Then we ate again, and then we danced until dawn, as everyone in the streets seemed to be dancing when we stumbled back home at sunrise. The Cubans loved our party because it was so American, and we loved it because it was so Cuban.