Committee for the Defense of the Vernacular

While on my recent trip to Cuba I brought gifts for the people I met.  I thought a lot about what gift would be suitable.  Should I give money?  Or soap?  I heard the Cubans always need soap.  I finally decided to give something that means a lot to me and turned out to mean a lot to the people I gave them to. I brought a couple of hundred American snapshots with me to pass out.  I put a sticker with my name and address on the back of each one.

   Whenever I would meet a new person I’d reach into my oversize pocket and pull out my stack of Vernacular.  I’d fan them out like a magician performing a card trick. Most people got the idea immediately and picked one.  Then the questions began and a conversation was started.  Human to human contact was made through the vehicle of the vernacular.  

  Occasionally I asked the receiver of the snapshots to hold them up so I could take a photo.  That was a very easy way to ask to take a person’s photo.  I was taking a photo of their snapshot and not them so they posed very unselfconsciously.  

   I also like the idea that hardly anyone ever throws away a snapshot.  The mysterious snapshots I gave away in Cuba will probably be put up on the walls of homes there for years to come.  Maybe some day the owner will notice my name and address on the reverse of the snapshot and have the means and the interest to contact me.  

  As I walked around Havana I would occasionally see signs on buildings saying “Committee for the Defense of the Revolution”.  They were in Spanish though.  It means that you are being watched for disloyalty at all times.  Sort of like under the Bush administration.  I titled the photo above “The Committee for the Defense of the Vernacular”.  Maybe the two bicycle mechanics do not know what the vernacular is but I think that they are now in defense of it.