Havana buying Ecstasy

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Havana buying Ecstasy

We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. I step self-consciously out of the clutch of tourists and drop a coin in the bowl. Like a windup doll, the clown begins to move, his limbs sliding in slow, wide arcs. He touches a finger to his nose, then points it at me. A child giggles. For a minute he and I watch each other; then he smiles in a sudden, private ecstasy, tips his oversize top hat to me, and freezes. I melt backward into the crowd. Another tourist steps forward and drops a coin into the bowl. The clown reaches into the cavernous pocket of his trench coat and pulls out a flute. Placing it to his lips, he ejects a cluster of notes that rise through the murky heat, echoing off the baroque lines of the eighteenth-century cathedral behind him, becoming part of the lilting, pulsing melee that is Havana. This being Old Havana, a lot of the passersby are tourists, mostly Europeans; but then there are the Cubans, sitting on doorsteps or sauntering down the streets. Their casualness draws me in: the smiles that blossom easily, the effortless dialogue with a stranger. One reason I travel is to leave the alienation of the U. Cuba, a mere sixty miles off the coast of Florida, has stubbornly and courageously maintained its independence from American culture. There is no Hollywood here, no cult of consumption, no advertising for healthcare or hair spray — in fact, no advertising at all, which comes as a delight to me. I theorize that there is a direct relationship between having no television and hearing music on the streets, between the absence of commercials and the willingness to talk with strangers. Outside the airport I saw a billboard covered with the smiling faces of children. I see the shortcomings of dictatorship. The struggle to feed themselves has resulted in a country rife with urban gardens, locally grown food, and organic farms — an inadvertent model for a world in dire need of sustainability. The conversation makes me think: What if what the people want is no good for them? Is democracy still such a great idea? In the U. We work longer hours than any other nation in the world and then devote our leisure time to shopping. Americans seem less concerned with civil rights, war, and climate change than we are with consumption. Perhaps a benign dictatorship is not so bad after all. I harbor these thoughts guiltily. What is the freedom to travel worth if the poorest are scrambling to feed themselves? Here there is poverty — the buildings outside the tourism zone are falling apart, and many families live squeezed into a small unit — but there is no homelessness, no hunger. Perhaps a sensible dictatorship is better than a distracted, superficial democracy? Everybody I meet has relatives in Miami, and practically everybody, it seems, wants to join them. I can barely walk ten feet without being approached. With man number , I finally lose it, crossing the street and yelling that I want to walk alone. Cubans ask me why I came to Cuba. I wanted to see it before Castro dies, I respond, a little ashamedly. I wanted to see the old cars, the children playing marbles on the sidewalk, the socialism. I came here, I say, to see Cuba before it changes. But change is what the Cubans I meet want. Commodities are so scarce that some earn their living fixing cigarette lighters on the street, and others are standing outside the fancy hotels asking tourists for soap. The very reasons I came to visit are the reasons Cubans want to leave. On my fifth day in Havana, I emerge from a bookstore into the sunny Plaza de Armas, where a street-theater group is rehearsing. A small crowd has gathered to watch, and I settle on a bench among them. The actors prance about, some of them on stilts, singing and clowning, spinning a tale of magic and spells. When he approaches me, I tell him how much I enjoyed the performance. I take it, peering into his bright brown eyes and wondering why he looks familiar. Then I realize: he is the clown from in front of the cathedral. They talk animatedly, arguing and conceding, leaping up to protest, then dropping down to lean on each other or light cigarettes. They seem unusually comfortable with conflict. After the discussion most of them leave, but a few remain to speak to me. Wrong answer. He lectures me at length on the hardships of being Cuban. Later he will tell me that his Zen Buddhist meditation practice has granted him some equanimity inside this cage. Here people play music on the streets. You support yourself by making street theater. People actually seem happy. It fucks with your head. We leave to get coffee, still debating. The line at the Cuban cafe stretches out the door. For psychological control. We sit at the polished bar and down the espressos the barista shoves our way. There are none of the polite smiles or niceties of the tourist establishments here. It has zero to do with the Revolution. Cuba is either demonized on the Right or lionized on the Left. What my new friends have here is invaluable to me: their art, their community, their relationships. But then, who am I to tell them how good they have it — I, the heir to a colonial legacy, able to come and go as I please? When I meet my friends at their rehearsal space the next day, they greet me with a chorus of welcomes. She struts about in a bra, stockings, and a pair of dangerously high platform heels. The rest laze around in their underwear, dabbing on makeup, singing, and playing instruments. When they are painted and costumed, they gather together and call for me to join them as they place their hands in the middle. Then they waltz, stride, or glide out the building in character, and I tail them through the cobbled streets with my camera. People, especially children, stare and follow, entranced. I feel as if I am in a dream and these are my dream comrades. Is Havana nothing but a dream? Does this land of palaces and fairies really exist? Her voice shakes. When I tell her where I am going next — Mexico, then Guatemala — her eyes fill with tears, and I berate myself for my stupidity. A malaise of the spirit. A weighty inertia. Time and again Castro has crushed dissent. We have nothing. Begging is illegal. I do, and she is inordinately grateful. This is capitalism. For example, Cubans who work in the tourist industry are barred from having contact with tourists outside of work. When Alejandro and I stop by the house where I am staying, the landlady forbids him to enter beyond the vestibule. But later, when we visit an Australian friend in his lavish hotel and Alejandro is not allowed beyond the lobby, he grows enraged. What a joke! In a globalized world of interlocking economies, is it possible for a culture to evolve at its own pace, or does change come in only two packages: fast-tracked by corporate-sponsored leaders, or arrested entirely by dictators and juntas? Is there even a possibility that Cuba can preserve its culture while opening to the world, to dissent, to change? Every place, wrote the English poet Kathleen Raine, has its secret, inviolable essence. She wrote this in an era before globalization. When we reach the roof, we pause. We sit down on a couple of ancient chairs in one of the huts, and I ask him what he thinks of the future. He smiles and shakes his head. The country has no economy. All these educated people with no jobs. When Cuba opens, American corporations will come in and eat this island up. When I first arrived in Havana, I marveled at the colonial architecture. But when I woke up the next morning and walked the cobbled streets of Old Havana, the place felt subtly different. It was all a facade for tourists. The people were oppressed; the country was a sham. The Answer has assumed a number of forms for me over the years: electoral politics, socialism, feminism, civil disobedience, dialogue — all wonderful ideas, but ones that get knotty when put into practice; that get bent, sometimes out of shape, by personalities and biases. First Cuba was heaven to me. Then it looked like hell. Where is the middle ground? Moreover, what is it in me that seeks the Answer? Why must I always look for a simple fix? I grew up in a society that claimed to be utopia for the 12 percent of its population to which it catered. Cities, restaurants, public schools, vacations, careers, hopes, and dreams: all were reserved for whites only. I knew it was wrong, but it was all I knew. When I was twelve, my family arrived in Los Angeles, miraculous city of mixed-race schools and neighborhoods, of black doctors and white service workers, and it struck me as paradise. But over the years, the realities of my new home revealed themselves — the injustice, the racism, the hypocrisy — and disillusionment arose. I went from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with great gusto to watching bewildered as downtown Los Angeles erupted in race riots. Our utopia was no more than a house of cards erected on some beautiful, oft-forgotten ideas. Awareness of injustice made me an activist. But my experience in Cuba makes me wonder: Am I still the twelve-year-old seeking utopia? Am I so naive as to deny the complexities of human society? These days I have a hard time recognizing anything good about my adopted homeland. But the truth about the U. Granted, the Bush years have brought us low, but for anyone coming from the global South, the U. Castro had his own utopian dreams, but no matter how benign his dictatorship was, he had no faith in the wisdom and capability of the people, and he imposed his Answer over the diverse answers of his people. Underlying my own quest for the Answer, I see, is a history of defeat: as an adolescent I was defeated by the ugly truths of the U. The seduction of the Answer invariably lets me down; the disappointment keeps me yearning for the next fix. Alejandro insists on accompanying me to the airport for my A. I am free to flit to the next country; my new friend is obliged to stay in his cage. I have my art, my life, my practice. In a society that walls off its population from both the pleasures and the dangers of liberty, this man has found more freedom within his art and his spiritual practice than most who cross the globe without a second thought. Is this, then, where utopia lies: in our own minds and hearts? Certainly it can. But although inner freedom is a virtue, it is nonetheless wrong to restrict physical freedom. Upon my arrival here, I struggled to make sense of Cuba. Like a child, I categorized: This is good; this is bad. This goes here; that, there. But then the categories developed cracks and fault lines, and I was reminded to listen and to question. I travel in Central America for three and a half months. As always, my return to the U. I am going through the usual culture shock, watching the children run and swing in their little flowered frocks and knitted cardigans, each child attended by at least one caretaker, sometimes two. The entire city strikes me as too clean, and no part of it is quite as gleamingly perfect as this playground, with its slides and monkey bars, its expensive strollers and appropriately concerned nannies and mothers and grandmothers. I think of all that is being trampled to grant us this lifestyle, and the resentment rises in me. Or are we? I think of Alejandro and Rafa and Magalys capering through the streets of Havana, whooping and frolicking. We all suffer, I remind myself. Utopia looks like utopia only from across the fence. And if there is a fence between me and the people in this park, it is one that I have built. I look up, and there is my niece, swooping back and forth in the swing. She is laughing, her green eyes shining, dark curls flying. Together, we push her. Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? Accept Deny. Contact Us Subscribe Submission Guideliness. What Do You Think? Related Selections. Quotations Sunbeams. Restricted Content You must have JavaScript enabled to enjoy a limited number of articles over the next 30 days. Please click here to continue without javascript..

Molly poses health and legal risks for users

Havana buying Ecstasy

Late Tuesday night Jerod Clemons showed up at the Havana police headquarters taking off his clothes, sweating profusely and acting strangely. He told police officers he had taken Molly, a euphoric stimulant closely related to Ecstasy. He needed help. As the ambulance sped south on Thomasville Road, the year-old Havana resident undid the straps that secured him to the stretcher and opened the rear door. As he tried to leap from the vehicle going 50 mph, an emergency medical technician grabbed him, keeping him from rolling out onto the asphalt whizzing below. After the ambulance stopped, Clemons fought with paramedics and took off along Thomasville Road. Minutes later, he broke into the home of a retired police officer. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Molly played a role in several bizarre Tallahassee incidents — a man ran through buzzing traffic screaming frantically; another man shot at a car at a busy fast food restaurant because he thought someone was after him; another man pulled a flag off a house and tried to set it on fire. As the drug increasingly creeps onto streets in the area, more people are finding themselves in emergency rooms and involved in run-ins with police. Largely regarded as a pure form of ecstasy, Molly is similar but is made of a panoply of other amphetamine chemicals that have started to surge in the drug culture and among a wide range of drug users. Roger Salmonsen. You spin the wheel. He said the first time undercover narcotics officers bought Molly over two years ago, there was confusion about what the drug actually was until it was sent to Florida Department of Law Enforcement analysts. Salmonsen said Molly ranks third in popularity right behind marijuana and cocaine in Tallahassee, and kilos of it have been seized in the past six months. You can go to schools and you can buy Molly. You can go to campus areas and buy Molly and even professionals are using Molly. More and more people, almost on a daily basis, are coming into the emergency room because of bad experiences with Molly, said Dr. Rapid heart rate, increased blood pressure, kidney damage and a heightened likelihood of heart attacks are all risks that come with Molly use. Ashoo said the chemicals found in Molly, and whatever dealers mix it with, cause significant changes in brain function more than other drugs. Users pay little attention to the unregulated sales and makeup of the drugs they buy on the street. Molly is a synthetic form of a naturally occurring compound found in the khat plant native to Africa, which is mostly made in mass quantities in China and shipped directly to buyers in the United States. The most common derivatives that find their way onto the street are white powdered or crystalline amphetamines like methalone, buphedrone and cathinone, but dealers and users rarely know what is making its way into baggies. Possession of the drug is a third-degree felony. Molly poses health and legal risks for users. Karl Etters Democrat staff writer. Facebook Twitter Email.

Havana buying Ecstasy