Two thousand miles southeast of the birthplace of skateboarding, in Havana, Cuba, I discovered a band of skateboarders not unlike the pioneering Venice crew I remember from my childhood. They have turned the entire city into their own skatepark; stairs, rails, and public monuments are all fair game. Empty fountains are swept out and skated in. Young boys learn to ollie on broken concreteand dirt. Equipment is scarce, and broken boards are patched and nailed back together. Still, they skate with the same wild freedom of the guys back home.
“Stopped in time,” Americans always say when discussing Cuba. As if since the embargo, Hemmingway’s colonial playground has remained as it was. But time stops for no one, and the reality of modern day Cuba is that time has gone on. There are teenagers and young adults there that look like kids you know at home. They could be your kids, and they know there has to be something better than what they have. In the meantime, just like the skaters of Venice Beach in the 1970′s, they are going to skate and go to the beach and hang out like any group of skaters in the world, because it is better than sitting around feeling hopeless. And they are just going to wait for things to get better — for their lives to start.
One year after my first encounter with the skaters in Havana, I returned with a group of skaters from Miami. The guys from Havana were one year older, still loyal to skateboarding and to eachother. By the end of the trip, national boundaries disappeared, and our two groups became one. Cultural and language barriers disappeared, replaced by the international language of trying a trickover and over until you bleed, make the trick, or both. It’s always hard to leave. Each time, new friendships are formed and old ones strengthened. A week’s worth of skating, falling, drinking Havana Club out of the same bottle, eating tamales out of a bucket, running for the bus, jokes, and laughter seem enough to demolish the tensions between our nations, but the truth is, when we leave, we are once again separated by the great wall of the embargo.
“Patina o Muerte” – Skate or Die –they say in Havana. They used to say that in Venice when I was young. It is a universal sentiment among the brotherhood of skaters. No matter their differences –when they skate, they all feel the same anticipation and fear, and the same pain when they hit the ground. They are boys who live for the hope that their next run will launch them so high that they will be free from the Earth’s gravitational pull and reach the stars. They need to skate to live. ¡Patina y viva!
