-In Cuba, I got robbed, and it made me question that Nowhere Men motto that people are good. Here's the crazy story. When we landed in Cuba, we knew our weekend trip would be fascinating. We just didn't realize how fascinating.
-If you had told us 10 years ago that we'd be setting foot on Cuba.
-On our taxi ride from the airport to our Airbnb, the cars looked stuck in time, like traveling back to the 1950s. Exactly how we imagined. The view from our Airbnb balcony was beautiful. But after a few short hours in Old Havana, and a very brief night's sleep, a miserable scenario played out. We woke up this morning and realized that when we were gone last night, we were totally robbed. All of our cash, Michael's computer, all of our expensive electronics, gone. Because we had under 48 hours in Cuba, we thought our trip was over. But this was really only the beginning. Before we get back to what happened, here's what we originally planned: an Airbnb food walking tour, a stroll around Old Havana with a local, and some drinks in the evening to cap it off. Everything would be perfect. So, the reality of what happened made things that much worse. Our Airbnb host, Lianet, took us right to the police. The police attended to our case right away. But we spent all day with the police filing the report. They even brought an entire team back to our Airbnb to dust for fingerprints. Stuck in the apartment, we watched our short weekend in Havana pass us by from above. Eventually the police finished their work with us.
-[In Spanish] Terminamos!
-We're free, we're free! The irony of this saga is real. Here's why. Brian, Alex, and I traveled through Latin America for 13 months. And along the way, we found ourselves in some pretty precarious situations, like when we got our car stuck in the mud in Bolivia. But random strangers always came to help us, and we never got robbed once. We considered ourselves pretty lucky. But we still came away with the philosophy that people are good. The cognitive dissonance that I experienced between 13 robbery-free months in Latin America and what happened in one night in Cuba is weird. In the end, here's how I'm making sense of all of this. Yes, I had an objectively terrible experience in Cuba. But that was a result of only one bad guy, while everybody else was amazing and rallied to our support. So believe it or not, I can't wait to get back to Cuba because I still believe that people are good. We're four Americans who got robbed in Cuba.
-Rally on!