I am noticing a trend online lately, and it is honestly a bit disturbing. When did it become acceptable to use social media as a space to treat people as our own personal verbal punching bags?

2020 has been a crazy year so far. In just the first month alone, Australia was burning to the ground at an unmeasurable rate of speed, an Iranian General was killed in a drone strike, a passenger plane crashed killing 176 people, an impeachment trial was started against our president, a helicopter crashed killing Kobe Bryant, his daughter, their friends and the pilot and the United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union. Oh right and this little thing called COVID-19 started making its way around the world. That was month one.

Dear fellow humans born into white privilege,

Many of you by now are aware of the story of Ahmaud Arbery, a young 25 year old man of color, who was senselessly gunned down and murdered, by two white men in Georgia on February 23rd, 2020, while out for a run. His crime, being black while running and allegedly in their minds, matching the description of a robbery suspect from the area. They saw him and intentionally chased after him in their vehicle, and shot him dead. For running, while black.

Yesterday would have been his 26th birthday. 

I learned of this story, as many others did, via social media. Earlier in the week, the hashtag #justiceforahmaud started popping up, along with the tragic story of this young man, followed by the video of his death, which I still cannot and will not watch. 

Like many, I had the question, “Why is this now just making the rounds on social media, almost two months after the event occured?”

Despite being completely exhausted from the thirteen plus miles of walking in high heat and humidity the day prior, we were awake at 6:30 on day three. The early rise was thanks in part to many factors, sore legs, sore blisters and oh yeah, the roosters at the farmers market on the side of our apartment building. 

With both Kelly and I being up long before we planned to, and no real entertainment in the apartment, we decided to take a walk down to the Malecón and check things out. A fairly nasty storm had rolled through overnight.  We read online prior to the trip, the Malecón is occasionally closed to vehicle traffic during bad storms due to the heavy waves that crash over the sea wall onto the street. We of course had to go check this out for ourselves!

We took what was now our normal route through our neighborhood of Vedado towards the Hotel Nacional. Along the way I stopped to take some photos of the various homes around our apartment building. Having seen a good portion of the city the day prior, it was now quite clear that we were actually staying in what used to be one of the more affluent sections of Havana.

Day two we decided to keep a bit low key and not have any set plans for waking up early or scheduling any specific activities, beyond having Diana cook breakfast for us. One of the add ons with our Airbnb was the option to have breakfast served for $5 pesos per person, so we thought this would be a nice treat for our first morning there. Diana cooked us eggs, hotdog (apparently the breakfast meat of choice in Havana), fried tomato slices with green peppers and onions and a plantain/papaya fruit smoothie. 

While this sounds good, and for the most part it was, we quickly learned certain things don’t taste the same in Cuba despite being the same item you would get in the United States. I still wasn’t feeling 100% from the day prior so between that and the odd taste I didn’t eat much. We did our best to assure Diana it wasn’t her cooking, as she seemed a bit confused by my barely touching my breakfast.

Once we were done eating, everyone got cleaned up and ready to go explore. Despite being January, it was insanely hot and humid outside. I slathered on some suntan lotion, got dressed in a pair of shorts and a tank top, tossed on a pair of well worn leather sandals, grabbed my camera bag and two bottles of water and we headed off towards the Hotel Nacional and the Malecón.