How Cuba Helped Me Remember I Love Journalism

Well, I’m home. It’s very weird to have central air conditioning and broccoli, but I’m happy to be here. I like that GEO asks us to write a reflection once we’re home. It’s been a good way to think about the trip.

The last bit of the trip was complete chaos. Everyone was trying to finish projects and essays before we left. That means everyone was stressed out, too. Like I talked about in my last blog, we spent the weekend in Varadero, a resort area about two hours east of Havana. It’s popular with Canadian and European tourists and it was really beautiful. But, it was a little weird to end on that note, spending our last weekend in the country in a resort. But, it was also a well-deserved and enjoyable vacation. I’m proud of the work I accomplished in Cuba and I’m excited to take it home with me. The short weekend trip gave me some time to process everything that’s happened.

Overall, Cuba was a lesson in adaptability. Nothing was ever as it seemed — interviewees would be late, stand me up, or even forget we planned to meet. May is the wet season there, so sometimes it would rain all day and never stop. Other days there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. I had to constantly adapt.

That’s why the program was so valuable to me as a journalist and why I can’t talk about it just in the context of a vacation or a break from reality. If anything, it was a return to reality. I’ve realized recently that being a journalism student inherently means it’s hard to get professional journalism experience. While you can act as a freelance reporter or get internships, often you have other schoolwork. If I’m writing an article for a journalism class, I’m probably also working on a lab report for chemistry. It’s never just journalism, and I can never get completely immersed because I have an entirely separate field that I’m also studying.

Cuba was special because it brought that immersion to my life. Sometimes, it’s hard to imagine yourself working in your field because every day of your life, it’s just homework, tests, school, over and over and over again. And sometimes, that means I have doubts about the industries I want to join and what I want to bring to the world. Then, I go to places like Cuba and I get to tell real stories. That’s when I realize that I have chosen the right place for me.

I did have work for the culture class, but it was relevant to my journalism coursework. The things we learned through lecturers and cultural visits informed my reporting and made me a better journalist while I was there. All of that culminated in the visit to the resort. It felt pretty strange, considering I was still working on this blog, my culture class projects and even a few final tweaks to one of my stories. But the beach was beautiful and I got to spend time with the 17 other students on the trip that had become really awesome friends.

I also wanted to reflect on what it was like writing this blog. I’m a journalist, so I’m not used to writing in the first person and it was definitely something I had to get used to. And, a lot of the time, I was using this opportunity to get something off my chest or process some new information I had learned. Because I’m a writer, the best way for me to figure something out is by writing it down. That’s also been a different experience because I haven’t been able to upload them as I go. So, they’ve just been sitting on my flash drive. It’s given me an opportunity to remember how I felt about a certain memory or what I was thinking at a specific moment, which is really valuable.

The first three-and-a-half weeks of the trip, it really felt like a gigantic reporting project, not a vacation. But toward the end, I think I became more relaxed because I got used to Cuba. Instead of the constant anxiety that something wasn’t going to go my way, I adapted to the flow and rhythm of a place like Cuba. That’s a skill absolutely necessary in journalism. Journalists are always required to suddenly become experts the second their editor assigns them a new story. Journalists must always be ready to go out and work on a story when something comes up. That’s hard in a place like Cuba and we all had to learn that pretty quickly.

But then, surprisingly, we did get used to it and we did learn. And I realized that the process of journalistic culture shock, as I’m naming it, is something that I actually love. Instead of constant stress, it just felt right. I felt like I was doing exactly what I was meant to be doing, which is an incredible feeling to have. I still feel it, even though I’m home and far away from all the moments that made me feel this way.

I have to admit I was worried about running out of things to write about in this blog. I wanted it to be true to my real experiences without trivializing how serious this dialogue was meant to be. Like I’ve said before, I didn’t want to write about the five best beaches near Havana or the coolest restaurants. That just hasn’t been my experience here. And, it’s hard to link to opportunities or give people travel tips when Cuba is constantly changing and it’s nearly impossible to get there without an academic visa. Also, there’s no Internet!

I wanted my blog and my experiences in Cuba to be genuine, and I hope they have been. I’m so excited to start co-op in July and return to journalism after a much-deserved vacation back home in June. I’m excited to move forward and bring the lessons I learned on the dialogue with me to co-op and to life.