On September 26, 2016, fifty U.S. students stormed the bar in the Habana Libre Hotel and commandeered the TV to watch the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
The irony of watching our political system fall apart from a former Marriott Hotel which was taken over and renamed for the revolution was not lost on us.
In fact, they ran out of government funded mojitos from the amount we were trying to drink to forget.
There were several drinking game rules floating around:
- Take a drink every time Trump says the word ‘yuge
- Take a drink every time Hillary says something from Bernie Sanders’ platform
- Finish your drink every time someone mentions Cuba
Needless to say, there were some pretty tipsy millennial by the end of the night. This is a great first election.
I ordered a piña colada without alcohol but it came back as basically rum with a pineapple slice. Cuba understands. These times aren’t easy for anyone.
You may be surprised (we certainly were) to know that there are in fact Trump supporters in Cuba. Not Cubans of course. I think the Cubans would be feeling pretty smug right now if they weren’t so flat out flabbergasted and terrified for the future of our hemisphere.
But Trump-supporting Americans do exist here. Even here. Nobody is quite sure why they chose to study in Cuba, but that’s their business. Although I intend to ask.
By the end of the debate we couldn’t hear the TV over the sound of the government sanctioned music playing in the lobby and I was losing the continual battle with the Cuban internet; but it was nice to see Twitter scrolling across my phone screen for the first time in a month.
The next morning we woke up bright and early to get our residence cards to make us legal residents of Cuba. When we got to the office they had, of course, lost our paperwork.
I like to imagine the typical Cuban official’s morning starting like this:
They walk into the office, coffee in hand, and spread all the important documents for registration and citizenship and university course schedules etc. out in front of them. They then select five via eny-meeny-miny-mo and proceed to hide them. You know, just for fun. One goes under the coffee maker. One goes behind the toilet seat. One gets fed to the dog. And so forth.
This is the only reasonable explanation for why things happen in Cuba the way they do.
Anyway, our ever persistent director Helen stood in the middle of the office until one of the workers retrieved our applications, probably from behind a fake bookcase everyone had forgotten about.
So that was good.
Next – fueled on national chagrin from the previous night, we walked to the embassy to register for our absentee ballots.
Let me tell you, you have not experienced homesickness until walking into a dimly lit American style bathroom prompts a deep craving for McDonalds. Call that what you will.
Registration went off more or less without incident. Except that one of us mistook President Ford for Fidel because we have been conditioned to associate anything with a beard with the great leader of the revolution. Oops.
We waved at the guards as we left and cast sympathetic glances at the room full of Cuban waiting to get into the embassy. It was heartbreaking to see the kids dressed in their nicest clothes and to see adults surreptitiously tucking strings of Santeria beads into their 
neckline for good luck. I almost wanted to tell them don’t bother, it’s really not any better over there. But I suppose any choice is better than none.
That afternoon we got a phone call from the embassy saying that, giving Cuba’s track record with paperwork, it would probably be a good idea for us to come back in and actually vote so that they could mail our ballots and our applications all at once.
So we trooped back down to the embassy. We once again waded through the entrance line and went through the two levels of security and metal detectors and bypassed the sea of anxious faces.
We were ushered back into the citizen’s waiting room – which was for some reason being kept at subzero temperatures on the assumption that Yankees can’t deal with heat. (An only partially unreasonable assumption)
We were then handed our ballots and we stared in horror at the write-in line.
No one could remember how to spell Hillary.
It was one of those moments when the ridiculousness of a month in a foreign country comes crashing down and gets channeled into one moment. It came down to whether her name was spelled with one L or two, and none of us could remember.
The only thing left to do was to dissolve into a puddle of hysterical laughter. Four American students on the verge of tears all alone in the middle of Cuba. We were going to have to vote for Trump because we couldn’t google “Hillary Clinton, one L or two?”
In the end we had to call over the Cuban lady behind the desk to tell us. She walked over, huddled in a blanket against the ridiculous air-conditioning, and gave us the most incredulous look I have ever seen. She quickly pointed us straight, because no one outside of Russia wants to see Trump getting any sort of unfair advantage.
And that was it. The first time I ever voted in a federal election. If Trump wins it wasn’t for a lack of effort on my part. If any of you can come up with a better story then you may be excused. The rest of you: November 8, I expect the mail trucks to stop working due to too many ballots. If I can vote in Cuba then you can vote in the great US of A.
And if there are any other ex-patriots out there reading this blog: 1) VOTE. 2) Hillary is spelled with two Ls, and Trump is exactly how it sounds. Don’t forget.
Kesia Lee 