Human

It happened over a beer down in Havana Cuba. In a smoky hotel bar that was dirty marble floors and patched up wooden walls. The guard from the hotel I called home patted me on the back. I bought him a beer. We began to talk over a drink through cigar smoke and two people from different worlds found out they weren't so different after all.

Between our daily sorrows and our colorful pasts our conversation had hours to go.

"You know the boy needs shoes to go to school, but can you believe the cost of shoes in this country? It's almost as bad as the cost of housing here. I get friends to bring shoes from Canada or Europe for my son because they are much cheaper," He said. "It's hard here, if you want Wi-Fi you have to go downtown Havana. Most people here don't even know what it is,"

I smiled back. Sipping down the bitter local beer. I remembered how enthralled everyone was when I pulled out my iPhone on my arrival at the hotel. "It's hard when the world around you doesn't match the world you know exists elsewhere," I said.

The big burly man shook his bald head in the smoke and was silent a moment. Then he said, "It is worse when people from the outside think your world is different than it really is," He let out a smile, but it was a sad smile full of years of hurt and forgiveness layered one atop the other.

I nodded slowly. I knew the feeling. When people walk into your world and refused to see it for what it is and instead see everything just as they expect to see it. I remember sitting with my friend Ford who worked 12 hours a day and still struggled to feed his mother and brother. An X-Pat visitor came and said, with no uncertainty, "I would give anything to have your life here. Just a block from the ocean, and with this tropical weather. It is perfect. You are so lucky. None of us live this nice,"

I wanted to tell him that a typhoon had wiped out Ford's house along with half the village just a few months ago. That we had pulled hundreds of bodies out of the ocean and out of the trees. I wanted to say Ford had lost his younger brother to some unknown sickness. Last time we had been to the ocean mom had ended up in the hospital because she reacted to jellyfish stings. I didn't say that though, instead I nodded and said, "It is a beautiful country," and I didn't lie.

The bald man and I sat in silence for a while listening to the beat of the music coming from an old stereo in the corner. "Maybe all of us are like that," He shook his head a little. "Maybe we all only see the world through our own experience. Do you think we can ever empathize with those from other worlds?" He asked.

"I didn't answer right away, unsure what to say. "Yes," I said slowly. "If we take the time to listen I think we can always empathize with those in pain, even when we cannot fully understand their reality,"

He nodded, then motioned for the bartender, asking for a lighter. He lit his big cigar and sent a streak of smoke to join that lingering around us. "Maybe that's what makes us human, the ability to feel for others."

"To feel /with/ others," I smiled. "We do more than just feel for them, we feel with them."

He nodded, took his cigar out of his mouth, and raised his glass to me, "Here is to being human."

I raised my glass and we both smiled.

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Luisito is a poet and wanderer. He has lived his whole life cross culturally, in languages he isn't quite fluent in, doing things he isn't quite comfortable with. He writes stories and poems reflecting on those experiences and the stories of the people he has met along the way.