For the past few days I’ve been at Goucher College for the alumnae weekend of the program in creative nonfiction from which I graduated in 2003. I was delighted to be back with my flock, having nothing but positive feelings about the nest in which the book Lost and Found in Cuba was conceived. Along with others who published books this year, I was invited to read to the gathered alums, current students, and faculty. The air was light with celebration even in the heat of August.  Among books we collectively feted were Illegal by fellow alum Terry Greene Sterling and Zoo Story by one of my mentors, Tom French.  

A confession: one of my indulgences while visiting Goucher was to cruise the Nordstrom’s next to the campus. Clothes-shopping is always more fun away from home and my suitcase often harbors a tissue-wrapped package or two after a trip. Unless the trip is to Cuba, that is. Yesterday as I was perusing sale racks, it occurred to me that Cuba was the only place I had ever traveled that offered not a single temptation of apparel. Instead, it offered forced abstinence from consumption and a mystery: where did all those gorgeous Cuban women buy their clothes?

In months of crisscrossing Havana on foot, I saw barely a single garment in a store window. So once, after a small gathering in Havana at the home of Enrique and Belkis, a gathering noteworthy for the presence of several beautifully-garbed women, I asked Belkis to solve the mystery.  You have to know where to go, she told me, where informal entrepreneurs hawk treasures out of the recesses of their homes in “stores” invisible from the street. She offered to take me “trapo-shopping” (rag shopping).

When I’m next in Havana, I want to take Belkis up on her offer. I’ll pack a stash of U.S. underpants to use for barter.