Havana, Cuba: where a Yankee imperialist *is* a Yankee imperialist.

There’s a great expression in American English: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”

It means: your point of view is probably highly correlated with what you think your place in the world is.

It’s a simple idea, but I have found it extremely powerful to keep it in mind when working on place branding jobs, or doing any kind of corporate identity work that involves getting to know the culture of an organization or a nation. And I’ve been grateful — and amused — whenever I’ve stumbled across something that makes me realize my perspective is just that: a perspective, not [necessarily] the gospel truth.

Example 1:

Once I wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal about the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, England. When I visited the museum, I found one placard on the wall which put the American Revolution somewhat differently than did my childhood history texts in Southern California:

Colonial rebels: The American War of Independence

By 1765 thirteen very different English-speaking colonies stretched along America’s east coast. But, from Georgia in the south to Massachusetts in the north, one thing united them. They disliked Britain imposing taxes on them.

The colonists kept spreading westwards, seizing land and starting wars with the local people. They expected British troops to defend them. But they objected when parliament tried to recover its defence costs by taxing them.

And so on. Not inaccurate — but certainly framed from an angle alien to the one I grew up accepting as reality.

Example 2:

In Havana, Cuba, the one-time presidential palace now houses the Museum of the Revolution. Outside the museum is the tank which supposedly (but why shouldn’t it be so?) Fidel Castro himself drove at the Bay of Pigs invasion. The text is all about Yankee imperialist invaders and heroic rebuffs. So, too, is the placard beside the pieces of Maj. Rudolph Anderson’s U-2 plane, which the Cubans managed to shoot down in 1962 just prior to the Cuban missile crisis. To an American it’s entertaining to read. Sure, it’s propagandistic, but it makes you realize there’s another side to the coin.

But my point is simple: I always try to remember that mine isn’t the only way of looking at things, and — possibly even more vitally — that people’s perspectives are always as real and truthful to them as mine is to me.

There’s no sweeter coffee than a café Cubano, and although obviously the beans don’t come from Cuba (I bet I could write a separate article on the lure of forbidden provenance), the espressos at the La Carreta kiosk in Miami airport (terminal E, lowest level) are dense, sugary, smooth and sludge- and grit-free.

I ordered two. But I’ll go upstairs to eat after I check in. “Cuban” is mostly a terrible endorsement for food. Main exceptions: the Cuban cafe on Prince Street in NYC (get the Cuban press sandwich), the big La Carreta here in Miami (ropa vieja’s my thing, side of fried plantains), and the La Guarida paladar in Havana itself (which, um, a good friend of mine can tell you about in a few years once the statute of limitations on American travel to Cuba runs out or Helms-Burton is repealed).