First Job Interview at Age 59

My Cuban husband adapts to life outside the communist island

A musician in Cuba since the age of eight, my husband has never stepped outside of the world of culture and music. He studied music and choir direction in university, taught music in school, became director of culture for his local province, and then gave up politics to set up his band.

In Cuba, the government pays musicians to work. Not much less than they pay doctors or accountants. Abysmally.

For the next 20 years, he directed his band, with a repertoire of classic Cuban son, jazz and salsa, influenced by his idols Earth, Wind and Fire. The eight-piece band worked alternate afternoons and nights in a bar in Old Havana and that is where I met him.

When we met in 2015, I had no intention of leaving the paradise I had made my home, with a job in tourism that paid me well and that made the most of the booming tourism in Cuba. That was before Trump. And Covid-19.

We left Cuba last summer, the economy was on the floor, and by now, it’s even worse. We needed some income equality in our marriage if we were to survive, and our four-year-old daughter needed more than Cuba could offer her at that point.

It breaks my heart to imagine we might not go back, but as long as we can’t make a living there, and the politics and propaganda is too stifling to bear, we will make our life elsewhere.

It’s telling that my husband, a life-long musician with all his extended family on the island, and two grown-up daughters, will have a better future working the early shelf-filling shift at the Spanish version of Home Depot than doing what he lived for all his life.

He’ll have to get up at 4 am to go to work, but he had to regularly get up that early in Havana, to be in line for 5 am to try and buy groceries at 9 am when the store opened. Then he’d come home with a few frozen chicken drumsticks many hours later if he was lucky.

Now he’ll come home with a salary, and the chicken we can pop in and buy anytime we need.

One never tires of convenience!

So when his residency finally came through last week, he wasted no time in informing his network of Cuban and other immigrant friends here in Spain, who were only too happy to help him out. They know how it is. They’ve been there.

Within a day, he had this interview, and I just pray it was a success. He’s more than qualified to do the job, but I just hope his lack of experience outside of music doesn’t hurt. He’s 59 and just had his first-ever job interview! Everything he did before was offered to him, or people sought him out.

As a worried mother, I sat with him while he waited for his online video interview to begin, knowing how inexperienced he is at zoom, skype or anything approximating most technology.

When we first met in Cuba, I set up his email, created his Facebook account (I would later come to regret that :), helped him organise his bank account and have spent years applying for his visitor visas, residency application, you name it.

Back then, in 2015, internet on the island was pretty non-existent for ordinary Cubans and super expensive. Internet was available using scratch cards at the cost of US$10 an hour in fancy hotel lobbies, half an average Cuban monthly wage.

In December 2018, Cuba’s telecommunications company, ETECSA, finally provided Cubans lucky enough to own smartphones with mobile internet at 3G speeds. Six months later, Cuba legalized private wifi in homes and businesses.

Now, you can see images like this all over the island.

It causes friction between us, I must admit because there are days I imagine an alternate life where my partner organises things and is the tech-savvy one, and I get to bear a little less responsibility. Or spend more time just being a Mum.

Still, this is the man I chose, we worked well in Cuba, we can work well here, I just have to help him adapt. Cuba is full of people who never learned technology, the internet, how to drive (almost no one can afford a car), or to discuss challenging ideas, be proactive and take initiative. Why bother when you get told what to do anyway, and almost everyone works for the state?

I am keeping my fingers crossed my husband gets this job. He’ll learn so much more in a year than he was ever learning before. It’s a whole new world, as he nervously told his prospective employer in the interview!

It would be a whole new world for us too, the beginning of the next chapter of our lives. Meanwhile, the sound of Cuban son keeping playing in my heart. And in our home.

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Gracias!