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Day 0 of the Cuba Brigade
Wednesday on 2025-04-23
Hannover, Germany (GMT+1)

Today would be the day where we'd all have to finish our preparations, get to know all final info before the brigade, and drive to Frankfurt in order to stay the night and be on time for the flight tomorrow. Nothing really exciting, except for me who just started packing today! But... how did we get here, and what even is a „brigade”?

Unlike previously presented, I am not flying to Cuba to deliver the Mastodon plushie (exclusively). For the past half a year, I've been studying Spanish, going to prep meetings, and learning a lot about Cuban culture, politics, and history as part of a political delegation: a youth brigade through labor day (1st of May). The final preparation meeting was on the 4th of April, just recently: a whole weekend where we even met a Cuban ambassador to have a long conversation with. I asked her how much she believed German politicians in the Bundestag make, she couldn't believe my response (450.000 Cuban pesos a month). The entire conversation was an inner flower picking, as she explained everything she knew with a choice of words akin to that of a poet.

This is organized by Cuba Sí, a work group inside of the political party The Left, which I am a part of. This is the second year where this brigade is also funded by the Leftist Youth Solid (Linksjugend ['solid], the youth organization of The Left) and the SDS – Socialist-Democratic Student Association (Sozialistisch-Demokratischer Studierendenverband), hence we have a lot more people coming! I believe 24 people are joining this year, all from different places in Germany, and a wide age range of rather young people (from 19 to 29).

We have a two week program with a mixture of everything one needs to get to know Cuban culture, the people, politics, and general life! We'll even regularly work on a field! However, visits to the infamous medical university ELAM, El Cano and its city council, a primary school, as well as the labor day demonstration with over 500k people in Havana, and much much more are part of the program too!

Within this mess, I'll have to find time for an appointment with my friend Jorge, who happened to have won the little giveaway we've done last year regarding a Mastodon plushie. Since then, we've talked a lot about what he as a teacher needs, so I managed to also bring a laptop, a bag to hold it, as well as some utensils he asked for. The plushie hence doesn't just arrive as a meaningless gift, but also lots of technology to bypass the horrible international blockade by the United States of America.

You can download a PDF of our schedule in German here, but I'll try to translate it to the best of my abilities:

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