John Mayer Is a Wonderland

On a recent trip to Cuba, a travelling companion and I found ourselves in a strange make of Honda, being piloted through the verdant countryside by a twenty-four-year-old university professor named Ernesto. We’d met him through an enterprising employee of our hotel in Havana. For a prearranged price, Ernesto had agreed to ferry us from the city to Viñales, an inland mountain town known for its vistas, tobacco plots, and horseback-riding trails. These sorts of transactions are commonplace in Cuba, where the economy tolerates (if not quite allows for) a second, shadow marketplace: indulging the whims of insistent tourists. Ernesto stayed abreast of American culture primarily via a flash drive containing television shows and pop songs, which was floated over weekly with new files from Miami. The particulars of the drive’s transport and arrival remained obscured to me. Ernesto liked Jimmy Kimmel, he said, and cooking shows. Mostly, though, he was into the songwriter and guitarist John Mayer.