A Cuban evening at the film society

Well, that was a bizarre evening - huge fun but definitely bizarre. We hadn't expected to come to Gaberone to get a taste of Cuban culture.

To begin at the beginnning, as they say: Jes and Kelone go most Tuesday evenings to a film club in Gaberone. They told us that the films were good, put on, as a hobby, by a retired Indian professor, and that there would be very few people there. Ten would be a good turn-out. We were happy to go along.
Jes looked up the film and found it would be Guantanamera, the 1995 film with the catchy tune made in Cuba. And that it would be part of a Cuban cultural evening with salsa and snacks. OK! So we dressed smartly - me in my new TKMaxx long skirt no less - and drove off through the evening traffic jams.

Sure enough there was an empty lecture hall, and laughing we pretended to choose our seats carefully. But it was a good thing we did.
Soon enough the more people came in and then more. And then more.

Peter astutely noticed that there was a queue of people at the door going out - as you can see in the picture. They were coming back holding small white polystyrene cups. So we went to investigate.

Oh, good heavens. There was a table set up, where you could be served a tot of rum, followed by a little lemonade and a piece of fresh mint. As in the photo. Excellent! If you wanted there were some good cigars as well, but happily nobody smoked in the hall.

 Then first one couple and then another came to the front of the hall, by the screen and danced a salsa to some very good music,
The audience was extremely multi-cultural, multi-ethnic. And very sweet-tempered. Also very large. There was standing room only for the actual film.  I think many of them must have come from the diplomatic circles because the film was introduced by the Cuban ambassador, who was celebrating Cuban links with Botswana. that's her in the picture. The four people dancing the salsa, she told us, were doctors working in Botswana.

We'd all been invited to pick a piece of paper with a number on it our of a hat. After the film it turned out that the pieces of paper were raffle tickets. The ambassador gave out a number of bottles of rum, and quite a few cigars. However our group didn't win any. Oh well. Peter and I are used to this: we keep not winning the lottery too.

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