The morning sun in Havana hits differently when you’re used to waking up in Canada. It wasn’t the warmth on my skin that stopped me in my tracks during my recent trip to Cuba, it was watching an elderly woman on a Havana street corner teaching three generations of her family how to prepare infusions (what Jamaicans like me call Bush tea), hojas de guayaba (guava leaves) tea for digestive issues.
Three generations. Learning together. No shame about “old ways.” Just knowledge flowing like water from elder to youth, the way it’s supposed to.
As a Caribbean woman who spent years unlearning colonial conditioning about our healing practices, witnessing this scene felt like coming home to something I’d been searching for without knowing it.
What Cuba shows us about radical self-determination
Cuba isn’t perfect. No place is, but what struck me most was how Cubans have maintained their cultural identity and healing practices despite decades of isolation and economic hardship. They’ve had to be resourceful, creative, and deeply connected to ancestral knowledge out of necessity.
“Why would we throw away thousands of years of wisdom?”
Walking through Old Havana, I met Dr. María, a physician who also practices traditional Yoruba healing. In Toronto, we call this “alternative medicine. In Cuba, it’s just medicine. “Why would we throw away thousands of years of wisdom?” she asked, preparing a botanical remedy alongside her prescription pad. “Your ancestors didn’t survive the Middle Passage just for you to forget what they knew.”
Her words hit like lightning. How many of us in the diaspora have been taught to see our traditional practices as “backwards” or “unscientific”? How many grandmothers’ remedies have we dismissed in favour of systems that often fail us anyway?
What Cuba taught me most was about community care that happens when people depend on each other. In Toronto, we’re often isolated in our healing journeys: individual therapy, personal wellness plans, solo recovery, but in Cuba, I saw healing as a collective practice.
Neighbours checking on neighbours. Extended families living together by choice. Children learning from elders. Everyone contributes to everyone’s well-being, because that’s how communities survive.
“The revolution starts with remembering who we are. The healing starts with community, and both start with each of us deciding that our ancestors’ knowledge deserves to live through us.”
What this means for the Toronto Caribbean community
We don’t need to move to Cuba to reclaim this wisdom, but we need to ask ourselves hard questions:
- When did we start being ashamed of our healing practices? Bush tea, spiritual baths, the power of music and movement; these aren’t “alternatives” to Western medicine. They’re foundational to who we are.
- Why are we so isolated in our healing? Imagine if we approached mental health struggles, addiction recovery, and chronic illness like Cuban communities approach hurricanes: everybody helps, everybody contributes, nobody gets left behind.
Bringing Cuba home
When I return home, I want to start what I’m calling “Abuela Circles” monthly gatherings where Caribbean women share traditional healing knowledge. Last month, a Trinidadian grandmother taught me about chandelier beni for respiratory issues. A Jamaican elder showed me how to properly prepare cerasee. A Cuban Canadian woman shared her family’s recipe for stress-relief tea.
The magic is in the passing down, the community, the reclaiming of our right to heal ourselves and each other.
“The revolution starts with remembering who we are.”
Cuba didn’t just give me a chance to reset. It gave me a vision of what our communities could look like when we stop apologizing for our wisdom and start living it boldly. This doesn’t mean rejecting modern medicine, or professional therapy. I’m a strong advocate for both, but it means integrating them with the wisdom our ancestors carried in their bones, knowledge that helped them survive everything from slavery to displacement to systemic oppression. This integration can provide a sense of community and support in our healing journeys.
The revolution starts with remembering who we are. The healing begins with community, and both start with each of us deciding that our ancestors’ knowledge deserves to live through us, empowering us to take control of our health and well-being.
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