n October 1959, Fidel Castro spoke to the American Society of
Travel Agents (ASTA) convention, held that year in the old Blanquita Theater (now the Karl Marx) in Havana. "We have sea," said Castro. 'We have bays, we have beautiful beaches, we have medicinal waters in our hotels,
we have mountains, we have game and we have fish in the sea and the rivers, and we have sun. Our people are noble, hospitable, and most important, they hate no one. They love visitors, so much in fact that that our
visitors feel completely at home."Normal relations with the United States still existed back then, and the US ambassador, Philip Bonsai, also lauded Cuban tourism at the ASTA convention: "Cuba is one of the most
admirable countries in the world from the point of view of North American tourism and from many other points of view."
Four decades have passed. Nothing has changed but the politics.
Cuba won its independence from
Spain at the turn of the century only to be occupied militarily, politically, and economically by the United States. It was an uncertain independence: never fully under the United States' thumb, but never fully out from
under it, either, until the Revolution wrote another chapter in Cuban history. Castro & Co. made a beautiful revolution but, alas, spun off into Soviet orbit and got trapped in the Cold War. Four decades later, Cuba
and the US remain separated by 90 miles of shimmering ocean churned into a watery no-man's land by political enmity. Today, the Straits of Florida is the widest, deepest moat in the world.
Travelers visiting Cuba
today do so at a fascinating historical moment, as Cuba is unwinding from its Marxist coccoon. A new Cuba is emerging. It is extending its hand to the rest of the world and inviting us to visit. Four decades after Cuba
closed its doors to outsiders, tourism is booming again.
Sadly, the US government isn't listening, although an increasing number of US citizens are circumventing the travel restrictions by entering Cuba through
Canada, Mexico, or Caribbean nations (... or on any of dozens of organized tours that permit virtually any US citizen to travel to Cuba legally!).
It's remarkably easy to do. Cubans play their part by abstaining from stamping passports, so Uncle Sam need never know. Most yanquis harbor the misimpression that it's illegal for US citizens to visit Cuba.
It's not; it's merely illegal to spend dollars there. In any event. no US tourist has ever been prosecuted merely for visiting Cuba.
Cuba is made for tropical tourism: the diamond-dust beaches and bathtub-warm
seas the colors of peacock feathers... the bottle-green mountains and jade valleys full of dramatic formations... the ancient cities, especially Havana and Trinidad, with their flower-bedecked balconies, rococo
churches, and elegant plazas... and, above all, the sultriness and spontaneity of a country called "the most emotionally involving in the Western hemisphere."
The country is blessed with possibility. Divers are
already delirious over Cuba's wealth of deep-sea treasures. Sportfishing is also relatively advanced, with several dedicated resorts and far more fish than fishhooks. Laguna del Tesoro, part of the swampy Zapata
Peninsula National Park, is one of several premier bird-watching areas. There are crocodiles, too, lurking leery-eyed in well-preserved Everglades. Horseback riding options abound. Spa and health tourism is booming.
Cuba is being eyed as a prime destination for bicycle and motorcycle touring. And hikers can head for the Sierra del Rosario or tread trails trod by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra.
Cuba's greatest,
most enigmatic appeal is that traveling through it you sense you are living inside an unfolding drama. Cuba is still intoxicating, still laced with the sharp edges that made Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet,
write to his parents, "If I get lost, look for me in Cuba," and that made Ernest Hemingway want to "stay here for ever."
Set foot one time in Havana and you can only flee or succumb to its enigmatic allure. It is
impossible to resist the city's mysteries and contradictions. Walking Havana's streets you sense you are living inside a romantic thriller. You don't want to sleep for fear of missing a vital experience. Before the
Revolution, Havana had a reputation as a place of intrigue and tawdry romance. The whiff of conspiracy, the intimation of liaison, is still in the air.
Your first reaction is of being caught in an eerie
colonial-cum-1950s time warp. Fading signs evoke the decadent decades when Cuba was a virtual colony of the United States. High-finned, chrome-spangled dowagers from the heyday of Detroit are everywhere, conjuring
images of dark-eyed temptresses and men in Panama hats and white linen suits. Havana, now Communist but still carnal, is peopled in fact as in fiction by characters from the novels of Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene.
All the glamor of an abandoned stage set is here, patinated by age. For foreign visitors it is heady stuff.
Thirty-odd years of US propaganda and negative media reports have led many visitors to expect the worst--a
fossilized shell of a country with a population cowed and sullen, their lips glued shut by fear. Yet those who simply point out Cuba's negatives--the inept bureaucracy, the shortages, themuffled press--do not see the
smiling children, or notice the
educated youths eager to dissect Voltaire or challenge you to a game of chess. Cuba rightly brags about its educational network and its health system, which provides free care for
everyone and has reduced infant mortality and raised the life expectancy to a par with developed nations. And after several decades of not being caught up in the monied economy, there is a distinct lack of hype, an
environment in which success is not measured by the level of consumption (although this is changing). Cubans can still take ample pleasure in rocking on a veranda watching laughing children chase a hoop down a dusty
street. Even the young retain fond memories of days before the Soviet Union collapsed, when Cubans had become accustomed to a quality of life that has only recently been pulled from under their feet.
Nonetheless,
today there is general agreement that things have gone terribly wrong and the future is full of uncertainty. The current crisis is severely testing the Cubans' faith in human cooperation, a situation exarcerbated by the
tourism boom, which has hallmarks of a Faustian bargain...
To the international visitor, the frustrations of life for the average Cuban need be no more than a slight inconvenience. Tourists are free to go wherever
they wish, and there are few visible hallmarks of a totalitarian system.
And yet the "real" Cuba isn't easy to fathom. The casual visitor is easily beguiled. Tourists riding in comfortable Toyota minivans may wind up
with little more than a canned experience of the country. An open-minded visitor is torn two ways: Cuba is both disheartening and uplifting. You'll most probably fall in love with the country, while being thankful that
you don't have to live in it.
After all, you don't have to respect a government to fall in love with a country or its people.
Cubans relish a passion for pleasure despite (or because of) their hardships. Salsa and
irresistible rumbas pulse through the streets, and throngs of people congregate at nightclubs and cabarets, including the Tropicana, the open-air extravaganza--girls! girls! girls!--now in its sixth decade of
stiletto-heeled paganism. Cubans you have met only moments previously may invite you into their homes, where rum and beer are passed around and you are lured to dance by narcotic rhythms. How often have I been carried
away, laughing, flirting, dancing as it were with the enemy? It is hard to believe that the US government's Trading With The Enemy Act is directed at these compellingly warm-hearted people.
Everywhere Cubans embrace
and welcome you into their arms. Everything touches your heart. You come away feeling like one of my friends, who on her first visit to Cuba began dancing uncontrollably in a casa de la trova. The Cubans formed a
line and, "like a diplomat," took her hand, kissed her cheek. As I set out to write this book, she implored me: "Chris, bring your genuine feeling into your pages. Breathe the innocence and beauty of Cuba without
castrating Castro and his revolution."
Ernest Hemingway, who loved Cuba and lived there for the better part of 20 years, once warned novice writer Arnold Samuelson against "a tendency to condemn before you completely
understand. You aren't God, and you never judge a man," Hemingway said. "You present him as he is and you let the reader judge."
Enjoy!
