Brief Observations on Visiting Cuba after 50 Years

My wife and I spent a month in Cuba in July 2012. Flying in from Miami, we stayed 10 days in Havana in a small hotel, walked the streets, then explored central Cuba by rental car for two weeks: Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Trinidad, Camaguey, Cayo Santa Maria (for foreigners), and Varadero. We spent the final days in Havana at the iconic Hotel Nacional from the 1930s. This was my first visit since leaving Cuba for Chicago in late 1961 just shy of 5 years old, almost 3 years after Castro took power and 4 months after the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The U.S. government grants a general travel license (no specific permit needed) if you have a Cuban second cousin, or if you accompany a household member with such a relative. The Cuban government considers me Cuban but requires a visa. My visa category is “resided abroad before 1971” which required proof. Luckily my super-organized father kept my 6th-grade report card, which I submitted after altering my C’s to B’s (kidding).

My mother's first cousin from Madrid was with us throughout. He left Cuba after being sent to cut sugar cane in the countryside for 19 months in the late 1960s, away from his wife and young son, as punishment for seeking to emigrate; at the same time, his savings were frozen. He had visited Cuba recently in 2009. He has a first cousin in Havana and we spent considerable time with his cousin - a retired professor at the University of Havana - and his wife, hearing their stories. All three of their children emigrated to Canada and Costa Rica.

I visited the Havana apartment building (needs paint) where I was born, finding someone there who remembered (unprovoked) my tricycle-riding on the top floor. I visited Havana’s former Baldor Academy where my mother taught high-school math and earlier had been a pupil; the academy was expropriated soon after the Revolution and is today a state school. I visited Limonar, a small town in Matanzas province where my father's mother (surname: Booth) came from. I went to the local church, spoke with the archivist, and visited her home. It seems that Booth was an American who emigrated to Cuba about 200 years ago, and not an Englishman like my father used to say; so the cycle is completed. Every such visit confirmed for me Cubans’ openness with strangers, part of their national character. I encountered few cases of guardedness.

By consulting recent visitors to Cuba, I was prepared for what I saw, heard, and did. I was warned not to drive in Cuba, but we drove anyway, but only by day, and suffered minor contretemps (Cuba’s most famous dissident was not so lucky). One surprise was the poor telecommunications: phone, internet. The web is for foreigners or for a small elite. People spoke freely about their dissatisfactions after you got to know them a little and they felt they were not being overheard. Of course, speaking Spanish helps.

I used to think that shortages in Cuba were because the state-controlled economy didn't produce enough to buy things with. I wonder now if it isn't more because of supply-chain incompetence. For example, it was hard to find simple Ibuprofen for my swollen toe, finally buying some tablets at the Hotel Nacional that had been left behind by a Chinese hotel guest and wrapped in a recycled computer printout of a day's guest-list. During the first 10 days in our Havana hotel, its two computers sat idle because the hotel hadn’t received internet cards ($6/hr) from the State; the cards reveal an access code after scratching them. $6 is almost 1/3 the average Cuban monthly salary, so they should want to make sales. By the way, Cubans pay $1 for a beer.

Summarizing, I toss these ingredients in a blender and find Cuba: (1) communist orthodoxy; (2) a tropical island with lively, open people; and (3) a regime striving for economic progress under an iron political grip. Unique flavors emerge from this blender. A tragicomic joke I heard: “A Cuban asks a young person what he wants to be when he grows up. A foreigner, he says.” My fond memories of Cuba are of its people, music, beaches, and grandeur - both lost and future. I won’t miss the billboard propaganda: here, there, everywhere.

There are great makeover opportunities once things truly change. When it will be, I know not . Soon, I pray.