Cuba Relations Here We Go Again Our Man in Havana
Apparently, the "garbage on the road" was maneuvers. Tomás joked: "We begin the bombing in five minutes." Two classmates insisted the MiGs were dropping something. We had just passed the Provincial School for the Defense, and we were on the front row of this show.
Then the helicopter gunships started chopping across the sky. There were two.
I hope to God everything turns out. Some first day in Cuba.
Cuba's diverse assortment of architectural styles speaks to its history as a European colonial outpost, as well as a once-affluent Caribbean capital city.
I wrote those words 30 years ago during my first visit here. In January 2016, I got the opportunity to return, traveling with my uncle, a world-renowned orthopedic surgeon who also happens to be an 81-year-old retired Army officer with a chronic case of wanderlust. We flew in his small Cessna from Key West to Cienfuegos, Cuba, and then to Havana, in one of the first-ever caravans of private American aircraft to land here, at least since 1959.
Cuba has changed dramatically in three decades. For one, we didn't cross paths this time with any Soviet MiG fighter jets or attack helicopters. Those days are gone, the Kremlin no longer propping up the Cuban economy. For another, Cuba's all the rage now, especially for Americans.
While President Obama normalized relations with Havana last year, the American embargo remains. Still, optimism flies as high as the Stars and Stripes over the just-opened American Embassy fronting Havana's storied Malecón seaside promenade, a broad sidewalk that's also, incidentally, in worse shape than it was in 1986.
Seems like everyone I know is planning a trip or they can't wait to get here, especially before Starbucks and McDonald's overwhelm this city's achingly charming, decaying architecture. A Greenville Tech group is coming in July. Fifteen artists from Asheville went in February. Students from Converse College, where I teach in Spartanburg, are studying here next January. Hotels in this seedy, loud, tourist-jammed capital city are booked at least a year in advance now, thanks to block reservations from anxious cruise lines and travel agencies. Even Obama made a trip in March—the first for a sitting U.S. president in more than 80 years.
For Americans these last 57 years, the island just 90 miles away might as well have been in a different galaxy. For most of us, Cuba is a place where time stands still. That's not entirely true.
Although diplomatic relations have been reestablished with Cuba, travel to the island nation is still strictly regulated. However, there are plans for direct commercial flights as soon as October.
The journal I kept right after I left Manhattan and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism tells of a Cuba I almost didn't recognize this time. In the notebook's 69 pages, I wrote entries nearly every day.
The small, careful print totals some 17,000 words, about a quarter of the length of a garden-variety novel. I didn't keep a journal on my return, instead using high-tech gizmos unthinkable back in the day, but I did collect some pretty cool audio and video recordings and tons of hi-res JPEGs, as photographs are called these days.
I first came here during the time of Ronald Reagan, near the end of the Cold War. Russians were all over the place, keeping an eye on their comrades and investments. I returned in the days of Barack Obama, with tourists from all over the world and Americans beginning to poke around for opportunities.
Havana remains an ineluctable, if somewhat forlorn, city. Classic Chevy Bel Airs and Ford Fairlanes still cough up fumes that layer the town with soot, but thirty years ago, the streets of Havana were tidier. Likewise, you saw few, if any, panhandlers back then. Now, especially in the tourist traps of Cienfuegos and the pirate-lair seaport town of Trinidad, you see even-poorer people holding a hand out for a coin as payment for taking their picture. Back then, discreet hustlers worked the black and gray markets to wheedle illegal greenbacks out of the rare American visitor, even though possession of dollar bills was illegal. Nowadays, doe-eyed children, buskers, ragged old people, and part-time jineteros—slang for street jockeys—openly ask for whatever you're willing to give them, from ink pens to pesos in Cuban Convertible Currency, or CUCs (pronounced "kooks") available only to foreigners.
RUNAWAY REVOLUTION // Classic cars remain one of Cuba's most enduring calling cards, but their appeal is just one aspect of a landscape that is also coping with significant financial hardship.
In 2016, our group was free to go anywhere. We had no government guides or monitored itinerary. We even stayed in Old Havana, in casas particulares, private homes now open for the tourist tsunami. Unlike the days when it was illegal for Cubans to approach Americans, I could speak with all kinds of people, including many who weren't even born when I was here last.
"Now, we have the opportunity to say what we want," Pepe Diaz, 28, tells me over café con leche at a plaza café across from an unassuming Spanish Colonial church. With a sharp image of Che Guevara tattooed on his belly, Pepe tears up when he talks about Cuba's much-mythologized revolutionary. But when you ask about Fidel, whose cult of personality and force built La Revolución, Pepe simply shrugs.
Cuba's nothing if not a hotly political and politicized place, which only nurtures the baffling dichotomies that ensure the island's enduring allure. As I wrote in 1986, trying to make sense of it all:
A country of extremes: One day, a busload of American journalists witnesses MiG maneuvers and gunships strafing a hill near Havana … The next day, Tomás and I are bobbing up and down in two or three feet of crystal clear Caribbean Sea and talking about friendships and the fundamental silliness of hatred and conflict.
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