Cuba: Forbidden Fruit

WARNING:  If you have a prejudice against Cuba, this blog probably isn’t for you.  At least not this trip - my 9 days in Cuba on a 23-person National Geographic tour.  You’ll find Che Guevara mentioned many times, especially in the attached videos (which aren’t mine).  You’ll find praise for the Cuban Revolution and what it accomplished, not necessarily said by me but by the people we met on this people-to-people trip.  These people were not chosen for their propaganda value, but for their knowledge of specific sectors:  architecture, sociology, art, music...  We were given no Minders and were free to go anywhere we wanted - including alone - and to ask any questions we wanted.  This being said, and in spite of the past (and present) hostilities between the U.S. and Cuban governments, the welcome extended to me, whether in the group or out on my own, was always warm, never hostile, and I’d go back to visit again in a heartbeat.


Preface

Growing up, Cuba, to me, was essentially music.  Ricky Ricardo aka Desi Arnaz.  Exotic dance steps such as the mambo and cha-cha-cha learned at Aunt Marge and Uncle Bill‘s ballroom dancing class on Saturday mornings.
       In junior high it became something you saw on the nightly news.  Scraggly-bearded men in green fatigues and combat boots with cigars clenched between their teeth and their fingers in a V for Victory.
       Then in high school, it became something much worse.  It became a reminder of the duck-and-cover days of nuclear exercises in grade school.  A reminder of The Bomb.  Which we were told was headed for Cuba on board a Soviet ship, to be aimed at our shores from 90 miles south of Key West.  I remember vividly watching those ships approach.  The face of a resolute John F. Kennedy, blissfully ignorant of his demise, also approaching.  And then one afternoon the footage of a ship - the ship - doing a U-turn in the ocean.
       From that time on, Cuba was The Enemy.  It was Cuba vs America, the Hatfields and the McCoys.  I watched most of the drama play out from across the Atlantic, in France, as my children were born, grew up and moved away... as my entire career began, grew and ended.  Outside my door, the world changed.  Man walked on the Moon.  Cures were found for incurable diseases.  We sent probes into the farthest reaches of our solar system.
       Yet Cuba remained on America’s State Enemies list.  Off limits.

One of my loves has always been travel, since that first trip abroad in 1958, seen through a child’s eyes.  National Geographic had always nurtured that wanderlust in their issues filled with strange sights, photos bursting with color, words echoing strange sounds and customs.
        So when I started receiving their travel magazines, and when Cuba was on their list of destinations in spite of America’s travel restrictions still in place, the attraction became even stronger.  After all, the island was still only 90 miles south of Key West, where one day I’d watched Cuban TV from my friend’s couch as I visited her there.  (And wasn’t it ironic that the movie they were showing was... a John Wayne western!)
        What’s more, many travelers were flying - albeit illegally - to Cuba from Toronto, and Ann Arbor is only 30 minutes from the Canadian border.  The prospect of visiting the Unvisitable became ever more tantalizing.
        I’d even flown over it on my way to South America and back!  Seen it out the window of the plane.  Taken photos of it.

One day I decided to sign up.  Winter is cold in Michigan, and not in Cuba.  And National Geographic has access to lots of interesting people, I reasoned, lots of experts I’d never be able to see if I just went there on my own.
       There were problems with red tape.  And of course they arose while I was far away, in Paris.  A Cuban visa would be required, so I scanned my passport and sent it to National Geographic.  They told me it expired too soon and I’d need a new one, but there was no time to do that before my return flight to the States, by which time it would late to get the visa.  The Cuban Embassy in Paris was tauntingly near, I told them, but National Geographic needed to do all the visas together, so I didn’t get to enter their forbidden doors and see if it was as posh as the embassies of capitalist countries.  E-mails flashed back and forth between National Geographic and my apartment in Montmartre.  It became clear that Cuba couldn’t care less when my passport expired but the U.S. wanted my passport to still be valid six months after my return.  Being me, I asked if that was an air-tight requirement... and it turns out it isn’t.  I mean, sincerely, were the Customs Authorities in Miami going to deny me re-entry and send me back to Cuba?  Me, a U.S. citizen?

       So the paperwork went through.  I was granted an entry (and an exit!) visa to Cuba, even with an elderly passport.  I booked a flight to Miami, stuffed enough clothes into a carry-on, and streamlined my huge purse into a small pouch I could hang around my neck - alongside my camera.
       A lot of thought went into planning this trip.  U.S. credit cards don’t work in Cuba, so you can’t just zip into a store and buy what you forgot.  Provided they even have it, given the embargo.  The same holds true for ATMs - not an option.  It was going to be a trapeze act without a net, unlike any other trip I’d ever made, which includes most of Western Europe, Jordan, Burundi, Peru, Chile... even the remote Easter Island, the farthest place on Earth from any other place on Earth.
       And it was still only 90 miles south of Key West.  But decades in the past, as I’d soon discover.