Keeping Cuba A Secret The Vacation Americans Don’t Talk About

Here we are, 13,000-plus days into the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba, another day of humidity and nostalgia in Fidel Castro’s capital.

Beneath the flaking pastel-hued walls of Old Havana, old men peddle the government newspaper and young men peddle black-market cigars. In the swanky Hotel Nacional, a receptionist hits a button on her computer, which shows that 24 of the 465 rooms are occupied by Americans.

Outside the Inglaterra Hotel, the “taxistas” congregate to polish their prized ‘56 Chevys and ‘58 Cadillacs. Inside, another receptionist hits another button: Nine of 83 rooms belong to American visitors.

In the suburbs, parents muddle through another power outage and pack their children off to school in threadbare uniforms. And in the fifth-floor breakfast room of the Plaza Hotel, a cheerful man takes a seat opposite me and introduces himself. He is a retired teacher from San Diego County, and, like dozens of others lodged in hotels and private homes around this island, he is trading with the enemy. He’d rather not see his real name in the newspaper. Call him Tom.

“I’m 62 years old,” says Tom dreamily. “The other night I went out with a girl about 20. We went to a disco. We went in this ‘50s car and danced. It was like going back in time. It was like I was back in high school.”

In the ferocious and long-standing argument over America’s Cuba policy, this man may not sound like anyone’s best spokesman. But he is part of a fast-expanding constituency. Even as their government has been tightening the screws in its 37-year campaign to weaken Fidel Castro, thousands of U.S. citizens, mocking the letter or the spirit of American laws, have decided to visit Cuba anyway.

Unintimidated by the threat of hefty U.S. government fines, they come by air and by sea. Some are pushing political agendas. Others are lured by cultural curiosity or a quest for business prospects. And still others are simply following gut-level appetites. Cheap rum. Fine cigars. And readily available sex, of the casual and explicitly professional kind.

The number of Americans visiting Cuba keeps growing, according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council based in New York.

“Only an act of war between the countries will prevent the numbers from increasing exponentially,” says John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.

“It’s the only so-called communist country left. And everyone says they want to see it before it turns capitalist. So the visitors are either crazed cigar enthusiasts or they’re people who want to see Cuba before it becomes Miami,” says Sandra Levinson, director of the Center for Cuban Studies in New York. “I tell them, ‘To just be a tourist is illegal.’ And they say, ‘I don’t care.”’

In fact, American law stops just short of forbidding travel to Cuba. Instead, it bars most Americans from spending any money once they’re here - a subtle distinction that has made enforcement difficult and encouraged loophole-seekers and covert travelers.

It is early March, and Norman Russell and I are standing in line at the Cubana Airlines desk at Cancun International Airport. He’s 65, a military veteran, and usually divides his time between Texas and Florida. He’s on his way to Cuba because “I wanna see what it’s like before the bubble breaks.”

When I raise the idea that Russell may be helping a repressive government by visiting now, he rolls his eyes.

“I can go to China!” he says.

Soon our number is called, and several dozen of us - dominated by a group of Italian men - board Cubana Flight 452, a propeller-powered Fokker 27. An hour later, forewarned of privations to come by a loud and humid cabin that would embarrass any American budget airline, we swoop past the red-tiled roofs and crumbling colonial architecture of Havana and touch down at Jose Marti International Airport.

Taxi drivers, tour guides, customs officials and tearful family reunions surround us. The customs officials, well practiced in the accommodation of anxious Americans, stamp a separate piece of paper and leave my passport unmarked.

The drive into central Havana is a half-hour adventure amid motorcycles with sidecars, Soviet-era Lada sedans, bicyclists by the thousands and billboards that show the face of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, or bear inspirational slogans: “Two hundred million children sleep in the streets around the world. Not one in Cuba.”

Yet in block after block of dilapidated buildings, families live in squalid quarters. Enduring periodic losses of power and water, they hang ragged laundry, prize their rationed foodstuffs, endure vigorous censorship of information from the outside world and ponder schemes to get some dollars. This is the Cuba that exiles call “Castro’s concentration camp,” and it exists just a few steps from the vital street life and coastline scenery of Havana’s famed Malecon promenade.

And strange juxtapositions just begin there. Despite all his fulminations against capitalism over the years, his island’s post-Soviet poverty has inspired Castro to allow thousands of Cubans to go into business for themselves. And so in La Bodeguita del Medio, the most famed of Ernest Hemingway’s many alleged old watering holes in Havana, a quick-sketch artist draws tourist caricatures for a few dollars each. A few yards away, by the Plaza de Armas, another man will chauffeur you all day in a shiny black 1956 Cadillac for $25 - or, he offers hopefully, sell you the car for just $12,000. And all over town, perhaps hundreds of Cubans now informally set bedrooms aside to house tourists at $10 to $25 nightly. Meanwhile, a 1995 law permits home-based restaurants (known as “paladares”), so long as they serve no more than 12 customers at a time. In 1993, Castro made it legal for Cuban citizens to use American currency.

In the offices of Havanatur, one of Cuba’s largest government-controlled tour agencies, the quest for dollars goes well. Overall international tourism, led by Canadians and Europeans, has quadrupled in seven years and now stands at about 1.1 million per year - four times as many foreigners as Cuba drew in its headiest days as a playground for high-living Americans in the 1950s. With foreign investments coming in from throughout Europe and Canada, the number of hotel rooms on the island has grown from 13,000 in 1990 to 26,000.

Havanatur is happy to serve Americans, too. The agency has pages up on the Internet and English-language literature pitching ecology tours, cigar tours, Hemingway tours, ‘50s nostalgia tours and so on. North American specialist Joel Sanz Hernandez estimates that the organization booked 22,000 Cuba trips for Americans in 1996, up from 17,000 in 1995. The goal for 1997 is 30,000.

The island’s top selling points are largely the same features that brought Americans south in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. In the capital, there is the historic architecture of Old Havana, which UNESCO has listed as a World Heritage site, and the city’s legendary night life, which reaches its most striking and highpriced expression at the Tropicana club.

Famed for its floor shows since 1939, the Tropicana charges about $50 per guest - a staggering sum for Cubans that virtually assures all-foreign audiences - and on a typical night presents dozens of dancing men and women, who wear headgear inspired by chandeliers, and very little else.

The other classic Cuban attraction is Varadero Beach. A two-hour drive east of Havana, its fine white sands and seductive blue waters filled the same role as an international getaway in the 1950s that the Mexican resort of Cancun does today.

The old Hotel Internacional, epicenter of American beachfront fun in 1956, looks like an aging starlet now, but it still fills up with Canadian and Italian package tourists paying about $70 a night.

Elsewhere along Varadero, a Club Med is going up, and the Spain-based Grupo Sol Melia is managing three luxury hotels, where rooms routinely fetch $150 a night and up. Next to one of those hotels stands the mansion once maintained as an island getaway by the Du Pont family. Now the elegant building is run as Las Americas, a tourist restaurant and bar. As the sun sets one evening, I sit there with a Cuban guide named Jorge, imbibing Cuba Libres at $2.50 each while an adept jazz combo has its way with “The Girl from Ipanema.”

The land where Cuba’s best cigars comes from has no beach and only a handful of hotels, but day trips there are increasingly popular. I stay two nights at a $45-a-night hilltop hotel just outside in Vinales, a small town in the Pinar del Rio region, and can almost feel my pulse slowing. It’s hot.

What happens to illegal tourists to Cuba? Over the three years ending Sept. 30, 1996, U.S. Treasury officials say they initiated 159 civil cases alleging forbidden trade with Cuba (individual tourists as well as larger commercial enterprises, such as cigar-smuggling operations) and collected $192,198 in fines.

In many cases, a Treasury spokesman says, the individual illegal travelers to Cuba are “starry-eyed newlyweds” who quickly profess regret when found out. In those cases, the spokesman says, the government might seek a $1,000 fine and require the travelers to sign a pledge not to do it again.

In Cancun, the travel agency Divermex books Cuban holidays that begin with a three-day, two-night Havana trip for $200. At the international airport’s Cubana Airlines desk, a ticket agent estimates that one in 10 passengers on Cancun-Havana flights carries American passports.

Thinking of these various American routes into Cuba, I take a waterfront stroll one afternoon at Havana’s Marina Hemingway. As I go, I count the American flags on visiting vessels. Once I get to 12, I retreat to Papa’s Bar, where three American men sit sipping beers.

“Here’s a question,” says Peter George Weilerbacher, 53, of Ramrod Key, Fla. “If we live in a democracy and we’re a free people, what’s our government doing telling us we can’t do this and we can’t do that?”

The beaches, the architecture, the cigars and the rum have their drawing power, to be sure, but there is another reason some Americans visit Cuba: to meet and encourage people who have endured much, and will probably endure much more, with resilience and grace.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: TRAVELING TO CUBA CAN PROVE DIFFICULT HAVANA - To legally visit Cuba, a U.S. citizen generally must either A) spend no money there, or B) qualify for licensing by the U.S. Treasury Department. Government officials, journalists, Cuban-Americans, educators, students, charity workers and select others can qualify but may be required to submit applications for case-by-case consideration. Those who qualify are generally limited to $100 in total spending per day. The U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council’s estimates 43,000 Cuban-Americans and 17,000 “qualified” visitors went to Cuba legally in 1996. Since last year’s ban on all nonstop commercial flights between the U.S. and Cuba, Americans - traveling legally or illegally - enter Cuba via a third country. Cuban customs officials typically do not stamp American passports, so there is no official evidence of a visit. The most recent tightening of U.S. restrictions on Cuba - which began in 1960 under President Eisenhower - came in February 1996 after the Cuban military shot down two private U.S. planes on a propaganda mission near Cuba. After the incident, President Clinton dropped his opposition to Congress’ Helms-Burton bill, which allows Americans to sue foreign companies whose Cuban dealings tie them to properties seized in the 1959 revolution. - Los Angeles Times