Conde Nast Traveler

Nov. 1995

Cuba Fever

Long before Fidel Castro dazzled the French last March in his navy designer suit and red polka dot tie--demonstrating that he will do whatever is necessary to keep his island fiefdom afloat--the signs were everywhere that a dramatic re-invention of Castro and Cuba was in the works. While the cold warriors in the States are busy sharpening their swords, sounding more and more like throwbacks to some earlier, polarized era, their Cuban nemesis, is moving precisely in the opposite direction, doing everything short of throwing a welcome mat over Havana Harbor.

And though the American government may have an official policy of hostility toward Cuba, American certainly does not. In the last year, the three major networks escalated their duel as to who would be the first to open a Cuba Bureau in Havana. While NBC/General Electric honcho Robert Wright wined and dined Fidel Castro in January, ABC's Bob Murphy lunched with Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina, while Tom Brokaw, Barbara Walters, and Mort Zuckerman waited in the wings for interviews with El Comandante that were never granted.

The barometer of Cuba fever is best measured by the thousands of Americans who, according to informed sources, snub U.S. law against travel to Cuba by going via the Bahamas, Mexico, or Canada. In the last two years they were part of a contingent of 600,000 visitors to the island - primarily Canadians, Germans, Italians, Spanish and Latin Americans - generating nearly $500 million in revenue. Then there are the rich and famous like Ted Turner, Ron Perlman, Robert de Niro, Treat Williams, and Lee Iaccoca who simply arrive in their own jets. Even as a forbidden, embargoed third world country, Cuba is once again irresistible--flush with renewed allure, buzz, and self-importance.

Aboard the no-frills Russian-built Cubana aircraft that fly daily from Cancun and Mexico City to Havana, chilly white clouds stream out of the antiquated air conditioning vents and hover along the floor of the plane. By then, however, the mojitos--killer rum drinks with a splash of yerba buena--have kicked in, and no one seems to notice much until forty minutes later when the plane coasts over Cuba's western edge and the resplendent countryside of this tropical island comes into view. From the air, Pinar del Rio looks like nothing so much as a patchwork of blazing greens - mossy, verdurous, chartreuse, jade - bordered by frost-white beaches and the wild teal-blue sea. As promised by Fidel Castro in the early 1960's, the soft hills are intersected by a comprehensive road system. However, upon closer scrutiny, one sees that there are hardly any vehicles--often not a single car--for miles, until the plane makes its descent into Havana.

Havana is a shock even to those forewarned. Its once regal, glorious edifices are literally crumbling along the Malecon, the spectacular boulevard that shoulders the city from the Caribbean. Others, like gaudy old whores, their pastel paint peeling and flaking, evoke the broken South of Tennessee Williams or the eerie beauty of Venice before its rescue. Except for the hotels, government ministries and embassies, most of Vedado, the neighborhood that borders the Malecon and literally means "forbidden," is in dire disrepair. Nevertheless it remains the liveliest and busiest part of the city. With its endless stream of bicyclers, fisherman and lovers strolling along the Malecon gazing into the sea, it is, to my mind the most enchanted part of the city. Miramar, once the bastion of the Cuban aristocracy, has the fared better. Most of its grand old homes along its wide boulevards now house foreign embassies, government agencies and foreign businesses.

Architectural restoration, like just about everything else these days, is reserved for places of interest to tourists, the great white hope of the Cuban economy. Parts of Old Havana like the Capitolo (modeled on the U.S. original), the museums, and colonial churches are once again splendid, as are many of the hotels: The Inglaterra, The Sevilla, and, most notably, the Hotel Nacional, overlooking the Malecon. Following a $15million facelift, The Nacional--built by the same architect who designed The Breakers in Palm Beach--has been restored to its Spanish colonial glory. Its awesome lobby with its marbled floor, exquisite Moorish arches and wrap around veranda overlooking the Caribbean, is the unofficial clubhouse for the jet set, V.I.P.'s and American travelers. At any given time, one can bump into top government officials, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, director Stephen Frears, Maximillan Schell, most of the visiting foreign press corps, assorted relatives of Fidel Castro and the occasional American tycoon pretending that he's not doing business in Cuba.

In 1992, shortly after his eponymous legislation tightening the U.S. Embargo against Cuba took effect, Congressman Robert Torricelli promised the world that Fidel Castro would fall within "three months.'' Three years later, not only does Fidel remain firmly in place, but Cuba has actually begun to reverse its economic slide. Like ``the little train that could,'' it has rescued itself, thanks to a veritable onslaught of foreign investment, including some Americans willing to skirt the Embargo. Last December, in the last days of his tenure as CIA chief, Jim Woolsley confirmed the anecdotal reports of visitors to Cuba: that the beleaguered island tossed into economic free fall by the collapse of its Soviet patron had hit bottom some time in mid-1994 and was slowly climbing out of the abyss. Since then, economic reform has steadily accelerated, much of it implemented by Raul Castro and implemented by the Cuban Army, firmly under his thumb.

Backed into a corner, with few options, Fidel Castro has finally loosened up the market place. Tiendas and mercados (shops and markets) which last year had been empty, are filled with goods and produce, the result of the popular and successful farmers' markets which allow farmers to sell some of their goods for profit. Of course, the prices are generally unaffordable to many Cubans, but, at least, there is something to buy. In the last year, Benetton shops have popped up throughout the island, Pierre Cardin announced the opening of a Maxim's restaurant in Havana, scheduled to open in late 1996, fashion shows in Miramar became a nightly feature, and Cubans lined up around the block to get into Havana's first drive-in fast food eatery. If you are audacious enough to try Cuban fast food--like fried chicken,french fries and hotdogs --you too can stop in at El Rapido, just off the Malecon in Vedado, where folks drive in and get served in their cars by drop-dead gorgeous waitresses on roller skates. Plans for another thirty El Rapidos are in the works. The best part is that the prices are affordable even to Cubans--a welcome departure from what some call "tourist apartheid," - a policy that forbids most Cubans from entering hotels unless accompanied by a foreign guest and sets restaurants prices that are affordable only to tourists.

Throughout the island, people demonstrated a new entrepreneurship. The government now allows Cubans to work as plumbers, carpenters, electricians, mechanics, etc. but with the Kafkaesque provision that prohibits them from having a shop or employees. Even the garbage trucks, once idled by lack of fuel, were once again to be seen. The buzz around Havana is that even the paladares, the illegal underground restaurants that flourish in people's homes, will soon be legalized. Hardly an economic miracle, but certainly a sign that the profitsfrom Cuba's foreign trade and burgeoning tourism industry have begun to kick in and that the island is irrevocably unwinding itself from its Marxist cocoon. One bellwether of the new de-Communized Cuba is that in the better hotels on the island one is no longer called companero and companera, but once again senor and senora.

The recent strides towards economic viability notwithstanding, it is a bitter pill that 36 years after tossing out the imperialist Yankees, the coin of the realm is once again the dollar. Worse yet, it has created a divisive two-class system: those who have dollars and those who don't. The ensuing inequities are obvious and troublesome to all. The big winners are those with relatives in the U.S.-- exiles once condemned as gusanos (worms)--who succeed in smuggling them dollars, and anyone working in tourism. Waiters now make more than the country's top scientists. The piano player at the Nacional Hotel, is in fact, a doctor. As a doctor he is paid 400 pesos -once a grand salary in Cuba but now worth less than $6.00 a month on the black market, the only market that counts. By singing for his supper to tourists, the doctor can make as much as $100 a week in tips. Tenured professors have given up their positions at the University to drive taxis, and not a few college graduates have joined the ranks of putas, where a girl can make $150 on a "date." Most ominously, the dollarization of the economy has undermined "the moral high ground" of the Revolution, fomenting more loyalty to the dollar than to Fidel.

"We are the Jews of the Caribbean," Cubans will tell you proudly, meaning they are smarter, quicker and sharper than the rest of us, - an assessment with which few disagree. They are also famously argumentative and known to call themselves testaduros - hardheads. My personal pet theory - however specious- attributes their volubility to the fact that they have no Indian blood inthem. When the conquistadores arrived in 1502, the native Siboney Indians of the island were given an ultimatum: convert to Catholicism or die. Following the lead of their chief, Hatuey, many Indians literally leapt into the flames of their immolation. Those who didn't were summarily massacred. Consequently, Cubans, unlike the mestizomajority of Latin America, are either of Spanish or African blood, usually an Afro-Cuban mix. For all intents and purposes, they also have their own language, spoken at a rapid-fire clip with nary an "s" uttered. "We speak Cuban," cracks a hotel clerk in Santiago, "not Spanish."

Continuously in Cuba, one is assaulted with bizarre incongruities and contradictions. Not only does Cuba lead Latin America in education and health care, it has even surpassed the United States in having virtually eradicated illiteracy. Cubans seem well informed about international events. Gerry-built satellite dishes, often made from fan grids and mop poles, dot the rooftops of Havana, enabling many to get CNN, Discovery, and up to ten stations in addition to the several state-run TV channels, and everybody listens to Monitor Radio beamed by the Christian Science Monitor. Although the government recently banned parabolic satellite dishes, no one expects any serious kind of enforcement. However, like its paved roads bereft of cars, Cuba's hyper-educated population is hard pressed to find books to read or paper to write on. Although Cuba has more doctors per capita than any country in the world, such medical basics as aspirin, insulin, and penicillin are often as scarce as ivory. And while homelessness does not exist on the island, the housing shortage is so severe that lovers routinely line up for posadas, rooms rented to couples by the hour offering them a bottle of rum and a bed.

The national depression is most evident in the food, arguably, the worst thing in Cuba. Except for the aforementioned paladares (literally meaning "palate" and so named for a popular Brazilian soap-opera character) or the occasional home cooked meal from a hospitable Cuban, the food is, at best, forgettable, and at worst, inedible. Hotel food leans heavily towards pork and canned vegetables.

With gasoline the privilege of the privileged, the streets belong to the high-polluting Hungarian-built buses literally packed to the roof and to thousands of bicycles, some of which carry an entire family of four, acrobatically-positioned on one ancient three-speeder.

Alberto Pedro, 64, is a respected Cuban anthropologist. He has walked more than five miles to see me because he could not find a bus nor afford a taxi. When I ask him if he was prepared for such hardships, he laughs and says that this is nothing new for him. "Being black, I grew up very poor. Twelve of us lived in one room--with one snake." By now I've learned that snakes, regarded as good luck in Santeria, the national religion of Cuba, are not uncommon house pets. Others are not so sanguine. "It used to be that there were the rich and the poor," a former Miramar aristocrat sniffs with unconcealed bitterness. "Now we are all poor."

A slender, attractive black woman pedaling an old fashioned bicycle along the Malecon stops to chat. Alicia P. is a 34-year-old mother of three children. Her family lives in a cramped one-room hovel in Fanguito, a notorious slum in Havana. "I have to buy my food on the black market," she says, "because my ration book is used up before half the month is gone." With arthritis in her wrists and ankles, she is not unable to bicycle ten miles each day to work nor can she stand and wait up to three hours for the rare bus that comes along. Moreover, like for many Cubans, it doesn't make much sense to bother working. Her salary of 165 pesos a month translates to about $3.OO. Her husband, an electrician, earns roughly the same. "Four hours a day, we don't have electricity," she tells me. Still, she is wary of a new system and a new leader. "We know that without Fidel it could be worse," she says, "especially for me because I am black and Fidel treats everyone the same."

Unquestionably, the race issue is Fidel Castro's greatest achievement and weapon. Prior to the revolution, blacks were 30 percent of the population and chillingly marginalized. Today they are 70 percent, whereas Miami's Cuban exile community is more than 95 percent white. The hostility between the two is silent but palpable--and has a long history. Miami resident Rosario Moreno, who left Cuba in 1963, remembers being in the exclusive Havana Yacht Club with her parents when the much-feared Batista--who happened to be a mixture of white, black, and Chinese--came in. "They turned the lights off," recalls Moreno, "to let him know that even though he was President, he was a mulatto and not welcome in the Club. And he left."

Natalia Bolivar came by her imperial, aristocratic manner honestly - as a descendent on both sides of her family of the great liberator of Latin America, Simon Bolivar. At 58, and six feet tall, she is still quite striking. As a child, she would ride her horse up and down Fifth Avenue, the tree lined main boulevard of Miramar. Her mother was so rabid about race that she would often phone the police when she spied blacks on the once pristine streets of Miramar. Today, Natalia's apartment is a salon to many blacks including her son-in-law. Bolivar is a pre-eminent authority on Santeria, having written eight books illuminating Afro-Cuban religions. "Santeria does not exclude having another religion," she explains. "You can practice Santeria and also be a Catholic or Jew as many people here are." Though she says that animal sacrifice is central to the practice, she is irritated by references to white magic and black magic. "All Santeria is done for the good," she says impatiently, "Anybody who says they do it for the bad, doesn't know what they're talking about."

Bolivar has an airy three-bedroom apartment in Miramar, which she shares with her extended family, ten dogs, three snakes and one of the finest private art collections in Cuba. From 1959 to 1966, Bolivar was curator of Cuba's foremost museum, the Museo Nacional, and has long been a central figure in its art scene. Spectacular art of Rene Portocarreo, Wifredo Lam, Mariano and Cabrera-Moreno fill the rooms of her home. "I met Wifredo Lam when I was ten years old," she tells me in January. He was very close to my cousin." The work of Lam, a Cubist and student of Picasso, is now hugely valuable. One painting, Manana Verde was sold at Sotheby's in November for $965,000. Bolivar says she still owns more than thirty of his drawings.

People stream in and out all day anxious to consult with Bolivar who has achieved somewhat of a cult status. It is a status, along with her distinguished lineage, which has protected her, known as she is for being willing to criticize those in power. She says she has been married eight times "officially," and can't remember how many times unofficially. "But I'm looking for a companion now," she says, her face brightening, "if you know anyone."

Although Bolivar may be fed up with the government these days, she reminds me that she fought for the Revolution when she was a student at the University before being captured by Batista's secret police and tortured. "Thirty-four years later, I was in Miami," she adds, "and I saw the man who had tortured me. His name was Orlando Piedra. He didn't remember me." No, she recalls, she didn't verbally or physically attack him. "One can't stay angry forever," she says, her voice weary and amused. "It's all part of the folklore of being alive."

A few blocks away from Bolivar lives Cubas most famous doctor, Rodrigo Alvarez Cambras. Counting on his fingers, he says, "I am seeing eleven world leaders at this time." Although, he will only smile when asked their names, it is well known that the list includes Castro, Francois Mitterand, Muammar Kaddafi, and Saddam Hussein. A small bespectacled man in his sixties, Alvarez Cambras gives me a tour of his gated Miramar Spanish home - a Cuban bucolic paradise just off Fifth Avenue - pointing out the various fruit trees while at the end of the yard a huge pig paces in its pen and chickens squawk.

The story goes that several years ago, Dr. Alvarez Cambras removed a tumor from the spine of Saddam Hussein, thus saving his life. Since no other surgeon believed that removal of the tumor was possible, Saddam had been convinced that he was going to die. As a token of his gratitude, he gave the doctor a million dollars. Alvarez Cambras, however, being the dedicated socialist he is, turned the money over to Castro, who asked him if there was anything he wanted. When the doctor said he could use a larger home, he was given the Miramar villa.

A biochemist in her mid 40's described her country as a "rowdy, dysfunctional family" with Castro as its dictatorial patriarch, the cowboy who took on the big bad giant to the North. "We all have this love-hate relationship with Fidel," says writer Miguel Barnet, who now sits in the National Assembly representing the city of Trinidad, "because he re-designed this country with an international perspective and not as an American subsidy." For those who have a hate-hate relationship with El Maximo, there is exile, jail, or sullen misery.

Many Cubans wait anxiously for the return of a free market economy with all its freedoms, privileges and risks. At the same time, after thirty years of cradle-to-grave education and health care--albeit seriously erodedat this point--few Cubans are willing to give up the benefits that they now take for granted. Reynaldo Verrier, 44, an English language translator and marathon runner, shrugs at his neighbors' complaints. "The problem with us is that we compare ourselves to the United States instead of to Latin America. Look at our two closest neighbors: Haiti and the Dominican Republic."

Ricardo Alarcon, Cuba's hi-profile head of the National Assembly and former foreign minister, disagrees. "Our real problem," he laughs, "is comparing ourselves with ourselves five years ago. That's the problem." The years from 1980 to 1988, when Cuba was the recipient of billions of dollars of aid from Mother Russia are now recalled by some as the golden years. According to Alaron's secretary who, it turns out, is not some svelte chica but a 77-year-old veteran of the Sierra Maestra named Andres Montes. Like many fidelistas, Montes was a Cuban aristocrat who gave it all away for the revolution. In 1950, he finished a degree in business at the University of Virginia, earning his C.P.A. before returning to Havana. Disgusted by the misery and corruption under the regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista, he joined the Revolution, eventually hooking up with Fidel, Che Guevara, and Camilio Cienfuegos in the Sierra Maestras for their final victory in 1958. "Many wonderful memories," he says softly, sadly.

Alarcon can be quite candid in discussing the "setbacks and disappointments" of the last few years, such as the poor sugar harvest and a number of devastating storms, and eagerly points out some of Cuba's successes, notably in biotechnology and medical research, such as the drug PPG, which lowers cholesterol and doubles as an aphrodisiac, and is a popular smuggled item in the States. There is also international recognition for their discovery of vaccines for Hepatitis B and numerous tropical diseases, as well as a cure for the skin disease, vitiligo, and even invited the afflicted singer Michael Jackson down for treatment.

For all the talk of his elusiveness, it's not all that difficult to see Fidel Castro in Cuba. He not infrequently holds receptions for American "cultural or education " exchange groups at the Palacio de la Revolucion--to honor their willingness to thumb their nose at U.S. policy. The Palacio de la Revolucion, built under Batista, is one of the rare buildings in Havana that doesn't look like it might totter over.

At one reception, Fidel spoke at length gesticulating with his long, exoressive hands. Castro's speeches are operatic--layered and textured with ever shifting moods and crescendos. He waxes lyrical, in a way few leaders - much less dictators - would never dare. "A revolution is not only a material task. A revolution is above all, a work of the spirit...it's really a spiritual task." Trained as a lawyer, he effortlessly argues a host of contradictory positions. "Propaganda can never be abandoned even for a minute," he wrote in 1954, "because it is the soul of the revolution."

Chatting with him at the reception that followed, I see that the El Maximo has aged--the skin on his face is thin and prone to dermatitis, his lips are narrow and purple. Still, he has lost none of his formidable stamina. His energy and laser-clear focus are keenly evident. Having outlived eight American presidents, all of whom predicted his imminent demise, even his enemies joke nervously about him being a force of nature. After quickly knocking back a tall mojito, he's ready to romance the room. A world-class seducer, he has the withering ability to confer great importance upon whomever he's talking with. His close friends cross all political/cultural lines: Ted Turner, who comes down to fish and carouse with him, former French Premier Francois Mitterand, who entreated both Bush and Clinton to abandon the embargo, the late poet Pablo Neruda, several members of the Rockefeller clan.

I asked him his thoughts on the role of the U.N. "Each country should resolve its own problems," he insisted, calling the United Nations "simply an arm of U.S. policy," which should stay out of things. His criticism of the U.N. is peculiar considering that it has twice soundly condemned the Embargo and the Torricelli Bill. Although sympathetic to Aristide in Haiti, he is clearly troubled by the precedent of an American-sponsored intervention. "Let countries resolve their own problems," he said repeatedly, his eyes narrowing darkly. Always his thinking is sifted through an obsession with his mighty neighbor, his northern Goliath. He knows that he can survive anything--embargoes, balseros, and assassination attempts--everything except a U.S. military invasion.

His fears are not unfounded. A powerful anti-Cuba lobby in the U.S. has relentlessly campaigned for an American intervention. It is led by Florida representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehntinen and the controversial Miami tycoon, Jorge Mas Canosa, the mouthpiece of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), whom one Miami Herald writer has dubbed "Cuba's dictator inwaiting." Among Mas' latest imbroglios include a leaked USIA report, which finds that he has abused his advisory role as chairman of Radio Marti for self-aggrandizement and an ongoing paternity suit from a fomer mistress of twenty year's duration. Diaz-Balart, whose father was president of the Cuban Senate under Batista and Ros-Lehtinen have called for a naval blockade of Cuba to be followed by a U.S. invasion. "Mas has been telling people for a long time that at least 150,000 Cubans have to die to take Cuba back," says Miami businessman Raul Masvidal, who was the original founder of CANF until he was pushed out Mas. "Of course, he won't say which Cubans will be chosen to die."

Although long dismissed as "sore losers" and politically irrelevant--even the Wall Street Journal has called for the end of the Embargo--the Cuba hawks have a new powerful ally, the unrepentant cold warrior Senator Jesse Helms, chief of the Foreign Relations Committee. Helms threat to take Castro out of Cuba either "in a horizontal or vertical position," is probably only the first salvo in the new Cold War heating up in the Republican-controlled Congress. The latest proposals, known as the Helms-Burton bill, passed by the House in late September, would prohibit third countries from selling Cuban products in the U.S. and deny visas to and threaten lawsuits against those who traffic in the properties of pre-revolutionary companies with arrest should they visit the U.S.

With CANF among the most powerful and feared lobbyies on the Hill, annually depositing millions of dollars in the pockets of Congress, it is not inconceivable that a successor to Clinton could be maneuvered into a military confrontation with Cuba. As Jesse Helms said last year, "Forget Haiti. Invade Cuba!" With, on the one hand, the cold warriors so breathless for action, and on the other the developers, this could be the last opportunity to see Cuba - " "the jewel of the Caribbean" - in all its virgin, broken splendor.

Once out of Havana, one is silenced by the majesty of this country and finally understands what everyone has been fighting about. With its limitless expanses of rolling hills, rivers, and ocean, Cuba is truly God's country. The woes of underdevelopment for Cubans are precisely what makes this an island paradise for visitors. In the last 36 years, not a single skyscraper has been built and hundreds of kilometers of beaches remain virgin and untouched.

In Cayo Largo, a small island off the southern belly of Cuba, one sees the Caribbean as the conquistadors did. A 30-minute plane trip from Havana or Varadero lands one on this narrow slip of an island - 22 miles of naked splendor. Other than a postage stamp sized airport and four very commodious beachfront hotels - which range from attractive albeit Spartan rooms to semi-luxury spanking-new bungalows, there is nothing but ocean, sand and corral reefs. Endless aprons of beach are as clean and bright as turbinado sugar and one can walk out for nearly a mile into the teal-blue sea--literally "walk on water"--without getting one's ankles wet.

Courtesy buses leave the hotels several times a day chauffeuring guests to the harbor where one takes a ten-minute boat ride to Playa Sirena, the loveliest beach on the island. Here, days are best spent pursuing mindlessness. Jet skis are also available for rental and boats leave daily with scuba divers to Cayo Largo's famed coral reefs. Lunch - chicken, lobster or pork - is served daily on Playa Sirena to the accompaniment of some extraordinary Cuban musicians and dancers all of whom are worthy of Carnegie Hall debut. (As Tito Puente quipped recently, "When all this is over and the musicians start coming out of Cuba, we will all have to go back to school to catch up with them.") In the larger cities, one can attend concerts of some of the Cuban greats, such as Celina Gonzalez or the Afro-cuban virtuoso Lazaro Ros or Los Van Van, Cuba's answer to The Rolling Stones , which has been playing together for 25 years. Yet, some of the best music I've ever heard sprang from unrecorded singers on the streets of Santiago and Trinidad and the beaches of Cayo Largo. Perhaps most unforgettable was a huge mulata singing a cappella - a voice as clear and passionate as Piaf's, as joyful as Aretha's - belting it out for fun and for free outside a market in Old Havana.

One evening in Cayo Largo, I wandered over to one of the hotels, where one can eat outside on a pleasant Spanish-style patio, a stone's throw from the beach. The hotel was built and managed by Italians and several of them asked me to join them. Among my new found friends was an affable Italian businessman named Fabio Torricelli, who reported that his company arranges for more than 50,000 Italian tourists to visit Cuba each year, flying directly from Milan to Cayo Largo. "There would have been more this year," he says, "but people were scared off by the balsero crisis in August." After dinner, he regaled us with his trials and tribulations going through Cuban Customs. "There was a big to-do about my passport and a host of hostile questions before they let me pass," he said. Subsequently, he discovered that whenever he introduced himself, the normally amiable Cubans became quite chilly. "Finally, it was explained to me that I have the same name asthat American whom everybody hates here." The reference, of course, is to Congressman Robert Torricelli. "So I don't tell people my name anymore," he laughed.

Although Robert Vesco, the renegade financier and America's most famous fugitive, once had his second home here, these days, Cayo Largo is strictly for tourists--and upscale, chic tourism at that -primarily Germans, Argentines, Canadians and, of course, the Italians. Cubans only work here-- a prime example of the much resented "tourist apartheid." I learn that plans are in the works to throw up more hotels--450 more rooms in the next five years, bringing the total to 1200 rooms. Although the Cubans have repeatedly vowed that they will never over-develop, Varadero, the famous resort two hours west of Havana, is already showing the early symptoms of "Cancunization," as Spanish, Canadian, and Mexican investors have thrown up nearly a dozen hotels in the last ten years, with more on the drawing board. While it has given the resort the highest standard of living in Cuba, Varadero, is now barely recognizable from what it was only a decade ago.

No place in Cuba, however, has eluded modern life more successfully than Trinidad. A sixteenth-century former slave port on the southern coast, Cuba's oldest colonial city has been the recipient of enough precious pesos earmarked for restoration. If you know exactly how to get to Trinidad, and don't make any stops, you can make the journey from Havana in four hours, providing, of course, you have a good car, not a Russian Lada. Be sure to fill up with gasoline and find out where to get more along the Autopista. Do not assume that you can get gas at any petrol station along the way unless you're prepared for an overnight on the Autopista. It is the rare gas station, in fact, that has gas. It is also worth remembering that the leading cause of traffic deaths in Cuba is not from other cars but from collisions with such four-legged creatures as the wayward horse, goat, oxen, or cow out for an evening stroll. As there are no fences or rails along the highway, not to mention no lights, one drives at night at one's own peril.

Built in 1514, Trinidad is somewhat reminiscent of Mexico's San Cristobal de las Casas, with its soft pastel painted churches and Mission architecture, its grid of small squares and plazas neatly latticed together by cobblestone streets. Surrounded by a verdurus ring of mountains known as the Topes de Collantes, the town gazes out into the Caribbean.

In the center lies the main square, ringed by four museums, all once the grand mansions of wealthy colonialists. The Museo Romantico is perhaps the loveliest, though the Municipal Museum is unquestionably grander (the other two, both worth a visit, are the Archeological Museum and the Architecture Museum). The leakiness of the People's Paradise of Cuba is never more evident than when visiting Trinidad's historical district. Jineteros--street hustlers--swarm around foreigners like so many bees. Even the docents in the museums are quick to hawk their wares as they conduct tours.

The best sightseeing comes from simply strolling the narrow stone streets and peering into the opened shuttered doors of people's homes. Invariably, one is invited inside by the gracious locals. I passed some time with three generations of the Morena-Zembrano clan, ranging in age from 5 to 82, in their sprawling Mission-style home near the main square. In the courtyard, the children played next to a huge fenced pig, soon to be slaughtered for Christmas dinner.

The next day, I am invited to lunch with four young art restorers of Trinidad's preservation program. They complain about the shoestring budget and the staggeringly inept bureaucracy. "Things have never been harder," says Macholo Lopez, a Trinidad native, who heads the project. Nevertheless, he says, Fidel fever still runs strong here, notably among blacks and those over fifty. Those most disaffected are the young--angry about an uncertain future. Most balseros have been, in fact, young white males. A taxi driver told me that the flight of Cubans was having a catastophic effect upon women. "Between the men killed in Angola and the men that have fled to the States," he joked, "the ratio of women to men is about eight to one."

Cojimar, the fishing town popularized by Ernest Hemingway in The Old Man and The Sea, is not more than an hour outside Havana and makes for an interesting day trip. In August 1994, it won fame as the departure site for nearly 30,000 balseros who fled during the government-sanctioned exodus. Previously it had been the site of some very nasty unreported riots after police shot at a fleeing vessel, killing dozens of fleeing Cubans including a pregnant woman.

Cojimar also lays claim to a lovely restaurant with enchanting window views of the sea called La Terraza. The food isn't bad and one can actually find toilet paper, that most precious of commodities, in the rest rooms. At meal times, one can depend on running into Hemingway's old pal, Gregorio Fuentes, who in exchange for being the premier tourist attraction gets free meals. Ancient and grizzled at 97, he was holding court to a swarm of Italian journalists when I sat down. When he was finished charming them, he hobbled over to my table, cane in one hand, cigar in another, demanding to know when "the god dam U.S. Government is going to end this blockade," complaining that hes not getting enough medication because of it. After accepting dollars from the restaurants patrons, he returned to his table and ate his dinner.

A half hour's drive from Cojimar, one can visit the Hemingway estate, Finca Vigia, now a museum. A graceful white shuttered home with views all the way to Havana, the house has been preserved just as Hemingway left it, with his personally designed furniture, books, posters, and record collection, even his booze. The grounds are quite beautiful and the boat, in which he and Gregorio Fuentes sculled the Caribbean, sits atop the tennis court. Free tours are offered by an impressively articulate guide named Joaquin Bernardo Gomez. Twenty- six-years-old, black, Gomez is one of those Cubans who live up to all the conceits about Cuban superiority. He spoke letter-perfect, accent-free English, learned, he said, in school and listening to Christian Science Monitor radio. Even slang expressions like "being 86-ed" rolled off his tongue effortlessly. He gave a lively, informative tour of the great white hunter's house, but I found him to be far the more interesting.

The western province of Pinar Del Rio, home to the fertile Vegas that produce Cuba's incomparable tobacco, is a must-do journey for cigar afficionados. It is not, as I discovered, a day trip from Havana, at least not if you're driving a 1971 Russian Lade bereft of headlights - as I was and you don't mind driving the Autopista back home at night - as I do. Figure on three hours each way and more if you plan to stop and sightsee on the way.

On my first failed attempt to Pinar del Rio, I ended up passing the afternoon in Soroa, an idyllic, woodsy town about an hour and half west of Havana. Most of the hotels and facilities have been abandoned. Evidently, most foreign tourists have little curiosity about Cuba's innards opting invariably for the beaches. However, it's a lovely place to drive about, hike in the hills, and chat with the locals.

A bit further west in the small town of Las Terrazas one finds the Hotel Moka, a highly touted "eco-tourism" resort, - the idea here being to capitalize on underdevelopment. (A similar campaign in health care has resulted in a renaissance in folk remedies called medicine verde.) However, all that the Cubans seem to mean by "eco-tourism'' is a bucolic, uncommercialized setting; such environmental basics such as recycling and unleaded gas are unheard of anywhere on the island. The Moka Hotel is the brainchild of Osmany Cienfuegos, Castro's tourism strategist and the brother of the martyred revolutionary hero Camilo Cienfuegos. In fact, it surpasses expectations, built into the forested hills near a lake, and offering boating, hunting and horseback riding in the mountains. Few, however, seem to have discovered it yet. In the adjoining outdoor restaurant the only other diners were a party of six German and French women.

On a later visit, when I was able to rent an air-conditioned Renault, I finally made the trip to Pinar del Rio. Everywhere in Cuba people hitchhike, including on the Autopista. I picked up a young couple sleeping in the grass after asking them for directions. They had just married, she a nurse and he a 28-year-old engineer who didn't weigh a feather more than 120 pounds. I invited them to join me for lunch at a local restaurant, a luxury that I knew they could never afford. Halfway through the meal, they confided their plan to flee their homeland in a balso built to carry eight people to the Mexican shoreline. Suddenly, my ham and cheese sandwich became even more tasteless than it was. I urged them to abandon their dangerous escape plan and wait for political change. "There is no future here for us," he said emphatically. "We can't wait forever."

In the capital city of Pinar del Rio, one can visit the cigar factories and watch how the country's premier export is hand rolled into puros - cigars. Twenty-five minutes north is the sleepy town of Vinales, which has the feel of a Cuban Stonehenge. Vinales sits in an exquisite valley of drop-dead splendor, surrounded by clusters of huge anthropomorphic-looking boulders known as mogotes. An extraordinary lattice of caves, waterfalls, and even an underground river bear witness to the region's prehistoric life, when Vinales was believed to be under the sea as does a towering, dramatic mural painted on a massive boulder in the late 1950's by Leovigildo Gonzalez, an assistant of the Mexican master, Diego Rivera. The place to stay is La Ermita, a comfortable rustic hotel with daunting views of the mogotes, which boasts the best food I've ever eaten in Cuba. Despite the miracle of great cooking, there were less than thirty guests, bestowing the place with a lonely, almost haunted silence.

Santiago de Cuba, on the eastern corner of island, is my favorite place in Cuba. Here, the sun is hotter, the people blacker, and the Spanish spoken even faster. The cradle of Afro-Cuban culture, Santiago is legendary for its music and is the birthplace of a powerful, sensuous brew of sound known as guajiro (country), whose most famous exponent is the awe-inspiring Celina Gonzalez (she had her first hit in 1948 with "Que Viva Chango''). The rivalry between the locals and the habaneros is a few centuries old, and ranges from who got here first to whose smarter and who won the Revolution. Santiago, heralded as the Ciudad de Los Heroes, is known as the birthplace of the Revolution, (not to mention of Fidel Castro), though plenty of people insist it was won by students in the streets of Havana. Streets, parks, and buildings are named for the martyrs of the Revolution, most notably for Frank Pais, the twenty-two-year-old leader who was killed in an ambush early on, and for Abel Santamaria, Fidel's unfortunate comrade at the unsuccessful storming of the Moncada Garrison in the center of town. This ritualized memorializing is propaganda at its most potent--ever reminding Cubans of the searing brutality of their past. Every Cuban child knows that upon his capture by Batista's troops, Santamaria had his eyes gouged out, that his comrade, Boris Santa Coloma had his testicles cut off, and on and on. For Cuban Revolution buffs, a visit to Moncada, now a museum, should be high on the itinerary. For those interested in the history of Santiago, the fortress of El Morro built by the conquistadores on the lookout for enemy pirates, is the place to go.

Although Santiago is only a 90-minute flight from Havana, be prepared for possible interminable delays. On one excursion, the departure time was delayed four hours and authorities changed the airport location twice before take-off. On a return trip from Santiago, the plane made an unscheduled stop, delivering its human cargo to a military base an hour outside of Havana. As olive green-clad soldiers rushed toward the plane, I imagined a coup had taken place. The Cubans on board were far more blase, long inured to such digressions. The Hotel Santiago, in the center of town, which gives itself four stars, is the choice of visiting businessmen. I prefer staying by the sea and recommend the hotels in Parque Bacanao, a fifty-mile long nature preserve along the Atlantic coast. My personal favorite is the Hotel Bucanero, because it is the newest with attractive, cheerful rooms and its own private beach pocketed inside a broad rocky cove. Not to be missed is a trek to La Gran Piedra (literally the Big Rock), which is midway between the center of the city and the beach. It takes about twenty minutes to drive up the mountain from the beach, followed by another twenty to ascend to the lookout point on its summit, but the vistas of the Sierras Maestras, the ocean, and the city will not soon leave you.

It was while swimming in Santiago, that I came across a French Canadian couple on a float who held forth that the allure of Cuba was precisely the absence of Americans. "When the Americans start coming again," the woman opined , "you won't see us anymore." However, there are plenty of Americans in Cuba. Over the years, tens of thousands have disregarded the U.S. travel ban. I met two retired couples from Detroit who told me that they simply drove over the Canadian border and caught a direct flight to Havana from Toronto. This was their third trip. In fact, more than a dozen Americans have been living in Cuba since before the Revolution. Among the most interesting is Lorna Burdsall, a former disciple of Martha Graham, who continues to dance and perform at the age of 66. "I never thought I'd be staying here," the sprightly Burdsall tells me from the terrace of her seventh floor Vedado apartment overlooking the Almendares River and the Atlantic Ocean. "I met this guy at a mambo dance on Halloween night in 1953 at the International House up at Columbia University." He was a wealthy Cuban named Manuel Pinero, with freckles and a mop of red hair.

Burdsall, reared in a very proper Republican Boston family, ended up marrying her Caribbean mambo partner in New York and followed him home to Havana in 1955. And when he signed up with a band of guerrillas in the Sierra Maestras, Burdsall went along for the adventure. Pinero, who is still known by his nom de guerre, Barbaroja (literally Redbeard) became an ardent fidelista and later a kry Cabinet official. After twenty years of marriage, Burdsall divorced her affable albeit skirt chasing Cuban. Why? "Because Martha Graham used to say, 'never get caught up in a pattern.'" Her son with Pinero, who barely speaks English, has made her a grandmother.

Although Burdsall claims not to be political, she says, "obviously, if I'm continuing to walk up seven flights of steps with no running water, and a toilet that doesn't work, I'm taking a stand." Asked what keeps her in Cuba, she gripped the ledge of her coveted terrace and leveled her gaze on the Caribbean sun melting into the sea. She loves Cuban art, Cuban music, and Cuban dance, she says, - "everything except the theater which is pretty terrible here." Trinidad is her favorite place and she loves walking the streets of Old Havana. "There is still perfumed air in Cuba," she said, "and the feeling of spaciousness. I love Cuba because I'm never bored. Every day, one never knows what's going to happen."