The changing face of travel to Cuba

The changing face of travel to Cuba
Wed Aug 2, 5:14 PM ET

This week
Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power as he underwent surgery, spurring
much speculation about post-Castro Cuba. Here at Adventure Beat we
wondered what a change in leadership might mean for American travelers,
who for years have been frustrated in their curiosity about our
near-neighbor in the Caribbean. We turned to writer Tom Miller for
insight on the matter. His book, "Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee
Travels Through Castro's Cuba," is as close as most of us have been able
to get to the country.

For decades now, the quickest way to get a laugh on the streets of
Havana has been to tell a joke about Fidel Castro — his policies, his
temper, and, yes, his longevity. Even the jokes that don't mention him
criticize life on his island. "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
the little Cuban boy was asked. "A tourist!" he replied.

And why not? Tourists have access to much of Cuba that natives can't
enjoy. Canadians and Europeans arrive by the charterful, whisked to Club
Med-type resorts where the only Cubans they run into are the help and
the entertainers. Industrial tourism has overtaken sugar and mining as
the country's leading hard-currency earner, second only to cash sent by
overseas relatives. More inventive tourists come in smaller groups or
solo, to catch a whiff of one of the only Communist countries around.
Bicyclists, scuba-divers, naturalists, vintage car enthusiasts,
Marxists, Hemingway devotees— they crowd the streets of Havana and
Santiago, they linger in small towns, they pause in coastal villages to
inhale the salty Caribbean air.

Among the many questions people are asking now that Castro is closer to
death than life (go ahead, Fidel, prove me wrong) is this: How much of
travel to Cuba will change? For almost 20 years now I've visited at
least once a year and often twice, first for work (my book), then for
family (my in-laws). I can equivocate with the best of them: Fidel has
been good for some people and a disaster for others. Yet even among
those who have benefited most by him — mainly rural and non-white — the
daily sacrifices that Castro demands of his paisanos have grown
tiresome, frustrating and disillusioning.

Castro's obsession with the United States has served him well. While the
U.S. has found common ground with other Communist countries, there's so
much baggage with Fidel's mere name that few in official Washington want
to be seen as accommodating him. For that reason, it's been in
politicians' interest to support an impossibly unworkable policy rather
than to consider another, less belligerent one.

And that brings us back to travel, something over which the White House
has considerable influence. There's a mouthful of a
Treasury Department bureaucracy called the Office of Foreign Assets
Control (OFAC) that enforces policy about travel to Cuba. Under
President Clinton, OFAC allowed "educational" trips to Cuba, and boy did
we educate ourselves — unions, bird-watchers, alumni groups, gallery
curators, athletes, architects, law students, bicyclists; practically
any outfit that had a cohesive identity could get an OFAC license.
Anyone who wanted to visit and couldn't find a group simply wasn't
looking hard enough. A colleague and I jumped through that window of
opportunity, and took some twenty emerging writers from the U.S. to Cuba
for a week of bi-national workshops with a couple dozen young Cuban
writers, a sort of literary détente.

I recall one week in March 1999 when you could find more Americans in
Cuba than in Minot, North Dakota. The Baltimore Orioles, accompanied by
ESPN, were playing the Cuban national team. Ry Cooder was producing a
Buena Vista Social Club album. A troupe of American songwriters met for
a week with Cuban counterparts preparing for a bi-national concert at
the Karl Marx Theater. For a fleeting moment in history it seemed the
embargo had ended, that free trade — in culture, anyway — had emerged
victorious.

Well, those days are gone. Educational trips, out the window. Cultural
exchanges, locked in a dark, abandoned building. Person-to-person
diplomacy, sunk deep into the Caribbean. The only groups getting OFAC
licenses these days are religious in nature. Meanwhile, travelers from
every other country in the world are free to drive slowly by the
remaining sugar fields, take in rural tobacco warehouses, and catch a
night game between Matanzas and Sancti Spíritus.

This will change, I predict, six months after Cuba is lead by someone
whose last name isn't Castro. Foreign travelers traipsing through Cuba
have been healthy for the country in many ways, and when Americans join
that parade, we'll all be the smarter for it. In the interim these are
the possibilities: smooth transition (likely); civil unrest (unlikely);
U.S. invasion (least likely). Contingency plans have been on the boards
for a good while now, and the official obfuscation coming from
post-operation Havana is part of the plan.

Cuba will likely change economically before it does politically, and as
the island moves into territory as unexplored as some mountains in its
magnificent Sierra Maestra range, 11 million Cubans could find
conditions getting yet tighter. For foreigners, though, these same
restrictions may still allow visitors to stroll Havana's Malecón seaside
boulevard, play dominos in a Santiago park near the Bacardí Museum, or
take in the colonial architecture of a well-preserved Trinidad. Don't be
surprised, though, if you run into nostalgia for the Castro regime.

http://travel.news.yahoo.com/b/rba_daily/rba_daily8102;_ylt=A9G_R0biENNE_mMA4wahO84F;_ylu=X3oDMTBjamtzcG1mBHNlYwNoei1zdG9yeQ--