Travel Reference
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driving down the spine of Cuba, into the vast green interior of the island. Hitchhikers were
scattered along the highway, as were people selling various things—garlic, strings of fish.
They ran at you as you passed, yelling and seeming to come too close to the car.
Iwokeupthenextdaytothesoundsofmorningpoolactivity.Watersplashingonconcrete.
Insistent, unfamiliar bird song. Sleepy murmurs of people rubbing lotion on themselves.
Hotel carts rattled by outside the double glass doors. It was about 8
A.M
. in Varadero on a
warm spring day, which I'm pretty sure is literally Utopia, in some vague historico-linguistic
way: the northern shore of Cuba, which supposedly moved Columbus to call this the most
beautifulplacehumaneyeshadeverseen.MywifehasathingaboutgoingtoVaraderowhen
shegoestoCuba.Idon'tknowifsheevenlikesit.Shedoesitforherfamily.Tothemitwould
seem insane to skip it—it was the place they most wanted to go when they lived there—not
to go, on returning, would be like taking a trip to Keystone, South Dakota, and not going to
see Mount Rushmore.
Sitting up in my twin bed, I looked over at the queen bed—they were already gone. The
massive cafeteria operation swung into motion for only a couple of hours each morning. You
hadtobethere forthestampede. Weweremovingthroughdifferent micro-Cubas soquickly;
too quickly, really. The day before we rode horses through the jungle to see the ruins of an-
cient coffee plantations and the stone huts where the slaves were kept. We passed cooper-
ative villages of
campesinos
in the forest and heard political speeches coming from loud-
speakers, something about the new agriculture laws. The previous night, coming in on the
suddenly pitch-black Cuban highways, zooming up to unlighted
ROAD CLOSED
signs at 60
miles an hour, swerving to miss car-killing potholes and horse-drawn wagons . . . that was
already dreamlike. And now we were navigating the omelet and cereal stations, in lines of
mainly European tourists: Germans, Italians, Central Europeans, and also Brazilians, Argen-
tines, and Canadians. (You know when you're meeting a Canadian, because they always ask,
in the same shocked tone, “How did you get into the country?” It's an opportunity to remind
youthatyoucan'tgolegally,andtheycan.Andbyextension,thattheycomefromamoreen-
lightenedland.“Youneedtogrowupaboutthatstuff,”oneguythatImetatanaturepreserve
said,towhichIwantedtotellhimtogetalargeandpowerfulpopulationofCubanexilesand
move them into an election-determining province of Canada and call me in the morning.)
The cook at the omelet station, when he asked where I was from and I told him, put up his
fists like a boxer, as if we were about to have it out, then started laughing. He told me that he
had family in the United States, in Florida. That's what everyone says. You can't understand
thetransnationallydysfunctional,mutuallyimplicatedrelationshipbetweenCubaandMiami,
which defies all embargoes and policies of “definitive abandonment,” until you realize that
the line often cuts through families, almost always, in fact. People make all sorts of inner ad-
justments.ItoldthemanIhatedtheembargo(theblockade,astheycallit)andthoughtitwas
stupid, which was both true and what he wanted to hear. He gave me a manly clap-grasp. I
