Tom Miller - Cuba, Hot and Cold

I want to get there before it changes.

If I heard that once I heard it five hundred times. The speakers were invariably middle-class Americans who, having learned that diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States were warming, hoped to see Havana and the rest of the country in its pre-McDonalds mode. In short, before capitalism overran communism.

Before it changes? You dont understand. You are the change, dear reader, you are the change.

Nostalgia for old American clunkers? To get misty-eyed for classic American cars is to long for the embargo, because thats the only reason those cars are there. When you see chauffeur-driven vintage American convertibles tooling down the Malecn with smiling tourists in the backseats waving to impoverished Cubans on the nearby sidewalk, well, thats only one step away from occupiers acknowledging the occupied.

Take your time, chicos and chicas. The change you want to precede isnt going to take place anytime soon.

My travels through Cuba, lasting from a few days to many months, took place during the Special Period in a Time of Peace, a euphemism for the islands economic free fall. Although the Cold War was over and done with elsewhere, U.S. foreign policy ensured years of convolutedchange when nothing in Cuba was available all the time. I wrote occasional accounts of Cuban life in that era, and now, looking back on it, I see a pattern. Without realizing it, I was there before the change.

In those days, right-wing first-wave Cubans in America discouraged visits and even phone calls between the two countries. Isolation was the attitude of the day.

Back in those dark ages, communication between the United States and Cuba was extremely difficult. Few Cubans had home phones, and fewer of those functioned adequately. Neighbors used neighbors phones all the time. When I wanted to arrange a call to Cuba Id either send a telegram a few days early suggesting the time and number Id call, or Id use a gray-market operator in Canada who, at an agreed-upon time, would link my phone line with a Cuban line, allowing a third-country conversation to take place. The Canadian would bill me for both calls and add a service charge. And mail service? Ha! It often took four or more weeks for a letter to get to Cuba, and you were lucky if it actually reached its destination, To add insult to injury, because there were no relations between the two neighbors, mail had to go through a third country (i.e., Mexico). Is it any wonder that the only safe and secure way to send a letter to Cuba was to have a traveling friend hand-deliver it?

I had breakfast one morning in 1990 with a Miami-based journalist who had to leave for the States early. She handed me a short stack of envelopes, all neatly addressed; could I deliver these letters? A day or so later I found myself in Barrio Chino and realized that one of the letters was addressed to a woman there. I knocked on the door, Regla Albarrn answered it, and two and a half years later we were married.

The Cold War carried on, and the U.S. government hoped to learn what it could about Cubas economy through old-fashioned spying. They wanted to know the availability of crops at neighborhood mercados and how the day-to-day produce supply was holding up. Most workers at the U.S. Interests Sectionour embassy that wasnt an embassylived in Miramar and discussed the availability ofhousehold goods. Diplomats were allowed to shop at the Diplotienda, a supermarket for foreigners; even U.S. Marines who lived in a complex on Seventh Avenue were allowed to shop there. Because I was integrated into Cuban society and traveled through the country with some ease, the CIA tried to recruit me.

But not for the first time. That was back in the winter of 1968 when, at age twenty-one, I worked for a news agency in Washington, D.C. We covered college news, the antiVietnam War movement, and occasionally student movements overseas. Now and then wed get phone calls from readers wanting details beyond the stories. One man who expressed interest invited me for dinner at a walk-down Dupont Circle Chinese restaurant. He explained that his organization was looking for a young American journalist to travel through Latin America filing reports about student movements. Theyd cover my expenses, Id be enrolled in Spanish courses, I could visit my brotherthen a Peace Corpsman in South Americaand I would be free to sell these stories to any publication I wanted, as long as I faithfully filed stories on Latin American student movements with him and his unnamed organization. The fellow was very suspect. He operated an African art gallery but asked that I not meet him there. Once he paid for our dinner, I never heard from him again.