Guide to Cuba

Cuba is unlike any other place on earth. What draws people to this fascinating Caribbean island is much more than beaches, sun, and cheap drinks, though there are plenty of all three for those who want them. Cuba's rich culture, unique political history, and continued economic hardship make it one of the most eye-opening countries that experienced travelers can still discover. Seeing the best of Cuba means grooving to its intoxicating music, marveling at how Cubans improvise on a daily basis to make ends meet, and visiting a land in which the past 50 years seem to have crept by.

Cuba is an enduring enigma. By any conventional measuring stick, the Caribbean island should be a speck in the global geopolitical ocean. Yet for nearly half a century, this complicated nation of 11.3 million people has commanded the world stage in a manner wholly incommensurate with its small size and economic insignificance. A former colony of Spain and playground of American high rollers, Cuba struck out on its own in the late 1950s, and the nation remains a hot topic in the corridors of the world's power brokers. Fiercely independent but rarely free, and the unlikeliest of major players, Cuba arouses passions like perhaps no other nation.

For decades, those inflamed feelings have focused on the Communist regime that one man, Fidel Castro, brazenly engineered. Hated and worshiped in almost equal measure, Castro -- the longest-surviving head of state in the world -- has defied critics, confounded pundits, and frustrated his own followers. Slowly, though, the world is learning that Cuba is more than a coveted property in a high stakes game of Risk. Wider exposure to Cuban culture (especially music), the island's colonial treasures, and the Cuban people has given rise to a love affair that transcends international politics.

Cuba was once the dazzling iconoclast, held in awe by much of Latin America for its willingness to stand up to the United States. Lately, though, Castro finds himself increasingly isolated, and few are those who don't believe that Cuba is a Communist dinosaur. Castro has promoted foreign investment and joint ventures in oil, mining, and tourism, but Cuba remains willfully individualistic.

The country's uniqueness is also the source of its phenomenal appeal. Cuba is a puzzling anachronism, a creaky and sputtering country caught in a tortuous time warp. Many of Havana's crumbling colonial buildings are little more than facades, propped up like a movie set. While most of the planet plunges ahead at a dizzying digital pace, Cuba crawls along in slow motion. Homes, which Cubans do not actually own but are instead given title to by the state, have only the most rudimentary appliances -- if they have any at all. Vintage Chevy and Cadillac jalopies from the '40s and '50s, their chrome fenders pock-marked and their engines patched together with a hodgepodge of parts, lumber down the streets of dimly lit cities. In rural areas, even antique cars are a luxury; transportation is more commonly by oxen-led cart and rickety iron bicycle.

To many visitors, Cuba offers a mystifying but welcome retreat from the whiz-bang of technology and convenience most of us have become accustomed to. Groups of underemployed men while away the hours playing dominoes on card tables set up in the street. Septets of octogenarian musicians play traditional Cuban son, music with roots in the 1920s and whose rhythms are largely unaffected by outside influence and changing global tastes. Neighbors gather on door stoops in the wilting heat of the late afternoon to chat and fan themselves, and they form friendly networks working together to solve problems of accommodation, transportation, plumbing, and electricity.

Many travelers, convinced that Cuba cannot forever remain a land of time travel, hasten to experience the country before it gets reeled in by a ravenous Western world. Cuba's tourist potential is unlimited, and a desperate government has embraced tourism as its best and perhaps only hope to bring in hard currency and employ large numbers of people. The largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba is abundantly blessed with palm trees, sultry temperatures, hip-swiveling rhythms, stunning beaches, warm people, and a surfeit of rum and the world's finest hand-rolled cigars. In the mid-1980s, only about 250,000 annual visitors traveled to Cuba; in 2005, as many as 3 million visitors are expected. Tourism has now surpassed the source of Cuba's original wealth, the sugar industry, to become the country's top revenue earner. If all Americans were allowed to travel legally, politicians and hoteliers reason, Cuba might receive as many as 10 million visitors annually. Yet massive tourism is still a dream in Cuba. Most travelers still cling to package tours and tourist resorts clustered on beaches.

In an irony almost too great to overstate, the U.S. dollar is now king in Cuba. In the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of the state subsidies that had effectively propped Cuba up for a couple of decades, the Cuban government introduced the "Special Period," which was just another name for extreme austerity and hardship. In need of hard currency, the government made it legal for Cubans to hold U.S. dollars, even establishing dollar-only stores. Though most Cubans earn their salaries in lowly pesos, a great many products and foodstuffs are available only in dollar stores (which are considerably nicer and better lighted than peso stores).

Modern Cuba is a tangled mass of contradictions. Besides the dollar's unlikely proliferation in the economy, this socialist regime, ostensibly founded upon an egalitarian revolution, doesn't allow its own citizens to step foot into tourist enclaves, including most resorts, hotels, and restaurants. The centralized economy is dependent upon capitalistic joint ventures with foreign investors from Canada, Germany, and Spain. A long list of goods and services are readily available to foreigners but cannot be enjoyed by nationals. Plenty of Cubans survive only with the assistance of political and religious opponents of the regime who've fled the country and send hundreds of millions of dollars each year to relatives.

Cubans often fall back on an all-purpose national refrain to describe what their lives are like: No es fácil. It isn't easy. Cubans are specialists in what might be called the arte de inventar, the art of inventing solutions where there are none. That means fighting to make ends meet through odd jobs and hustling. Setting up neighborhood networks that distribute contraband goods, such as cigars nicked from the tobacco factory. Running illicit paladares in living rooms and backyards, serving black market lobster or beef. Driving unlicensed taxis fueled by pilfered gasoline. Cuba is an entire nation jimmy-rigged and bandaged with duct tape.

Unless you're ensconced in a gleaming, all-inclusive beach resort, where the realities of Cuban life are whitewashed for the benefit of tourists, the grinding deficiencies of the Cuban economy and bottomless needs of the Cuban people are hard to ignore. Talk to almost any Cuban and he'll tell you about appallingly overcrowded conditions, state rations that don't cover basic needs, the scarcity of basic commodities, and the $10 to $20 monthly salaries paid in the almost worthless Cuban currency, the peso. Workers trained by the state as engineers and doctors instead scramble for more lucrative positions as bellboys, while others cobble together a few dollars from occasional, often extralegal, odd jobs. Ration booklets don't suffice: just 6 pounds of rice and sugar, 20 ounces of beans, 2 pounds of sugar, 1 pound of chicken, two bottles of cooking oil, some bread, plus some cigarettes, coffee, and a few other goods. Anything beyond those miserly provisions -- the odd piece of beef, a pair of decent shoes -- must be purchased on the black market or in dollar-only stores.

Yet Cuba is remarkably free of the execrable poverty sadly common in Africa, India, and even other parts of Latin America. Housing is provided by the state -- homeless people sleeping on the streets are nowhere to be seen in Cuba -- and all citizens receive regular food rations. Many appear surprisingly well dressed, no doubt a privilege of possessing a job that earns a few dollars or having family members outside of Cuba who send money that helps ease the pain.

Fidel Castro took power with a commitment to remake the nation by overhauling its economy, land ownership, education system, and health care. On a social agenda, Cuba has been remarkably successful. All Cubans receive excellent free health care (though most hospitals and pharmacies are lacking in the most basic supplies, like aspirin and X-ray plates). Compulsory state education through high school is free, and the national university system has produced some of the world's most accomplished professionals in medicine and science. Average life expectancy rose from 57 years in 1958 to 77 in 2003 -- the highest in Latin America. Infant mortality, just 6.45 per 1,000 births, is the lowest in the region and equal to or better than many developed countries. Literacy rates are above 95% (the government claims to have erased illiteracy entirely), violent crime is almost nonexistent, and the pervasive sexism and racism of pre-revolutionary Cuba have given way to a more equitable landscape.

Those achievements receive less attention, though, than Cuba's strangled economy and continued political repression. Opponents of the socialist regime, both outside of Cuba and increasingly within the country, make the case that Cuba is a nation with no semblance of democracy. A single political party dominates all Cuban life. Cubans cannot speak freely, the media are state-owned and closely orchestrated by the Communist Party, and ordinary citizens have no rights to travel beyond Cuba.

Hundreds of thousands of Castro's early opponents fled Cuba in the early days of the Revolution, when the state was busy expropriating private property, land, and businesses. Since then thousands more have tried, only a few successfully, to make it to U.S. shores, often in rickety balseros (rafts). The less daring but equally hopeful form daily queues at the U.S. Interests Office in Havana and other foreign embassies desperately hoping for exit visas. On three major occasions, including the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, Castro has sought to relieve pressure by allowing large groups, many of them deemed "undesirables," to emigrate.

The U.S. trade embargo and travel restrictions are still firmly in place, and President George W. Bush made them even more stringent. But the embargo has done nothing to bring down Castro and little to force him to adopt more inclusive, democratic policies. In fact, the U.S. stance has emboldened Fidel Castro, giving him a tangible enemy to rally his troops against, and may have even stifled change in Cuba. As one Cuban told me, "Fidel eats well every day. Don't worry about him. As for the rest of us, well, that's another question."

Despite years of difficulty and isolation, La Revolución, now nearly 50 years old, continues to be the nation's rallying cry and raison d'etre. Schoolchildren don't become Boy or Girl Scouts, but Young Communist Pioneers. Secretive local chapters of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution keep tabs on dissenters and those not upholding the party line. Throughout the country, giant billboards function like government pep talks to convince a population more worried about shoes and food than ideology to stay on the path. Billboards proclaim quaint notions like VICTORIA DE IDEAS (A Victory of Ideas), VIVIMOS EN UN PAIS LIBRE (We Live in a Free Country), LA REVOLUCION SOMOS NOSOTROS (We Are the Revolution), and even the melancholy rationalization SOMOS FELICES AQUI (We're Happy Here). Larger-than-life portraits of heroes and martyrs like Che Guevara (the roguish icon of revolution the world over), José Martí, and Camilo Cienfuegos guard the entrances to towns and are plastered on the walls of shops, offices, and homes. Perhaps fittingly, most of these billboards and portraits are now worn and faded.

Amid the extraordinary dilapidation of Havana and other decaying towns, it's near impossible for travelers not to wonder: What must this place once have looked like? Formerly grand, and now just badly faded and deteriorated buildings stand -- if barely so -- as harsh evidence of 4 decades of frustration, empty state coffers, and bankrupt promises of an idealistic, battle-hardened regime. Cubans are exhorted to fight on to bring the Revolution to fruition, but many Cubans, especially the young who've known nothing but Fidel, are weary of waiting. Un año más -- one more year, they say.

Cuba, though, is as exhilarating as it is perplexing. One of the most exciting, mind-bending and sensation-tingling countries one can visit, Cuba is a flood of indelible images. Many are inspiring, others heartbreaking. An open-air cafe with a smiling band of preternaturally cool musicians locked in a perfect swing groove. Huge crowds of hitchhiking Cubans gathered on the side of the road, desperate for a lift. Noisy Carnival rumbas and conga groups piercing the heat with Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Sexy couples with well-oiled hips gliding across dance floors. Those combative billboards forlornly pitched along the side of empty highways. Crowded camellos, crazy people-hauler flatbed trucks that look like urban transportation in a post-apocalyptic world. Mile-long lines for ice cream at Coppelia shops. Kids playing pelota, the national pastime of baseball, with a stick in the hollows of a ruined building.

But perhaps the truest picture of Cuba comes from the people themselves. Resilient and eternally patient Cubans somehow find the will to rise above devastating poverty, shortages, dense bureaucracy, and political authoritarianism. Hospitable like few others, they invite visitors into their cramped homes even if they've nothing to offer them. Schoolchildren, like an ad for the U.N. in identical maroon and mustard-colored uniforms, smile sweetly for photographs.

Cuba remains a quandary and a country full of potential. Hope can be seen in the painstaking restoration of landmark colonial buildings in Habana Vieja, whose decrepitude only a few years ago was the perfect metaphor for Cuba. Who can predict what will become of Cuba after Castro? Hope grows on both sides of the political spectrum for greater engagement, but as always, intransigence lingers. And Cuba soldiers on.

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