Next week, my wife and I head to Cuba for a week at the Cayo Coco resort area. I’m looking forward to this special return engagement since the last time we went was in 1978, just a couple of years after Cuba had opened to tourists. At that time the “hotels” were the expropriated mansions and guest quarters of the American elite that had been forced to abandon their playhouses after the Revolution. I believe we stayed at one of the guest houses on the DuPont estate (I could be wrong). The room was pleasant enough if you didn’t mind cockroaches the size of lobsters and the lack of a toilet seat (plus sandpaper for toilet paper), but the food was a killer: Every meal consisted of soup made with water, flour and salt, plus a piece of chicken, beef, or pork thrown into the deep-fryer and served with canned Russian beets…..every meal! There was no variety! I did like the freshly made hot bread rolls though, until my last day when I found a piece of dogshit stuck to the bottom of one that I had bitten into (apparently the baking pans were thrown into the alley to cool, where animals roamed freely over them). What’s worse than a bread roll with shit stuck to the bottom you might ask? Half a bread roll with shit stuck to the bottom!

The beaches and water were spectacular though, with one exception: Every morning around 10 AM as you basked in the warm sea, crop-dusting planes would fly overhead and bomb you with DDT to kill the mosquitoes and other insects. We quickly learned to duck underwater for 30 seconds to avoid the rainstorm of dead bugs that ensued.

Day trips to Havana were of limited interest since you couldn’t get off the bus and there were soldiers with machine guns at every street corner looking suspiciously into the buses for seditious American spies posing as innocent Canadian goobers.

On a positive note, the people were very friendly and extremely proud of their Revolution despite having to line up once a year for a pair of new shoes (and hope they had your size, otherwise wait till next year). Tipping anyone was strictly forbidden and quite impossible anyway since you had to turn in all your foreign currency upon arrival and then get it back when you presented receipts for anything you bought that balanced with the Cuban pesos you still had left (which you then re-exchanged for your own money back!). The locals learned to bypass this restriction by ogling your clothing and letting it be known that if you happened to forget your jeans in the hotel upon departure, it would be much appreciated. Suffice it to say, we came home a lot lighter in both weight and clothing.

There were small compensations though….since Italy was one of the few countries still trading with Cuba, there were more Alfa Romeos than I had ever seen in one place…more than in Italy per capita, I suspect. And the old Amercan cars! Truly something to behold. In those days the cigars were still authentic and cheap, and the rum was plentiful and delicious too.