Cuba: Prohibida la entrada

In 2004, I traveled to Cuba as a student in a course on sustainable agricultural systems. On my application, I listed my reasons for wanting to join the course: to practice Spanish, and to learn about agriculture (a topic I truly knew nothing about). But there was really only one reason I had for choosing Cuba: it was forbidden.

Travel to Cuba had been effectively banned for American citizens since the early 1960s, with few exceptions. Back then, one exception applied for students, who could obtain short-term educational visas. So under the auspices of my university, I could legally visit Cuba.

Even with a backdoor way in, the travel embargo added an air of danger to the prospect of travel. Before I left, people gave me a lot of strange warnings. The provenance of these warnings still remains a mystery to me, as most of those who gave me advice had never actually been to Cuba. Some of it was typical travel-paranoia: carry your passport with you at all times (all Cubans want to steal American passports so they can escape); don’t ever get into a private vehicle (you might be kidnapped); avoid any public gatherings (they might turn into violent demonstrations against Castro, or the United States, depending on what way the winds are blowing that day).

All of my tentative well-wishers did agree on one thing: whatever you do, don’t get sick there! Miami is only a hundred miles away, but arranging a medevac flight would be an expensive logistical nightmare, though less of a nightmare than, say, visiting a Cuban hospital. (As I would later learn, healthcare in Cuba actually ranks extremely high in international indices, even ahead of the United States by some metrics.)

Another piece of advice came from a classmate whose grandparents fled the revolution in ’59. Though he had never been to Cuba himself, he told me that I should never talk about communism with anyone, under any circumstances. If a Cuban says that he or she actually likes Cuba, they are lying. No one could possibly like living in a communist state.

Maybe the most bizarre thing told to me was from an American doctor who had actually been to Cuba on a medical mission trip. He told me conspiratorially, in a hushed voice, about the loudspeakers that blare propaganda and patriotic music all night long at ear-splitting volumes on the streets of Havana. Sleep deprivation, he assured me in all seriousness, is the government’s way of torturing its citizens and making them too tired to rebel. Did you know sleep deprivation is actually one of the most common forms of torture in the world?

I decided to dismiss all of this as little more than hyperbolic urban legend born of the forty-odd year blockade. But part of me hoped these warnings were just a little bit true. They promised danger, excitement, intrigue, a revival of Cold War era paranoia in an era of blasé internationalism. Despite its geographical proximity to the United States, Cuba was surely a world apart.

I decided that I would just have to see for myself. But first, I would have to get there. Pursuant to the legalese of the “Cuban Assets Control Regulations,” which established the trade embargo in 1963, my visa cryptically stated that I understood that "the University’s license only authorizes travel-related transactions in connection with full-time educational activities and does not authorize transactions related to commercial or tourist-related activities while in Cuba.”

Actually, I didn’t really “understand” what the visa claimed I did. Apparently I was allowed to spend money on “full-time educational activities” but not for “commercial” or “tourist-related” activities? So, I was allowed to “learn” insofar as I didn’t spend any money while doing it, because buying things means that I am, however inadvertently, supporting the government of Fidel Castro. So, I could study but not live? But I would be staying at a hotel. Surely this qualifies as a “tourist-related” transaction. What about buying food? Is food anti-capitalist? Was I allowed to go to a museum, a restaurant (or the Havana nightclubs I was wondering about)? Surely the officials at the State Department must have known that their requirements were impossible.

With my doublespeak visa in hand I left for Havana by way of Toronto. When we arrived at the Havana airport and shuffled toward customs, all of those hysterical warnings that I had written off as tall tales suddenly popped back into my mind. What is this place? Will I be ushered into a labyrinthine Soviet-style bureaucracy, with officials barking orders, ferreting out enemies of the state?

The officials waiting at immigration didn’t seem worried about much at all. Tanned men were dragging on unfiltered cigarettes, puffing in public with a relaxed nonchalance I hadn’t seen in many years. The smoky, humid air held us close, with the warmth and weight of an old friend.

When I got up to the immigration counter, the officer took a look at my passport and asked me if I spoke Spanish. Sí, I said. Smiling, he stamped a small piece of paper, wrote the date on it, and slipped it into my passport, winking: “So you won’t have trouble getting back into your country.”

June 2004.