The International School of Havana is one of those things in Cuba that is not supposed to exist but by some miracle does. Under Cuban law, the State has the sole right to educate the island’s children and dictate what they learn in school.

Cuban school children begin each day singing Seremos Como El Che—We will be like Che. Education is free of cost but heavy on indoctrination. Most foreign diplomats, businesspeople and any other members of Havana’s small expat community avoided sending their kids to Cuban state schools if at all possible.

In the 1960’s, a group of diplomat families took over a mansion in the neighborhood of Miramar and started a school. Officially the school had no legal status. The foreign missions whose diplomats had kids there brought the teachers into the country as if they were embassy employees.

The unofficial agreement with the Cuban government was that the school would not accept any Cuban students. Some Cubans who were married to a foreigner or had obtained a passport from another country and could afford the school’s hefty fees managed to send their kids there anyway.

It was easy to understand why they wanted to educate their children outside the government school system. By the time we moved to Havana, Cuban schools were falling apart. Teachers were underpaid and survived on the gifts they received from parents of students. There had been several scandals involving teachers selling the exam answers to their pupils.

School uniforms supposed to be provided by the State were constantly running out. Parents had to ask relatives in Miami to buy them and in Little Havana store fronts the red and white Cuban school uniforms synonymous with communist childhood indoctrination were now on sale.

Bathrooms in Cuban schools were notoriously filthy. At one school in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana, that I heard about, the parents started a collection to repair and keep the lavatories clean. But not all the parents chipped in. So the parents who paid to fix up the bathroom put a padlock on the door to keep out the kids of the parents who had not contributed. Barring kids from having a place to relieve themselves didn’t seem very socialist. The parent who told me the story said the most scandalous thing was this class struggle was playing out in a school inaugurated by Che Guevara.

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With spotless bathrooms that everyone could use, Wifi and pizza Fridays at the snack bar, the International School felt like some kind of oasis, what my wife Alex called an out “of Cuba body experience.” At PTSA meetings you could expect to find Cuban trophy wives in miniskirts chatting with the spouses of Middle Eastern diplomats wearing the full length chador.

“You won’t believe whose kids are going to the school,” Tim, a US diplomat stationed in Havana, told me.

In his son’s fourth grade classroom, Tim said, there were two girls that stood out from the other students. They were identical twin sisters with long black hair. In the doorway of each classroom at the International School, there was a collage with the student’s photographs and country of origin.

It was normal to have students from six different countries in a small classroom. The twin girls listed their country simply as “Korea.” As Cuba did not have diplomatic relations with South Korea, it was easy enough to figure out which Korea they were from.

I had already seen a black Mercedes sedan driving towards the school with the 145001 Diplomatic plate that signaled the car belonged to the North Korean ambassador.

The twins were his daughters. Havana was the kind of place where one occasionally bumped into North Koreans.

During my summer internship with CNN in 1998, I met North Korean delegates to a youth conference that took place in Havana. I spotted them at Jose Marti Airport lugging large plastic bags with bottles of scotch and shampoo inside to bring back home.

“Who goes shopping in Cuba?” I thought as I walked over to strike up a conversation with the depaarting North Koreans.

I introduced myself and stuck out my hand, explaining I worked for CNN and would they like to give me an interview. A tall, heavy guy who appeared to be in charge, frowned and grabbed my outstretched hand.

His fingers were a thick and calloused, more of a mitt than a hand and evidence of a life spent doing heavy manual labor. He would not let go and instead spread my hand out which he studied intently. Finally, he looked up into my eyes, our noses almost touching.

“You have hands like a woman,” he informed me.

I didn’t get the interview.

Even for Cuba’s “Patria o Muerte” crowd, North Koreans were a breed apart.

When I moved to Cuba in early 2012, North Korean Leader Kim Jung Un of the poofy hair and high heeled boots had died a few weeks before.

Shortly after I arrived , I heard a group of Cuban State journalists after a press conference discussing how they had been dispatched to North Korea to cover their socialist ally’s funeral.

After days of traveling, they finally arrived to the hotel. In their shared room they showered only to discover there were no towels. It was winter in Pyongyang and they were wet and freezing.

The journalists complained to each other loudly when a knock came at the door. A hotel worker was there with the towels.

The Cubans thought it over and next started discussing how great a Coca-Cola would taste. There was another knock at the door.

The North Korean ambassador to Havana, I learned from Tim, was affable and polished.

He wanted his daughters to learn English, which Tim told me, he spoke fluently.

The ambassador was named Jon Yong-jin and he came from a prominent family in North Korea. His wife was the sister of General Jang Song-thaek, the second most powerful man in North Korea, who was mentoring the new young dictator Kim Jong-un.

Schooling for his two daughters at the International School of Havana cost over $30,000 a year in tuition but the money did not seem to be a problem for the North Korean ambassador.

He did, though, have one condition, Tim said.

The ambassador needed to know if there were any South Korean students at the school.

No, the school director told him, but there were many children with parents who were American diplomats.

Americans were acceptable, the ambassador replied, but his daughters could never have any contact with South Koreans.

Tim said he ran into the North Korean ambassador at events for their children and there was always that look of recognition, a nod and a smile for the American diplomat.

You know who I am, I know who you are.

The US and North Korea were still technically at war but the school where their kids studied together was apparently neutral territory.

The North Korean twins were unusual students but the school was full of children of ambassadors and Cuban sports stars and businesspeople with high level government connections.

One day the twins stopped coming.

Tim told me there had no goodbye party, no talk of a new assignment for their father. They just didn’t show up anymore.

The school tried to contact the North Korean embassy, an elegant townhouse in Vedado surrounded by bleak cement walls with barb wire on top. Photos posted outside showed an auditorium of North Koreans giving a standing ovation to a beaming Kim Jong-un.

The school never heard anything back.

Weeks went by and word trickled out about a purge. Kim Jong-un had soured on his uncle and mentor, General Jang Song-thaek. Some reports said he had his uncle torn apart by feral dogs, others said he had blown him to shreds with anti-aircraft guns.

Either way, they clearly had parted on bad terms.

Then the young dictator sent word that North Korean diplomats who were related or connected to the murdered general, needed to come home.

The ambassador to Havana and his family were on that list.

For a while, when I would run into Tim at diplomatic cocktail parties, this became our fallback conversation.

Had he heard anything new about the North Koreans?

We wondered what someone does do when they get a summons to return home that they know only leads to a work camp or a firing squad.

Had the ambassador bothered to buy a round-trip plane ticket?

He and his family must have traveled through a third country to get from Havana to Pyongyang. Had they considered defecting or just disappearing?

Or were they so blindly loyal that they could not conceive of the brutal fate that was waiting for them when they landed?

Tim guessed they went back because they knew their extended families would be killed if they did not.

Finally, a short dispatch from North Korean State-media provided confirmation.

The ambassador and his wife had been executed for treason.

There was no mention of their daughters.

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Havana at night is not like other places.

When the bright Caribbean sun no longer beams down, the city takes on a brooding, almost solemn air.

And on nights when nortes ­--storms from the north-- blow in, the Malecón seawall that serves as Havana’s couch for the thousands that usually congregate there starting at sundown to gossip, booze and romance becomes eerily vacant as waves crash over.

Look down from a high vantage point on the city of more than two million people and there are just pin pricks of light. Havana past dusk is a city enveloped in darkness.

As we hurtled down the empty avenue to Jose Marti International Airport, I struggle to make out the vague and distant shadows moving in the Havana nightscape.

A couple sharing a bicycle pedal slowly in the lane next to us.

Rows of people languish under an underpass waiting for a bus.

Beneath a fading billboard of Che Guevara, a security guard keeps watch over a long shuttered factory.

The street lamps on the Avenida Boyeros give off faint, bluish glow as if the bulbs and perhaps the whole country are seconds away from flickering out for good.

Next to me, driving our battered jeep is Rafa and as always he is talking. I am silent, thinking I our now five month old daughter Alma who I am going to visit in Panama and how in a few days I will be back here again by myself.

Instead of reporting as CNN’s correspondent in Cuba, I am spending most of my time fixing up our new home. Organizing a small army of work men has become my never ending task. Everyone has an excuse about why they can’t come or don’t have the materials they need. The days go by and nothing gets done. I would not wish repairing a home in Cuba on my worst enemy.

Until I fix up our home, Alex and Alma can’t join me. I am beginning to sense they will never be able to come.

Rafa’s clearing of his throat signaled he was changing topic.

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I was wondering....”

We were close to the airport and so it was time for Rafa to ask for something.

Rafa hadn’t always been a driver. He had actually been an agronomist and must have been good one because in the 1980’s Fidel Castro sent him to Canada to buy Holstein cows to import to the island.

Fidel was obsessed with Holstein cows and how they produced more milk than the Cuban variety. Those were the kinds of things Fidel studied day and night. He filled the airwaves of the Cuba of that era with statistics about cows, coffee, tractors and sugar cane that the Maximum Leader could rattle off endlessly. That Fidel knew the most about any and every subject was an accepted fact in Cuba.

A favorite cow of Fidel’s named Urbe Blanca --White Udder-- had supposedly set a world record for milk production.

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Isolated from much of the rest of the world, Cubans were told by their leaders that were living in the country of the future. Soon they would exceed the living standards of more developed, capitalist nations.

But their great leap forward came to a crashing belly flop when their main trading partner the Soviet Union imploded. Suddenly Cuba was on its own. Castro had bet the house on the wrong side of history. Regular Cubans were the ones still paying the price.

Back home, Rafa found out that all the cows he had spent three years carefully selecting were now starving. Holstein cows needed grain that Cuba could no longer afford to import from abroad. He suggested to his superiors at the Ministry that the cows all be slaughtered so people had something to eat. Instead, his bosses criticized Rafa for his defeatism, for not believing Fidel had a plan to save the cows and the country.

The cows starved to death. Rafa quit the Ministry to become a taxi driver just as the island reopened to tourism. With tips, driving a taxi certainly paid better than any State job. He said that he kept a pair of swim trunks and a towel in his taxi to earn extra money from Cuban Americans visiting the homeland they had been forced to abandon. Day or night, he said, the first thing returning exiles wanted to do upon arriving again in Cuba, even before checking into their hotel, was swim in the ocean again.

Rafa liked to tell stories of wealthy foreigners who had come to Cuba and fallen in love with the island or a Cuban woman or both. They all planned on opening a factory or starting a business. In Rafa’s stories he was always going to be put in charge of their investment. But the tales ended with the foreign investor getting swindled and Rafa back to being stuck driving his taxi.

The first time I had gone out to lunch with him, Rafa asked if he could eat the food I left on my plate. It was habit from the bad times that many Cubans held onto, never allowing anything edible to be thrown away.

He also was unable to pass up asking someone who was about to travel abroad to bring a hard-to-find item back for him.

“If you have time to buy something for me...” Rafa began.

Already I had brought back Rafa fishing lures and a bottle of perfume for his wife or more likely for a girlfriend. What did he want now?

“I need a can of mace,” he said.

I must have looked surprised. Cuba was supposed to be one of the safest countries in the world, at least that’s what Cuban officials claimed and besides Rafa said he had been a judo champion in his youth. He carried a crinkled photograph in his wallet of him in a fighting stance with a black belt on.

“It’s not for me,” Rafa clarified, “It’s for my daughter. She lives in a rough neighborhood and comes home late from school. The never put any of lights on her street at night anymore and I am afraid some men one night will surround her and rob her or maybe do something worse.”

I told Rafa that as a new father I sympathized and would try to bring the mace back with me, as long as they didn’t stop me at the airport. I couldn’t imagine that Cuban custom officers would be very keen on an American bringing aerosol weapons into their country.

Still, I wondered why Rafa’s daughter needed to arm herself.

Residents of Havana joked that the city’s population consisted of one million people and another one million cops to keep an eye on them.

What were all these police, military, neighborhood watches, plain-clothes State Security and their army of informants that were supposedly safeguarding the country actually doing?

“If you scream ‘Help!’ no one comes,” Rafa said with a heavy sigh of disappointment.

Rafa was fond of saying the Cubans had tried to create the “New Man” but left him in the oven too long.

The revolution had promised an egalitarian, just society but decades later people like Rafa who sacrificed their youth to the cause were left to grapple with the breakdown of the island’s social fabric. The dream of a socialist utopia had died long ago, now everyone was fending for themselves.

Rafa quit his job as an agricultural engineer to become a taxi driver because it paid better. And he had to ask a foreigner for help to protect his daughter from being attacked on the dark streets outside her front door.

Whatever Fidel’s grand vision had been, the reality Cubans were now living was not it.

Rafa grinned at me with a toothy smile. “I tell my daughter that if she is ever accosted not to scream that’s she being robbed. No one is coming if you yell that. Instead, I tell her to scream, ‘Down with Fidel!”

“If someone yells that, then the police have to come.”

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When I arrived to Cuba I found someone in CNN accounting had told the bureau staff to stop paying rent on the previous correspondent’s home, assuming that the money would be wasted paying for a house no one was living in.

Now I would have to live in a hotel while looking for a new place to live and fix up, repairs that would cost CNN thousands of dollars more than keeping the other home would have.

A government agency called Palco was in charge of maintaining and renting homes that foreign diplomats, businesspeople and journalists lived in. There was no other choice than to have the State as my landlord. When I tried calling Palco though I was told they had nothing available at the moment. Try back later.

Later as in a week? A month?

Later, they said and hung up.

For the time being, I lived in the Habana Libre, the same hotel where the CNN Havana bureau was located and where my grandfather had eaten breakfast next to Che Guevara in 1959, days after the revolution.

The hotel staff proudly gave me the Suite 2224, the room that Fidel Castro had lived for two years after he took power.

Back when it had been the Havana Hilton, the hotel had been billed as “Latin America’s tallest, largest hotel.”

Castro and his gun-toting revolutionaries knocked off Hilton from the name and rechristened the hotel the Habana Libre. The Free Havana Hotel.

From the top of the Rampa, the slight hill in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana, the hotel looked out over the Straits of Florida, an endless expanse of blue to the horizon. When nortes, storms that blasted in from the north, waves exploded over the seawall, drenching the cars that drove by like an enormous saltwater car wash. Other times the Straits seemed as calm as a pond and I imagined skipping a stone all the way to Miami.

The hotel’s interior had fallen on hard times. What had seemed cutting edge and futuristic in 1959 now was outdated and tired; a forgotten time capsule or episode of The Jetsons.

Even though the hotel was busy with mostly European tourists, the Habana Libre was falling apart.

On a good day only one or two of the eight elevators were in service. Sometimes they would get stuck between floors and the trapped tourists would yell at the top of their lungs and bang on the doors to be rescued. The synthetic carpet in Castro’s sprawling former suite was so stained, I didn’t dare take my shoes off. I had to shower before 6am if I wanted hot water.

Every day the maids arranged the threadbare towels into kissing swans onto the bed that formed the shape of a heart.

They would leave a hand-written note tucked in the towel swan’s smooching beaks.

“I am your maid and my name is Yaramelis, please let me know if there is anything I can do to make your stay more special…”

It could take up to a half-hour for the elevator to come so I usually didn’t bother leaving the hotel to eat. I quickly worked through the room service menu with the exception of the Pizza Havana Club, which came with dark rum drizzled over bleu cheese and tomato sauce and I never dared to order.

The bureau staff gave me a Cubacel SIM card that refused to work with my IPhone. I had asked CNN to have my phone unlocked before leaving for Cuba but apparently the request had not gone through. When I finally got through to Apple customer support, a cheery operator told me to visit my nearest Genius Bar and they would swap the phone with another one for me.

A few days later, I found myself at Havana’s equivalent of a Genius Bar. A technician named Tony sat examining my phone on a wooden table in a back alley. His shop behind him was full of the husks of old Nokia and Huaweii phones. Tony was a cuentapropista, someone who worked “by the own account,” Cuba’s euphemism for the legion of small entrepreneurs now able to operate legally thanks to reforms initiated by Raul Castro to jumpstart the cratering economy.

“How did you learn to do this?” I asked Tony as he connected my phone to an old laptop to run a program that he said would jailbreak my phone.

“I used to be an electrical engineer,” he said without looking up at me. “This pays better.”

Tony was charging me $10 to get my phone working in Cuba, more than any engineer working for the state made in a week.

As promised, Tony had the phone working in Cuba within in an hour. But during the hacking, by accident, Tony synced his contacts onto my device and now I had a suspicious amount of numbers for Viagra.

There was Pepe Viagra, Nelson Viagra and Viagra Jose. How much Viagra did Cuban men need?

I forgot about my new connections until Alex visited and while looking up a number on my phone came across the cache of black market pill dealers.

“Why do you have all these numbers for Viagra?” she asked.

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With the SIM card working, I soon missed the days when I did not have a Cuban number.

I had inherited the number from a producer who had fancied himself something of a ladies man. At night the occasional caller would wake me up.

“Is David there?” the female voice on the other end of the line would inquire. No, I said he had left the country a while back.

“Oh that’s too bad,” the voice said. “What’s your name? Maybe we could meet.”

Everywhere I went in Cuba I could sense a hustle taking place. The Habana Libre was a hive of activity, although little of that energy was devoted to taking care of the hotel’s guests.

The hotel employees worked for the State and like all government workers were not paid a living wage. So they stole. They pilfered shampoo and soap from the maid’s carts. They walked off with eggs from the kitchen. They pocketed sunglasses and cameras that hotel guests had left behind to sell to other hotel guests.

My Cuban office staff explained to me this was not stealing at all, simply la busqueda or the hunt.

Ladrón al ladrón, cien años de perdón, they would recite to me.

“One hundred years of pardon for the thief who steals from a thief.”

The consortium that ran than hotel, the Spanish hotel chain Melia, paid the Cuban government in pesos convertibles or CUCs, which in theory were one to one with the dollar. But the Cuban government paid the workers their salary in a different currency, in pesos Cubano or CUP, which were pegged at 24 to the dollar. The State pocketed 96% of what the company running the hotel paid for the workers.

Cuba was the only country in the world to print two currencies, probably because it was an idea that didn’t make much sense and certainly didn’t inspire productivity in the workers earning the lesser valued money.

As Cubans liked to say, the government pretends to pay us and we pretend to work.

The hotel employees’ real job –la busqueda—was to search for whatever they could to supplement their meager earnings with.

One short, dark-skinned hotel employee known simply as El Indio wheeled a cart of contraband goods into our office every day which he covered with a sheet. Underneath were Spanish cheeses, baskets of eggs, tins of peaches and cleaning supplies. My employees didn’t think anything was wrong with buying from El Indio. He wasn’t stealing, he was surviving.

The level of pilfering became so widespread that every time I took the CNN car out of the underground garage, a security guard waiting at the exit peered into the back window before I could leave to make sure I wasn’t the one making off with the tiny soaps and hand towels.

Some days as I waited for him to complete the inspection, I dreamed of filling the backseat of the car with contraband hotel property just to see the guard’s reaction. In all likelihood he would have waved me through rather than deal with the headache of reporting me. Everyone seemed to be on the take or just going through the motions.

With all this frenetic black market activity going on, taking care of the guests became a secondary concern.

Cuba was a cheap Caribbean destination and most tourists visited once and never returned.

After Alex came to visit to me for a weekend, a bellhop blocked her exit from the hotel and grabbed her bag from her. He needed proof that we had paid the bill.

I tried to explain that I was living in the hotel and she was just visiting me. It didn’t do any good. I had to show him a bill proving that we had paid, he told me. There was no way to convince him that Alex was leaving and I was staying. We had to pay our bill before she could leave. Only after the manager intervened did the suspicious bellhop grudgingly move from the door, return the suitcase and let us leave the lobby for the airport.

After that, whenever I ran into the same bellhop he would look blankly at me as if the time we played tug of war with my wife’s suitcase existed only in my imagination.

During my extended stay, the power kept going out for longer and longer stretches. To leave the hotel I had to descend twenty-two flights of darkened stairs with my phone flashlight.

Half-way down I was already covered in sweat and gasping for breath.

“Dale suave!” the chambermaids coming up the stairs told me. “Go easy!”

While Cubans regularly dealt with the outages, it was a fact of life the government usually tried to keep from tourists.

At night I opened the window to my balcony to allow a breeze to come in. I inevitably woke up though in a puddle of sweat which pooled on the plastic mattress cover underneath me.

The power cuts continued until one night I found a different kind of handwritten note on my bed next to the towel swans, apologizing for the situation.

“Dear Señor/a, We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience. Tomorrow the power situation will be fixed. Please accept this gift.”

Next to the note was a large candle and a box of Cuban matches, the kind that when struck sent flaming embers in every direction.

I realized each guest in this 630-room hotel with the flammable carpet and drapes and likely malfunctioning sprinkler systems had also received their own candle and matches.

A late-night conflagration seemed inevitable.

I went to bed fully clothed, with my sneakers on, ready to evacuate at the first whiff of smoke.

In the morning, the hotel had miraculously not gone up in flames and I called Palco, the government agency charged with supplying foreign residents with places to live.

When could I see whatever homes they had to show me?

Before I embarked on my house hunt I was warned repeatedly how frustrating the experience of finding a home in Cuba was going to be.

Diplomats, businesspeople and journalists working in Cuba were all required to rent homes from the Cuban government. And while the State had a seemingly endless supply of homes –many seized after their former owners fled the island for Miami—what the Cuban government hadn’t done over the years was maintain those homes.

As part of the rental contract, the new tenant –me—had to fix up the home I agreed to take. The Cuban government stipulated that I not only restore the home I rented from them but when I moved from Cuba give the house back to them with toilets, sinks and lightbulbs installed.

I had moved to Cuba to be journalist but first I needed to redo a home for the Cuban government, on CNN’s dime.

Carmen, my Cuban government realtor, told me to pick her up outside her office because her car was broken down and she needed a lift to show me the available houses.

As she got into the car, I noticed that there seemed to be only three kinds of hair dye available to Cuban women: bright red, platinum blonde and jet black. Carmen had opted for the jet-black hair dye.

“I have never shown houses to an American before,” Carmen told me. “Why do you want to live in Cuba?”

I heard this a lot. There were so few foreigners and almost no Americans living in Cuba. Meanwhile nearly every Cuban had relatives living in the US even though the image that their government gave Cubans of life there was more than a little skewed.

Each night on the noticiero estelar, the Cuban State news evening newscast, the anchors gravely presented stories about America’s rampant violence and endemic racism. Then immediately after the government would air old episodes of “Friends” or “Gilmour Girls” and Cubans would marvel at the enormous apartments that Americans lived in and their supermarkets bursting with goods.

They tended to believe what those sitcoms showed them about life in the US more than their own government’s ominous warnings.

Despite years of negative propaganda, Cubans felt that as soon as they got to the US their lives would suddenly become far easier. Their relatives who had left fed into the perception by boasting about how well they were doing in “La Yuma,” the term Cubans used for the United States and foreigners, which according to urban legend came from repeated showings for years of the classic Western “3:10 to Yuma” on State-TV.

“The first thing every Cuban does when they get to Miami is take a photo with a fancy car that’s actually not theirs to send back home,” said Enrique, a friend who had more family in Florida than he had in Cuba.

There was even a service I had heard about in Miami that rented Cubans gold chains, high end watches and the latest smart phones for their trips back to the island. They needed the right bling if they wanted to impress their families when they stepped off the plane.

Every day Cubans like Carmen asked why I wanted to live in Cuba. The hidden meaning behind this question seemed to be “Why would you choose to live here, when you could live there.”

I told Carmen that I had a baby daughter and Cuba was very safe and Cubans seemed to love kids. And anyway my company had sent me here, I said.

“Ah,” Carmen said, thinking she finally understood. “You are on a misión internacionalista.”

I hesitated to say I was on a “mission.” Most Cubans had trouble believing that I didn’t work for the US government in some capacity. As all Cuban journalists worked for their government, it was logical that I worked for mine. That would make me a spy and anyway what exactly would my mission here be?

At the moment I spent all my time on just finding a place to live.

But Carmen seemed satisfied by her interpretation of my reason for being in Cuba and didn’t ask any more questions. Tens of thousands of Cuban doctors, diplomats and spies had been sent to remote, dangerous corners of the world, to places like Venezuela or Angola on “internationalist missions” to spread communism. Their reasons for going were simple. They were ordered to.

We arrived at the first house she was showing me and an old man holding a bike waited for us outside. This was the custodío. one of the army of usually old men whose job it was to watch the houses owned by the Cuban government. He fumbled with a large ring of keys before finally opening the padlock on the gate outside. We walked in to inspect a house that looked as if it had been on the receiving end of an airstrike.

There was no glass in any of the windows and several doors were missing. The sun shone through a hole in the roof. Tree roots had broken through the floor.

“Look at the beautiful yard!” Carmen called out to me. “How old is your daughter? She can take her first steps here!”

The house needed serious work, I pointed out to Carmen.

She waved her finger at me, dismissing my pessimism.

“We will reduce the first few months of rent, that will cover it.”

I asked why if I was required to return the house fully repaired, she didn’t have any houses in that condition to show me. Carmen gave me a pity-filled look and then something else caught her eye.

“Mangoes!”

A plastic bag came out of her purse and she got on the tip of her high heeled shoes to begin taking down heavy green fruit from the mango-laden tree in my prospective back yard.

The bureau driver Rafa looked at me as we both were thinking the same thing.

La busqueda.

It took Carmen and me several months of looking at houses to get on the same page.

Initially she showed me only one-bedroom homes. When I told her we might want something bigger, she looked surprised.

“Who else is going to be living with you?”

There had been little construction since the revolution. Most Cubans lived several generations to a home. Couples with a baby in Cuba invariably slept with the child in their bedroom at least for the first few years. Few couples in their 30’s like us could hope to have their own place.

During the collective labor era of the revolution, office workers spent their days off building the apartment buildings they eventually would live in. The materials and results were invariably shoddy and it was no wonder that pre-revolution homes advertised as being construcción capitalista, capitalist construction, were sought after.

Lack of housing was just one of the reasons that the birth rate in Cuba was the lowest in the hemisphere. We needed a bigger house I told Carmen because we were hoping to have more kids and perhaps the occasional visitor stay with us.

The houses that Carmen showed us that had been occupied by other foreigners were in decent shape if picked clean of any item of value. Light fixtures, faucets and toilets had all been removed long before the house became available to rent.

Homes that had been occupied by a Cuban government entity were invariably trashed. There was something intrinsic to the system that everything eventually broke, nothing seemed to be maintained for very long. Farms that had been productive at the beginning of the revolution that were confiscated after a few years were barren. Tractors stopped running because no one bothered to put oil in them. Elevators across Havana broke down after Fidel gave everyone the apartments they had rented before because there were no more landlords to make repairs.

So many untended water pipes across Havana had ruptured that the government only turned the water on every other day and only for a few hours to prevent the spread of mosquito-borne diseases from getting completely out of control.

Everything had become the property of the State which meant no one owned anything. When you asked people why the elevator or bus or bathroom was broken, they would shrug.

What did it matter if it didn’t belong to me?

One house Carmen showed us had been converted into offices for a government rental car agency. The previous occupants had put holes in the walls, smashed the bathrooms and left trash strewn throughout the house. A few posters with the different Fiats and Geelys for rent still hung from the walls.

But the house had more space than other houses we had seen, a tidy back yard and was in the Playa neighborhood near where the International School was. I told Carmen I liked the house and that Alex would come from Panama to see it and give her final approval. Carmen promised to hold the house for us until we made our decision.

A week later when Alex arrived from Panama, Carmen insisted on showing us a different house first.

“I think you are going to like this one more,” she said. We were confused as soon as we saw the second house. It was much smaller and didn’t have a yard.

I thanked Carmen but told her the first house, the one she had agreed to hold, was the one we wanted. The smile on Carmen’s face slipped as she was forced to confess that the original house was no longer available.

After she had shown it to me, the Council of State –the uppermost ring of power-- told her employer Palco to turn over twenty houses to be given to top government officials. On the list was the house we thought she was saving for us.

Carmen said she tried to say that the house had been promised to me but was told that it was being given to a general. There was nothing she could or anyone at the rental agency could do. Even if the house was technically mine no one wanted to make the argument that a foreign journalist was more deserving of this particular house than the general. The worst thing, she said, looking like she might cry, was that unlike me the general wouldn’t have to pay rent. No wonder the country was bankrupt.

Weeks after losing the house, Carmen called me as I arrived at Cuba’s most sacred shrine at La Caridad del Cobre on the Eastern end of the island. I traveled there on a long and bumpy bus ride organized by the government’s International Press Center to film some of the places that Pope Benedict would visit on his upcoming tour of Cuba. Inside the church that was built nestled in blindingly green hills, was Cuba’s own black Madonna, know universally by Cubans as “La Cachita.”

We were taken to a small house behind the church that had been built for Pope Benedict. He would spend one night there. Used to home construction taking years if not decades, the Cuban cameraman whistled in admiration at the home made in a flash, however briefly, to house a Pope.

As I was pondering how the Pope already had a house even before setting foot in Cuba, Carmen called me. She had a new home, when could I see it? It seemed like a fortuitous moment to receive a call about a new home but by now I knew not to get too excited by Carmen’s practiced enthusiasm. I had seen too many “houses that need a few repairs” that had turned out to be unsalvageable wrecks.

I told her I was near Santiago and could see the house in a few days.

No, she said, she hadn’t let anyone else at Palco know this one was available. She was trying to do me a favor. In a few days the house would be spoken for.

Realizing this house must be better than anything else she had shown me, I told Carmen I would be in Havana the next day. Instead of returning to Havana on the 15 hour long bus ride, I went to the Santiago airport and got a seat on the last Cubana flight back to the capital that day. I met Carmen in front of what was the fortieth house she had shown me.

The house was a block away from 5^th Avenue, one of the last stately boulevards in Havana. Nearby was the International School where foreign diplomats, business people and other expats sent their kids to study.

I walked into the house and immediately look up at the high ceilings where murals and frescos stared back at me

The house was over a century old and while it needed plenty of repairs I could see the potential. Unlike everywhere else Carmen I had shown me, it was a house with history. Carmen said she had held this one back to make up to me the home we had lost to the general. But there wouldn’t even be time to consult with Alexandra, I had to let her now if we wanted live here.

We’ll take it, I told her.

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On the day that the funeral caravan carrying Fidel Castro’s ashes arrived in Holguín, as near as the procession that traveled nearly the entire length of the island came to his birthplace at the family farm in Birán, there was nothing to eat.

Government officials had decreed nine days of mourning following the announcement of Castro’s passing, the same period of grieving bestowed by the Vatican to departed Popes.

Cubans interpreted this mandated solemnity in varying ways. People thronged the sides of highways and roads across the island to catch a glance of the olive-green Soviet GAZ jeeps transporting Castro’s ashes back down the same route that he had traveled in January 1959 when his rag-tag rebels improbably seized control of the island.

For many Cubans it was only in death that they, for the first time, saw Castro in person.

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He had been out of power for eight years when he died and for younger Cubans, Castro was a figure from another generation, someone they had heard about every day of their lives but had never actually seen thunder against imperialism before huge crowds or hobnob with Arafat and Quadaffi. The Castro they knew wasn’t the towering revolutionary in olive green but a stooped, frail man in a track suit.

Still, school girls on the route of the funeral caravan dutifully painted “I am Fidel!” onto their faces with sparkly ink that looked as if it had come from a children’s birthday party.

Flags were flown at half-mast and patriotic programs filled TV and radio airwaves. Live music was banned from all plazas and clubs. A concert that the tenor Placido Domingo had been planning for years to give in Cuba was abruptly canceled. Birthday parties and family gatherings were called off by Cubans wary of being seen to be celebrating Castro’s passing.

In Havana, sales of rum were forbidden, but you could still buy a beer with a wink and a tip. Some establishments dared to sell mixed drinks that they, if busted by the authorities, could always claim were alcohol free.

The legions of hustlers that usually make a living hawking knock off cigars and goods pilfered from government warehouses all seemed to go on vacation. A strange, ominous silence ruled the island.

Hundreds of thousands of Cubans waited for hours in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana to be able to briefly shuffle past wreaths of flowers, a large photo of Castro on an easel and a box with what everyone assumed contained his ashes. A government official admitted to me though that Castro’s remains were not kept in the public viewing area at all but across the street, under tight guard, at the Ministry of Defense. Top Cuban officials were too concerned that some dissident or counter revolutionary might try to create a final scene to embarrass the comandante.

In Santiago de Cuba, where Castro was to be buried and we had driven, to get ahead of the slow-moving funeral caravan, the staff at the Hotel de las Americas all wore over their uniforms the red and black 26 de Julio armbands from Castro’s days in the mountains, as if they were soldiers in a still ongoing armed rebellion, instead of waiters and maids.

Before dawn, as the caravan of army jeeps carrying the box with Castro’s ashes approached the Eastern end of Cuba, we doubled back from Santiago to Holguín. In the dark leaving Santiago, we passed faded billboards displaying the faces of martyrs that had died fighting alongside Castro more than 60 years before and had otherwise been forgotten.

Holguín was the closest the funeral caravan would come to Castro’s birthplace and I hoped there might be some deeper sentiment there among the people as they bade farewell to a local son who had gone from the hinterlands of Cuba to become one of the most consequential world leaders of the 20th century.

As the sun came up, I found Ana Rosa Quintana hanging a large handwritten cardboard sign on the front of her rundown home at the entrance to the city. It read “Hasta siempre comandante” –until forever commander—and she had pasted pictures of Castro on it that she had cut from the newspaper. Ana Rosa proudly said she had been born in 1959 and had the same exact age as the revolution.

“I feel like his daughter,” she told me about Castro. “I have been crying ever since I heard the news.” Ana Rosa’s mother Norma sat in her nightgown on the front porch sobbing. Worried about 93-year-old Norma’s delicate health, her family had waited a day before telling her Castro was gone.

“Before the revolution there was no electricity here, no hospital, nothing,” Ada Rosa said to explain her lifelong devotion to Fidel Castro. I was thinking of how to ask Ada Rosa if she didn’t think the power lines and medical care would have come anyway to where she lived even if Castro had not been in power when she strode past me into the street where the caravan was going to arrive.

The funeral procession was hours away, but the two women already were walking to the center of town –with a plastic chair for Norma to sit on—to get a good spot for when Fidel came one last time.

When we arrived in Holguin, every cafe, restaurant, stand or Cupet gas station that might have sold food was shuttered in compliance with the period of national mourning. We had not been able to find any breakfast before leaving Santiago and as we set up our camera equipment along the side the road to wait for the caravan, our stomachs were already beginning to rumble.

The caravan was not expected until mid-day, but Cubans already had started to line the two-lane road to wait for Fidel. When we asked where we could find something to eat, the holguineros we approached shook their heads nervously in response. The Maximum Leader was on his way. Disobeying this final edict from the man who had told Cubans how to live every day for the last half century seemed too risky.

I wasn’t surprised at the lengths the Cuban government went to mourn Castro.

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Shortly after my wife Alexandra and our baby daughter Alma had moved to Cuba, Hugo Chavez died despite several bouts of cancer treatment on the island. The Venezuelan leader’s shipments of oil had kept the lights on, for the most part, in Cuba and official mourning was also decreed. On the first day following his death when we went to pick up Alma from the circulo infantil, her Cuban daycare, she tearfully told us the teachers had forbidden that the kids sing the entire day. Even small children were not allowed to show joy, out of respect for the passing of the man that officials called “Cuba’s best friend.”

I had been anticipating Castro’s death for years. Rumors of his demise ruined vacations and triggered more late-night phone calls from the International Desk than I wanted to remember. Before Cuba, I had worked for CNN in Miami where Fidel death rumors were as much as part of life as excessive plastic surgery and overly inquisitive alligators.

I had to remind my bosses that every April Fool’s Day we could count on several false reports of his demise. CNN’s plan original plan developed in the 1990’s for Fidel’s death was called “Operation Adios” and involved dubious schemes like renting cigarette boats in Miami to speed across the Straits of Florida if civil war broke out in a post-Castro Cuba.

Castro had outlasted 11 American presidents and joked that when he did finally die no one would believe it.

The night Castro died, Cubans were watching a documentary on the American director Robert Altman when State TV suddenly cut to Raul Castro

“Beloved Cubans,” the slightly younger Castro read from a sheet of paper that fluttered in his hands, “With profound grief, I appear to inform our people, our friends in the Americas and around the world that today the 25th of November of 2016 at 10:29pm died the commander in chief of the revolution Fidel Castro Ruz.”

After his brief address, Cuban State TV returned to taped programming.

Most Cubans were still not online and word of Castro’s passing slowly trickled out. Foreign news bureaus in Havana had for years tasked their staff with watching each of the daily newscasts but the announcement had come in the middle of the night when no one expected it.

I was at a party celebrating the wedding of the AP bureau chief when people’s phones started ringing with calls from friends on the island asking if the news was really true this time. I quickly called Nory, the CNN bureau’s secretary who always seemed to know what was going on.

Nory was a devout Catholic and I knew she had little love Castro for his attacks on the church and people of faith in the early years of the revolution. Still when I told her it looked like he died, Nory’s voice cracked and she sobbed into the telephone as if a weight she lived with her entire life had suddenly been lifted. She had just turned off her TV to go to bed but Nory walked over to the apartment of an elderly neighbor who kept the television on constantly and confirmed the news.

It was less than ideal as far as confirmations go but as no government officials were picking up their phones. What Nory’s neighbor described to me would have to do. Minutes later I was breaking the news by phone to CNN viewers on a broadcast being simulcast on both the US and international channels.

As I raced down Havana’s Malecón to the office to go live, I had to remind myself it was not the night to get into a car accident. I knew I would get stuck at the office talking for hours on TV so at every red light I rolled down the window to ask people if they had heard. The Cubans I informed of Castro’s passing looked at me open mouthed and disbelieving.

I spent the entire night reporting live on CNN and coordinating the arrival of reporters, producers and technical staff on a chartered plane. Days later when the massive memorial for Castro in Havana concluded, I began to drive the length of the island and report as the funeral caravan approached his final resting place.

But first the now-cremated remains of the former Cuban leader needed to travel the nearly 500 miles between Havana and Santiago, the route of his 1959 “Victory Caravan” in reverse.

Castro was famous for arriving late, making American network TV anchors and heads of state wait hours for him. Death apparently had not changed his legendary tardiness.

We had been told to arrive in Holguin in the early morning as the city would fill with mourners and shut down out of security concerns. Workers hurriedly painted the fronts of any buildings along the route the caravan would take. They did not bother with the backs of the buildings. There was no time and not enough paint.

The main road was soon packed with waiting onlookers and there was not a kitchen open anywhere.

As I waited for the funeral caravan to arrive amid growing hunger pangs, I remembered a popular joke about how Castro had once encountered a poor Cuban complaining he was starving. Castro said the man was mistaken, that the revolution had eradicated hunger in Cuba.

But the hungry Cuban insisted there was no food anymore. Castro brought the man back to his mansion and told him that while his chefs prepared a lavish banquet, he should drink some water. Every time the man asked when the meal would be ready, Castro insisted the poor Cuban drink another glass of water. Hours went by, more glasses of water. Finally, when the platters of food were served, the Cuban said with amazement that he was so full of water, that he could not possibly eat.

“You see!” Castro exclaimed. “You weren’t hungry! You were thirsty!”

Castro’s long decades in power were defined by this telling of Cubans that their desires were not their desires, that he knew them better than they knew themselves. During his last years alive, Castro had evangelized eating moringa, a vitamin and protein rich plant. It was easy to grow, Castro wrote in the pages of Granma, and provided the same nutrients as meat, eggs and milk. I had to go to agros all over Havana to find this miracle plant and after the first bite realized that Castro had neglected to mention that moringa tasted like grass.

Cubans reading about Castro’s latest obsession rolled their eyes. They didn’t want to eat moringa or any other substitute. They wanted actual meat, eggs and milk.

As we waited for the caravan and the morning turned into afternoon, someone in the crowd surreptitiously sold us a few mayonnaise sandwiches. The bread was stale and the mayonnaise warm. After a few nibbles, I too, was no longer hungry.

Then we heard the rumble of an ancient Soviet-era helicopter overhead that was traveling in front of the funeral caravan. Police on motorcycles came racing through. Alerted to our presence, local party officials arrived and inspected our press passes and Cuban residency cards. No one had told them we would be there, they winged. I argued that, naturally, the comandante’s arrival to his hometown had attracted the international press. The officials seemed unsure of what to do and, for a second, I thought after waiting almost the entire day they were going to expel us from the funeral procession route at the last possible moment.

The crowd had us boxed in tight though and before the officials could reach a decision on our fate, some of Castro’s security detail barked at them to get off the road. The helicopter was now flying in tight circles above us. More motorcycles and jeeps with their sirens blaring flew by. The skinny legs of school children poked out from under framed photographs of Raul and Fidel some adult had told them to carry. A little man we interviewed with a box full of white pigeons released them into the sky. All the police and military stood rigid and saluted.

And for a brief second, a green jeep carrying a wooden chest not much bigger than a foot locker inside sped past. Then it was over.

“Why did they have to cremate him?” Ana Rosa sobbed next to me as she and her mother watched the miniature coffin with with the ashes of Fidel Castro inside disappear. “He’s so small now.”

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One day shortly after we arrived in Cuba I came home from the office and found our nanny Mayra holding Alma in the kitchen, looking preoccupied.

“The señora is upstairs and I think she’s packing to leave,” she told me.

I found Alex in our bedroom crying with frustration. Another wandering salesman had appeared at our door with a bag of oranges. These were not the sour bitter oranges Cubans made mojo criollo sauce to marinate pork with but the kind you could actually squeeze into a glass and then drink. Fresh juice was somehow a rarity on this tropical island. All the juices in hotels and restaurants usually came out of a box and tasted like it. We had never seen oranges this supermarket-perfect in Cuba. These looked as if they had just floated across the Florida Straits.

Alex resolved to make some orange juice and went to one of the larger government-run supermarkets known by its location- 3er y 70- to buy an electric juicer.

For $40 she bought a Chinese one, the only model for sale, and went home to start squeezing oranges. One and half oranges in though the juicer suddenly became too hot to touch, seized up and died.

She had managed to squeeze just a few sips of juice.

Alex returned to the store where she had bought the juicer not a half hour before. In front of her in line was an elderly Cuban woman trying to get a refund for an extension cord that also did not work. The woman and sales clerk argued more and more heatedly until the elderly lady lost her temper and threw the useless length of cord at the clerk’s head and then stormed out of the store.

Witnessing this scene, my wife began to realize returning the juicer would not be so easy.

Alex showed the glowering clerk her time stamped receipt to prove she had just purchased the defective juicer but the clerk cut her off. The store did not accept any returns. For that to happen, first Alex would have to go a taller, a government workshop and leave the juicer. Once they had analyzed whether the juicer was truly broken, then they would give her a paper saying the juicer was defective to take to the casa matriz, the main office. There someone would study the case and see if Alex was entitled to a new juicer. Then and only then Alex could return to the original store with the correct documentation to be given a new machine, provided there were any still in stock.

The clerk explained this chain of events to Alex in a mocking tone to let her know that she was an especially dumb Yuma for not knowing the exact steps one needed to complete to return a broken appliance in Cuba.

Somehow in a country where everyone was supposed to be equal, anyone with the tiniest bit more power often felt they had the right to mistreat everyone else.

If Alex wanted to make it her life’s mission to be reimbursed for the faulty juicer maybe it would happen. But more likely not.

Alex returned home –defeated- with the broken juicer under her arm.

“I just don’t know if I can live here,” Alex told me, sleep deprived from Alma’s night feedings and momentarily reaching the end of her patience.

It was clear that our future on the island depended on a favorable outcome to this crisis.

I went back to the kitchen to inspect the faulty equipment and ask Mayra what she thought I should do.

“Go back but don’t speak to the same woman your wife did,” Mayra counseled me. “Say you want to speak to the gerente –the manager—who will be another man. Tell him your wife knows how hard you work and just wanted to make you some fresh juice for when you got home.”

Still wearing my clothes from work and armed with the broken juicer and sexist tale that Mayra concocted, I returned to the supermarket. Immediately a woman at the counter recognizes the box I am holding and glares at me. As Mayra suggested, I skip the clerk Alex had already spoken with and ask another attendant if she could get me the manager.

A few minutes later, a thin man in his late 20’s with acne and gelled hair walks out looking for the strange foreigner inquiring for him. I launch into my story of my poor suffering wife who only desired to prepare for her husband a delicious, refreshing glass of juice. As he listens, the manager’s confused expression turns into a smile. Slowly he begins to nod. He has probably seen a similar scene on an American TV show or movie. Someone goes into store with a malfunctioning item and is immediately given satisfaction. They don’t even have to go to five different places first. That’s not how it works in Cuba. Here the customer is always wrong.

The manager seems to enjoy playing along with this scene we are acting out together. Maybe he wants to live in a country or at least work in a store where justice is so easily meted out. I can see he is going to tell his family about me at dinner later that night. How he was the savior of a poor, deluded Yuma that thought he could just exchange something he purchased simply because it was broken.

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He takes me over to the same counter and tells the grumpy clerk to give me a new juicer. She glowers even more. I am now the foreigner breaking all the rules. She comes back with a different juicer and as salespeople always do when ringing up a new appliance in Cuba, she takes it out of the box and plugs it into an outlet to prove that the machine works. I accept the new functioning juicer in exchange for the broken one. As I leave the store in triumph, I can feel the clerk’s eyes burning holes into the back of my head.

At home, I tell Alex my tale of how I swapped juicers and we laugh as we begin to finally squeeze the bag of oranges. The tension has been broken and no one is talking about leaving Cuba anymore. Just this one time we have beaten a system that always wins. Today, the house, for once, lost.

Then in my hands the new juicer suddenly becomes scaldingly hot. It gives a sudden jolt and stops working. There is the faint odor of something burning in the air. I cannot believe our bad luck that we receieved a second defective juicer.

Then I read the instruction manual:

“This juicer cannot be used for more than two minutes at one time.”

It seems too absurd that this $40 juicer, a fortune for most Cubans, is such a piece of junk that it breaks upon squeezing the first orange. But that’s the only option there is. The juicer is from a Chinese brand called Midea which sells many of the appliances available on the island. After trying their wares, Cuban rechristened the company “Ni idea” – clueless.

Dark rumors circulate that the purchasers for Cuban state stores receive bribes for buying malfunctioning appliances and defective goods no one else will. I don’t bother returning the second juicer. We squeeze the oranges as best as we can by hand. Our reward is the story that we now have as a way of explaining Cuba to people. This is the kind of frustrating thing that is totally normal here. It’s why Cubans mutter no es facil or la lucha to themselves fifty times a day. The deck is stacked against them always. They are treated as marks to be shaken down. At least we can laugh at our ordeals.

Then one day I notice that the temperamental elevators I take twenty floors up to my office every day are also manufactured by Midea. Several times a day my life depeds on a company that cannot figure out how to make a juicer operate for more than two minutes. Our story no longer seems so funny.

At the end of my internship with CNN Havana in 1998, I was invited to have dinner with one of the first US universities to have a summer program in Cuba.

We met at La Guarida restaurant, a paladar, Cuba’s invented word for a privately owned restaurant

The term came from the name of a restaurant called Raquel’s paladar or palate from a Brazilian soap opera that everyone had been glued to in Cuba.

The abysmal food in state-run hotels and restaurants was a universal complaint among visitors to Cuba in those days.

In the mid-1990’s Fidel Castro finally permitted a small injection of capitalism to jump start the stalled economy and he grudgingly allowed Cubans to open their own restaurants for the first time since the revolution.

There naturally were endless caveats though.

Paladars could just have twelve diners eating at any one time. Only the owner and their family could work there. They weren’t allowed to serve lobster or shrimp.

This last rule was enforced particularly harshly.

When another popular restaurant called Prado 20 had been raided by inspectors, the owner threw plates of crustaceans over the side of the restaurant’s 10^th floor balcony, one startled guest who had their lobster dinner yanked away from them told me.

That violation closed Prado 20 permanently.

Even with the restrictions, paladar owners cooked with soul and the simple meals they prepared were far better than anything state-run establishments could turn out.

La Guarida was on the third floor of La Mansión Camagüey, the sprawling former home of a Cuban sugar baron in the now gritty neighborhood of Centro Habana.

After the revolution, the residence was turned into what Cubans called a solar, a home divided up for dozens of people to live in, a tenement in the bones of a former palace.

The small apartment that the restaurant inhabited was the setting of the Cuban movie Fresa y Chocolate, the first Cuban film to dare tackle the government’s decades-long repression of gays in Cuba.

Soon people came to seek out the small but iconic apartment where the watershed movie had been filmed.

The owner of the apartment Enrique Nuñez del Valle decided to open a restaurant to capitalize on the interest.

“We had enough money to do one dinner,” Enrique told me. “Word got out and we made enough money to do another dinner and then another.”

Two years after opening their doors, Queen Sofia of Spain dined at La Guarida. A seemingly endless stream of celebrities, musicians and movie stars also came to eat in the crumbling mansion.

When La Guarida first opened, the entrance of the building was used as a garage at night by the owner of a tiny blue Polski who parked the car snugly under the sweeping stone staircase.

On the wall to the right of the stairs someone in a patriotic fervor had carefully painted in blood red the words to one of Fidel’s speeches.

“This is why we say homeland or death!” read the block letters of the beginning of the speech occupying the entire wall.

“Without the homeland we do not want life, without dignity, we do not want life, without justice, we do not want life….” Fidel’s words continued.

On the second floor, neighbors hung their laundry to dry, kids played soccer and people watched the evening news or latest soap opera on aging TVs at full volume. The smell of tostones frying wafted from the warren of apartments. On good days, there was one working bathroom per floor.

I found the group from Duke University waiting for our table.

La Guarida in its initial days was only two rooms and since you couldn’t sit down if the twelve seats were occupied, we stood a few feet away from the diners ahead of us, watching them finish their meal.

Enrique and his wife Odeysis, who were waiting the tables, made up for the delay by serving us mojitos on the restaurant’s balcony.

There I met Alexandra.

She was tall with dark black hair and green eyes.

Alex’s grandfather had been a famous architect in Havana named Miguel Gastón who left after the revolution with his family. Her mom was Cuban and still had relatives on the island. Alex had grown up in Panama and this was her first trip to the island where her Mom had been raised.

Unlike the other students, Alex was not that impressed with what I thought I knew about Cuba.

Throughout dinner she peppered me with questions and by the end of the night I was thinking up an excuse to try and see her again.

I was still talking with Alex as we walked down the flights of stairs and out into the dark Centro Habana street when something exploded against her head. There was briefly a bright halo of shards around her and a loud crack. For a brief moment I thought she had been hit by lightning. She fell down on the sidewalk, blood streaming from her scalp.

The group crowded around Alex, who was shaken but was getting back to her feet. Someone thought to put a small compact mirror in front of her face so she could see the blood and broken glass in her hair.

I turned to go back into the restaurant to find out what had happened and nearly collided into a white-faced Enrique running down the stairs to see if anyone had been hurt.

He told me that they had been picking up the mojitos from the balcony where we had drinks before dinner when a glass had fallen over the side of the building down to the street below.

“I am the one responsible,” Enrique said, knowing if that anyone, much less a tourist, was badly hurt, the Cuban government could shut down La Guarida for a good while, possibly forever.

Some people from the neighborhood flagged down an almendrón, what Cubans call the battered, smoke belching jerry-rigged American cars from the 1950’s to take Alex to the Hermanos Almeijeras hospital down the street.

Days before a Cuban friend of mine had just gone to the same hospital after falling off his roof while trying to hook up an illegal satellite dish. He told me there had been no sutures in the emergency room.

Inside the almendron, I told the driver to take us to Cira Garcia Hospital instead. It was a hospital for foreigners and although I had never been there I had heard that Saddam Hussein had been treated at the Cira Garcia once for a brain tumor. That meant it had to be the best.

Inside the hospital, the doctors cleaned the blood and broken glass from Alex’s hair to get a better look at the cuts caused by the falling glass.

“We need to shave her head,” one of the doctors informed us.

We looked at horrified at the two male doctors. They began to crack up.

Estaban jodiendo

They were messing with us. Alex was going to be fine.

As the almendrón took us back, I felt Alex’s fingers grab mine, the first time my future wife held my hand.

Editors note Alfredo Forcada was the long time bellman at the Hotel Sevilla in Havana where before the 1959 Cuban revolution he met Graham Greene, Ted Williams, Frank Sinatra and many other famous guests. My Dad Harvey and I met Alfredo in the 1990s and Dad convinced him to write his memories of pre-Castro Cuba which for the first time I am publishing below.

MYTHS PAST AND PRESENT

This story has to do with when the construction

workers, working on the foundations of the original Hotel

Sevilla found the sealed mouths of tunnels coming from the

street in front of what is today the Museum of Fine Arts. In my

twenty-one years working at the Hotel, I never heard of the

existence of such tunnels that were suppose to come from the

harbor inland as far as the Hotel. But I had a clue, and I decided

to make an investigation on the matter.

I knew from way back, that the whole city block in

question was known as the “Armory Market Place.” Evidently

there was a reason to name it so. There had to be a connection

with that building and the protection of the city and the entrance

to the harbor. These tunnels were connected to the fortresses

surrounding the ports entrance. To the north, to “La Punta

Fort”

, to the east to the Maestranza de Artillileria (Artillery

Quarter Master), and to “La Fuerza Fort. The Morro Fortress

across the harbor entrance was self-sustained. My inquiries

went on. Some sources indicated to me, that by 1840, the

seashore was 300 feet due south from the Hotel Sevilla’s terrain.

I wrote to the Spanish cultural attaché demanding his

cooperation, without success. Later, I thought of writing to the

Consejo de Indias (Council of Indies) in Seville and/or the

Military Museum in Madrid, Spain. Once again with no luck.

Finally, I went to the National Archives, although I

knew that years before a fire had destroyed a lot of documents.

Overcoming the red tape, they showed me a very good

plan drawn by the Spanish military engineers corps in fairly

houses. In the evening of March 12, they had analyzed the

whole plan of attack. His uncle had made objections about the

plan. Unfortunately no one had contemplated the military

preparations on the roof of the palace.

Menelao Mora, the leader, said the attack would take

place as planned and if he didn’t want to participate in it, he

could do so with the proviso that he had to remain at their base

of operations, till the attack was well under way. He said he

would go along as planned.

That evening, the weapons were distributed. Tomas

received a biretta. He told them he did not know how to use it.

One of his comrades took his biretta from him, and handed him

his garand rifle.

Tomas rode with the other attackers in the “Fast

Delivery” truck. I wanted to gain further information from him,

but his companions were impatient and I couldn’t hold him any

longer.

The Hotel Sevilla continued making history. It was

host to Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Mathews of the New York Times,

who from departed from somewhere in the neighborhood

toward the Oriente province, for a rendezvous with Dr. Fidel

Castro in the mountains. The Batista government had claimed

that they had killed Castro and there were no rebels left in the

mountains. Mathews report in S I T demonstrated the Fidel

Castro was alive, and with he rebel companions. For a long

period of time the office of the New York Times was located in

the Sevilla Hotel. The principal correspondent was Ruby Hart

Phillips. She had come to Havana with her husband, who was in

charge of the office. When Mr. Phillips died in an automobile

accident his wife took over. Her house still exists today and is

located several blocks north of the Sevilla, near the Parkview

Hotel.

THE CASE OF RACHEL KEIGESTER

This case involved both my father and me. My father,

because he was the first police officer to arrive at the scene of

the crime. He was a first lieutenant then. Many years later, I

was involved in a reproduction of the affair.

But first things first. Sometime between 1925 and

1931, Rachel Keigester, a blue-eyed blond, came to Havana as

the amant d’colur of a rich Spaniard. They registered at the

Sevilla- Biltmore Hotel, as it was called in those days. It was to

be around that date, because by 1930 the hotel was closed along

with the Nacional and Almendares Hotels. The latter had

recently been inaugurated; this closing was due to the 1929

world economic crisis.

In 1930, a French vaudeville troop came to town, and

was a total failure. That fiasco disbanded the whole company

and every one was left at their own fate.

Rachel was a beautiful women who combined her

activities as a chorus girl with others of a more intimate nature.

Before long, because of her beauty, she was able to secured

some selected patrons for her non-chorus services.

The whole scheme started when she was found dead in

her bathtub. The door of her apartment was locked from the

inside and therefore it appeared to be an accident.

But the investigators were not satisfied with that

explanation. They kept digging about her lifestyle, her friends

and acquaintances. Soon the theory of an accident evolved into

one of a murder. The locked door from the inside was a puzzle.

But so many times it had been used in crime and mystery novels.

What the police were finally able to determine was it was

possible to pass a piece of string through the peephole and with a

loop on the end you could slide the bolt across. The string was

then carefully pulled by one end until it would come out free

through the peephole, leaving the apartment locked from the

inside.

As you might have guessed this lady had frequent

visitors to her apartment. The police were looking for a suspect

who could have committed the crime. For most of her friends

heir alibis were able to clear them of this murder charge.

In the meantime, the paper was making a mint selling

all kinds of tales with the follow up of the investigation. Even a

musician and composer wrote a song about “Rachel la francesita

de Pario”.

. This song was transmitted by the Havana radio

stations. For weeks the news media and “Rachel’s song”

captivated readers and radio audiences.

But as soon as started, one day, no more was read or

said of Rachel’s death. This is where I come in this matter. I

was visited by a movie director, who was writing a script of a

much longer film (very interesting I may say) about the death of

Rachel Keigster as the plat-du-jout. He asked me to play the part

of an American V.I.P. who among those who shared the favors

of Mile. Rachel. This man was wealthy enough to present her

with a set of diamond earrings worth a bundle. I accepted the

part, and by my participation in the filming process I learned a

lot of details surrounding the Rachel affair.

Most of the details were extracted from the criminal

investigation departments archive. One of the first things that I

the case was closed and nothing else should be published.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

During several weeks of May 1985, I got hold of

several issues of a German weekly magazine called Quick,

which published a series of articles under the title “Vor Vierzig

Jahre” (40 years ago) related day by day the happenings

occurred in those final days of World War Two and the final

capitulation of the Third Reich Some I don’t remember, but

these are three I’ll never forget. One, the Allied aviation had

launched a massive aerial on griff unto the Rheinland, the

backbone of the German heavy industry, turning their factories

into a rubble. This notes comport an onslaught of twelve

hundred Flying Fortresses on that area.

The Luftwaffe had only one hundred and twenty-five

fighter planes operational. They all took off to intercept the

attack. Of those one hundred and twenty-five, only 15 returned

to their bases, most of them damaged so badly they might never

fly again.

Two, I saw a photo taken inside a shed of three or four

youngsters, an age around 14 or 15 years old. They were

wearing steel helmets, armbands with their swastikas on them.

A 1898 issue Mauser rifles slung over their shoulder, and two

bazookas strapped to the forks of their bicycles. Armed in such

a manner they were to face the enemy and try to destroy or

disable the armored vehicles that were coming their way.

And third, a large centerfold picture of das Tribunal

surrounded by small photos of the by then dead Nazi leaders…

During our trips to Cuba, I began to pop up uninvited into the newly opened CNN offices on the 20^th floor of the Hotel Havana Libre.

Ted Turner had personally had lobbied Fidel Castro to allow the cable news channel to become the first US media outlet to have a full-time bureau in Cuba. The capitalist and the communist somehow hit it off. It probably didn’t hurt that Fidel was smitten with Ted’s then-wife Jane Fonda. For years Ted and CNN executives attended late night dinners with Fidel at the Palace of the Revolution and tried to convince him to let the network open a bureau in Havana.

At one dinner, Fidel claimed that CNN “only had bureaus in countries where there are protests and uprisings.”

Ted Turner replied by listing the company’s offices in Paris, London, Tokyo and Berlin. Important countries had CNN bureaus based there, shouldn’t Cuba as well? After more of these late-night dinners and exchanges, Fidel finally gave Ted the greenlight for CNN to begin reporting from Havana.

Castro attended the small party the day the bureau opened in the Havana Libre. When the Cuban leader went to leave the hotel, a crowd of tourists and Cubans formed in the lobby to see him. His bodyguards had to push through the throng of people to get to Castro’s Mercedes. One of the CNN executives got shoved into the Mercedes with Castro and fell onto the floor of the car where his face was inches away from a machine gun and box of grenades.

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I mounted my own campaign to become the bureau’s first intern and for no other reason other than my continued insistence was finally invited back the following summer.

One of my jobs that summer was to monitor Castro’s regular nighttime speeches.

I couldn’t believe that I was being tasked with what seemed like a crucial assignment and promised to pay close attention to Castro’s every word.

The bureau chief Lucia Newman smiled at my cub reporter enthusiasm and told me to call the International Desk in Atlanta if Fidel actually made any news.

Accompanying me was the bureau sound tech Tony in case there was some nuance or cubanismo that I likely would have missed.

On the first night of Fidel duty after the first forty-five minutes of Castro’s haranguing tirade against imperialism, I felt Tony tap me on the shoulder. He was heavy set and balding and seemed to be perpetually sweating even with the office AC on full.

“Let’s go get some beers.”

“Tony,” I replied. “This is important, I think we are supposed to watch the whole speech.”

Tony responded with the hoarse laugh of someone who had listened to Fidel’s speeches all his life.

“He’s going to go on like this for at least another hour…. C’mon.”

We went down to the lobby’s cafeteria-style restaurant that had not been altered since opening in 1958 and downed two Hatuey beers while I looked nervously at the clock on the wall.

Finally, after nearly an hour had passed, Tony gestured for us to go back up to the office.

We arrived right on time, just as Fidel was transitioning to milk production. Tony sighed.

“Now this could take a while, let’s get some pizza.”

Over a slightly rancid tasting, rubbery cheese pizza and more beers Tony told me he and his wife were expecting twins and for months they had been looking for a bigger place to live. Real estate sales were forbidden in Cuba. What was permitted was to permutar.

The definition of the word permutar is simply to exchange. But in Cuba the word had taken on the significance of a never-ending bureaucratic purgatory.

Since the government had banned home sales, the only legal option for people wanting to move was to swap residences. In the socialist utopia Cuba was supposed to have been transformed into, Cubans were expected to trade homes based upon their needs not for selfish motives of profit. In each transaction though there was money being passed under the table. Everyone knew what was going on and simply pretended commerce wasn’t taking place.

Rarely did two people want to swap for each other’s homes so permuta chains grew and grew until everyone finally was getting better place to live or enough money to justify swapping for a lesser home. Tony’s permuta chain involved more than 30 people and there was one hold out unhappy with his options keeping the deal from happening.

“If the twins are born before that singao agrees to it, I am going to kill him,” Tony groused, using the Cuban profanity reserved for the lowest of the low.

As the summer continued, we watched Fidel speech after Fidel speech and during our well-timed intermissions downed more Hatuey beers and pizzas.

Finally, one night, four hours into Fidel’s latest diatribe, Tony grabbed my arm.

“Did you hear what he said?”

“No, what?”

At long last Fidel had said something newsworthy and I had missed it.

“He said the USSR invaded Afghanistan,” Tony exclaimed, his face for once not the usual ruddy color.

“Tony that was years ago, everyone knows that.”

He shook his head.

“Cubans don’t know that. Fidel must have slipped. They have never said that before here.”

A few weeks later, I was invited to see Fidel Castro in person.

Tony and I were assigned to cover a meeting of the Asamblea Nacional, Cuba’s Congress. There was little genuine debate as there was only one political party –the Cuban Communist Party—and the legislators approved whatever bills were put in front of them. The Asamblea had more than 700 members, making it larger than the US House of Representatives

“Why do you need so many legislators to vote ‘yes?’” Tony said to me as we drove to the Palace of Conventions.

Fidel built the Conventions Palace in 1979 to host a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana. Following the summit, the 60,000 square meter building slipped into disrepair. Despite its grand name, the Palace was a boxy convention center that had mold on the walls where rain had leaked in and there were no longer doors on the bathroom stalls. A week-long cigar festival was held there every year and the smell of tobacco smoke permeated the furniture.

Around the corner was one of Fidel’s stately residences.

According to legend Castro changed houses constantly to thwart assassination attempts and few people knew where he slept each night. Down the street from the Conventions Palace was El Laguito, Fidel’s personal cigar factory where rollers made Cohiba, which had been his private brand. The neighborhood was called Siboney but before the revolution, its name had been Country Club.

As we walked into the Palace of Conventions, our government minders from the Centro de Prensa Internacional told us to pick up pieces of brown stock paper with our names and our news agency typed onto a white sticker laid out on a table. These were the credentials we needed to cover the event,

I didn’t see one with my name on it and asked what I should do.

“If yours isn’t there, grab that one,” a government official named Roberto said to me. He pointed at a credential that said Rudy Marshall/CNN.

Rudy was the bureau cameraman. He was a short, tightly muscled, fast talking Barbadian. He was black and bald. Everyone knew Rudy. No one had ever confused the two of us.

“Are you sure?” I said to Roberto. He told me to grab Rudy’s credential and get moving inside. We were going to be late for the security sweep.

The Cuban government claimed that Fidel had survived hundreds of assassination attempts. According to legend, the CIA had tried to kill him with exploding cigars, dive suits dipped in poison and cyanide-laced milkshakes.

After so many plots on his life, I expected the security around Fidel to be iron clad.

We passed through an ancient metal detector where a group of men built like judo instructors wearing immaculate white guayaberas, muttered into walkie-talkies.

They were Fidel’s bodyguards and they told the assembled cameramen and photographers to leave all their gear in a mop closet. Then they brought in two bored looking collies to sniff the equipment. A few minutes later we were cleared to start setting up in the auditorium inside. It seemed too easy.

I was helping Tony set up the camera and tripod when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Usted es Rudy Marshall?”

I looked up to see I was flanked by three of the judo instructors, Fidel’s bodyguards.

One of them pointed to the credential with Rudy’s name that I was wearing.

“Are you Rudy Marshall?”

I saw Tony freeze. I knew there was no talking my way out of whatever trouble I was in.

No, I am not, I replied, I am Patrick, I also work for CNN.

The bodyguard in the middle leaned in close to me.

“So why are you using Rudy Marshall’s credential if you are not him? You are violating the chief of state’s security protocols, that’s a serious offense in Cuba,” he explained.

I said I had been told that it was ok to use the credential by a CPI funcionario named Roberto.

“Who?” the main bodyguard looked around in an exaggerated manner. “Point him out to me.”

Roberto was nowhere to be seen.

I guess he’s not here right now but anyway it’s my fault, I said, I am the one responsible.

The bodyguard looked at me for a minute and then plucked away Rudy’s credential. From his pocket he took out another one out with my name on it.

“Use the right one from now on,” he said handing me the credential as he and the other judo instructors stalked off.

About an hour later, high ranking officials began to walk onto the stage. Raul Castro, the Defense Minister and Fidel Castro’s younger brother took his seat next to Fidel’s empty chair. When Fidel Castro appeared on the stage, the air in the room seemed to change. The legislators and government officials shot to their feet and applauded.

Castro took his seat next to Raul. One of the correspondents wondered aloud when was the last time the two Castros had been seen together in public. Another pointed out a government minister thought to have fallen into disgrace seated just behind Fidel.

The Soviet Union was history but Kremlinology –drawing sweeping conclusions about affairs of state from the smallest crumbs of information—was still being practiced in Havana.

Fidel sat listening as an official gave his report in his trademark green military uniform that I noticed was not regular issue but gave off a silky sheen. After a few minutes passed Castro’s bodyguards reappeared to escort the press off while the asamblea continued on.

Leaving the building, I ran into Roberto, the minder who had told me to use the wrong credential. As soon as he saw me, he gave me a knowing ear-to-ear smile under his moustache.

“You found your credential! Good!”

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For decades, Cuba was the object of obsession for American presidents, Soviet premiers, revolutionaries, exiles, journalists, spies and my Dad, Harvey G. Oppmann.

As best as I can determine it was on a freezing cold evening in January 1959, when my Dad’s fascination for all things Cuba was born. He was twelve years old and standing on his street in Shaker Heights, Ohio, pelting cars that passed by with snowballs when an irresistible target came into view: A cop car.

He waited for the blue police sedan to drive by and then Dad threw the snowball with everything he had. What followed was the sound of glass cracking and brakes squealing and then the rustle of my Dad’s snow pants as he took off up his driveway with the police officer running behind him in full pursuit.

Dad sprinted into his house, up the stairs and dove under his bed. He thought he was safe until a hand grabbed his leg and pulled him out. Dad found himself red face to red face with the police officer whose back window he had smashed and who, uninvited, had followed him into his house.

“Where are your parents?” the officer yelled.

Terrified, my Dad could only think to tell the truth.

“They are in Cuba!” he answered.

His parents visited Cuba every year but at this particular moment Cuba was all over the news. There was a revolution going on. Bearded guerrillas had just toppled the government. The cop didn’t believe him.

He smacked my Dad across his head.

“That’s for being a wise guy,” he said as he left the house.

And that’s when my Dad’s lifelong fascination with Cuba began.

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My Dad simply was not like the anyone else’s father.

Growing up he had an old fire truck that he used to take my brother, sister, me and whatever friends that happened to be at our house out for a spin with the sirens blaring as we lay on top of the moldy hoses, hanging on for dear life.

I doubt my Dad ever bothered to get a license to operate the fire truck or actually learned how to drive the eight-wheel behemoth. One night he lost control speeding down Old Mill Road and ran over a row of mailboxes that he had to return to sheepishly set right early the next morning.

Why he owned a fire truck is a mystery since he was clearly more comfortable starting fires. At some point he had taught himself how to blow fire. Breathing out the ball of flame that would curl up with a resounding clap was one his favorite party tricks, usually performed at the end of the night after more than a few drinks. After one such night he singed my mother’s eyebrows almost completely off.

When he instructed us kids how to blow fire, he told us to coat our mouths with a glass of milk and only use Ronson’s lighter fluid. Other brands burned faster and would set your head on fire. That was the extent of his explanation. The only other thing you needed was to be crazy.

As a kid I used to love to look at the pieces of fireworks embedded in his chest from a pyrotechnics stunt gone wrong, dark specks under his skin that never fully worked their way out.

My Dad had few close friends, didn’t show follow sports and you never knew what he was thinking about. He had spent a year in Asia after college as the Vietnam war was winding down and growing up my siblings and I wondered if he had been working for the CIA.

Dad seemed to have his own vocabulary for things. If you vomited –which he claimed he never had—you “ralphed.” If you were really drunk or confused you were “on queer street.” He taught us swear words in Mandarin that people who actually knew the language said were gibberish.

After we saw the first Indiana Jones movie, I asked him to buy me a bull whip like Indy’s which we picked up from a cowboy apparel store on the way home from the movie theater. It only took me a few minutes of playing with my new toy before I cut my lip open with the end of the whip he had bought me. I was four years old at the time.

My Dad’s other quirks paled in comparison to his fascination with Cuba. He read every book and saw every movie he could find about Cuba. He organized heavy scrapbooks full of old postcards of the white sand beaches of Varadero and gambling chips from long-defunct Havana casinos run by American mafiosos.

His parents had made frequent trips to the island in the 1950s before Fidel Castro took power. Tourism ads from back then advertised Cuba as being “so close yet so foreign.” The island remained a distant mirage for my Dad. When his parents visited Cuba, they always left him behind in Ohio with a babysitter.

His father Paul Oppmann would return home with pungent cigars, mambo records and after, one trip, a fighting rooster that terrorized the neighborhood dogs. He and my grandmother would go fly fishing along Cuba’s Southern Coast for tarpon and bone fish. Their favorite nightspot was Sloppy Joe’s where the waiters would weigh a bottle of rum on a scale at the table at the beginning of the evening and then weigh it again at tclsoing time to calculate the bill.

With each trip, my grandfather promised my father Harvey that the next time he traveled to the island, my Dad that he would go with him.

Even tourists like my grandparents could see Cuba was on the verge of historic upheaval. My grandfather told stories of seeing a murdered student demonstrator strung up from a light post as the dictator Fulgencio Batista cracked down on growing opposition.

So why go there on vacation? Why not go somewhere for holiday where the secret police wasn’t murdering activists or better yet where there wasn’t a secret police. I never met my grandfather but he clearly was the first in our family to develop this peculiar obsession for Cuba.

On New Year’s Eve 1958 when Batista fled the island and Fidel Castro’s revolution took power --a few days before my Dad threw the snowball at the cop car-- my grandfather was on vacation in Havana. He witnessed Cubans flooding the streets in celebration, the euphoria of a people certain that a brighter future was finally at hand.

Days later, he went to have breakfast at the Nacional Hotel, where he was staying, and was told by a chagrined maître d’ that the staff was still out partying and there was no one cooking food that morning.

Hunting for breakfast, my grandfather walked up the small hill known as la rampa to the Havana Hilton. Most of the tourists had fled from the hotel and the victorious bearded revolutionaries pouring into the city had taken the Hilton –soon to be renamed Habana Libre --as their headquarters.

At breakfast, he sat at the next table to a rebel comandante, an English-speaking Argentine doctor few people at that point had heard of outside Cuba. Fidel Castro was slowly traveling up the island in a “victory caravan” that was being thronged by thousands of jubilant Cubans. He had sent Ernesto “Che” Guevara ahead to secure Havana immediately.

Over breakfast, the two men, my grandfather and the revolutionary, struck up a conversation. It speaks to Che’s charisma that my grandfather –a Goldwater Republican- was immediately impressed. He told my father after that trip that Cuba was now in the right hands, something that years later my father loved to remind him every time reports circulated that Che was fomenting revolutions in Africa or South America.

My grandfather returned to the US convinced that prosperity awaited Cubans, there would be elections and no more students strung up from light posts. He once again told my Dad that he would take him to visit soon.

Instead, Castro consolidated power. He put Batista cronies on trial before revolutionary tribunals and aired their executions by firing squad on television for all to see. Businesses and private property were expropriated. The economy tanked. Tens of thousands of Cubans fled the island. The US broke off diplomatic relations. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, my Dad practiced hiding under his desk at school from the impending nuclear holocaust.

One day, an American family named the Sweatlands who had their farm on the Isle of Pines in Cuba expropriated by the revolution were invited to speak at my Dad’s school.

“Kids take a good look at me so you can say you have seen a man who only has the clothes on his back,” the family patriarch told the auditorium of students and that “to kill some rats, Castro burned down the barn.”

My Dad was enthralled.

Decades passed. My grandfather died five years before I was born. Paul Oppmann was fly fishing in Michigan when he said he heard music playing and collapsed from a fatal heart attack.

He never made it back to Cuba and never fulfilled his promise to my father. It was the greatest regret my Dad had in his life.

Cuba was always in the ambient noise of my childhood as one of my father’s strange obsessions. Someplace forbidden, someplace we would never see in person.

Then my Dad asked a question that changed my life.

“Do you want to go with me to Cuba?”

In 1994, I was 17 years old when Dad began plotting our first trip.

The Berlin Wall had fallen five years before and Cuba, now cash strapped and isolated, had out of desperation reopened to tourism. Americans were welcomed back as if the previous five decades of animosity had been a simple misunderstanding.

We weren’t quite sure what awaited us in Cuba but it promised to be an adventure, if not an entirely legal one. Under US sanctions any commerce with Cuba was considered “trading with the enemy.” We faced fines, possibly even losing our passports.

This possible criminality of our visit made my Dad want to go even more.

As we plotted the trip, I looked at a map of the routes American Airlines flew. The hemisphere was crisscrossed in a red spider’s web of flights. The destinations all ended at the edges of Cuba; a dark void, someplace still off limits.

When the Cubana flight touched down in Havana, the passengers around me broke into raucous applause. It was not polite “nice landing“ or “glad we finally arrived“ clapping, but the kind of full-throated cheering usually reserved for a last-minute goal at the World Cup.

Looking at the threadbare Russian plane we had taken from the Bahamas, it was easy to understand why everyone was so excited to be back on the ground. Cuba was no longer receiving much of anything from their former patrons in Moscow; certainly not replacement parts for the island’s fleet of aging YAK-42 aircraft.

My fellow passengers were mostly Cuban-Americans, known as mulas for hauling suitcases of goods. Some wore multiple cowboy hats stacked on their heads to resell upon arrival, some had checked car tires as luggage. We saw one man argue with the ticket agent about why he couldn’t take a bandsaw aboard as his carry-on item.

Fidel Castro had called Cubans who left the island gusanos -- “worms.” The returning exiles joked that the gusanos were now returning with another type of gusano, long duffel bags full of food, medicine and clothes that were impossible to find in the island’s remaining threadbare, picked-over State-owned stores.

As we came in for the landing, flight attendants walked down the aisles blasting us with insecticide. Later, I would learn the Cuban government claimed the CIA was planting dengue-carrying mosquitoes on planes to the island.

A small, uniformed man waited at the foot of the stairs of the runway pointing a Geiger counter at the disembarking passengers to check if anyone was smuggling in nuclear material.

“Do you have any idea how old that must be,” my Dad whispered to me as the little man waved the ancient machine emitting a soft crackling noise past us.

Jose Marti Terminal One was my first brush with Cuba’s brand of tropical communism. Unlike most airports in the Caribbean, there was no steel drum band to welcome visitors, no free plastic glasses of rum being handed out. Instead, revolutionary slogans adorned the walls and stern Cuban Interior Ministry officers occasionally pulled a traveler out of line for further questioning.

My first impression of Cuba was of the ominous existing alongside the ridiculous.

At the metal detector where arriving passengers were searched, women customs officials were inexplicably dressed in tight khaki miniskirts and fishnet stockings. They hissed or called you “mi amor” to get your attention.

Looking at the officials’ outfits, my Dad had an epiphany.

“Whoever opens the first Victoria’s Secret in this country is going to make a fortune,” he said.

Driving into Havana, I saw far more Chinese Flying Pidgeon bicycles on the road than cars.

The cars that we did see were 1950’s classics from my Dad’s youth. He argued with the driver of the taxi we were in whether one was a Packard or a Plymouth. The driver was only in his 20’s but he knew the cars better than my Dad remembered them.

A large billboard across Avenida Boyeros into Havana commanded “All Cubans Should Know How to Shoot and to Shoot Well.”

The sign was all the more perplexing for me since in Cuba the word to shoot was “tirar,” which in the Spanish I had learned meant to have intercourse.

Cubans walked up to us on the street to try and guess what country we were from.

“Russian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Canadian, Italian?” They would ask, attempting to break the ice. No one ever guessed the United States, their neighbor a mere 90 miles away.

This was the Cuba of the Special Period in Time of Peace. There were no warships on horizon but the island felt as besieged as Troy.

The government couldn’t afford to continue printing the main newspaper on a mass scale, so copies of the Communist Party daily Granma were taped up in empty storefront windows for people to read.

Eating at the State-owned restaurants, became a guessing game.

I began by telling the waiter, who no matter the restaurant wore a black bow tie with a black vest and white shirt, that I wanted the fish.

Before the order was out of my mouth, the waiter responded “no hay”--- we don’t have any.

Shrimp?

“No hay”

Chicken?

“No hay”

Beef?

The waiter chuckled sarcastically.

Finally, about halfway down the menu I arrived at a pork or pasta dish that the restaurant did in fact have. The guessing game finally over, the waiter would go put in the order.

When we asked Cubans about Fidel Castro, they –out of fear- would never refer to him by name, instead pulling their fingers across their chin as if stroking an imaginary beard. Others, even more paranoid of being seen conversing about the island’s maximum leader, made the opposite sign, pulling the beard up from their forehead, supposedly to throw off anyone who might have been watching.

On our first night, my Dad and I went to the bar at the Nacional Hotel where his father had stayed, a sprawling complex on a bluff overlooking the ocean that had been the height of pre-revolution luxury. The hotel had fallen on hard times. Chandeliers still hung in the lobby and peacocks strutted in the gardens but one of the two pools stood empty, paint peeled from the walls and the stale odor of humidity permeated the hotel.

Among the few other people in the bar were a young Cuban newlywed couple. Cubans who married were treated to a government-comped honeymoon and bequeathed hard to find sets of sheets and soap. Faced with plummeting birth rates, the government was trying to encourage Cubans to marry and have families.

The freebies sparked a never-ending cycle of sham marriages. People got married just to resell the sheets and soap and enjoy a free weekend in a hotel. Couples married each other again and again in different municipalities. Eventually the Cuban government wised up to the fact they were being scammed and halted the practice of gifting the entire island wedding presents.

“Want one?” my Dad asked, handing me a Montecristo No. 2 he had picked up in the lobby.

As I savored my first ever cigar and drink with my Dad, he gave the bartender a tip who looked confused.

“For you,” my Dad said.

The bartender smiled, pocketed the tip and glanced around to make sure no one was watching. He broke out a bottle of pricey 15-year-old Havana Club rum and filled Dad’s glass to the top. Anywhere else a free drink was on the house. In Cuba, it was on the State.

Down the bar from us, sat a balding foreigner with a Steven Segal ponytail talking to a much younger, attractive Cuban woman.

“This is my eighth trip here,” the man bragged to her. “I always bring medicine and clothes with me for my Cuban friends. My government would be very mad if they knew I was coming here but I don’t care. It’s too important to me to help the Cuban people.”

The woman looked off into space while the man continued talking, not hiding how bored she was.

The next morning, we drove around the Miramar neighborhood where many of the pre-revolution mansions of the Cuban upper class had been turned into government offices, embassies or multi-family dwellings that were slowly falling apart after years of neglect.

On the horizon jutted up the former Soviet --now Russian-- embassy. The brutalist architecture of the imposing embassy seemed completely out of place in Havana. Armed guards and walls topped with razor wire surrounded the sprawling Russian diplomatic compound. From the middle of the concrete edifice rose a tower giving the building the appearance of a fortress.

One could imagine a Soviet ambassador peering out from the embassy’s tower during the height of the Cold War and believing victory over the West was close at hand.

“It’s supposed to represent the handle of a scimitar that’s been stabbed into the heart of imperialism,” our taxi driver, who happened to be an architect, told us about the looming embassy in front of us. “We Cubans call it el dedo –the finger—because we had the Russians wrapped around ours.”

Just past the embassy we saw groups of people milling around a parking lot. My Dad asked the driver to pull over.

There we found ourselves standing in front of Havana’s diplotienda.

One didn’t have to be a diplomat to go into the “Diplomat Store,” just not Cuban. The official reason Cubans were barred from a supermarket in their own country was that all the prices were in US dollars. Cubans could go to jail for having dollars even though their government tried to accumulate as much of their enemy’s currency as they could. The diplotienda was better stocked than any normal store, provoking bitterness and envy among Cubans used to finding empty shelves wherever they shopped.

“What did the Cuban boy tell his father he wanted to be when he grew up?” went one joke we heard again and again.

“A foreigner.”

In the parking lot of the diplotienda hovered groups of Cubans trying to make eye contact with foreigners as they walked in.

One short grey-haired woman, a little bolder than the others, stepped forward and pressed her shopping list and money into my Dad’s palm.

“Can you help me buy a few things?” she asked.

The security guards at the entrance were feet away. Shopping for a Cuban at the diplotienda was forbidden. The guards were bored or just too used to this scene to bother doing anything.

When we got inside, we looked at the grey-haired lady’s list and money she had given us. There were three crumpled $10 bills, more than a doctor made in a month.

On the list here were only two items: hot dogs and buns.

While the store gave the appearance of being fully stocked, it was a Potemkin village masquerading as a supermarket.

Entire aisles possessed only a single item.

There were dozens of bottles of the same brand of white vinegar, which were followed by stacks of the same brand of canned tomato paste and then uniform packets of dried beans; the labels unchanging as I walked the aisles.

We found the hot dogs and buns, paid for them with the money the grey-haired lady had given us, showed our receipt at the door where it was ripped in half like a movie ticket and then wheeled the cart out to our now smiling, new best friend.

“You have an interesting diet,” my Dad told the grey-haired lady.

“Oh, it’s not for me,” she replied. “I work for the State selling hot dogs in a park and every day by noon, I run out. For years I have been telling them to send me more to sell but they never do. So now I work for the State until noon and then after that I work for myself.”

Our last night we went to one of the few restaurants that was open, an old Hemingway haunt long ago taken over by the government called the Bodeguita del Medio.

A frayed brown rope divided the restaurant in half. On one side were the Cuban customers paying in pesos, the other side was reserved for foreigners paying in dollars.

A long line of couples and families snaked out from the door from the Cuban section. Their side –the people paying in pesos—was full. The foreigner side was nearly empty. We walked in and sat down at one of the tables immediately. The people in line stood waiting, watching the diners in front of them, silently praying the food didn’t run out before their turn to eat.

The restaurants walls were covered in the signatures of clients. Ernest Hemingway’s signed ode to the Mojito was framed over the bar. By the bathroom an anonymous author had scrawled, “Enjoy your visit to crumbling Havana, the Sarajevo of the Caribbean.”

After dinner as we walked back towards our hotel, the cobblestone streets were completely dark. The only light came from TV sets playing through open windows. There were only a few channels available and I could follow the same soap opera everyone seemed to be watching as we walked from block to block. It was too dark to see them but the murmuring of couples sitting close together rose from the entrances of the buildings we passed.

Out in the darkness, on the outskirts of Havana province, farmers were burning the remnants of freshly cut sugar cane fields and the air was full of a smell that was both sweet and bitter.

Being in Havana that night felt as close as one could get to time travel.

The author on a trip to Cuba in the 1990’s

Before we left my Dad wanted to get some cigars to take back home, even though this too was illegal under US law.

In front of the Partagas factory, which like all private businesses in Cuba had been seized by the revolution, congregated groups of hustlers selling tobacco. They hawked tourists stolen cigars in front of the factory security guards who either couldn’t be bothered to report them or were in on the scam.

We went with the first group that approached us to a nearby building and up the creaky staircase to the apartment where they had their stash. Once they brought us inside and locked the door behind us, the “jineteros” –jockies—the Cuban slang word for street hustlers—began pulling out box after box of cigars. Whether they were knockoffs or stolen, they had everything the factory did and probably more.

My Dad consulted a handwritten wish list he had made up. There was one box of the lesser-known brand Punch the jineteros didn’t have but they quickly dispatched a runner who returned minutes later with the freshly pilfered cigars wrapped in a frayed bag used to transport sugar.

As we were completing the sale, my Dad realized his Ray Ban sunglasses that he had placed on a table moments before were now missing.

“My glasses? Las gafas?” my Dad said in his basic Spanish. The jineteros made an exaggerated pantomime of pretending to look for his missing Ray Bans.

No glasses, they said, holding their hands up to demonstrate their innocence.

My Dad pulled out from his pocket and flicked open a large knife that I had bought that morning at a crafts fair thinking it would make a good letter opener. Without me seeing him, Dad had grabbed the blade from the car before we ventured up to the apartment to do the cigar deal.

The apartment was silent for a beat. We were locked inside a room with four large guys in a country that was notoriously unfriendly to Americans.

One of the jineteros took the Ray Bans out of his pocket and placed them on the table.

“No problem! No problem!” they shouted as my Dad folded the knife up and put it back into his pocket. We exchanged the money for the cigars which we carried out to the street inside the same sugar sack.

Somehow it had only been a few days since we had arrived in Cuba and my Dad was already pulling knives on people.

As we boarded the creaky Cubana flight to leave the island, he turned to me with a question.

“When are we coming back?”

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After the trip my Dad sent a Cuban American friend a letter of his impressions of that first trip when we had driven to the countryside outside Havana.

“The soil appears to grow any crop but lack of modern procedures and equipment are placing limits on what is actually produced,” he wrote. “Not once did we see a tractor… everything we saw was being done by hand. While we were there, Castro announced there were no funds for cane cutters and they will need to go into the fields for the harvest barefoot.”

We returned again and again. Our first visit was supposed to have quenched my Dad’s yearning to see Cuba but the experience only deepened his obsession. We came back with the rest of our family, with friends, with people we hardly knew that had heard my Dad was the person to show you Cuba.

The more we traveled to Cuba, the more we realized how much more there was to understand. Everyone in Cuba seemed to have a story and secrets. The first time I talked with people I met they would repeat the party line about Cuba’s free education and health care. But later after they invited me to drink rum at their homes late at night, Cubans would confess how irretrievably broken their country was, how much better people with the right connections lived than they did and how they thought constantly about leaving.

As we made more Cuban friends, Dad began packing bags full of the medicines, beauty products and car parts they asked him to bring down on every trip.

There was usually some snafu with the travel plans. Cancelled flights, lost hotel reservations, flat tires on crappy Chinese rental cars. Cuba was not ready to be a travel destination, at least not for sane people, and yet we still kept coming.

There were few tourists in those days and Cuban cops, hoping for a bribe or just suspicious of foreigners, routinely pulled over our T plate rental car to question us. My Dad’s workaround to this hassle was to photoshop and plasticize an invented picture of him deep in conversation with Fidel Castro. I told him it was a stupid idea that would get us in trouble. Every time he flashed the photo to the police, they immediately let us go.

Once while we made a pit stop while driving from Santiago de Cuba to Havana, a group of skinny old cowboys appeared herding their even thinner cows across the deserted highway. Suddenly a semi-truck came barreling the down the road and one of the cows bolted back across from where it had come. The driver slammed on the breaks too late and ran the cow down. As the truck screeched to a halt, the cow became jammed between the third and fourth wheels of the semi.

Feet away from where we stood witnessing this bovine tragedy, the cowboys yanked on the cow’s horns to pry the animal out from the truck’s wheels. They grunted and pushed until, finally free, the injured cow hobbled away pitifully on four broken legs. The cowboys trailed after it, pulling long knives from their belts to begin butchering the animal.

Cuba’s cows were property of the government and Cubans that slaughtered them without state permission faced up to 20 years in jail, far more than anyone typically got for murdering another human. The one exception that allowed people to eat a cow was if the animal died by accident. During the Special Period, fatal accidents involving cows, like the one we witnessed, skyrocketed.

After that trip, my Dad said the only thing he looked forward to more than the flight down to Cuba was the flight out.

Once, convinced that the US trade embargo was in its final days, my Dad bought 100 boxes of Cuban cigars and arranged for the cousin of family friends to sail his boat down to pick them up. Dad reasoned that as soon as the embargo was lifted, Cuban cigars would sell out in the US and he would have his own stockpile.

It was a sound plan except Alfie, the boat captain, got lost on the trip down, ran aground and then sailed into Nuevitas, a restricted Cuban military port.

It took hours to convince the Cuban border guard that Alfie was not a gun smuggler, merely a cigar smuggler. After they agreed to let him leave, my Dad handed off the bags of tobacco to him to hide in secret compartments on his boat.

“This will be just like when my old man smuggled gin during prohibition,” Alfie bragged to us. “I know everyone at customs in Nantucket, they will wave me right through.”

But at sea, Alfie had second thoughts and heaved the cigars into the Atlantic. Or so he claimed. My Dad never amassed his secret cigar cache and despite his predictions, the US embargo on Cuba stayed firmly in place.

A few trips later we had lunch in Havana with the relatives of a Cuban-American friend who had asked us to look in on their family. Dad and I took them to El Aljibe, a restaurant famous for serving all you can eat chicken and rice and beans to customers paying in dollars.

There were a few tables of Cuban exiles taking their families out for a special lunch. The rest were elderly Italian or Spanish men with their far younger Cuban girlfriends.

After lunch we told the couple we met, Patricia and Ernesto, that they should take home with them the piles of leftover rice and beans, fried plantains and chicken.

“No, we have already eaten more than we usually do in an entire day,” Patricia said, “And anyway our fridge is broken.”

My Dad asked why they couldn’t simply repair the fridge but Patricia explained that it was an older Russian model that were steadily vanishing in Cuba. She shrugged, the part they needed would turn up or they would eventually be able to afford to buy a new one. Not having a working fridge wasn’t an unusual predicament during the Special Period in Cuba.

As we left the restaurant Dad said he wanted to see where they sold appliances here. Patricia and Ernesto acquiesced to this strange request from a foreigner and took us to a picked over State store where they had a few Chinese fridges at exorbitant prices.

“How about this one?” My Dad pointed at the largest fridge and pulled out a wad of US bills from the stack he carried in a money belt.

Patricia and Ernesto tried to argue but my Dad wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was buying them a fridge.

“So when will they deliver it to your house?” my Dad asked as the cashier counted his bills.

Ernesto was still laughing at my Dad’s question as we hoisted the heavy cardboard box containing the fridge onto the top of the trunk of our rental car.

Luckily, they only lived a few miles away.

As my Dad drove, Ernesto and I ran behind the car with our arms raised to keep the fridge from failing off.

All of Havana seemed to stop and watch in envy as we creeped by with the new fridge balancing on the trunk of the car. It was August and the heat mixed with the car fumes was suffocating.

Every few minutes Ernesto repeated to me. “Your father. He is a great man.”

I can still see Dad’s grinning face looking back in the side view mirror.

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