Hey, Hemingway!
On a jaunt that took me from Key West to Havana, I explore Papa’s past and marvel at how European colonialism was apparently the best thing that ever happened to Cuba
By Mark Cromer
It’s a late night in the last week of July 2025 and I am sitting on the balcony of my room on the 25th floor of The Diplomat in Hollywood, Florida, enjoying a vodka tonic and a cigarette with my wife Julianne as we watch the light show from a massive storm front that’s making landfall on the other side of the Florida peninsula.
The inky night sky suddenly flashes hues of gold and amber as lightning explodes behind the huge billowing clouds that are for an instant framed in ominous silhouette. The electricity in the air is like nature’s paparazzi, unleashing thousands of flashes that capture the brooding advance of a storm in a manner that’s something akin to stop-action photography.
The horizon falls deathly dark for a spell, only to be suddenly backlit again by rapid fire punctuations that explode like a mighty broadside from a French ship of the line during the glories of the Age of Sail.
It is a frightfully beautiful sight to behold and my wife and I savor it together.
I had returned to Florida to conduct some strategic research for a client that took me across the state’s swampland from Hollywood to Naples, where I slipped into the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation’s upscale detox and rehab clinic to speak with a source during the permitted visitation period. We had chatted quietly in a deserted corner of a conference room that is usually used for group sessions in the former business park that has been converted into a recovery clinic.
I emerged from the complex a few hours later, satisfied that I had acquired from the source most of the information that I had flown from Los Angeles to Miami to obtain, and it did have one other added benefit. When I jumped into our rental car that Julianne had parked across the street from the clinic, I exclaimed: “Well, after more than 40 years of the drinking life, I can now finally say that I have been to Betty Ford.”
Julianne laughed and added: “And you didn’t burst into flames when you walked through the doors!”
“Nope,” I said. “Not yet.”
We made our way out of Naples and slogged back across the peninsula to The Diplomat and returned to our lofty firebase in Room 2531, where in honor of my successful reconnaissance, fraught as it was with the ever-present peril of detection and intervention by Betty Ford staff keen on preventing onsite interviews, we immediately ordered a barrage of high-octane drinks properly infused with Ketel One to settle our nerves. Our first choice of Stolichnaya was unfortunately unavailable for the moment, so Ketel One would have to work for now, with perhaps Tito’s as a backup.
Regardless, we knew it was absolutely vital to replenish and restore our blood alcohol levels following such an extended foray that required the usual levels of intellectual acuity that’s mandatory on such assignments, to say nothing of the complete sobriety such field work demands, lest anything go awry while covertly visiting a source in Betty Ford and the research suddenly turns into a residency for myself. Pass.
As we watched the storm perform deep in the distance, I found myself distracted by the garish display emanating from The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, a guitar shaped tumor with an exterior wrapped in perpetual lighting schemes that made the freakish sign of these times stand out even more. As a concession located on the Seminole Tribe’s Hollywood reservation, I figured the fire water, wigwams and wampum business must be pretty damn good these days for the local inheritors of the indigenous bloodlines.
Perched twenty-five stories above the Atlantic beachfront provided a nice breeze, but the ever-present humidity on the ground took some acclimating to for an old writer like me, heading into my 60s and utterly gone to fat as my many appetites had caught up with and overpowered my former frame of youthful vigor that was once impervious to the ocean of alcohol and the vast herds of cattle that I’ve consumed since my teens. I had held on well enough through my late 40s and into my 50s, by which point I must admit I was somewhat surprised that I’d made it that far down the road anyway—vertical and breathing—and accordingly surrendered without much of a further fight to my fatalistic sensibilities that had long centered around the old line of advice: ‘Eat, drink and be merry.’
Well, that was the easy part.
Waiter! Another round and let’s look at that dessert menu again.
I had been in Florida a few times before, on several trips decades earlier while working business intelligence cases for Kroll that put me in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando during the mid-aughts, but the corporate spook work didn’t leave too much time to really unwind and explore the Sunshine State and I had long been looking forward to the chance to make my way down the state and across the chain of small islands spinning off the fingertip of Florida into the Caribbean and just drift awhile in the atmosphere that Jimmy Buffet and Ernest Hemingway had both found so intoxicating.
In early 2013, I did have a close encounter with the Florida Keys when a kept housewife whose serial indiscretions that I had indulged planned a trip to Key West for us during a window provided by her husband’s business travel itinerary. We had dated in the 1990s and she had slipped back into my life in 2009, showing up at a conference that I was speaking at in Georgetown and then following me back to my hotel room alongside The Potomac, where she proceeded to provide room service. As the years passed and she kept whispering promises and assurances in my ear that proved to be far more scandalous than the sins we shared under the sheets, I began to realize that her divorce would never materialize, since cutting herself free from the walking wallet that she had gleefully harpooned as the Millenium got underway was far more unsettling to her than perpetually performing her highly choreographed and not-so-private reality series she had once joked was entitled Adultery: My Scarlett Letter to Love.
But alas, the adventure she had planned for us in Key West collapsed unexpectedly due to her hubby’s shifting plans and she had to rescheduled her serial fling with me to a new location and time slot.
My experiences with the cheating wife did ultimately produce a lasting upside for me after I put her in the rearview for good in 2017, as it eventually informed my decision to finally tie the matrimonial knot years later as the last mile-marker of my 50s approached. I finally took the plunge into marriage for the first and what will be the only time in my life, putting a ring on the finger of a beautiful college professor a decade my junior (I don’t mind sayin’) whose sharp intellect is as enticing as her ginger mane is wild. We took our vows on a November afternoon in Morro Bay and have settled into the warmth of our shared life based in the sublime comfort that comes with the plain truth. With Julianne, I don’t have to look over my shoulder—and she doesn’t have to look over hers.
It’s a reassuring place to land and one for me that stands in stark contrast to the chaos that came with the meth-like addiction to deceit I had witnessed the cheating wife of yesteryear descend into as she dissolved into an insidious junkie of deception.
So, as Julianne and I watch the storm advance across the night sky, I am pleased that my virginal plunge into Key West comes unpolluted by the poisonous contrails that the cheating wife’s toxic infidelity always left in her wake and refreshed by the clear skies and clean slate of an honest woman I can trust.
I refill our drinks, light another cigarette and let my gaze diffuse into the distant flashes.
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The drive from Hollywood down into Key West was a relatively smooth affair, with the Nissan Rogue we picked up at the airport offering the comforts of a mid-size sports utility vehicle along with the size and all-wheel drive that might prove useful in swampy Florida, though we had no plans to offroad anything during the trip but good to have just in case, especially as hurricane season had begun in June.
One thing I noticed immediately after slouching behind the wheel was the general insanity that seemed pervasive among many Florida drivers, the madmen who seemed hellbent on putting the casual lunacy evident every day on the freeways of Los Angeles or across the streets of Seattle to shame; tailgating while shouting into their iPhones before speeding past in a blur that makes it difficult to discern if there was a courtesy bird flipped or not.
Heading south on Highway 1 through Key Largo, Islamorado and Marathon before crossing the Seven Mile Bridge was mildly anticlimactic. It begins as a serene visual experience that wears off pretty quickly as you suddenly become more concerned that the death-wish drivers darting into oncoming traffic to pass the vehicles already doing 70 mph might result in a deadly head-on collision. That was a very real and worrisome prospect as vehicular insanity bloomed on the two-lane bridge as we crossed it, with speed demons attempting to pass multiple vehicles on the bridge in outbursts that led other, sane drivers, to visualize the spectacular fireball the crash they were tempting would produce with a sense of satisfaction surrounding the fate of the ass-hat behind the wheel that would be showcased in an orange and black orb of death. Relishing that would just as quickly disappear, of course, washed over with terrible grief for the people in the vehicle the lunatic hit and the mother of all traffic jams that would follow, trapping thousands of motorists.
So, a mixed bag. Passing through The Keys there was scenic beauty to be glimpsed and savored just outside the windows, but deadly peril lurked constantly in the rearview and driver’s side mirrors.
Big Pine, Sugarloaf and Stock Island came and went, along with the surreal sight of massive iguanas lazing in the sun on the side of the highway, a couple of which appeared to be Sailfin Dragons, judging by their distinctive dorsal crests. Imported from the Philippines by exotic pet dealers, the semiaquatic giant lizards have become an invasive species in The Keys as former owners tire of them and free them into the mangroves.
We reached Mile 0 in Key West about four hours after leaving Hollywood and checked into our room at Eden House, the oldest boutique hotel on the island that’s still operating, having first opened its doors a century earlier in 1924. We took an upstairs room that also had a loft, where the bed was, connected to the living room and kitchen with a spiral staircase. Given the temperatures, humidity and the prospect of having to navigate the staircase three or four times each night thanks to my enlarged prostate, we decided to use the rollout couch downstairs next to the wall air conditioning unit as our main quarters.
Beyond offering a place to sleep, shower and a personal shitter, we didn’t anticipate being in our room at Eden House much. While some of our trips were made for the express purpose of holing up for an extended period of time in a grand hotel, disappearing into its comforts and services to forget about the world and its timeless troubles, most other trips are taken to explore the surrounding landscapes and the hotel rooms are ultimately just glorified crash pads.
After a few drinks at the thatched-roof poolside cabana bar, we took in a night stroll along Fleming Street and started zig-zagging (intentionally) lazily toward the historic district, taking Grinnell Street to Southard Street and then kept walking under the lush canopy peppered with palms and past the Conch-style homes, bungalows and white picket fences that all spoke to a gilded age of casual glory frozen in time. Preserved. At least for now.
It was a quiet night and as we walked the sound of a solo guitarist strumming rather earnestly away on his acoustic six-string while howling in a passable Springsteen manner grew steadily louder until it was directly across the street from us, emanating from a two-story revival designed home from the early 20th Century known as the Albury House. The Victorian frontage of the home was illuminated to reveal red, white and blue bunting left over from the Fourth of July and Old Glory flying up top and festooned all over the place.
It just seemed to beckon us.
As we walked in, I suddenly realized the joint was a ghost bar at the moment, literally empty of even a single customer. The bartender stood smiling behind the bar and the long-haired busker sitting on the stool in the corner cradling his guitar in his lap were the only two souls to be found and as we headed toward the bar the guitarist asked for a request. Without thinking or even looking at him I just said “Free Bird!” and as we settled onto our stools the guitar slinger in the window amazingly launched into a wistfully acoustic rendition of Ronnie Van Zant’s ode to freedom and the uncertainties of love.
I had the sense that he was being more than a good sport having a go at it, that he knew the song intrinsically and was more than just happy to play it, he was hoping to play it, and while his fingers weren’t as magically possessed as Allen Collins had been, he poured enough soul into his rendering of the song to animate a fitting reminder that spirit of Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Lost Cause still abides in Dixie.
Maybe I was feeling a little like Jack Torrance amid the recent relentless jags of writing—though thankful I could still crank out more than a repetitive sentence to convey my own growing misanthropy—but it did seem to me that our bartender appeared to be a bit like Lloyd at The Overlook Hotel’s Gold Room in The Shining. He offered a sly grin as he asked what we were in for, but instead of being donned smartly in a tux and bowtie under stoically slicked back hair like Lloyd, he sported a ballcap and T-shirt as he knowingly nodded to our request for a Stoli and tonic and a Stoli and soda, two limes.
The bartender’s said his name was Bobby, and as the night passed slowly away we shared a few pleasant reflections of our road trip and learned superficially of his time in Key West, all of it punctuated by our one-man juke box in the corner, Harley, who we came to treasure for a few hours as he continued to peel off my requests with surprising dexterity and an impressive lyrical vault that reached into deep and somewhat obscure tracks. The works of Jim Croce, The Eagles and Hank Williams Jr. all seemed to be second nature for him and reassuring to us that country folks will survive.
To help ensure our one-man musical outpost, Fort Harley, was able to survive in Key West, we papered his tip jar sufficiently enough that I told Julianne that while he may have only had an audience of two for most of the night, it had to have been one of his best paying bar nights in a spell.
I only vaguely remember us leaving Heroes.
I’d gone upstairs to use the bathroom and when I returned to the bar Julianne was talking to two or three blonde women (hard to say, it may have been three, or it could have been two and they somehow looked like three thanks to the magical elixir that had flowed so freely) who’d saddled up and I recall the conversation had drifted into something about Van Halen, though I don’t think Harley had torn into a version of Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love, at least not yet. The chatter was pleasant and then we seemed to be carried by an invisible current back out to Southard Street at Key Lime Square to slowly make our way back to Eden House in a lazy march of step, stumble, swerve and step again.
Key West in the wee hours turned out to be perfect for such a stumbling walk n’ talk, the landscape devoid of other humans but peppered with chickens darting about, iguanas in the trees and the occasional friendly feline on patrol that shadowed us as we painstakingly focused on making it back to our room. Shortly before we finally stepped into the welcoming embrace of the foyer of Eden House that felt like the one-yard line to our endzone in the room, I looked over to see Julianne looking directly at me, broadly grinning below half-lidded eyes as her ginger mane splayed wildly over her flawless pearl-skinned shoulders, and I noticed her hair sparkled in the light as if it had been bedecked with a scattershot of large diamonds.
I looked closer and it took me a second longer to realize that her hair was mottled with the dying ice cubes from our to-go cups from Heroes. She was modeling them after one tumble or another that left us wearing the remnants of our drinks.
“Shine on, my brilliant girl,” I said, channeling a little Art Garfunkel. “All your dreams are on their way.”
Our room key—an actual key, not a plastic card—blessedly worked its ‘open sesame’ magic on the door and our temporary abode swallowed us whole.
[]
We resurfaced sometime the following afternoon, recovering over good plates at Azur, the restaurant attached to Eden House that offers Mediterranean fare but can also crank out a proper late American hangover breakfast on request, then strolled back down to not far from where we had been the night before, but this time making our way not into a bar but past the broken brick wall and bright screen of fauna into the manor at 907 Whitehead Street.
The Key West digs of Ernest Hemingway.
I had first run into Hemingway around 1982, shortly before I turned 17 while in Honors English at Pomona High School, when I was assigned to read and report on A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s 1929 novel that follows an American medic as he navigates the terror of war and the intrigue of romance across a Europe roiling with the First World War. While I was a developing student of history, I didn’t yet have a real foothold in the Europe of the First World War. Yet I was immediately struck by Hemingway’s economy of words and his newspaper reporter’s sensibilities that he employed to capture and convey the horror and hope that follows Frederic and Catherine across a landscape rife with misery and alcoves of love.
The Sun Also Rises had been published three years earlier, in 1926, but it was with A Farewell to Arms that Hemingway’s often staccato style hit its focus as he peeled off crisp snapshots that captured far more than the skeletal framework might at first suggest and delivered a literary bestseller.
From its opening lines through to its cold ending, the novel proceeds at a steady clip that propels the reader from bucolic scenes of nature to grim operating tables and the awkward banality of merely waiting to the random musing of the importance of whores in wartime, and Hemingway wrang the most out of all of it through a simple structure of straight-ahead prose.
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.”
“Nothing happened until afternoon. The doctor was a thin quiet little man who seemed disturbed by the war. He took out a number of small steel splinters from my thighs with delicate and refined distaste.”
“I went to the door and looked out. It had stopped raining but there was a mist.
‘Should we go upstairs?’ I asked the priest.
‘I can only stay a little while.’
‘Come on up.’
We climbed the stairs and went into my room. I lay down on Rinaldi’s bed. The priest sat on my cot that the orderly had set up. It was dark in the room.”
“’Don’t go,’ I said. ‘Tell me about Gorizia. How are the girls?
‘There are no girls. For two weeks now they haven’t changed them. I don’t go there anymore. It is disgraceful. They aren’t girls; they are old war comrades.’
‘You don’t go at all?’
‘I just go to see if there is anything new. I stop by. They all ask for you. It is a disgrace that they should stay so long that they become friends.’
‘Maybe girls don’t want to go to the front anymore.’
‘Of course they do. They have plenty of girls. It is just bad administration. They are keeping them for the pleasure of the dugout hiders in the rear.’
‘Poor Rinaldi,’ I said. ‘All alone at the war with no new girls.’
And as the curtain dropped, Frederic’s life shattered by the sudden death of Catherine and their baby at birth, Hemingway offered an almost passing observation that pierced the ritual choreographed grief that has long been a feature of death in the West, closing with a shrug that could have just as well have been about missing a bus.
“But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”
Frederic’s walk back to the hotel alone in the rain became an iconic distillation of life as we all eventually must face it. At the end there is death, waiting for us all, and those who outlive us for a while are left to walk on awhile longer; to walk home, to eat dinner, to pour a drink, and to listen to the rain and wait.
For Bradley Cooper’s character Patrizio in the 2012 film Silver Linings Playbook, Hemingway’s ending was too much to process, too much to bear. Yet for most real-life readers of A Farewell to Arms over the past century, the novel’s ending was not so much a cold slap of betrayal that denied them hope in a happily ever after, but rather marked the birth of a long literary love affair with the writer, his work and his life.
I would go on to complete most of my reading of Hemingway throughout the 1980s; consuming For Whom The Bell Tolls and Death in the Afternoon as well as making my way through The Old Man and the Sea and various collections of his short stories, notably The Nick Adams Stories, where his The End of Something resonated with me, capturing the bleakness I had felt in the aftermath of a summer romance I had with an Italian-American girl that had run its course and died quietly for reasons that I could quite explain.
Written in 1925, Hemingway’s The End of Something rolls across a mere five pages, yet within that tight frame he still finds a seamless alchemy of words to perfectly frame Nick’s unraveling with his girl Marjorie. Long line fishing on a lake in the Northeast near an abandoned mill town, the young lovers wait it out on a beach by a driftwood fire they made, their banter dripping away at the end of what was once something between them.
“They sat on the blanket without touching each other and watched the moon rise.
‘You don’t have to talk silly,’ Marjorie said. ‘What’s really the matter?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Of course you know.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Go on and say it.’
Nick looked at the moon coming up over the hills.
‘It isn’t fun anymore.’
He was afraid to look at Marjorie. Then he looked at her. She sat there with her back toward him. He looked at her back. ‘It isn’t fun anymore. Not any of it.’
She didn’t say anything. He went on. ‘I feel as though everything has gone to hell inside of me. I don’t know, Marge. I don’t know what to say.’
He looked at her back.
‘Isn’t love any fun?’ Marjorie said.
‘No,’ Nick said. Marjorie stood up. Nick sat there, his head in his hands.
‘I’m going to take the boat,’ Marjorie called to him. ‘You can walk back around the point.’
After Marjorie rows away, Nick lays there in the sand for a long while, listening to her fade into the distance. His buddy Bill finally appears and casually asks if Marge had a made a scene. Nick asks him to just leave, but Bill helps himself to one of their sandwiches and checks the fishing lines.
Another end that was just, well, the end. Of something.
While I kept the works of Hemingway that I had selected in my home library, I hadn’t revisited in them in quite some time and as I made my way through his Key West home it felt a bit like a reintroduction of sorts to the iconic writer whose outsized persona of a ‘man’s man’ came as a refreshing reminder that the Triumph of Estrogen peddled by the Future is Female cult may have been greatly exaggerated.
Hemingway’s literary virility and Western masculinity was somewhat on display throughout the two-story home, which with its substantial wraparound balcony on the second floor and the fairly expansive grounds covered in fauna and sporting a sizable swimming pool still maintained a handsome dignity that is definitely a rebuke to the gaudy box-builders of the 21st Century. The French Colonial home was built in 1851 by marine architect Asa Tift and in 1862 he installed on its front entrance walkway a fountain designed by Tift that was shaped to reflect the ironclad warships Tift and his brother had designed for the Confederacy.
The heirlooms and relics around the home speak mostly to the 1930s era that Hemingway inhabited the house with wife No. 2, the newswoman Pauline Pfeiffer, as the pair made it their residence at least to the extent when Hemingway wasn’t abroad. I was pleased to learn the home was where he wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, as the works are two other favorite short stories of his that I found my way into early in the going and with the fate of poor Francis always resonating with me as a life lesson: never go big game hunting or turn your back to a cheating wife who has been handed a rifle. Bad things can happen, like your cranium suddenly going Kablooey!
One of the more delightful treats to be found across the 1.5 acre spread that Hemingway had made his own in Key West are the dozens of cats—estimates range to as many as 60 felines—that roam the property as living descendants of a polydactyl cat that Hemingway had been given during The Great Depression era. Known for their six-toes (instead of the usual five), the cats have become something of an attraction of their own, with visitors free to observe and pet them (if the cats are inclined to oblige) as they enjoy their inheritance, lounging across the grounds and in accordance with the universal cat code of conduct looking rather dismissively bored with it all between naps.
I couldn’t help but think that were it not for the steady flow of human traffic throughout their domain, Hemingway’s cats would definitely have it made in the shade.
We made our casual farewells and slipped back onto Whitehead Street, crossing it for a closer look at the Key West Lighthouse and then made our way steadily down the street to its terminus at South Street in the Whitehead Spit where we gazed upon the loudly-painted buoy-like marker jutting forth from its concrete mooring that denotes the “Southernmost point in the Continental U.S.A.” and advises that Cuba is a mere 90 miles away.
It’s a distance close enough to the promising land of America that 2 million Cubans have sought to cross the Florida Straits on every manner of vessel and jerry-rigged flotation device, with a few even daring to swim it. Cubans are almost within range to be haunted by El Norteamericanos enjoying the lavish splendor of their Miami nights, yet the straits are filled with peril as daunting as life itself is within the impoverished Marxist police state.
Rather than roll the dice with another revolution, most would rather just swim for it.
Not far behind us up the street, the longing words of writer Jennifer Grafiada were etched into the sidewalk.
Ninety Miles
Oh, Havana
Coffee-colored dreams of rainy streets
Boys playing with balls
La Playa Santa Maria
If only I could get to you
And your people could come to me
Julianne and I looked out into the Caribbean and knew that the following morning we would cross those 90 miles to take breakfast in Havana.
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The sun hadn’t yet peaked over the horizon as we climbed out of the Town Car service we had arranged to take us from Eden House to the small Key West airport at the break of dawn. Anticipating an ample sampling of Hemingway and Castro’s favorite drinks, we had no intention of driving either to or from the airstrip in Key West.
Our ride to Cuba came courtesy of a 1983 Britten-Norman BN2T Islander, a boxy-looking 10-seat turboprop fixed-wing aircraft operated by Five Kilo Whiskey, LLC, which sounded good to us. The older veneer and fixed ‘tricycle’ landing gear of the craft—the wheels, dangling from the wings, don’t retract after takeoff—might have given others momentary pause but I had been in enough beer can prop jobs in the past to not sweat it. And anyway, I figured if the flight didn’t make it across the straits, having disappeared with a splash into the Caribbean would be a suitable ending for my life, a nice dramatic flourish for the farewell.
The foray into Cuba came together somewhat on the fly months earlier, as I assembled the logistics of my research trip up the Florida panhandle, with Julianne and I deciding to turn the end of it in to a getaway in Key West. One evening as we discussed our impending trip I mentioned, almost in passing: “It’s a shame we can’t slip into Havana. It’s right there.” A few moments later, Julianne replied: “Well, maybe we can.”
It turned out that despite maintaining broad restrictions on travel to Cuba, the United States does allow its citizens some specific exemptions for visas granted under educational auspices and to the cultural and humanitarian benefit of the Cuban people, among other diplomatic wonk-speak. We applied for our visas through a charter company that oversees such trips to Cuba, submitting our passports and paying the fees and in a few weeks, thanks to the magic of diplomatic carveouts and loopholes, we had been approved for a trip to Cuba.
We crossed the tarmac to the plane shortly after daybreak and as we did I couldn’t help but think back to my old drinking buddy Rob, with whom I had kicked around a trip to Havana in 2000, as we had jointly arrived at the idea during our regular bouts of political badinage that making our way to Cuba to watch Fidel Castro deliver one of his hours-long fiery tirades at the ‘capitalist pigs’ would be a great adventure in pursuit of bearing witness to living history—or an epic booze-fueled goof to regale friends with back home. Probably both. But it was never to be, in part because our haphazard planning sessions usually took place at a bar, most often The Blackwatch Pub or The Hi-Brow, and in part because history and life would intervene before we could get far past planning to travel to Mexico City and heading to Cuba from there. September 11, 2001, arrived to drop its dark boom across the nation and world and then, in January 2003, during a pick-up basketball game in Claremont, Rob collapsed and died, his ticker delivering its last beat after just 41-years on Earth.
As Julianne and I clambered into the snug confines of the Islander aircraft along with six other Americans, I thought wherever his immortal soul was gliding along now, Rob would surely be pleased that I would soon be in Havana and while arriving too late to see The Beard perform for the masses, there was still time to lift a rum-filled glass or two in honor of my old drinking buddy from that fateful city.
The Islander lumbered off the runway in Key West and banked into the skies over the Caribbean, reaching a cruising altitude of around 12,000 feet as it pushed toward Cuba at a clip of about 150 mph, a smooth ride of about 90 minutes before descending into Jose Marti International Airport that sits just about a half hour outside of Havana. As the Caribbean’s shades of blue disappeared into the lush greens of the Cuban landscape below, even at relatively low altitudes it was difficult to discern that the country would be anything less than gorgeous.
The reality of the facts on the ground in Cuba would become apparent as fast as the approaching ground was as we landed.
Our plane taxied over to Terminal 2, where chartered flights are directed, and we were escorted off the tarmac and into a mostly empty terminal that looked as if it had been in stasis since the late-1970s. There was just a dinginess about it that announced rather clearly that we had indeed arrived in what is now charitably described as ‘a developing country.’ The high polished glitz, tech and general bustle of airports found throughout the developed world was nowhere to be seen as we passed through customs, where the agents appeared somewhat guarded and sounded rather stern—but not alarmingly so—as they asked a few rote questions and gave the onceover to this small gaggle of Americans. It all just rather looked and felt like it might have been a Trailways bus terminal on the outskirts of El Paso circa 1977.
Once outside the airport, we met our Cuban guide for the day and boarded a nice tour van that was some knockoff or downstream variant of a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, a ride that would turn out to be the most lavishly appointed modern vehicle that we encountered for the rest of the day.
The ride into Havana took us across through patches of verdant countryside that was as beautiful on the ground as it had appeared from the sky above, but the realities of daily life in Cuba immediately made its debut on its road system, which in some areas appeared to be comprised of large stretches of decaying asphalt that carried every manner of transport in one direction without traffic lanes or other control systems such as lights, signs or visible traffic enforcement units. As we chugged along into the capital, a few of the classic American cars that have been frozen in time on the island nation since the 1950s could be seen, but far more so were the ubiquitous Ladas, the boxy sedans that effectively were the Soviet Union’s version of the VW Bug.
But it wasn’t the old Chevrolet Bel Airs or Lada Rivas zipping along the road that spoke to the true condition of Cuba, but rather the occasional ox-drawn cart, the motor bikes that were towing other motorbikes with ropes or cables and the old Soviet-era buses that were jammed with people in something that looked like they had just driven out of Delhi, all swirling around each other in a low-flow of chaos.
Large groups of people could occasionally be glimpsed just standing by the side of the road, apparently waiting for one of the converted military transports that might be able to squeeze a few more sardines into the can to pull over and let them try their luck.
There was perhaps a quiet air of resignation that could be glimpsed on many of the faces among the people, or whatever it is that settles in once desperation has peaked and ebbed. Surrender, perhaps? No one seemed in too much of a rush and despite the vacuum of visible traffic controls, there was also a notable absence of the lunatic drivers that are now legion on American roads as the collapse of law enforcement continues apace following the thunderclaps of anarchy that exploded across the United States during the summer of 2020.
On the roads to Havana, we witnessed the Cuban people as they seemed to make their way about their day at a respectful speed and sans any juvenile displays from speed kings or road rage freaks. It was a rambling mess, and yet rather smooth and polite nonetheless.
Our first stop was Finca Vigía, which was Hemingway’s estate in the San Francisco de Paula district just outside of Havana proper. We arrived in time for a private breakfast of rum drinks and fresh melons served at a patio bar dubbed Pilar in honor of Hemingway’s famed fishing boat, which is also preserved on the property. It was here that the advisory we’d been issued before we arrived to bring at least several hundred dollars per person in small bills came into focus, as everything came with a tip attached. For the drinks, the musicians performing for our intimate charter and the plates of succulent melon offered up to us, of course gratuity made sense and was warranted, but the ‘oh’ moment came when you handed over cash to the docent who will take a picture for you, and the woman standing next to her also held out her hand as the docent says ‘For my friend, please. Yes, for her, too, thank you’ while she is still holding your camera.
I was tempted to ask “Are you sure you don’t want to run and grab a few more assistants to line up with you here for payment?” but was afraid the answer might indeed be: ‘As a matter of fact, yes, I do’ before hollering ‘Hey Rube!’ and setting off a feeding frenzy.
We strolled the finca’s grounds and peeked into Hemingway’s house, which is still adorned with most of his possessions that were expropriated by the Communists after a depleted and depressed Papa put a double-barreled shotgun in his mouth in the summer of 1961 and one-upped Jackson Pollock on his way out the door by painting the foyer of his Idaho home with a multimedia abstract rendering of his brains and skull fragments. Fresco a la cranial splat.
The home, which was built in 1886 and became Hemingway’s Havana pad in the late 1930s, appears much as one would imagine it would have been when Papa was patrolling its grounds in a bathrobe and armed with nothing more than a bottle, cigar chomped between his teeth and flashing his mad grin.
The old Corona typewriter is still there, along with the severed heads of big game that Hemingway had shot through the years before finally turning his gun on himself, hanging from the walls of the living room and study are the water buffalo, deer and antelope with notable horns and antlers that apparently made them too beautiful to not shoot. Some of the author’s actual art collection can still be glimpsed in the home as well, including an original Pablo Picaso etching of a bull and Hemingway’s own meticulous notations that he scrawled on the wall of his bathroom next to the scale attest to an obsession with his own weight.
We drifted by an old out building on the premises that had been used as a garage, which looked mildly interesting but remains in a state of disrepair like the estate’s pool that sits drained, but the remnant of Hemingway’s beloved fishing boat Pilar can also be found on the property, its 38-foot exterior partially restored but with much of its cabin and deck fixtures lost to time or picked away by trophy hunters from the Party’s ruling junta looking to show off some capitalist treasures. The vessel is kept under a corrugated steel roof and visitors can walk a stair and plank path alongside it for a better view, which offers a momentary delight be otherwise underwhelming presentation of the legendary boat.
That the Pilar was preserved at all speaks to Papa’s relationship with The Beard, transactional and transient as it appears to have been.
Castro met with Hemingway during a fishing tournament in the spring of 1960 and the two can be seen together in photographs around the grounds and across Havana, immortalized in black and white pictures that capture Castro and Hemingway seemingly in good spirits and having a pleasant time. Che Guevera was also around for the fishing tourney and apparently had a few words with Hemingway as well. Apparently there was enough good will and respect that in the frenzy of expropriations that would follow in Castro’s Cuba, the properties of Hemingway were largely protected up to his suicide and then ultimately preserved for history, albeit by the state.
It was from Pilar that Hemingway gathered much of the inspiration that would fuel The Old Man and the Sea, but the remnant of the fighting chair anchored into the boat’s stern evokes Robert Shaw’s defiantly salty portrayal of Quint in Jaws than Santiago’s desperate flailing on his skiff. Of course, Hemingway’s Pilar had some things in common with the fictional Orca that was Quint’s very own Pequod as he, Brody and Hooper faced down a 25-foot Great White off of Amity Island. Built by the Wheeler Yacht Company, the Pilar was a customized rendition of the company’s Playmate yacht series and was outfitted with two engines and some state-of-the-art equipment for the era.
Hemingway paid $7,455 for the Pilar on delivery, a pricey sum for the author that would be nearly $180,000 in today’s dollars. One element that captures my attention is the classy understated nature of the Pilar, which was classified as a yacht in the 1930s but would be seen as merely a boat today, along with his digs in Havana and Key West, which were both quite nice but vastly understated in contrast to the gauche sprawl of mansions for the must-have market of today.
After our first taste of Hemingway at his Cuban estate, our small charter group departed for the Castillo de Cojímar, a blockhouse-style fortification that the Spanish built in the 1640s that served as an observation post on the eastern coastal approach to Havana. As we looked around the fort, I marveled that it appeared as solid and sufficiently imposing as it surely did to the pirates and foreign naval vessels that encountered it nearly 400 years ago. I couldn’t escape the fact that the Spanish colonialists had erected a magnificent set of coastal fortifications around Havana that have held up remarkably well over four centuries, and was hard pressed to think of an America structure built in the United States in the past 50 years that I thought would still be standing after another century passes, let alone four more. Nothing came to mind.
Gazing east from the mouth of the small harbor at Cojímar bay, I watched as a group of kids from the sleepy fishing village took turns leaping off a crumbling dock and into the lapping sea below that was mottled with the varying reflections of different coverage along the shallow ocean floor, the darkness of seaweed giving way to sudden patches of brighter water coming off the sandy bottom. The boys trick jumped and dived for no one but themselves and the occasional girl that would join them and I was reminded of Jennifer Grafiada’s poem etched into Key West, her mournful ode committed to the sidewalk where it was daily trampled underfoot by the casual capitalists decked out in gaudy Hawaiian shirts, Tommy Bahama shorts and Nose Kote while nursing Margaritaville sipper-cups even as 90 miles away the Cuban boys don’t seem to mind at all as they arc, slice and somersault through the air before splashing into the ocean’s embrace.
Just across the road from the four-century old fort stands another monument that pays tribute to Hemingway, with a bust of the American writer planted atop a marble pedestal surrounded by open air Greco-Roman columns and staring eternally out to sea. It was in the hard luck fishing village of Cojímar that Hemingway had kept Pilar docked and where he set off from on many of his fishing excursions and it was here that Papa and Castro met up in 1960 during the anglers’ tourney.
From Cojímar we drove into Havana proper, passing through the spectral relics that captured the residue of the Soviet Union’s relatively brief days of playing empire in the Caribbean, its footprint on the island nation visible again in Chernobyl-like planned communities that now sit mostly abandoned, displayed to Western passerby as modern era ghost towns, scattered skeletons that speak to a sudden collapse. There were five-story concrete boxes of multifamily housing laid out with tidy fairways and gardens, now fallen into a decrepit and deathly silent repose more than three decades after the Russians pulled up stakes in 1992. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around why the structures and communities had been left to die on the civic vine, given the otherwise generally horrid conditions of housing visible around the island, but I doubted whether the Cuban people were in much of a position to raise questions about squandering such assets to the Communists who have run the island for more than 65 years.
After crossing underneath the entrance to Havana’s harbor via the half-mile subterranean run through the Túnel de la Bahía de La Habana, our party arrived at the Plaza de la Catedral on Calle Empedrado, where the Baroque-style Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception has loomed as stoically over the plaza since the mid-1700s and only slightly less imposingly than the fortress in Cojímar. It was here that the earthly remains of Cristopher Columbus were stashed by the Catholic Church before being spirited off to Seville in as the 1800s came to a close.
Before taking a look inside the cathedral, we made a wise choice to first duck into La Bodeguita del Medio, a small bar tucked into the side of the narrow but bustling Empedrado Street that is the purported birthplace of the Mojito, with the concoction of rum, mint, lime, cane sugar and soda water starting to appear at the joint in the mid-1940s out of what was then part inn, part grocery market that also provided notable drinks at its bar.
And here, too, Hemingway’s fingerprints could be felt and even figuratively seen.
The bar’s interior was long awash in the graffiti of its patrons, a few notables and very many more unknowns, most of which was lost forever during a refurbishment in 2021 that included stripping the walls before painting them, but Hemingway had offered his salutation of the bar courtesy of a napkin that was saved and framed, its simple inscription advising: ‘My Mojito in La Bodeguita, my Daiquiri in El Floridita’ beneath which his swirling signature appears with all the limelight of John Hankock’s on the Declaration of Independence.
Patron graffiti has begun to return to La Bodeguita and I affixed my scrawl to one of its walls at the entrance before crowding in at the bar for a couple of rounds of Mojitos made with original Havana Club rum that began distillation in 1934. Seized by the Communists in 1959, the rum has held on to its quality but is a rarity in the United States since it is illegal to sell in America due to the trade embargo. The family of world-renowned rum purveyors Bacardi, whose origins date to Santiago, Cuba, in the 1800s, fled Castro’s Cuba in 1960 and set up shop in Puerto Rico, where an Americanized version of the rum is crafted and made available to U.S. markets, but I was pleased to get the real deal of actual Cuban-created Havana Club rum at La Bodeguita.
The bar also had another admirable entry tucked into the pages of its historic register, that of Nat King Cole, the great American jazz pianist and crooner, who along with Hemingway enjoyed habituating at La Bodeguita, where his affection for the joint and its libations were returned by its staff and Cole’s fellow drinkers from all walks of life. The open arms and solid pours that Cole received at La Bodeguita stood in stark contrast with the treatment he received at Havana’s Hotel Nacional, where he was denied entry and service because he was black. Six decades after he departed the planet, Cole’s presence remains unforgettable at La Bodeguita and the bar keeps an open table symbolically reserved for him.
Salvador Allende, the Chilean socialist who had the audacity to get himself freely and fairly elected as President of Chile in 1970, only to be cashiered-via-bullet three years later courtesy of Henry Kissinger and President Nixon giving a greenlight to The Agency’s plans for a management shakeup in Santiago, was also a fellow drinker who enjoyed cocktails at La Bodeguita. Like a scene out of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, I couldn’t help but imagine what it might have been like to slip into this bar in the 1950s and watch Hemingway, Cole and Allende muse about life, love and the arts along with kicking around the political manipulation of the masses. There’s no evidence that three ever crossed paths with each other at La Bodeguita, but the prospect of what it might have been like is intriguing for an avid fan and participant of boozy salons such as myself.
Under such circumstances, I lifted a mojito in honor of Hemingway, Allende and Cole’s affection for good rum and all those who drank with them in the tight quarters of La Bodeguita, before we eventually made our way out of the bar with conveniently provided to-go cups as we walked back through the plaza and into the cathedral. It was during this leg of our adventure that I began to hear the occasional shout of ‘Hey, Hemingway!’ from locals passing me on the street in jocular greetings that were an apparent visual reference to my full beard fading to white.
And almost as often, the ‘Hey, Hemingway!’ was also followed by a street pitch of one sort or another, or simply an outstretched hand, as in Old Havana the presence of buskers and beggars can be a daunting gauntlet for the Westerner making their way along its streets. Having navigated the junkie zombies of Seattle for years and with decades-spanning experience in slaloming the schizophrenic street freaks from San Francisco and Los Angeles to New York City, Paris and London, I figured I was as well-equipped as one could be when encountering aggressive panhandlers.
But in Havana, even with a local fixer-guide leading our small entourage through the city, there were a few moments where the tidal flow of people starving for American greenbacks transcended from being a mere momentary inconvenience to quickly pass irritant and teeter on the brink of inescapable cluster fuckdom as street scenes suddenly dissolved from thriving marketplaces with street musicians and artists vying for eyes and ears (and yes, wallets) to something that looked like we made a wrong turn and walked down Leper Alley with grimy hands boiled over with still-oozing lesions reaching toward you amid a cacophony of cries of ‘Meester Please! Meester Please!’
It was here that the lonely strains of a horn player could be heard in the distance, offering an alluring series of notes that seemed familiar and we walked on until we could see a young man standing in a doorway playing and realized he was delivering a sparse but touching rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The juxtaposition of Old Havana’s colonial architecture that still radiates the splendor of the age and culture that gave it birth with a lone young man standing under one of its balconies and delivering a song that seemed to speak directly of his own dreams as they intermingle with the memories of passing Americans, well it was a beautiful moment to experience, the sort during which you stop, fall silent and take it all in, quietly appreciative of your life in this world.
I gave a proper cash tribute to the solitary horn player, putting a $20 bill in the open instrument case near his feet and wishing him luck on his eventual journey north, something I would never otherwise do as our American house is beyond full, but in this instance I felt he deserved the good mojo and America could use another talented musician if he managed to make it.
We walked on to the cathedral.
Flanked by towers that house massive mission bells that can still be heard pealing throughout the old district on notable occasions, the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception’s façade of coral stone rises mightily from the plaza floor to sprout in a vertical stretch of columns and empty aediculas. Like the fort at Cojímar, the cathedral has survived the passing of centuries to emerge in 2025 looking as authoritative as it surely did right after its debut in the mid-1700s.
Julianne and I disposed of our finished drinks and walked through the cathedral, a pleasant experience marked with all the usual Catholic iconography that ranged from San Cristóbal and the Christ child to the Nuestra Senora de la Asunción (aka Mary’s glory ride into heaven), but it was emerging from the church that we were quickly reminded of Christ’s earthly challenges.
A man on crutches was waiting just off the top of the steps and hobbled in front of us faster than one might have expected, leading me for a moment to think that the crutches were a nice prop to add some oomph to his stagecraft of street begging. But that skepticism vanished just as fast as he pointed to his leg and said ‘Senor, por favor, si, por favor.’ He was wearing shorts and as he turned his left leg it revealed a large, festering wound that had consumed most of his calf in a roiled swirl of puss, fragmented soft tissue turned hell red and patches of black spots that probably marked where the meat on his bone had literally died. Perhaps the size of a large butter dish, the rancid wound struck me as something that was moving well past badly infected into a state of decomposing rot that had amputation or death by septic shock written all over it.
I fished a couple of singles from my pocket and he seemed grateful for a moment, until a five-dollar bill that dislodged from my pocket as I was pulling out his singles fluttered to the ground, at which point he nearly knocked me over trying to beat me to it. He lost that race, but suddenly was back in my face just as fast, still holding the two dollars I had just handed him and now literally demanding in broken English the five bucks too.
“For me, yes, para mi! Para mi!” he said over and over.
“No, not for you,” I replied sternly. Pointing to the cash I had just handed him, I said “That’s for you. This is for me.”
I’ll always remember his reply: “No, I want! No, I want!” as he jabbed his finger at the five-dollar bill, still clutching the two he’d been given.
I wished him well with his disease and looming amputation and brushed him aside as Julianne and I reconnected with our crew in the plaza, shaking off the encounter and trying to banish the gory visual of Mr. Leg from our minds. I consoled myself with the knowledge that for two bucks I got a memorable experience and a great slogan to plaster over the maternity wards across America today and to adorn the welfare EBT cards with: “No, I want!”
We took our late lunch on the rooftop terrace at La Moneda Cubana, enjoying traditional cuisine with a lovely view across the harbor to the sprawling 18th Century fortifications of La Cabaña, a World Heritage Site, and the towering Cristo de La Habana—a 66-foot sculpture of Jesus carved out of more than 300 tons of Luna marble imported from Italy that was unveiled just a few days before Castro rolled into Havana in January 1959. After Batista flew the coop, Che set up his own little shop of horrors in the fort, keeping the compound, which had first become active in 1774, on track but redirecting the organized slaughter into a Communist operation, with Che personally overseeing the show trials and reprisal execution-murders of hundreds of suspected agents of Batista’s secret police over the course of just a few short months before getting bored and decamping for adventure elsewhere.
At lunch we dug into our food as musicians strummed away at a respectful distance, but I also had a chance to really talk with a few of the six other Americans that had joined Julianne and I on the charter. The six of them were from Louisiana, all engineers and their wives, and we were all peers in age and demographic, and it was nice to unwind a little over talk about our mutual takes on Cuba as well as some of the political history of the American bayou and its Kingfish Huey Long. They seemed pleased that I knew as much as I did about the Long family dynasty in the state and smiled at some of my adventures in the French Quarter back in 1998.
The casual nature of the meal and indeed our mutual adventure in Cuba reminded me somewhat of an extrapolation of an airport bar; you can meet amazing people huddled in a place like the old Sports Page in SeaTac, share a few rounds with them over snapshots of your life experience and then part company with a mutual blessing of ‘safe travels’ as you head off to different flights and planes and lives and fates, never to see one another again but happy to have shared a few hours. It’s a strangely satisfying experience.
After lunch we took stroll around a rather pleasant park where we encountered much more of the locals in all of their glory, more wandering musicians and artists and the curio hawkers and more of the sleazy grifters drifting among them to suddenly sidle up next to us, whispering good deals on ever manner of contraband.
I got more of the ‘Hey, Hemingway!’ treatment and mostly enjoyed it, figuring it was meant at least in a superficially endearing way, and quite frankly I thought it worked a lot better creatively speaking than just the vanilla ‘Hello!’ everyone else was getting. After greeting me as ‘Hemingway,’ a trio of musicians asked my name and when I said ‘Mark’ they launched into a pre-loaded raveup they called Mark’s in Havana! A lyrical outing that went something like ‘Mark’s in Havana, ole! Mark’s in Havana, today! Mark’s in Havana, hooray!’ Of course I knew if I told them I was ‘Fred’ the same song would still have exploded with gusto as they sang ‘Fred’s in Havana…’ but I danced along with them nonetheless for a solid twenty seconds before my knees and lungs called it, then gladly paid them for the momentary privilege of hearing them play.
A little later I handed another local cat $10 for a note of Cuban currency that had an image of Che on it—I was informed that Fidel does not appear on any Cuban money, aside from a historic bill that appeared in the 1960s, per his wishes. Our guide observed the lopsided currency exchange with a sigh: “You just paid ten bucks for something that’s worth about 30 cents, maybe less.”
“Ah, but you see, that’s the beauty of free market capitalism,” I told him. “I just set the market rate. The consumer decides what something is worth.”
He smiled and nodded along. “Well, you’re right about that part,” he said. “He’ll be asking ten bucks or more from the next few Americanos looking for that bill.”
We eventually made our way into El Floridita, the more than 200-year-old bar that Hemingway had declared to be his go-to spot for Daiquiris. And just as it was at La Bodeguita, the literary giant’s shadow still looms large over El Floridita, with the joint honoring him with a large bronze bust and numerous photos adorning the walls. We all filled into a booth and the Daiquiris began to arrive. More toasts to Papa were offered, and we raised a glass to ourselves too, why the hell not? We made it to Cuba and we were in Havana. Not too shabby. As the day’s stream of alcohol continued its accumulation, I slipped out of our booth and over to the bust of Hemingway, raised my glass to him again before giving the bust a kiss on the cheek; salud, Papa!
Later, as we were walking over to Ambos Mundos, the hotel in Old Havana where Hemingway had often holed up in Room 511, enjoying its proximity to El Floridita, I encountered another street beggar who approached me in a friendly enough manner, flashing her big smile and asking where I was from.
“Los Angeles, California,” I replied.
“Oh, good, good! I stayed in San Diego for awhile,” she said in almost passable English.
I resisted the urge to tell her that I was sorry to hear that, repressing my inherited distaste for the Golden State’s southernmost metro area and cultural ghetto that had generationally been the anemic red-haired stepchild of California’s happening scenes in contrast with the once vibrant powerhouses of LA and San Francisco, mainly because I didn’t care and moreover because if she had made it out of Cuba and into California, then I wondered what the hell she was doing back in Havana?
“Yeah, San Diego is nice. Good for you! So, what brought you back here?” I asked her.
Perhaps sensing our encounter had about five or six more seconds of lifespan left, she stuck her hand out in front of me, palm up, and said: “For my children, please.”
“I’m sorry Mam, but I really have to get going,” I said, resuming my stride toward the hotel.
She stepped in front of me again, still smiling, hand out and palm up. “For my children, please.”
“I’m sorry, but I really can’t help you today,” I said.
She stepped aside but kept apace of me, her outstretched hand floating like an invitation to slap my hand across it with a spoof jive greeting of ‘What’s happenin’ sista, gimmie some skin!’ but I didn’t think she get or appreciate the goof.
“My children, please!” she said, still speaking through a smile.
“Well, for your children, you should have stayed in San Diego,” I said.
And that’s when the truth finally came out.
Her smile dropped like a guillotine to reveal what I suspected all along, that behind that fake happy face had been a seething panhandler enraged by her self-inflicted humiliation of begging foreigners for handouts on the streets of her own nation.
“Fuck you, American,” she spat at me, her visage coiled in rage.
It was my turn to smile at her and with a friendly wave of my hand I bid her adieu: “Have a nice day!”
As the late afternoon grew into the early evening, we arrived at Plaza de la Revolución, the massive public square that had actually first taken shape under Fulgencio Batista, the primero patrón of Cuba until Fidel & Co. emerged from the Sierra Maestra to march on Havana. The plaza was made famous by Castro’s appearances there to unleash his multi-hour barn-burner diatribes against the corpulent Western Imperialists onto a sea of Cuban people gathered (or herded by cattle prod) before him. It’s unclear whether many among the throng suspected that after Fidel breathed fire upon the capitalist pigs across the Florida Straits, he would retire exhausted to either Punto Cero or perhaps his private island, where he would recuperate over Russian caviar and cocktails, content that the masses had been fed enough red meat for the day.
The vast sweep of the plaza—it ranks in the top 75 largest public squares in the world and Castro addressed crowds in excess of a million people—is eerily vacant as we walk across it, mostly deserted save for a few people here and there that appear to be Westerners, Russians or an occasional group of Asians. I laugh when I think that Castro would surely be pleased that, like Hemingway, his legacy continued to bring people from all over the world to Cuba, even if it sent Cubans desperate to escape his leader-for-life reign fleeing all over the world.
Ghostly steel outlines of Fidel and Che adorn the huge facades of the government ministry buildings, perhaps to remind whatever masses that are assembled here in the 21st Century that the infrastructure of one-party rule that the pair forged in the mid-20th Century still endures.
I enjoyed a cigarette as I walked along the plaza and noticed another heirloom that Castro’s reign delivered the Cuban people: the government ministry buildings are pocked with window air conditioning units. Even with all the graft and corruption, or perhaps because of it, central HVAC continues to elude the Communists of Cuba. Maybe by the Year 2100 this magical development will arrive in the People’s Paradise. Or maybe not.
Back at Jose Marti International Airport, we were again shuttled through the decrepit and mostly deserted Terminal 2, where a new batch of stern-looking Cuban customs agents screened us on our way out. It was just as painless as our arrival had been, with agent quickly offering my passport back to me.
“Would you mind stamping it?” I asked.
“You want a stamp?” he asked, somewhat surprised. Most Americans entering Cuba since 1960 have done so through Mexico or Canada and engage in the long-standing ritual of not having their passports stamped by Cuban customs, which the Cubans indulge since they want the hard currency the Americans bring with them.
But I figured since Uncle Sam had blessed my trip with an approved visa, why not get that rarity stamped in my passport, serving perhaps for nostalgia purposes much like my stamp from Yugoslavia in 1984, since that nation no longer exists.
As Cuba disappeared below and then behind us, we were all pleasantly exhausted and buzzed from our dawn to dusk excursion to Fidel Island, happy to have had the experience but glad that it was in the rearview for now, the rum in our tanks enough to see us back to Key West.
On the airstrip, a pair of armed United States Customs agents greeted us at the plane, carefully using a handheld device to scan the faces of each passenger on the tarmac, apparently going the extra mile to ensure that the eight people that left for Cuba that morning were the same eight people that had flown back to Key West that night.
Free to leave, Julianne and I caught our same car service back to Eden House and then made our way back into the neighborhood bars to reflect on our adventure, which just hours later already seemed surreal, like a car accident or winning big on a longshot at the track, the rush of the reality receding to leave it in a dreamlike stasis of your memory.
A few nights later finds us on our balcony of our room on the 30th floor of the Miami Marriott Biscayne Bay, again watching the distant advance of massive storm that was filling the night air over the Caribbean with explosive streaks of lightening. Our trip was winding down and we’d soon return to Los Angeles, where intensive writing awaited me and the college classroom Julianne, along with a few lightening-strikes of our own that we intended to deliver with relish, but in the remaining night air of Miami, humming as it was with high voltage, I once more thought of the beggar woman in Havana who dismissed me with the advisory of ‘Fuck you, American’ and raised my Stoli and lime toward Julianne and the night sky.
“Here’s to the Lady of Havana who wished me oh so very well,” I said. “May she find solace in her shitty hovel while she rots away in hell.”
“Chin chin,” Julianne said.
And then we laughed freely as Americans of a certain age sometimes do; content with our place in history and quite satisfied with our achievements and just downright pleased that we were perched 30 floors above Miami’s glittering Biscayne Bay and imbibing on drinks that cost more per glass than that bitterly begging bitch could ever scrape up in a month of scrounging handouts in Old Havana.
I’ll drink to that.
