This Party Might Last Long Time

It is a complicated time for Fidel Castro. The superpower Presidents, Bush and Gorbachev, sit holding hands in Moscow, discussing arms reductions and trade restrictions that might affect the Soviet Union’s military subsidy to Cuba; a baseball pitcher, Rene Arocha, defects from the Cuban national team because he proposes to become an American major leaguer, and Brent Musburger’s bath in Havana doesn’t have enough hot water.

Trouble, trouble everywhere.

For a day, at least, however, Castro’s Cuba is colorful and carefree. Dancing girls strut in costumes and yellow beads in tribute to Ochun, the Yoruban goddess of beauty. Copper-skinned men parade in loose-fitting linen guayaberas, staying cool in what has to be triple-digit heat. And the Americas, for sport’s sake, finally are having a hemispheric family reunion.

It would be naive, and then some, to presume that Cuba and the United States are about to become more neighborly again, that honeymooners soon will begin dialing their travel agents to ask about that special $299 three-day tropical package that includes a love-boat ride to Varadero and a romantic mud-bath for two at the springs of Elguea.

Yet as the world turns, everybody comes around, until eventually the Soviets take us to their leader, and the Berliners aim wrecking balls at walls, and the South Africans initiate racial reforms. The prospect, then, of a thaw in relations between “our” Americans and Cuban-Americans seems ever more possible, even if the Pan American Games pan out as little more than merely another fairly insignificant mini-Olympics.

Castro’s Cuba could use the tourist dollar, and certainly there are pockets being lined this month as rarely before. There remains a misconception in many minds that Cuban authorities have no use for travelers from the north with their Bermuda shorts and wrong-colored socks and Karl Malden-brand traveler’s checks, when in fact it is Washington, D.C., where nobody objects to our using American Express so long as we confine our travels to places where they will issue us a visa.

Nobody expects Cuba overnight to bid for electoral votes at the next Republican convention, or to apply for the next expansion franchise in the American League. Perhaps the island will never have an El Pollo Loco on every other corner, between the United Airlines office and the Texaco self-serve. These people might be close to us, but they have a long way to go before becoming our friends.

But at least we have a chance to play a little ball together, do some swimming, go out for a run, roll with a few punches, maybe make enough contact to remind one another that, psychologically as well as geographically, we are not so far apart.

For a number of Americans, Cuba some time ago was swallowed whole by the Bermuda Triangle, never to be seen again in this lifetime. Hasta la vista, baby. And even when Havana volunteered itself as host city of one of these Pan Am Games, there was many a day when there seemed little likelihood of actually bringing this thing off. No matter how hard Cubans worked, it had to be beyond their ways and means.

But they got it done. And as the ribbons waved and balloons flew Friday at the opening ceremony, as the char-broiled spectators in a brand-new stadium blistered certain fleshy but necessary portions of themselves on bleachers of already crumbling concrete, the only fact that mattered--for a day, anyway--was that Castro and Cuba were throwing a party, and Americans, even those Americans, were welcome guests.

The dancing girls are young and energetic and vividly dressed. Some of them have only recently experienced their quinceanera, the Cuban familial ceremony at which a female child turns 15 and officially becomes a woman, free to use as much eye makeup as she likes. Before the Pan Am opening ceremony, these girls obviously have gone into a Maybelline frenzy.

The men wiggle and jiggle and do the lambada without partners. This is a wholesome extravaganza, after all, beamed by satellite to Americas north and south. But dancing alone is not so bad, because at least it signifies that the party has begun. And even if what we have here is one simple step, perhaps soon everyone again will be dancing together.