Flying the Fast Lane to Havana

There is a right way, a wrong way and a very wrong way for an American living in Southern California to go to Cuba. I’ve tried all three.

On my third try, the right one, it took me two phone calls, one check and 41/2 hours to get from Los Angeles to Havana.

For you, depending on where your family lives, what you do for a living and how good your imagination is, it might take as many as four calls and maybe a letter. Or you might have to take a package tour. But, 40 years after Congress barred commerce with our communist neighbor, you can go to Cuba legally and more easily than ever.

Technically, it’s not illegal for Americans to come to Cuba, only to “trade with the enemy”-purchase goods and services here. And they do come, by the tens of thousands, most by way of a third country.

Two years ago a direct route was opened from Miami, then from New York, in the form of charter flights. Last April a Los Angeles charter was added. Tickets are sold to approved travelers by outfits licensed by the Treasury Department. For the flights from LAX, that’s a new firm, Cuba Travel Services, based in Long Beach.

Cuba Travel Services has an exclusive license and offers weekly flights on an Airbus 320 from Grupo TACA, an airline based in El Salvador. The agency screens potential passengers to ensure they qualify. Generally, those who make the cut include people with relatives in Cuba, journalists, people doing research in a professional field and athletes in international matches. I passed as a journalist but never had to prove I was one.

At check-in for a Saturday afternoon flight last month, I chatted with pediatricians who teach at UC San Francisco and were off to have a close look at pediatric care in Havana. My seatmate was a Cuban American on his third visit back to see family.

Lisa Perez of Cuba Travel Services was there to see us off and to tell us how to stay out of trouble with the Cuban government-and our own.

‘There are 130 seats on the plane, and we’re three-quarters full,” Perez told me. “Nearly everybody is either visiting relatives or doing research. Officially, there are no tourists on this plane.”

It was a happy flight. Drinks were free and unlimited-Chilean wine, Salvadoran beer, Puerto Rican rum. For dinner we had a choice of pasta or spicy Creole chicken, one of the best airline dishes I’ve had in years. The movie was “Charlie’s Angels,” shown on drop-down screens in front of each seat.

We landed in Havana on time and walked under a starlit sky to the baggage claim area at Jose Marti International Airport. A young woman from Havanatur, the government tourist agency, whisked me out to an air-conditioned van. In 25 minutes I was checking into the Hotel Habana Libre Tryp, the former Havana Hilton.

Made over by the Spanish Tryp chain into a palace with a gleaming gold and white interior, the Habana Libre is the biggest and liveliest hotel in town and among the five most luxurious. My enormous room, illuminated by nine spotlights and three lamps, with a wall of glass facing the Florida Strait, cost me $108.50 a night.

By midnight I was on my way to the lobby bar to drink my first mojito-rum with lemon juice, sugar, bitters and soda poured over a mint leaf. On the way, I watched security guards herd young Cuban women wearing hot pants, halter tops and stiletto heels into an express elevator to the rooftop disco. Cubans who are not hotel employees are forbidden to enter guest rooms, and security people were everywhere in the hotel. Still, it was Saturday night, the lobby was humming, and fun was in the air. Nearly 13,000 Americans disembarked at Jose Marti in January, according to Maritza Rodriguez, a marketing researcher for Havana’s luxury hotels. This projects to 156,000 this year, up from 140,00 in 2000 and 130,000 in 1999. The vast majority of them were scofflaws.

Technically, an American who visits Cuba without our government’s permission is in violation of the Trading With the Enemy Act. Although no American tourist has been prosecuted in years, the Americans I met who had come to Cuba by way of Canada or Mexico feared being found out.

Sunday morning, the Plaza de Armas in Havana’s Spanish colonial old city was swarming with Americans. They were friendly and eager to talk. But not about how they got here.

I met just one couple willing to come clean. Danny Epner and Mindy Wexler of New York had flown from Montreal on Cubana Air, the Cuban government airline, for $275 round trip. “We’re planning to spend four weeks in Cuba,” Wexler said. “We’re holding the budget down by staying in casas particulares.”

She was referring to the privately owned bed-and-breakfast inns legalized to bring in dollars.

That evening, I asked the desk clerk at the Habana Libre how many Americans were staying there. “Not more than 10 or 20,” he said. “I think they usually stay at casas particulares.”

I heard a reproachful voice: “Because you don’t meet the real Cuban people at five-star hotels.”

She was standing behind me. About 80 pounds, maybe 20 years old. A honey-haired waif with huge green eyes and a pouty mouth. She was wearing tattered little shoes and carrying a ratty little backpack. She said she had walked three miles in the dark to meet her sister here, and now she couldn’t find her. She said she was a barber-did I know I needed a haircut?-and could show me the real Havana the next day.

To the extent that I had any plan for my week in Havana, it was to sit in sidewalk cafes, drink daiquiris and watch classic old American cars go by. Instead, I would leave the world of air-conditioning, Mercedes Benz taxis and hygiene as we know it. I would enter the world of Yadia Carrasco.

The next morning we met outside the hotel. Yadia hailed an illegal private taxi, a noisy Russian Lada, on a back street, negotiated a $2 fare for a 15-minute trip and took me to the Mercado de Artesanias on the waterfront four miles west of downtown. It was the brightest collection of folk art I had ever seen. Yadia led me to painted idols of huge-breasted, cigar-smoking black Santeria figurines called orishas selling for $6, to hand-woven baby blankets in turquoise and peach and to tropical paintings in blazing colors. The orisha carvings were not schlock tourist souvenirs. They represented Orchun, the goddess of female pleasure. Yadia said she prayed to her every morning.

We took a bicotaxi, a bicycle with two passenger seats under a canopy, past tree-shaded rows of pastel limestone houses with wrought-iron balconies to Aries, a paladar near the University of Havana downtown. A paladar is a privately owned restaurant, another 1990s innovation to bring in dollars. Aries had seating for 12, the legal maximum, at four tables in a pretty room with pink curtains, primitive paintings on the walls and a tank of fish.

The waiter told us not to ask for bread because he didn’t have any.

Yadia, bent on showing me the real Cuba, took me to see the kitchen. It was thick with flies. There was no running water and no soap; dishes were cleaned by a swish through a tub of gray water with white specks of lard floating on top.

This definitely called for wine. I took a bottle out of my courier bag and opened it with the corkscrew from my Swiss Army knife. I poured some for Yadia and me and for a Cuban tour guide at the next table. He was escorting three Scots who looked Yadia up and down and said, not very quietly, that she was the first Cuban girl they’d seen who didn’t know how to dress.

Yadia and I ate grilled red snapper, along with tomato-and-cucumber salad, black beans, French fries and white rice. Yadia told me about her brief career in nursing school. She said I should just forget about sanitario and parasitos and have a good time, and I did. We laughed about the amoebas swimming on our plates.

Yadia ate every drop quickly, and I began to wonder how long it had been since her last meal. The bill came to $29.

We took a long walk along the Malecon, Havana’s beautifully restored seafront promenade, shopped for posters at the mercado beside the cathedral, stopped at a peso-only stand where Yadia bought me a striped scoop of ice cream for the equivalent of 4 cents, then walked to the neighborhood where she lived.

In Cayo Hueso, a typical Havana quarter of decaying old tenements, many residents were spending their day off working on home repair.

Yadia’s mother and sister were patching the ceiling of their three-room apartment, and they were covered with plaster dust. The family got its water from the central courtyard, where there was also a privy. Upstairs, in the windowless bedroom where the four of them slept, I met Yadia’s mother’s boyfriend. He was splicing a wire to bring new life to a flickering bulb that was the room’s only source of light.

Two days later, I stopped by to see Yadia’s mother, who earns the peso equivalent of $7.50 a month. I had brought gifts of soap, shampoo and toothpaste, all rationed in Cuba. I was wondering, I said, if she had time to take me to the street of Santeria, the closed-off block where the orishas are enshrined. Yadia had told me about it, but as a skinny old white guy carrying an expensive camera, I was not about to wander this sprawling slum alone.

Yadia’s mother turned out to be a wonderful guide. She led me through a maze of alleys teeming with people-men pushing wheelbarrows filled with stone blocks, little boys on battered bicycles, bigger boys playing stickball, girls parading around in bright bolts of Spandex sewn at home into tight little tops and skirts.

Every inch of the Callejon de Habel (the proper name of the street of Santeria) was painted with artist Salvador Gonzalez’s cheerful images of gods and goddesses dancing and lusting, and with poems speaking of matters more earthy than divine.

I asked Elias Aseff, keeper of the orishas, if they demanded sacrifices, and he said, “Yes, small birds, red wine.”

And were there days when they fasted?

“Oh, no,” he said. “They like to rumba.”

For seven days and seven nights in Havana, I enjoyed sweet rum drinks, enchanting music, open-air circuses and the joys of daily walks on streets where everyone smiled. Day after day, Cubans approached me to practice their English, to thank me for coming to their country, to ask me to send my friends.

On Friday I was at the Plaza de Armas watching a troupe of street performers entertain an audience of schoolchildren. Some of the performers paraded on stilts, some played horns or drums, and all led the children in song. I had been on my way to the Museum of Rum, but the cheerful innocence of the scene touched my heart, and I could not pull myself away. Maybe I was visibly moved, because a clown jumped off his unicycle to shake my hand. “I am Roberto Salas,” he said, “the manager of this troupe. Are you having a good time?”

The next day, Saturday, was my last in Cuba. Yadia stopped by to say goodbye. I handed her a thank-you note. I had traveled a lot, I wrote. In the past, when I landed in a foreign country where no one knew me, I was nobody. And when I left, I was still nobody. But now, thanks to the overwhelming hospitality of Yadia and her mother, and of so many other Cubans I had met, I felt more important in their world than I did in my own.

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Guidebook: Going to Cuba

Getting there: A nonstop charter flight leaves LAX for Havana (and returns) every Saturday. The price is $670 round trip.

Arranging a trip: Travelers must qualify for legal travel to Cuba under U.S. regulations (see story). For information: Office of Foreign Assets Control, Department of the Treasury, telephone (202) 622-2480, fax (202) 622-1657, Internet https://www.treas.gov/ofac.

Calling Cuba from the U.S. is difficult to impossible. Visas, flights, insurance and land arrangements are handled by Cuba Travel Services, tel. (310) 772-2822; https://www.latocuba.com. At least 200 nonprofit organizations offer group tours of Cuba. Among them: National Geographic Expeditions, Nov. 8-18 (photography); a general tour in November may be added. $3,950 double occupancy. Tel. (888) 966-8687, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngexpeditions.

Global Exchange, 13-day “Cuban Rhythms” tour, $1,350 double occupancy, May 5 and June 2 and 30. Other Cuba tours also available. Tel. (800) 497-1994, https://www.globalexchange.org/tours/auto.

* Where to stay: Hotel Habana Libre Tryp, Calle L between 23 and 25 streets; local tel. 733-4011, fax 733-3141, https://www.tryp.es/e-hlibre.htm. This is the old Havana Hilton, Fidel Castro’s headquarters before the 1959 revolution. Rates: $108 single, $145 double. I looked into 11 casas particulares-Cuban B&Bs-and; loved the rooms in these three (all with air-conditioning and private bath): Jose A. Perez, 508 Calle K, between 25th and 27th streets, Vedado district; tel. 732-3269. Rate: $35. Irma Avila de Lazo, 159 Calle G, Vedado district; tel. 732-7721. Rate: $35.

La Casa de Ana, 107 Calle F, Vedado district; tel. 32-2360 or 31-2344. Rates: $35 to $40.

* Where to eat: El Aljibe, Avenida 7, between 24th and 26th streets, Miramar district, tel. 24-1583. Signature dish of grilled garlic chicken with rice, beans, french fries, fried plantains and a salad, $12.

Habana Cafe, Calle Paseo at Malecon, Vedado district, tel. 33-3636. Cuba’s answer to the Hard Rock Cafe, without the amps. Fish or chicken dinner is about $15 after 8 p.m., when the entertainment, which might be big band, rock or rumba, begins.

* For more information: Because the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Cuba, there’s no Cuban information agency in the U.S. The Cuban government’s Web site is https://www.cubaweb.cu.

*

Barry Zwick is a news editor at The Times.