Adventure Beat

This week

Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power as he underwent surgery, spurring much speculation about post-Castro Cuba. Here at Adventure Beat we wondered what a change in leadership might mean for American travelers, who for years have been frustrated in their curiosity about our near-neighbor in the Caribbean. We turned to writer Tom Miller for insight on the matter. His book, "Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba," is as close as most of us have been able to get to the country.

For decades now, the quickest way to get a laugh on the streets of Havana has been to tell a joke about Fidel Castro — his policies, his temper, and, yes, his longevity. Even the jokes that don't mention him criticize life on his island. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" the little Cuban boy was asked. "A tourist!" he replied.

And why not? Tourists have access to much of Cuba that natives can't enjoy. Canadians and Europeans arrive by the charterful, whisked to Club Med-type resorts where the only Cubans they run into are the help and the entertainers. Industrial tourism has overtaken sugar and mining as the country's leading hard-currency earner, second only to cash sent by overseas relatives. More inventive tourists come in smaller groups or solo, to catch a whiff of one of the only Communist countries around. Bicyclists, scuba-divers, naturalists, vintage car enthusiasts, Marxists, Hemingway devotees— they crowd the streets of Havana and Santiago, they linger in small towns, they pause in coastal villages to inhale the salty Caribbean air.

Among the many questions people are asking now that Castro is closer to death than life (go ahead, Fidel, prove me wrong) is this: How much of travel to Cuba will change? For almost 20 years now I've visited at least once a year and often twice, first for work (my book), then for family (my in-laws). I can equivocate with the best of them: Fidel has been good for some people and a disaster for others. Yet even among those who have benefited most by him — mainly rural and non-white — the daily sacrifices that Castro demands of his paisanos have grown tiresome, frustrating and disillusioning.

Castro's obsession with the United States has served him well. While the U.S. has found common ground with other Communist countries, there's so much baggage with Fidel's mere name that few in official Washington want to be seen as accommodating him. For that reason, it's been in politicians' interest to support an impossibly unworkable policy rather than to consider another, less belligerent one.

And that brings us back to travel, something over which the White House has considerable influence. There's a mouthful of a

Treasury Department bureaucracy called the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) that enforces policy about travel to Cuba. Under

President Clinton, OFAC allowed "educational" trips to Cuba, and boy did we educate ourselves — unions, bird-watchers, alumni groups, gallery curators, athletes, architects, law students, bicyclists; practically any outfit that had a cohesive identity could get an OFAC license. Anyone who wanted to visit and couldn't find a group simply wasn't looking hard enough. A colleague and I jumped through that window of opportunity, and took some twenty emerging writers from the U.S. to Cuba for a week of bi-national workshops with a couple dozen young Cuban writers, a sort of literary détente.

I recall one week in March 1999 when you could find more Americans in Cuba than in Minot, North Dakota. The Baltimore Orioles, accompanied by ESPN, were playing the Cuban national team. Ry Cooder was producing a Buena Vista Social Club album. A troupe of American songwriters met for a week with Cuban counterparts preparing for a bi-national concert at the Karl Marx Theater. For a fleeting moment in history it seemed the embargo had ended, that free trade — in culture, anyway — had emerged victorious.

Well, those days are gone. Educational trips, out the window. Cultural exchanges, locked in a dark, abandoned building.  Person-to-person diplomacy, sunk deep into the Caribbean. The only groups getting OFAC licenses these days are religious in nature. Meanwhile, travelers from every other country in the world are free to drive slowly by the remaining sugar fields, take in rural tobacco warehouses, and catch a night game between Matanzas and Sancti Spíritus.

This will change, I predict, six months after Cuba is lead by someone whose last name isn't Castro. Foreign travelers traipsing through Cuba have been healthy for the country in many ways, and when Americans join that parade, we'll all be the smarter for it. In the interim these are the possibilities: smooth transition (likely); civil unrest (unlikely); U.S. invasion (least likely). Contingency plans have been on the boards for a good while now, and the official obfuscation coming from post-operation Havana is part of the plan.

Cuba will likely change economically before it does politically, and as the island moves into territory as unexplored as some mountains in its magnificent Sierra Maestra range, 11 million Cubans could find conditions getting yet tighter. For foreigners, though, these same restrictions may still allow visitors to stroll Havana's Malecón seaside boulevard, play dominos in a Santiago park near the Bacardí Museum, or take in the colonial architecture of a well-preserved Trinidad. Don't be surprised, though, if you run into nostalgia for the Castro regime.

Tom Miller has written about Latin America and other topics for three decades, in books including "The Panama Hat Trail" and "Jack Ruby's Kitchen Sink" as well as "Trading with the Enemy." You can find out more on his website.