A Non-Political Dispatch From Cuba

A nice man who rents rooms to tourists -- and who perhaps has the only private e-mail account in Cuba -- has been kind enough to let us type and receive non-political letters.

So, gee, what a charming country. Just like Macedonia, except a whole lot poorer, and by the ocean. And no one talks too much about Bill Gates. People hiss at each other to get attention -- and when you're a blond whiteboy with flowered shirts, you get a lot of hisses. Especially in our neighborhood, which is smack across the street from the Havana Libre, the former Hilton which has been converted to 20 floors of luxurious incompetence. I just spent 20 minutes there, waiting in line behind a bunch of prostitutes who were having their old, fat American/Italian boyfriends help them send international faxes.

You see, the hotel's only English copies of Granma International, Havana's daily newspaper, are behind the one desk that sends out international faxes at extortionate prices. If your fax takes 68 seconds, then you get charged for two minutes. If it doesn't work at all because the entire phone system's no good -- whoops! You pay for it anyway.

This is really the least of the worries and annoyances, and it isn't, after all, terribly unpredictable, given the choice of organizing principles this proud nation has embarked upon (remember, no politics). There is a mad grab for dollars, and no one is madder than the state. Nothing in the peso stores? Then better make a whole bunch of expensive state-owned dollar stores, where you can get luxury items like grapefruit juice. A pound of Cuban coffee costs $6. Meanwhile, if you insist on trying to be legal all the time, you just get charged for standing there. I showed up on a one-month, $25 tourist visa, but went the first day to the International Press Center to change the thing to a journalist visa.

This turns out to be at least partially necessary, since three interviewees have already asked if I was accredited -- including one American, an American socialist named Estella Bravo who knows Bob Scheer and Stanley Sheinbaum and who makes Castroite documentaries.

The International Press Center put me through a couple indifferent bureaucrats until I reached a sympathetic ear. He does a lot of eye-rolling, says it's very unusual to change the tourist visa to a journalist one, many problems, but he's my friend and he'll try to do something for me this afternoon. I call in the afternoon and learn he's gone. I show up the next day, and he says the terrible floods wiped out the immigration office; come back in five days. I come back in five days, and he won't meet me. Instead, some Magyar-educated goon named Igor comes out.

"Omar told you, didn't he," Igor says. "It will cost an additional $50 to switch the terms of your visa. For procedural costs, right?"

An extra fifty bucks hardly matters; what mattered was Omar's decision that my proposed journalistic subjects would require only a week -- so that's all they were giving me. I protested, got the rest of the month, and wound up paying $110 for a three-week extension.

Besides all that, these guys are really helpful about setting up official interviews. Igor, for example, gave me a number right away of a guy who could tell me about Martin Dihigo, this old Cuban baseball monster of which little is known. So I call this sports-office guy, set up an interview, walk an hour to leafy Miramar, and meet a perfectly nice former ballplayer who can't tell me one goddamned thing about Dihigo. He can, however, help set up some interviews for me. Great.

We talk a little baseball, and when I'm ready to leave he asks me for 200 bucks for "facilitation." Explains that foreign TV crews never had a problem with that. Thanks, CNN.

So I go to the Cuban Sports Hall of Fame, where Martin Dihigo is inducted, and ask the Hall of Fame director what information they have about him. They have literally none, besides his little plaque. I ask the director about six other tough questions (How many people are inducted here? "I don't know," he answered), then I gave up.

"Maybe I can help you track down these informations," he says with a weird look.

"Gee, that's great," I said, pretending like I didn't know the next step of the dance. Much shuffling.

"But I will have to charge you a fee."

On the way out, he stopped me from taking a picture of the pathetic little Dihigo display, saying I'd have to pay for that privilege, too.

Whatever, these aren't really the things that bug, they're just the things I'm dealing with today. The cocktails, my God, they're terrific ...

Click Here for More!