BRATTLEBORO — More than a decade ago, I was riding along the Havana Malecén in a white and blue '57 Ford with a four-cylinder Toyota engine. The taxi driver overheard my companions speaking English in the back seat.
“Where you from?” he asked in Spanish.
“Estados Unidos,” I replied.
“I thought so. The way they were talking, I thought I was in a film.”
We drove on in silence, the Ford creeping along the broad seaside avenue, the red sun dyeing the azure horizon beyond the flamboyant decay of the antique city.
“It's a shame our governments can't get along,” he said after a moment. “I've always thought Cubans and Americans were like fruit from the same tree. Like brothers, you know?”
“Both proud?” I asked, recognizing the outlines of a familiar conversation.
“Yes, and friendly. Open-minded.”
Such encounters always make me smile. It's a rarity anywhere in the world to be liked for being an American, and I have to admit: It feels good. It's one of the reasons I keep going back to Cuba.
Between 1999 and 2004, I visited the country frequently on a special educational license from the U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The longstanding U.S. prohibition against Americans traveling to Cuba had begun to loosen a bit, and everyone you talked to - from the U.S. and from Cuba - was convinced that the embargo would be ending soon.
Fast forward to 2012. The embargo still stood, and the Cuban people still loved Americans. On that recent visit to Havana, in a convenience store, I shook the hand of an old man, beaming, affable, and drunk.
“Cubans and Americans are just the same, except Cubans are hungrier,” he remarked. “Which is why I'm so skinny.” He lowered his chin to indicate his bony frame.
Many Cubans are skinny, because even with the government-issued ration books that keep people from starving to death, it's impossible to put together a month's worth of three square meals a day. Most people appear lean and healthy, hungry but not malnourished. Those who work in hotels, rental agencies, and other tourism-related businesses are better fed, even chubby.
Before we said goodbye, the old man asked for a convertible peso (C.U.C.), and I didn't hesitate to give it to him. He may have been a drunk, but there was no question he needed it more than I did.
Whether the average Cuban's nagging hunger is due more to the ills of a command-and-control economy or the stifling chokehold of the 50-year U.S. embargo appears to be an open question. A high-ranking officer at the U.S. Interests Section - which serves as our unofficial embassy in Havana as the Cold War drags on in this strange time-warped corner of the Caribbean - assured me that the embargo doesn't matter. “It's not like they can't buy their goods from other countries,” she pointed out.
True enough, I suppose. But think about the economic stimulus that might be created by allowing free commerce between this island nation of 11 million people and a market of 310 million of the world's wealthiest people, whose nearest beach is fewer than 90 miles away. The hordes of high-tipping tourists alone would create a major shot of adrenaline for the Cuban economy.
Despite it all, Cubans go on loving Americans. I find myself shaking hands with every taxi driver, every impromptu tour guide and street musician, every artist or fisherman or mechanic who takes the time to explain the make-do ingenuities of Cuban life. The Cubans you meet in the course of a day are so generous with their friendship, so eager to help, to facilitate and enlighten, that you feel you are in the company of close cousins, indulgent aunts and uncles.
The director of an arts foundation in Havana explained the roots of the Cuban-American affinity: Before 1959, Cuba was more Americanized than any other country in the world, he said. American corporations had satellite offices in Havana, and an undersea telecommunications cable ran across the Straits of Florida.
As a child in the 1950s, the foundation director remembers eating at the Woolworth's lunch counter, living in a house stocked with the latest American products, and watching Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy on TV.
The streets of Havana are a living museum of vintage American cars, but the relationship goes deeper than that. Cubans of a certain age, he pointed out, almost feel like Americans themselves. This is one reason the “reunions” that take place multiple times a day when Americans travel to Cuba are so warm and emotionally charged.
On a recent trip I stayed in a casa particular, a government-sanctioned private home serving as a bed-and-breakfast. This casa was a sixth-floor apartment in a 1950s building, nicely furnished with the well-used American period furniture and appliances common in Cuban houses, with views over the pleasantly leafy Vedado neighborhood down to the Malecón, and to the blue Gulf waters beyond.
My hostess, Olga, has lived here since 1963. A professor at the University of Havana, she loves to talk, lecture, tease, banter, and surprise you by offering ways of looking at things you haven't thought of before. She's expressive and gracious, often reaching out to touch you mid-conversation to stroke your chin or squeeze your shoulder. Her voice is deep and gravelly from too many years of smoking. As a teenager, she participated in Fidel Castro's youth brigades, sent out into the countryside to educate the campesinos.
I asked if she remembered the Revolution. She did, of course, but it was the Missile Crisis she wanted to talk about.
She still has nightmares from those anxiety-filled weeks, when the residents of Havana crouched in their living rooms expecting to be bombed into oblivion at any moment.
“Khrushchev didn't understand one thing, though,” she said. “Americans and Cubans are the same. Deep in my heart, I knew Kennedy would never bomb us.”
* * *
Havana is glorious, mesmerizing, simultaneously joyous and sad. It's one of the few world capitals I know where you can see the moon and stars at night.
Exquisite architecture, much of it badly in need of paint and renovation, lines streets that seem poised to explode at any moment into violence or dancing. Strangler figs slurp the ground with roots that slouch lazily upon each other like boneless fingers, or time-lapse tribes of sleep-deprived worms.
Finned American cars from the '40s and '50s combine nostalgia and menace, showcasing Cuban defiance and resourcefulness and taste. Little girls do surprisingly accomplished handsprings on the beach; highly talented musicians frequent every restaurant and square; boxers spar in rundown courtyards; taxi drivers have Ph.D.s; and the waitress in your neighborhood paladar - a family-run restaurant - may well be a poet, a dancer, and a moonlighting doctor, all at once.
Decades of privation have honed Cubans' special talent for making the best of what they have. In Havana and elsewhere on the island, you're always running into amazingly skilled people: mechanics, academics, doctors, artists, dancers, athletes, tour guides, inventors.
In part, this may be because there are fewer distractions, but it also springs from a pervasive cultural emphasis on creative excellence. People may be hungry, but they take pride in what they do. They spend many hours a day practicing it, and they do it well.
This refreshing truth is another reason Cuba is such an inspiring place to travel.
* * *
On one level, Havana has remained frozen in time since Jan. 1, 1959, when the corrupt ruler Fulgencio Batista fled in his private jet as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and their triumphant revolutionary cohorts made their final advance on the city. Antique Fords, Chevys, Pontiacs, and Buicks still dominate the avenues, and elegant mansions, most subdivided into multi-family apartment buildings, are literally falling apart around their inhabitants.
On another level, the entire country is a relic of the Cold War. Box-like Ladas, dented and street-worn but solid as war tanks, play second fiddle to the American classics, and ugly Soviet architecture - grime-soiled apartment blocks, abandoned factories, and oil refineries - crop up in the most unexpected places, like the fruits of a latent Stalinist fungus attacking the ancient bones of the Spanish Empire.
One more thing that makes visiting Cuba special: the feeling that you've entered a kind of grimy, rustic time warp. Change is underway, though, and beginning to accelerate.
The government of Raúl Castro had recently been easing the economic laws; Cuban citizens had recently been allowed to operate private businesses and to buy and sell cars and houses.
In 2012, there was palpably more commerce on the streets of Havana than there was just one year earlier. There was a new sense of animation and possibility. Young people had begun wearing fashionable stone washed jeans, a burgeoning middle class was patronizing a set of new stores and restaurants, and as many modern cars could be seen on the streets as antiques.
Despite these changes, it's important to emphasize that most people's finances remain dire. The ration books only go so far. Meat, eggs, and other essential proteins are a rarity on the majority of Cuban tables.
A tip of one convertible peso is standard for watching a car, helping with a bag, or providing access to something mildly forbidden at a museum or a cultural site. It sometimes feels embarrassing to engage in such transactions with Cubans, who are among the most dignified people I've ever known. But it is, at least for the time being, a necessity.
Many Cubans have long ago given up on making plans for the future. They live day-by-day, hand to mouth. “Sobrevivimos” is the common, stoical refrain: We do what it takes to survive.
“I'm going to say how I see it, and forget the consequences,” one young man in the countryside told me, having hitched a ride in a rent-a-car I was driving. “This government is not for us. It exists for one person only.” He made a familiar hand gesture, a quick stroking of an imaginary beard: Fidel Castro, also known as “tu tio,” your uncle.
This young man earns a salary of 12 convertible pesos a month, about what it costs for one tourist to sit down for a restaurant meal.
* * *
If you set out on the autopista nacional, the national highway vectoring eastward from Havana into the heart of the island, you will have a beautiful and at-times-surreal experience. The scenery is achingly picturesque: tall palm groves fading into the green distance like something out of the Land of the Lost; little hardwood fincas (estates) painted blue or pink and surrounded by flowers; stunning Caribbean tableaux of well-tended cane fields and jungled limestone hills.
Then you round a corner and come face to face with the massive concrete buttresses of an abandoned Soviet factory, and you remember where you are.
At least by outward appearances, not much has changed since the fall of the campo socialista in the early 1990s. With the demise of the Soviet Union came an end to ambitious infrastructure projects such as the autopista, most of which is still in excellent shape, in part because it sees so little traffic.
Across the island, unspoiled beaches, well-forested mountain ranges, and intact mangrove swamps serve as nurseries for new marine life. Chalk it up as an achievement of the Revolution - understanding also that there are benefits to 50 years of political and economic isolation.
Cuba's population is relatively urbanized, so much of the countryside feels, well, empty. Empty of tourists at least, once you get away from Old Havana, Trinidad, and the crowded beach resorts of Varadero.
Will this atmosphere change if and when the embargo is fully lifted?
Anything new - from iPhones to Hyundais - will be a huge temptation to Cubans. They will snap up such technology the moment they can afford it. This is likely to be particularly true of the Internet, which the state has thus far prevented from extending its tentacles as it has in virtually everywhere else, and which will provide for Cubans a craved-for opening to the rest of the world.
How much will Cuba change? Will you still see the old Chevys and Oldsmobiles on the Malecón? The ubiquitous Ladas, the putt-putt coco-taxis, the ancient tractors and bicycle taxis and horse-drawn caruajes?
More importantly, will the Cuban people maintain their special character? Their resourcefulness, talent, and hard won dignity?
I think they will. Perhaps it will be easier to buy familiar products, and there should be a lot more variety in available food. But Cubans are too independent to become completely bewitched by our culture of McDonald's and iPhones. Hopefully, they'll apply the same ingenuity to this new bounty of capitalist exchange that they've applied to five decades of economic isolation.
Contrary to what some might expect, the Cuban Revolution is too engrained to come crashing down the day Fidel Castro dies. The Revolution permeates the municipalities and the ministries, from tourism to agriculture and education and beyond. It's not just the Castro brothers, though it is important to understand that for most Cubans they and the Revolutionary compatriots they have outlived are analogous to George Washington and Paul Revere to Americans: founding fathers who have reached the plane of the mythological.
Cubans are proud of their Revolution. Does this mean they don't bemoan their current economic state, and aren't tired of so many years of non-democratic, one-party rule? No.
Most Cubans I've talked to, even the more “revolutionary” ones, long to see more freedom, more openness, and, emphatically, more economic opportunity. But that doesn't change the way they feel about the Revolution itself, not only what it has accomplished in health and education, but its heroic David-and-Goliath character - its proud history of standing up to the colossal enemy to the north.
Fortunately for those Americans who want to travel to Cuba - and the restrictions on traveling there have been substantially loosened since late 2014 - Cubans are good at making distinctions between a government and its people.
We are at what might be called an inflection point, and it's not just because of the recent changes in U.S. policy. For the last several years, under the surprisingly reform-minded leadership of Raúl Castro, Cuba has been undergoing a program of gradual economic liberalization.
Last year, there were an estimated $3 billion in remittances, much of which has been used to start up the small businesses that have been permitted and encouraged under regulations issued in early 2013.
Cuba is not a small, pristine Caribbean outpost; it is a complex society of more than 11 million people. Obama's paradigm shift has not suddenly exposed the country to the rapacious gaze of international corporations, with whom the Cuban government has been doing business for more than two decades.
Sure, there will be more American businesses and wealthy individuals interested in throwing their hats in the ring, but remember: foreign citizens are not allowed to buy property, and anyone who wants to invest in Cuba has to negotiate directly with the government. Every investment must be approved, and the Cuban state prefers to maintain tight control, at least at first, insisting on leases with expiration dates and majority ownership in joint ventures.
So development will come, but it will be strictly overseen, gradual, and limited to specific geographical areas. The remarkable richness of Cuban society and culture - and the picturesque time-capsule ambiance - is not likely to be overrun, commercialized, or Americanized any time soon.
In the end, whatever happens, Cuba will still be Cuba - like nowhere else in the world.