Member recalls Club trip to Cuba during Fidel Castro era

The death of Fidel Castro on Nov. 25 sparked memories of the National Press Club's 2000 working journalists' trip to Cuba arranged by Frederica Dunn.

The visit came at the height of the custody controversy over Elián González, a Cuban boy who survived an escape from Cuba during which his mother and most of her companions drowned when their boat sank before reaching Florida.

I have traveled to some strange places, but nothing compared to the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of Fidel Castro's Cuba.

In Havana, students were being bused to anti-American rallies demanding Elián's return from Miami (he eventually was) in school buses donated by U.S. schools. Popular rock bands had the students cheering and waiving plastic Cuban flags as the camera rolled, but the kids quickly disbursed when aging regime apparatchiks started their anti-American rants.

Some dropped the plastic Cuban flags they had been given onto the streets. The protests were staged in front of the U.S. Special Interest Section, formerly the U.S. embassy, where Cubans lined up to get one of the few exit visas allowed under a U.S.-Cuba agreement.

Portraits of U.S. Founding Fathers were widely sought throughout Cuba in the form of U.S. bills, then legal currency along with Cuban pesos.

Watching state television (the only kind available) at my hotel showed a frail Fidel Castro in the front row of an auditorium beaming at pre-teen Young Pioneers delivering fist-pounding anti-American diatribes in an annual speech contest. (The Club group had hopes of interviewing Castro, but it never happened.)

Our state tour guides chaperoned us on our travels outside of Havana in new Mercedes buses over near-empty highways built by the Soviets. The few trucks we saw were jammed with Cuban hitchhikers.

Oxen had replaced tractors on farms we passed, a sign of austerity after the collapse of Soviet aid. Most city infrastructure bore U.S. labels, fire hydrants from Alabama, water main covers from Wisconsin, even the clock works from Boston in the church tower in historic Trinidad.

In Santa Rosa, a bright yellow Caterpillar tractor held a place of honor as a monument for having torn up tracks to derail a Batista troop train to seal the revolution's victory in 1959.

And, of course, pre-revolution American cars stood out wherever.

One of our stops was Varadero, a posh resort east of Havana reserved for foreign tourists with hard currency. Nearby is the port city of Cárdenas, where Elián's father lived.

I joined another reporter and a photographer for an unescorted visit to the father's two-story row house. It was freshly patched and painted, as were houses on either side and across the street -- a Potemkin setting for photographers as all the other neighborhood buildings were unpainted and crumbing. A man professing to be Elián's uncle had no comment.

I teamed up with Chris Marquis, a Spanish-speaking correspondent for the Miami Herald, to investigate free Cuban health care -- one of the regime's supposed triumphs.

Our cab driver, who said he made more money as a cabby than he would using his engineering degree, took us to the city's main hospital where a relative was a doctor.

We met with the hospital director, who would have never spoken candidly, if at all, had he known we were American journalists. Chris cleverly introduced himself as being with "Knight-Ridder" (owners of the Miami Herald) and me as being with "the Kiplinger organization," literally true but leaving the impression we were with some kind of assistance program. He quickly added that we were interested in hearing about what kind of assistance his hospital might need.

What followed was a half hour review of the disastrous state of medical supplies and broken-down equipment. He reinforced what was obvious from the moldy walls (no air conditioning and unreliable electric power) and open-door lab, where a child was coughing in one corner and a technician was looking through a microscope in another. They were among the signs of how "free" health care was worth what the patients paid.

One night Llewellyn King of King Publishing led some of us to dinner at a family-run restaurant in the unrestored section of Havana. Small eateries were among the few privately run businesses allowed by the regime. The restaurant was famous for being the site of the 1994 film Strawberry And Chocolate.

We drove through unlit, pothole filled streets in a fumy 1950 Plymouth cab to a darkened three-story building. I was thinking "this can't be right" as we stepped cautiously up a beautiful but crumbling marble staircase. But music and light flowed from under a door on the top floor and, sure enough, inside was a festive little restaurant serving a few tourists and well-heeled Cuban officials.

I took one of my guides and his wife to dinner one evening, and she gave me a nighttime tour of her workplace, Marina Hemingway, a posh basin filled with sailboats listing U.S. ports on their transoms.Boaters got a 48-hour visa to spend money in Havana -- no stamps in their passports to show violation of U.S. regulations.

We met with students and young adults who even in private were hesitant to discuss dissatisfaction with the regime. Instead they would stroke their chins, pantomime for "Fidel Castro."