Recent news brings back memories of National Press Club trip in 2000 to Cuba

News from Cuba brings to mind an amazing two-week reporting stint in Cuba put together by the National Press Club during the Elian Gonzalez affair 21 years ago. 

Frederica Dunn, a member of what was then the Club Travel Committee, did a great job arranging a trip that included interviews with top Cuban apparatchiks, meetings with diplomats and time for independent exploration in the midst of hoopla over Cuban demands for the return from Miami of Elian, a five-year-old Cuban rescued off the coast of Florida after his mother drowned in her escape attempt.

I've been in some strange places around the world, but nothing compares to the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of Cuba in 2000. The preferred currency, legal at the time but not now, was the U.S. dollar. The bills with portraits of "In God We Trust" were much sought throughout the island.

The Castro regime sponsored daily anti-American demonstrations in front of the former U.S. embassy, home to our "special interest section" where Cubans lined up for a limited number of precious visas to the U.S. Students were bused to the demonstrations in yellow school buses donated by Americans. Buses still bore American lettering, including, I recall, "Huron County Board of Education." Students were issued plastic Cuban flags to wave as they got off the buses, drawn to the rallies by popular rock bands that entertained them before aging party leaders mounted the stage to rant against the U.S. The youngsters left the scene when the speeches started, some throwing their flags on the street, but their wild cheers for the rock bands were taped to air later on Cuban television as though they were cheering the anti-U.S. speeches.

Reporters on the trip included Christopher Marquis, whose specialty was covering Latin American politics for Knight-Ridder Newspapers.  While visiting Elian's home town of Cardenas, Chris invited me to join him in exploring the Cuban healthcare system by visiting the local provincial hospital. Our cab driver, an engineer supplementing his meager pay, had a cousin working as a hospital administrator and he arranged a meeting. Chris introduced himself as being from "Knight-Ridder" (the Miami Herald) and me as being from "the Kiplinger organization" (The Kiplinger Washington Editors). Although truthful, it was clear that the administrator assumed we worked for international aid groups when Chris said we were interested in what the hospital needed. The administrator would have never spoken candidly had he known we were journalists. The hospital was obviously in sad shape with mold on the walls, broken light fixtures, etc., and the administrator spoke for an hour about broken equipment, lacking supplies and an emergency room closed due to shortages. This was health "care" for the typical Cuban, not the boutique clinics catering to top party officials and medical tourists in Havana.

While in Cardenas, some of us tried to interview Elian's father.  A man guarding his small two-story cinder-block row house claimed he was not available. The house plus several on either side and across the street were freshly painted ... a Potemkin Village for visiting cameramen.  Houses in most of the neighborhood had not been painted in ages, if ever.

At Varadero, the nearby posh resort from which ordinary Cubans were then barred, I interviewed the manager of a four-star hotel built by investors from Spain. I wondered how much American capitalists were missing out on due to the U.S. investment embargo. Apparently not much. After forking over construction and permit bribes and paying initial annual profits to the government, the hotel barely broke even.

In another interview, I asked the ambassador from the Netherlands about investments in Cuba. She noted that businesses paid the state for workers (not the workers directly) in hard currencies (Euros or dollars) and the regime paid the employees in nearly worthless Cuban currency. Still, a job at a foreign-owned enterprise was coveted because of tips from tourists and what she insisted was the common practice of under-the-table bonuses.

Our stay in Cuba included trips to Trinidad, a world heritage site that includes pieces of a U-2 spy plane shot down during the Cuban missile crisis, and Santa Rosa, where Che Guevara waged the final battle of the revolution that toppled the Batista government in 1958. On prominent display was the Harvester International bulldozer used by Che to tear up railroad tracks to block troops being ferried to defend Batista in Havana.

Getting around Cuba was a breeze in our air-conditioned Mercedes bus provided by the regime. The few vehicles on the expressways included trucks packed with hitchhikers. An excursion to Ernest Hemingway's house just outside of Havana included a rare chance to enter rooms that were just as the famed author had left them. Most tourists can only look at the rooms through windows. 

I arranged a private nighttime tour of Marina Hemingway, a Havana port catering to American boaters who got temporary visitors visas in defiance of U.S. restrictions. The boat transoms showed home ports from all over the East and Gulf Coasts.

Our Cuban hosts held out the possibility of meeting Fidel Castro, but that never happened. I did watch the aging Castro on Cuban television presiding over a frightening annual assembly of young orators from all over the island. He applauded as youngsters, many not yet teens, competed to deliver the most bombastic anti-American speech to a packed assembly.

One of our group interviews was with Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada, president of the National Assembly. He held out prospects of better relations with the U.S. but blamed the island's woes on the long-standing U.S. embargo. The embargo did not bar imports of U.S. brands made in Canada and Mexico, including new Fords and Chevys. There was no embargo on food or medicine, but Cuba was denied credit and could not afford to pay cash. 

We also had a surreal interview with the head of Granma, Cuba's communist party newspaper, who insisted that the regime supported freedom of the press and that there was no censorship in Cuba. It was clear from interviewing Cuban officials that they were obsessed with U.S. while being oblivious of how little interest the vast majority of Americans had in their country. Once deeply invested in the island, time and isolation had made Cuba irrelevant for most Americans.

One memorable evening I joined Llewellyn King, producer of "White House Chronicles," for dinner in Old Havana at a restaurant featured in the 1993 movie "Strawberry and Chocolate." We caught a cab, a smoke-belching 1953 Chevy, outside the Hotel Nacional and were driven to an unlit, pothole-ridden street outside the popular downtown tourist district. "This can't be right," I thought as we entered the dark once-elegant lobby of an apartment building. We climbed a crumbling marble staircase and saw light streaming from under a door on an upper floor. Opening the door, we entered a cozy little eatery serving fine food at a bargain price. The regime allowed such enterprises as long as they stayed small and employed only family members. 

The Elian drama ended after our trip when the boy was taken from his U.S. relatives on April 22, 2000, and returned to his father in Cuba. I wrote a special report for the readers of The Kiplinger Letter based on our trip and other reporting, concluding that hoped-for change in Cuba was unlikely under a deeply embedded military dictatorship. Sadly, that has held true for more than two decades.