Our Man in Havana Chronicles the San Luis Jazz Dancers’ Historic Cuba Performance

August was really hot in Cuba, but the San Luis Jazz Dancers made it even hotter. The temperature rose several degrees when they lit up audiences throughout Havana. They were the first American dance troupe invited to appear in Cuba since Castro sent Batista fleeing way back in 1958.

But being first isn’t always easy. Especially in Cuba.

Although the young dancers at Joe and Lori Silvaggio’s Dance Academy on Higuera Street made history during that sweltering week of Aug. 12—19, it sometimes seemed they wouldn’t. Because it sometimes seemed the Cuban bureaucrats wished Fidel Castro hadn’t invited them at all. It was that kind of journey.

Just 90 miles from U.S. soil, Cuba remains a mystery to Americans, an embargoed island whose isolation has left us with stereotyped images 40 years out of date: poor farmers harvesting sugar cane and rolling cigars; poky American cars belching along Havana’s streets; Castro’s in-your-face theatrics, Soviet intrigue, and America’s stoic embargo, all awash in rum and music, drifting somewhere in a time warp of our misunderstanding.

The weird thing is that’s exactly what Cuba is like today. Weirder still is that it isn’t like that at all.

The 18 dancers, along with 31 friends and relatives, left San Luis Obispo on an early morning bus, then flew out of LAX on Taca Air directly to Havana. Washington considered the San Luis Obispo entourage emissaries of the United States government; Castro considered them guests of the nation. I considered myself lucky to join them.

"You are pioneers," Lori Silvaggio told the dancers many times during the weeklong trip. "You are doing something truly special."

Lori is without guile, forever upbeat and kind. She is a mother hen, carefully counting her brood and making sure all is right with their world–at least, as right as she can possibly make it. Coming from anyone else, her words would sound downright corny. But there was always a sweet dignity about her exhortations.

"I want you to think deeply about who you really are," she told us before leaving, "and not what you may think about the people we’re going to meet. We’ll be dealing with another time and another world, and our goal is to disprove all the negative things anyone there might have about Americans."

The troupe arrived in Havana International Airport at 1 in the morning and was met by Virgilio Martinto, the director of international relations for Cuba’s National Performing Arts Council. This was strange. In America, a high-level bureaucrat like Virgilio would certainly send a flunky at such an hour. Virgilio was either very gracious and interested or had a very tiny staff. Maybe both.

Virgilio is an astonishingly tall black man with a quick smile and a friendly demeanor.

"Ever think of playing basketball?" I asked him on the bus ride.

"Oh, yes!" he said. "Me, I played on the international team. But now"–and he held out his hand palm down, moving it back and forth in that universal sign that means "so-so"–"now I am in the government. But it is good. Very good. Like you, I am a journalist."

According to Virgilio, a journalist is someone who writes press releases for the government.

"We explain to the people how our intentions happen and where we want them to go," he said."And this is very good too. And very necessary."

At Havana’s Hotel Nacional, the only thing on TV at 2 a.m. was a soft-porn cable station featuring two naked bimbos explaining their intentions to each other and where they wanted to go, which was readily understandable in any language. The puritanical dogma of communism I’d expected was apparently losing out to more basic compulsions. But this was Cuba, after all.

The Hotel Nacional overlooks Havana and the Straits of Florida from a bluff above the Malecón, the wide boulevard stretching east and west along the city’s waterfront. In but one of Cuba’s endless contradictions, Cubans aren’t allowed in the hotel. Only tourists are. The Nacional’s opulent charm and overwrought décor seem the perfect setting for a Mafia gathering–mainly because that’s what it was back in the 1950s, when Mob bosses ruled Havana’s night life under the approving eyes of the corrupt Batista government.

No doubt the ghosts of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel still toast one another in the Nacional’s teak-lined bar, raising chilled mojitos with mint leaves, toasting the day when Castro finally goes off to that big Politburo in the sky. Which may not be far off. Castro turned 74 the day we arrived.

Coffee choices at the breakfast buffet ranged from American-style to Cuban, a far stronger, bitter blend that Starbucks might serve to masochistic insomniacs.

"I’ll have half-Cuban and half-American," I told Roberto, the server at the coffee bar.

"Ah, yes," he said, filling my cup with some of each. "We should mix things more, Cuba and America, don’t you think?"

Great. A philosopher at breakfast. After only four hours of sleep, that’s hard to take, even for me. How did he know I was an American? I took a sip.

"Could be better?" he asked, smiling. I think he was talking about the coffee. But maybe not.

"Things could be a lot better," I said.

Yes, Comrade, the Answer Is No

For the San Luis Jazz Dancers, performing in a communist country was nothing new. Last summer they toured China for two weeks as guests of the Chinese government.

In China they’d danced in great halls before thousands, eventually becoming familiar with the people and with that strange logic of communism and its ever-annoying subtext, which keeps you off balance as it smiles ingratiatingly: Yes, we would like you to perform. No, we would like it if you would not. I am sorry, but the show has been canceled–and would you like some tea?

They’d already encountered such convoluted nonsense in China, which had led to at least one canceled performance, so they had good reason to be wary of what might face them in communist Cuba. But the show, they knew, must go on.

Control is the driving force behind totalitarian regimes, always coupled with a fear of losing it. Or your job. Or even your head. Sorry, Comrade, but there’s been a change in plans. The new plan is you’re dead meat. Control is a special currency in Cuba, traded eagerly by petty government officials. This at least partially explains why things started getting so strange.

How the San Luis Jazz Dancers got to Cuba is simple. Government officials of the Red persuasion no doubt get together periodically to discuss such commie things as whether the next Great Leap Forward is about to stumble or why they can’t pick up "Baywatch" on their satellites. In one of those discussions, the American dancers from Sans Looie Obiskpo must have come up.

Someone said how much the Chinese people had enjoyed them. Castro, never to be outdone, decided if they were good enough for his Chinese revolutionary pals, they were good enough for Cuba.

If the details of the trip’s inception are vague, the outcome was quite clear: Castro wanted Lori Silvaggio’s dancers to perform in Cuba. So he commanded his minions to contact Bonnie Hood, formerly with the Ford administration and now head of the New Olympians, an organization whose stock in trade is arranging international cultural exchanges. Bonnie had already helped Lori get her dancers to China. Now they were Cuba-bound.

¡Viva la Revolución!

Havana is a glorious mess. With more than 2 million residents, it’s the largest metropolis in the Caribbean, a vast, doily-covered wedding cake of a city crumbling under the tropical sky. Spanish influences are evident everywhere–blocks stretching forever in all directions are lined with opulent homes falling into ruin, aging architectural matrons whose youthful pleasures are but faded memories. They’re filled with the poor.

The biggest problem is that no one can afford paint. Well, nobody but the capitalists, which is why what little restoration going on now is being done by the Spanish government.

In fact, the capitalists are the only ones who can afford much of anything in Cuba. The nation’s telephone company is owned principally by Italians; luxury apartments are being constructed by Israeli, Spanish, and Italian companies. The most commonly seen new cars are Fiats and Mercedes. American cigarettes are "Produced under the authority of the Philip Morris Co." in Mexico. Smokers rejoice: A pack costs only $1.50.

But things are much better now than a few years ago when the Russians left. Back then, a relentless economic malaise had gripped the island. Paint was the last thing anybody needed. Unless it was edible.

Here and there amid yesterday’s eroding splendors are the structural remnants of Soviet influence, mainly in the form of abusively large apartment buildings, warrens for Russian technocrats during the glory days before the Soviet Union collapsed.

The largest one, more reminiscent of the Ministry of Peace from George Orwell’s "1984" than a place to tuck the kids into bed at night, stares glumly out across the city, a monument to a vanished Worker’s Paradise. This towering hive was someone’s idea of utopia. May they choke on their borscht.

"Why are there never any lights on in that big building?" we asked our waiter one afternoon at a tiny restaurant beneath its shadow.

He told us that when the Russians left, they trashed the place.

"They ripped out all the wiring and air conditioners," he said. "No one lives there now."

But it’s the biggest building in Havana, I told him. And the Russians left years ago.

"Oh, yes, I know," he said. "Are you ready to order?"

I made a mental note to contact developer Rob Rossi when I got back to San Luis. He could be selling luxury apartments in the Russki Arms before the year was out.

State-built architecture throughout Cuba is stuck back in the 1960s, when Castro’s revolutionaries envisioned a future world filled with sweeping tail-finned buildings, the sorts of places a communist Jetsons family might park its hover-car before taking the people mover to the People’s Hall for Castro’s latest long-winded speech to the people. Today, these whoop-de-do, gee-whiz structures graying in the Caribbean rains are little more than absurdly sad reminders of a revolutionary architectural fervor long past.

Revolutions are the fun part when you get to shoot all your enemies and when anything seems possible. So you build buildings that shout your dreams to the clouds. But then things settle down, and there you are having to figure out how to get the damn tractor widgets to the tractors on time and why the heck no one double-checked how many crates of pencils you need to fill out all these requisition forms.

Cuba today is in that twilight of the revolution where butter is far more important than guns. And not as easy to come by.

I found myself rooming at the Hotel Nacional with Doug Shaw, owner of the Sanctuary Cigar Shop on Chorro Street. We’d walk the streets of Havana searching for cigars and cold beer and marveling at the loony juxtaposition of old and new and strange all around us.

The Metro-Bus is old and new and strange. And it’s a perfect example of gleeful revolutionary zeal devolving into mundane practicality. Metro-Bus is Havana’s public transportation system, a fleet of people-haulers that look more like dirty produce trucks than buses. A Russian diesel pulls a huge box that’s shaped much like a long trailer someone has accidentally stepped on, thus making it lower in its middle than its two ends. The huge logo on its side is that of a camel.

"Hey," I said to Doug. "It really is shaped sort of like a camel with its two humps, you know? And that’s kind of a cool logo to go with the design, don’t you think?"

Doug took his cigar from his mouth and gave an appraising look.

"Actually," he said. "It looks to me like they designed the logo first and then built the bus."

I had to admit he could be right.

Steppin’ Out, American-Style

The show Lori and her dancers devised for the Cubans was American to the core–an exuberant kaleidoscope of numbers featuring modern dance, Broadway glitz, jazz and hip-hop, Irving Berlin, disco, Latin dance, and MTV explosiveness, all tightly choreographed and ready to roar. It had more energy than a cruise missile. The Cubans had never seen anything like it.

As Lori put it, "We wanted to bring America with us." The only thing missing was the ticket scalpers.

The first performance was an impromptu affair at a local nightclub not far from the hotel. When the house salsa band had finished its set, the dancers took the floor.

"They are…so…so…" a Cuban woman in the audience was trying to explain what she thought of it all afterwards. "…so different. The moves are…wonderful!"

It was like trying to describe the wind on a glorious afternoon.

Cuba has astonishing dancers, of course. But the distinction between their dance and Lori’s is like the difference between a dirigible and the Concord. Although both are beautifully formed and graceful in the air, one remains a wondrous part of yesterday, while the other is on its way to tomorrow.

Cuban dance taps into a liquid pulse of primordial rhythms long forgotten by most of us, but joyously re-created in Cuba’s endless nightspots and festivals. But whether it’s the samba, the mambo, or the conga, the moves remain variations on ancient themes. That’s why Cubans had such a hard time describing the San Luis Jazz Dancers.

Americans, mad for variety, are forever seeking something new and different. The magical medley displayed by Lori’s dancers was exhilaratingly inexplicable to the Cubans. These kids were like some vital force on its way to someplace waaay out beyond, where the lights are shining brightly and gleefully taking everyone along for the ride.

"I think they are… incredibly… BEAUTEOUS, I would have to say," one of the nightclub’s waitresses, dark and beauteous herself, told me at the bar.

"Have you seen dancing like this before?"

"Never. No, never. And I would like to see it many times again."

There were a few who didn’t want to see it many times again–a small group of tourists who sat smugly, arms crossed and irritable throughout the performance, gesturing rudely whenever they could.

"So who are those assholes?" I asked Ilona Meza, the dance troupe’s publicist.

"I don’t know," she said. "But I bet they’re Germans."

Never one to let a slight pass unanswered, Ilona walked down the bar and confronted them in an animated conversation that revealed that, yes, they were indeed Germans and, no, they didn’t like the dancers one bit.

San Luis attorney Jim McKiernan, always known for his witty repartee, came up with an appropriately sophisticated German retort: "Ficken sie mit Schlauchanschluss, der Scheisskopf!" (Go fuck yourself with a fire hose, shithead), but unfortunately the music was too loud for them to hear. Or perhaps fortunately.

Ilona’s report: "They said they’d come all the way over here and were mad because they didn’t come to Cuba just to see a bunch of Americans. They said they’re sick of Americans."

Yeah, but we sure can dance.

Attack of the Cuban Capitalists

I’d always suspected that inside every communist is a capitalist screaming to get out. Now I’m sure.

Tourism, now Cuba’s largest industry, has given birth to the Cuban Hustle, which isn’t a new dance; it’s an old American custom usually referred to stateside as the bait-and-switch. Its moves are being exquisitely perfected throughout Cuba.

The Hustle comes in many forms. Take the Café Hustle, for example. If you’re a tourist walking into a restaurant, you’ll be immediately led upstairs to a separate dining room where you’re given a menu with prices four times more expensive than the same food being served downstairs to the locals. Doug and I got screwed twice this way before we caught on.

The third time, we looked around the room and said, no, we’d rather eat downstairs.

"Oh, but this is so very nice," the waiter said.

"We like downstairs," I said.

"But we have no tables available right now," he told us in all seriousness, even though he’d led us past four empty tables on the patio.

"No problem," said Doug. "We’ll wait at the bar."

"But there are no drinks at the bar and besides, the bartender is dead," he said. No he didn’t, but we were expecting him to. The guy desperately wanted us to stay and get fleeced.

The Café Hustle is everywhere. Two-dollar chicken dinners are $13 upstairs. Fifty-cent beers are $2. One restaurant initially offered our entire entourage a reasonable group rate but then changed it to $35 each. We said hasta la vista and walked.

The Street Hustle has its own special steps, where garbage cigars are sold as genuine Cohibas. The world’s oldest dance, prostitution, is everywhere, by some estimates accounting for half the tourist trade. The Hustle is even done by the military. One day I asked a Cuban soldier if I could take his picture. "For a dollar," he told me.

They do the Hustle in the countryside too. At one particularly brazen tourist trap, I told our tour guide, Jorge, that I couldn’t afford anything on display. He nodded apologetically.

"Yes, I know…everyone in Cuba thinks American tourists are all millionaires."

I suppose they have good reason. The average Cuban’s salary is 300 pesos a month, which is around $17 American, about enough to buy Julio Iglesias’ latest CD at Boo Boo Records. As a tour guide, Jorge officially makes 350 pesos a month, which means that next year if he took his family out to dinner each night, he’d spend his entire annual salary by Jan. 5th. If they ate downstairs, he might make it halfway to February.

The good news is the state sells him a monthly ration of rice, cooking oil, and beans for only five pesos. The bad news is it runs out by midmonth. The other good news is the state provides all his medical, education, and housing needs, which Cubans are always quick to point out. The bad news is Jorge wants more out of life. That’s why he quit teaching high school Russian and became a tour guide. The tips in American dollars are terrific.

One Cuban woman told us she makes $50 American in tips each night waiting tables. But she can’t spend much of it, she said, because every neighborhood has its own government-paid snitch with shifty eyes and a clipboard.

"If I go to buy shoes, everyone talks and I can get in trouble," she said. So she saves her money. In a bag under her bed, I suppose. And waits for the embargo to be lifted. Or for Castro to die.

Nobody speaks ill of Fidel Castro, by the way. The worst we heard was that he is "bullheaded." He is the father of the nation, after all. And as with your father, you appreciate all he’s done for you, even though he tells the same boring stories over and over and is getting irritable in his dotage. Yes, he leaves his beard hairs in the sink and dozes off when you ask him for a bigger allowance. But you love him anyway. And you defend him. Always.

But Cubans are growing weary of the austere life Castro’s communism has offered for 40 years. Huge billboards throughout Havana and the countryside proclaim, "¡¡En Cada Barrio Revolución!!" (Each Neighborhood Defends the Revolution!). When someone keeps telling you how great everything is, you can’t help but wonder if it really is. Many Cubans we spoke with sense the devil’s bargain they’ve made. Subsistence needs are met. But, like Jorge, they want more.

But they don’t want to go to jail over it, which is what’s happened to government critics, homosexuals, anyone with AIDs, and, presumably, women who try buying new shoes. The Americas Watch human-rights group says that Cuba has more political prisoners as a percentage of population than any other country in the world. In spite of that, Cubans grudgingly defend Castro even as they pine for something better.

Consider the tragic love affair between Cubans and Baskin-Robbins. After the revolution, Castro threw the no-good capitalist pig ice cream company off the island, then decided that since the people loved its 31 flavors so much, he’d create an even better, state-run ice cream company. And it would have 32 flavors. Thus was born the Coppelia Ice Cream Pavilion, which occupies an entire block in downtown Havana. For the first nine years it had one flavor, vanilla. Today it has nine. And everyone agrees that compared to Baskin-Robbins, it really sucks.

American dollars continue flooding the island, now accounting for two-thirds of the entire economy, much of it sent by Miami’s Cuban expatriates of the right-wing, Elián-supporting variety, who mail the right-wing fruits of capitalism to families back home.

For Cubans, the dollar is a cushion between the lowly peso, which nobody wants, and the good life, which everybody seeks. The only Cuban peso I saw the entire trip was an old one I bought. It cost $2. Without American greenbacks, Castro might be battling a new batch of revolutionaries shouting, "Capitalismo! Palm Pilots! Baskin-Robbins for the People!"

When the Russians pulled out in the early ’90s, no longer able to prop up Cuba’s bumbling economy, something had to be done. Papa Castro’s socialismo provides his children with meager monthly allowances, but when he isn’t looking, they’re all out working the streets for dollars. The people have turned into sharpies and scam artists, probably the best on the planet. It’s a dysfunctional game they play: Castro pretends it’s not really happening; the people, enablers all, go along with the charade.

In Cuba the contradictions keep coming at you. Castro is loved in exasperation. The workers aren’t allowed in the hotels with the capitalists, so they rip off the much-loved Americans. Vacationing KGB agents sit solemnly at poolside, pale in the Cuban sun. Communist street hustlers wear Tommy Hilfiger T-Shirts. The state is chaste and pure but tacitly allows prostitutes to heat the economy.

Here, Soviet rigidity mingles with loose island rhythms that waft free and easy in the ocean breezes, and Elián belongs home with his dad, Cubans say, while privatetly admitting his mom’s idea wasn’t half bad. And it’s not without irony that Cuba’s most renowned export, the cigar, remains the ultimate symbol of capitalist avarice.

"When the Soviet Union collapsed, everyone was surprised," Jorge told us. "Our economy was like a small boat adrift in the sea. What to do?"

Take the tourists upstairs, for a start.

Our Cuban Missile Crisis

When CNN showed up, the Cuban bureaucrats went ape-shit.

The relationship between the San Luis Obispo emissaries and Cuban officials was already strained when the bureaucrats discovered that KSBY-TV anchor Tony Cipolla and his cameraman, Gino Corridori, had come along to document the trip.

It was that control thing again. This was the first visit by an American dance troupe, so better keep a lock on it. If there’s one thing communist bureaucrats cannot abide, it’s nosy reporters strutting around with all that freedom of speech guff. The trip was planned as a cultural visit. When the press shows up, all of a sudden it’s political–at least it is so far as Cuban officials are concerned.

CNN’s Havana Bureau got wind of the San Luis Obispo visit and wanted to produce a special two-minute broadcast. When they found out the government bean-counters wouldn’t let them, they really wanted to produce it. Telling the American media it can’t do something is like telling Bart Simpson not to look in the room where the Christmas presents are kept. Hey! How did you get in here?

Lori had negotiated a performance at Cuba’s National Dance Academy, a large, tree-shaded, Spanish relic where the country’s international dancers train. Chairs had been set up in the outdoor courtyard for an afternoon performance. But as we sipped lukewarm Cristal beer and Tropicola, word spread among us that the Cuban officials weren’t happy.

"Something’s coming down," Gino told me as he set up his camera.

Officials from the Ministry of Culture had put the kibosh on KSBY, but relented when Tony and Gino agreed to pay them $100 for two minutes of filming. Control had finally given way to the Hustle. Might as well make a buck. Tony paid and got a receipt. But now he worried his tapes might be confiscated.

"Maybe we can hide them in everybody’s luggage," he wondered aloud. That’s what he’d done to get his tapes out of China during last summer’s dance tour, which became an award-winning KSBY documentary.

I didn’t think he’d have any problems.

"If that happens," I said, "just tell them you’re going to let CNN know about it. I mean, the last thing these guys want is worldwide coverage of Castro confiscating news footage."

The paranoia had intensified a few days before when Lori and dance academy officials got into an ugly disagreement over how much the academy was going to charge her dancers for a lesson. Lori had brought a signed government agreement stipulating a few hundred dollars plus a small donation. The academy said no, it would cost $1,800. The dancers were already warming up down the hall.

The officials wouldn’t budge. The dance academy was really good at the Cuban Hustle too; in fact, they were doing pirouettes.

They said hers wasn’t the right contract. One of them left the room and came back a few minutes later with "the real contract" showing the $1,800 amount. Then they said nobody could leave the building until they got their money.

"I asked if I could use the restroom," Lori said afterwards. "So I left the room and told the dancers to get out of the building immediately."

Like a Cold War test ban treaty, the negotiations had stalled. The only good will on this journey seemed to be emanating from Lori. She eventually excused herself from the meeting. But then she couldn’t find her shoes, which she’d left near the dance floor.

"We don’t know where they are," the staff told her. "We have no idea."

"I guess the negotiations didn’t go so well, did they?" Mike Lemos said to Lori when she got outside. "I mean, they even got your shoes."

Mike owns SLO County’s Lemos Feed and Pet Supply. He’s also a very large man. One thing he doesn’t like is having his friends get ripped off. When Lori told him about her shoes, he marched back into the academy and informed the staff in no uncertain terms that they were going to produce Lori’s shoes right now or else there was going to be trouble.

"They went over to a locker and got them," he told Lori, handing her the shoes.

Negotiations continued the next day when Lori was summoned for another meeting. The talk meandered in that too-familiar, weirdo commie logic that never quite gets to the point. But the upshot was soon clear. They wanted to make sure Lori wouldn’t say any bad things to their superiors about that silly money thing yesterday, and, yes, her contract would be honored and, yes, we would like you to perform–and would you like some tea?

On the bus ride back over to the academy for that day’s performance, Bonnie Hood of the New Olympians had stood up to address us all.

"We don’t know what we’ll be facing in there today," she said. "So please be VERY careful what you say. Remember: Everybody loves everybody. Are you with me?"

The bureaucrats were still powwowing somewhere inside. Virgilio Martinto, who’d met us at the plane, showed up from the Arts Council to join the backroom discussions. CNN, we soon heard, had been told by the Ministry of Culture that it couldn’t attend today’s performance. Everyone wondered what would happen next.

That’s when we looked over toward the wrought-iron entry gate and saw CNN’s Lucia Newman and her crew stroll in with Bart Simpson. Someone, we figured, was about to have a cow. We caught sight of Virgilio and the head dance instructor. I wondered if they’d throw the crew out. Or charge them twice the going rate. But nothing happened. They acted as if Lucia weren’t even there.

Lucia has been with CNN’s Havana Bureau for three years and knows her way around the Cuban bureaucracy. When low-level government dweebs tell her "no," she calls the high-level ones to get a "yes." That’s what she’d done that day.

"There really isn’t any ‘news’ in Cuba," she told us. "Everything is just damage control. Everybody’s covering themselves, making sure they don’t get into any trouble."

If you can imagine what America would be like if the Department of Motor Vehicles ran everything, you’ll have a pretty good idea what Lori’s dancers were up against. When you toss in the incompetence factor, well, that’s one more thing Cubans and Americans have in common. An international dialog between the two countries about pea-brained bureaucrats would probably do more to foster a sense of mutual understanding than anything the Clinton administration has come up with.

But one official was a tad more charitable when he put it this way a few days later: "You have to understand that this is our first time to have American dancers here, and we don’t know what to risk; we don’t know what to expect."

CNN filmed the performance for worldwide broadcast. Tony and Gino filmed it, too–and to hell with the two-minute time limit.

The audience was enthralled. They simply couldn’t tear their eyes from the explosive American verve before them. When the dancers launched into the hip-hopping energy of Broadway’s "Stomp," the crowd went nuts. In Cuba, giving performers a standing ovation isn’t part of the cultural etiquette. This time, it was.

As one of the dance instructors explained afterward, "We wanted to do something special, they were so marvelous. That is when I remembered seeing an old Hollywood movie where the audience stood up and applauded–and I knew that is what we should do."

Where Lenin Hits the Marx

Cubans genuinely like Americans, maybe because they’ve all got relatives here in the States. Everyone we talked to–everyone–had someone in America ("Oh! California! Yes! My uncle lives in Los Angeles! He has a Corvette!"). Some emigrated before the revolution, others left Cuba in the early ’80s when Castro allowed them to go, while others risked death braving the Caribbean waters.

I had to keep reminding myself that, beautiful as it is, Cuba remains an island prison and that we were here to entertain the inmates. But such were the charms all around us that this was easy to forget.

The warm regard Cubans hold us Yankees in is apparent. One long-haired guy put it bluntly as we walked by his ancient Chevy Bel Air blasting Def Leppard from its tape deck: "Hey!" he shouted. "America! Rock and ROLL!"

The Elián controversy certainly had something to do with the government’s ambivalence toward Lori’s dancers. The acrimony spawned throughout that protracted affair had renewed old suspicions. For one hot week in August, Lori and her dancers bore the brunt of it. But they did so with equanimity and grace. This is simply the way things are, they reasoned. It didn’t matter–the show was what mattered.

"Elián belonged back with his father," Jorge told us when the subject eventually came up, as we knew it would.

I told him most Americans agreed.

"You should remember that we are Americans too," he said, referring to the feeling among Cubans that since they live in the Americas, they too should be called Americans. I hereby move that we extend the moniker officially and wholeheartedly. Americans, all. ¡Viva los Americanos!

Cubans are Americans in more ways than name. Their native drive and energy is obvious even beneath the lumbering economic system they’re saddled with. When Castro eventually dies, the Miami expatriates will return, bringing rabid entrepreneurial know-how to the island, and then all the pent-up, black-market spirit of the streets will gush forth in legitimate enterprise.

The people now selling fake Cohiba cigars on the sidewalks will be operating Ford dealerships, selling Amway products, and day-trading like crazy on eBay, turning Cuba into the economic powerhouse of the Caribbean. We’d better get ready.

But for now, the economy pokes along like some gigantic Salvation Army thrift store, where you never know what will be on the shelves from one day to the next. At the moment, soap is scarce. And paper products. Many restaurants won’t bring you a napkin unless you ask.

Doug and I had brought along gifts we’d heard were hard to come by in Cuba–pens (from First Bank of San Luis Obispo), beef jerky (Cattaneo Brothers, of course), Post-It Notes, and facial tissues.

"Oh, very nice," Lidia told us, stroking a tiny packet of Long’s Drug Store facial tissues as if it were a rare and wondrous thing, which at the moment it was. Lidia is the mother of a friend of Doug’s who lives in Los Osos. Lidia has a nice apartment near the Hotel Nacional. By Cuban standards, she’s well off.

"Cuba and America should be friends," she told us. "They bicker like two old ladies–mip! mip! mip!–two old ladies who fight all the time!"

Lidia’s father was a rich Cuban businessman who’d lost everything following Castro’s power grab. She lived in New York for a while when she was young.

"But I will not go back to America," she told us as she put on a New York Yankees cap Doug had brought her. "I cannot…Cuba is like my mother. I cannot leave my mother, can I?"

After we said our goodbyes to Lidia, we walked along Avenida de los Presidentes toward the Plaza de la Revolución. Communist totalitarianism seems so out of place here, so plainly antithetical to the beat of the Cuban heart. Statues of Lenin and other Soviet party-poopers glare stoically out from their park perches with faces of irritated fussbudgetry, ever vigilant and absurd.

At a nearby outdoor cafe, a conga band played in sweet syncopation. Everyone was laughing and dancing and sipping Havana Club rum, carrying on like the bad kids in the back of the class, unmindful of these dour Russian hall monitors.

"We are a very sexy people," Lidia had told us devilishly.

"But you must stop this frivolity and get back to work!" the statues admonish with granite glumness. "Put down that bottle; get your clothes back on! We must strive! Together! For the Glory of the People, the Cause of the Revolution, the–"

But nobody was listening. A conga line had begun and the sunset, too lovely to ignore, was exploding softly across the sky, beyond the wildest dreams on the coldest Russian night. No wonder those Soviet technocrats had trashed that apartment building. They had to leave all of this behind for the moribund gloom of Moscow. Is big bummerinski, yes Comrade?

As Doug and I walked along, it was getting wearisome being accosted by hustlers every half-block–even if they did like Americans.

"But how can they always tell we’re Americans?" I asked Doug. "I mean, we could be French or English, right? Or we could–"

"Hallo! You are American, yes?"

"No," said Doug. "We’re from India."

"Ind-ee-ah?"

"Delhi, actually."

"Oh…You want Cohiba cigars? My brother, he works at the factory and sneaks them out. I have them, very cheap–"

Any Cohibas hawked on the street are fakes. Period. If you’re caught with them at customs, they’ll be confiscated, since Cuba doesn’t want its second-most famous export–fleeing Cubans being the first–diluted by piss-poor imitations. Half the Cuban economy must percolate along on the sale of phony-baloney cigars to stupid tourists. It’s a constant litany. "Psst! Cohiba? Cohibacohibacohiba…?"

It was getting late. The mad wonder of Havana’s street life was on the upswing. Evening had come to the city’s eternal carnival. Up the street, the prostitutes had begun congregating.

"How’d you like some of that?" I said, pointing toward a group of luscious lovelies.

No point even thinking about it. They’d just take us upstairs and charge us triple.

Dance of the Café Cantante

El Teatro Nacional de Cuba, the national theater, is a monstrous concrete façade, rising in stupefying grandiloquence across Venida Cespedes in West Havana. The official dance performance was scheduled for 4 o’clock, an odd hour, I thought, to attract an audience–which turned out to be exactly what the bureaucrats had in mind. Come entertain us–please!–but let’s not let anyone know.

This was the only government-sanctioned performance. But it wouldn’t take place on the main stage. In keeping with the low-profile, this-isn’t-really-happening-but-isn’t-it-great approach, the Ministry of Culture was having the dancers hoof it downstairs in the theater’s Café Cantante, which looks a lot like a huge Paso Robles bar, but not quite as fancy.

Nobody had been invited other than officials from the ministry–and Virgilio’s former teammates, Cuba’s international basketball team, who acted as if they’d merely been asked to stop by for beer and popcorn, and hey, look, what’s with all these dancers? A smattering of regulars sat at the bar looking perplexed but interested. Not the grandest of welcomes.

But no biggie. Lori and her dancers simply cleared the tables for a dance space, then proceeded to blow the place apart.

When I spoke with one dancer, Jamie Holland, afterwards, she expressed no sense of let-down.

"You walk in and go, ‘Oh-my-GOSH! This is going to be a difficult show!’ But you can’t have any expectations. I mean, anything can happen, and that’s what makes it so exciting." It was, she told me, the most exciting production she’d ever been part of.

"Halfway through the show there was a smile on everyone’s face," said Fred Ferber, longtime SLO County musician and the troupe’s musical director. "You could watch as they warmed to us."

American stomps and Broadway tunes and unrelenting rock’n’roll have that effect, even on communists. The show’s most touching number, "We Can Be Kind," featured SLO singer Jennifer Blomfield surrounded by red, white, and blue—bedecked dancers sporting American flags and San Luis smiles:

Nobody really wants to fight, nobody wants to go to war…

We can be kind. We can take care of each other.

We can remember that deep down inside, we all need the same things….

The show’s finale erupted in spontaneous dancing as audience and dancers filled the floor. The only thing separating them was Castro and Washington and an ocean of stalled diplomacy, but who gave a damn about that right now?

SLO Town physician Steve Carlson had acted as our interpreter throughout the journey, which by now seemed to have begun months before. As Lori held a bouquet of flowers, he translated her words to the audience. Oddly, they were made all the more eloquent as he haltingly picked out the words.

"The people of America love the people of Cuba," Lori told us all. "We should be ambassadors from our cultures, and friends always. If the world was as gracious and giving as the Cuban people have been to us, there would be peace forever."

The Cafe Cantante was very quiet. Even the government officials were moved.

"Viva our amigos!" she told them, holding the bouquet high. "Viva Cuba! May the culture among us unite us, today and tomorrow–for we are ALL Americans."

And at that moment, at least, we knew it was true.

No Island Is an Island

In the mountains west of Havana, pine trees reach heavenward as naturally as they do in Cambria–yet another revelation to the San Luis Obispo visitors who journeyed to Cuba for one hot week in August.

There are beaches too, as bright as the country’s citizens. And valleys as deep and lovely as the people we imagine we’ve become after we’ve all had a bit too much rum on a hot Havana evening. If only we could stay drunk on each other’s company forever. We might even invite Castro and Clinton. At least, for a while.

U.S. citizens are barred by law from traveling to Cuba. But that will change as indignation grows over our countries’ mutually dysfunctional relationship. Mip, mip, mip. Would that the bickering might end so the two old ladies could begin sharing recipes instead. And dancing together.

It’ll happen. We have far too much in common. Macho American novelist Ernest Hemingway, for example, is lionized by Cubans almost as much as macho guerrilla leader Che Guevara. This is encouraging. Cubans hate Gloria Estefan as much as I do. So is this. And so is having so many of us fed-up-to-here with endlessly stupid political posturing that keeps us norteamericanos so needlessly apart.

The historic trip by the San Luis Jazz Dancers helped nudge the door open a smidgen, fulfilling Lori’s mission to showcase unbridled San Luis Obispo talent in a gesture of good will through great dancing. Too bad the Castro government didn’t see fit to have them up on Teatro Nacional de Cuba’s main stage where they belonged. But others will follow. And the dance, Lori says, will go on.

Returning to San Luis Obispo was like awakening from a mad, wonderful dream we knew couldn’t have really happened but seemed so real it must have. Fragments still spin about like magical parts of the vast Cuban puzzle we’d encountered.

One stands out in particular.

During our stay in Havana, a young government worker was assigned to us as one of our Cultural Ministry liaisons. He spoke little English, but his happiness at being our guide that week transcended any language barrier.

One evening some of us visited him briefly in his sparse Havana apartment. He talked about the beauty of Cuba, his friends and family, the lands he’d read about beyond the sea, and eventually about some of the things he wished he had.

Then he paused reflectively.

"But what I miss most," he said, "is freedom." Æ

Steve Moss is the editor and publisher of New Times and a new convert to Havana Club rum.

If you have distant friends and relatives you think might enjoy this article, tell them they can access it on the New Times website at www.newtimesslo.com.