My trip to Cuba -or- My Second World Cup

Tuesday, 15 June, 1999.

My itinerary for the day is pretty simple.  I packed my fencing bag
the night before, and my suitcase and carry-on backpack
ready.  I get up and shower and drive to the airport.  The C parking
lot at National is as full as I've ever seen, so I end up parking
on the top level, and lugging my 100 pounds of bags (thank God for
the wheeled fencing bag) what seems like a mile.  I'm flying US
Airways all the way to Cancun, and checking in and flying from
Washington to Charlotte is uneventful.  Either that or I slept
through it, since I don't remember it in particular.

About 10:30am I'm in the Charlotte airport, and I have a short layover
there, so I check in at the gate and run down to "Cheers" to eat
breakfast.  After a 10 minute delay to get a waitress, I order
corned beef hash and scrambled eggs, OJ and coffee.  While I waiting
for it to show up, I check my ticket, which says 11am departure!
US Air closes the doors 10 minutes before departure, so I'm definitely
in a squeeze.  I ask for the check when the food arrives, wolf down
the hash and homefries, some of the eggs, the OJ and the coffee,
pay the bill and run back to the gate, right at 10 minutes till
11.

The sign at the gate said 11:45am departure.  No, the flight wasn't
"delayed," it was "rescheduled."  US Air is proud of their "On
Time" percentage.  It's hard to imagine not having 100% "On Time"
when you can "reschedule" whenever you want, and you close the
doors 10 minutes before "departure" time.

Anyway, now I had 45 minutes to sit and let the food land in my
stomach.  The plane arrives, I get on, it takes off and the rest
of the trip to Cancun is just as unmemorable as the trip to Charlotte.

In the Cancun airport, there are what seems like thousands of
adolescents, milling about in various states of repose or anxiety
or eagerness to get to the Mexican bar where 18 years is old enough
to drink.  And all of them are in front of me to go through customs.

After 20 minutes of standing in line, and 10 seconds with a customs
agent who doesn't ask me a single question or even glance at my
face when he takes my passport and stamps it, I go look for my
baggage.  Fortunately I have a long layover in Cancun.  It was to
be 7 hours, but the "on time" US Air arrival was an hour later than
scheduled, and with another half hour gone for customs and baggage,
it's now about 2:30pm and my flight is 8pm.  (Cancun a timezone
west of Eastern.)

At some point before the trip, I wondered out loud what I was going
to do in the Cancun airport for 7 hours, and was scolded for getting
old: don't stay in the airport, go to the beach!  Duh.  So I find
the place where a lone baggage handler is slowly carrying out his
duties, dumping bags one at a time onto a conveyer belt that brings
it through from his side of a steamy glass wall to ours and back around
again.  
It had apparently rained earlier, and the ground was wet and the
humidity was incredible.
I spot my suitcase, and wait for it to swing around to me.
No problem there.  But I don't see my fencing bag.  The baggage
guy takes the now empty baggage trailer and pulls it aside, and
pulls (in an impressive show of strength) a full one up to the
belt.  Aha!  I can see my fencing bag now.  And as I watch him
unload bags one at a time, I can see it fall with other bags into
the puddle on the tarmac.  And sit there while he picks up the
other bags one at a time, patiently waiting for an space between
other bags on the conveyor to dump it in.  Eventually he lifts my
bag, dripping, and dumps it onto the belt.  It circles through the
wall and I pick it up.  At least it made it, I tell myself.

So I wander with my 100 pounds of wet luggage in the direction everyone
else seems to be going, which is out off the airport.  I look around
for signs on where the Mexicana desks are so I can check in for my 8pm
flight, but there aren't any.  I ask someone where they are, and they
point out of the doors. 

After a minute of standing around in disbelief, I push my way out
of the airport through heavy swinging doors.  It's hot, and very
humid, there are swarms of taxi drivers and hotel vans, but no
signs for where to go to check in.  I ask the fourth person in
thirty seconds to say to me, "Hola amigo, Taxi?", where I should
go to check in, and he points off to my right, past a large yellow
stuccoed wall.  So I drag my baggage around the wall, and indeed,
there is the front of the airport.  I go in through automatic
sliding doors, and there are hordes of adolescents going in and
lounging in various degrees of sunburn and hangover and braided
hair, with proud displays of giant sequined sombreros, plastic beer
steins, and wrists covered with plastic bands indicating their
admission to various bars.  The bands are exactly the sort they
give patients on admission to the hospital, and at the first such
youngster I noticed with a half dozen or so on his left wrist, I
thought "wow, he must have a serious condition."

Indeed.

Now too I see the desks to check in for various airlines.  United,
American, Mexicana, AeroMexico, ATA.  I go to the Mexicana desk,
where there is no line, and they direct me to the Aerocaribe desk,
for this is to be a "regional carrier" trip, not actually on a
Mexicana airplane.  After another two minutes of confusion, I manage
to find my way around the corner and down a short hallway (there
are no signs indicating where the desk is), and to the Aerocaribe
representative.  Who promptly tells me I can't check in until two
and a half hours before departure.

After a moment of astonishment (and some more disbelief), I ask if
there's someplace I can store my bags until then.  The answer is
a definite no, definitely not.

So I drag my bags back towards where I saw a seat near the front
of the airport, and sit down to cool off and let dry the sweat this
lugging and humidity has caused.  The next two or three hours are
a haze of getting up now and then to walk around the airport with
my bags, looking for a better seat or some unimaginable succor.
At some point I ask a uniformed local who has a walkie-talkie if
there's anyplace to store my bags for a while, and he runs off to
find out.  But no, airports really don't want to be in business of
holding unknown bags, and there is no choice but to hang onto them.

In one of my aimless trips from one part of the small airport to
another, I bump into a couple who are obviously fencers, since they
look slightly familiar and have a fencing bag: Ariana Klinkov and
her fiance or husband.  I think his name is David, but I'm having
trouble recalling.  We grab a seat in the little restaurant, and
order margueritas and some light food.  Being in Cancun doesn't
mean anything, if you're still in the airport: the drinks are
horrible.  But I guess they're pretty strong, because the next few
hours seem even fuzzier than normal.

A few minutes later, a coach they know (and who's name I should
remember, but can't) walks up, and lets them know there are some
more Americans in the upstairs restaurant.  So we finish eating
and since there is no elevator, we lug our bags up the stairs to
the restaurant.  In there are Sue Bartholomew and Scott Rostal,
and maybe one more mystery person who's lost in the Marguerita fuzz
of my mind, all playing cards.  It's Scott's coach, from Minnesota,
whose name I can't recall.  So there are something like 6 or 7 of
us now, waiting for the 6:30pm check in time.

That time arrives, and we lug our bags back down the stairs, and
get in line at the Aerocaribe counter.  There's a big sign at the
counter marked "Habana," which lists the things you're not allowed to
bring into the country.  The first thing on the list is Refrigerators,
which I think we all find pretty amusing.  The list pretty much boils
down to "household electrical appliances," including VCRs.

There's an issue that the USFA hasn't resolved in time, which
becomes important at this point:  none of us have visas to get into
Cuba.  The Coach is the first to the counter, and he argues somehow
out of paying for his, but the rest of us end up paying $15 each
for the visa.  That money goes straight into the jeans pockets of
the people behind the counter.  But these tourist visas we buy are
OK, and we never have another problem with them.  But then there's
the Cuban weight regulation:  20 kilograms of baggage maximum, and
my baggage weighs in at 42kg.  So they write us each a bill for
the amount over 20kg, which we go pay at another window near the
desk.  Mine costs $58, which works out to about $1.20/pound.  At
least this time we get a receipt for the money, and they have a
cash drawer, of sorts, behind the counter.

Incidentally, with the addition of various Communist products my
bags weighed 50kg on the return trip, and I was charged $50, which
went into the pants pocket of the woman behind the counter, and no
receipt was given.  It makes me wonder who these rules are actually
helping.

So having checked our bags and gotten our boarding passes, we go
through security and up to the terminal, with about 2 hours to
kill.  There are, not surprisingly, hordes of adolescents with
sombreros, and tshirts extolling the virtues of drinking and sex,
and sunburns, all sleeping on the floor or lounging in chairs.

We walk around and look at the chintzy Cancun plates and hats and
keychains, the knockoff watches and perfumes, the wooden and clay
figurines of happy fat Mexicans, and the postcards.  Since it's
about 7pm and we won't arrive in Havana until 10pm, we get some
pizza.  Or at least something vaguely related to pizza, about three
generations back, maybe just by marriage.  It was terrible, in a
way I won't even attempt to describe.

Eventually, just after 8pm, the woman at the gate picks up her
loudspeaker and announces that boarding is beginning.  We cram
into the airplane, where I have been assigned a seat 12E, between
a man at the window and an empty seat on the aisle.  Not to mention
there are three rows of empty seats a bit farther forward.  I think
their seat assignment process needs some work.  So I move over to
the aisle, and the plane rumbles into the air.  They hand out
sandwiches made with three slices of bread: a slice of bread, some
tuna salad, another slice of bread, some kind of red salad with
tomatoes, and a slice of bread on top.  I don't really know what it
is, but I eat about half of it.  And they give us an airline sized
bag of peanuts "Japanese Style," which I hang onto in case of future
need.

About 10:30pm, back in the Eastern time zone, we land in Havana.
We're herded to customs, where no hard questions are asked, they
take half the visa I bought in Mexico.  I was definitely conscious
of entering a Communist country at this point.  Everyone in the
airport is wearing a uniform, and some wear a type of hat no
government official in the free world wears: olive colored with a
five pointed star on its flat front.

My memory of which airport had which system of customs inspection
is hazy.  The Cancun airport has a button you push, and if the full
sized stoplight -- mounted 4' above the floor right in front of
your face -- lights up red, they inspect all your baggage.  If it
lit up green, which it does almost all the time, you get out of
jail free, so to speak.  In Havana I don't recall ever thinking
they were going to inspect my baggage, but it was late and I was
tired from 14 hours of travel and the bad but strong marguerita.

So I just entered Fidel's country, and it's 11:30pm, and all we
know is the name of the hotel we're supposed to be staying in.
Fortunately we bump into a referee coming to the tournament from
another South American country (which one I never learned) on the
plane.  The Coach talks to him, and he
talks to the locals.  We walk out of the airport, it's cooler than
Cancun but just as humid and smells kind of funny, and into the
dark near the parking lot.  The Referee finds a bus driver who is
going to take us to Hotel Palco.  As we're crossing the road to
the parking lot, in the dark, he stops.  The bus driver goes back
inside.  He says "it was a mistake."  I don't know what this means,
or what is happening, other than that we are standing right in the
middle of the road, in the middle of the night, with no street lights
anywhere nearby.  The only light is that coming through the doors
of the airport.  Only one car is moving anywhere nearby, but it
somehow still makes me ill at ease: the hushed transaction between
Coach and Referee, Referee and bus driver, and the bus driver
suddenly abandoning us in the road.  But he returns after a minute
with a woman and another man.  Apparently they are going to take
us to the hotel we're actually staying in, which isn't Hotel Palco.
This makes me even more uneasy, but apparently everyone else has
more faith in the Coach's ability to judge what's going on.  We
all pile into a small bus, which just barely accommodates all our
fencing bags and ourselves.

The bus is obviously not burning American gasoline.  I hear they put
alcohol in the gasoline in Eastern Europe as a cheap way to raise
its octane enough so the engines will run the poorly refined fuel,
and the alcohol tears up the rings so the engines are always making
black smoke and terrible smells.  That seems to be the case in
Cuba.  Every motorized vehicle produced a bizzare and unpleasant
stench, much like a 50 year old John Deere tractor might, but
magnified a few times.  Black smoke comes from every tail pipe,
but a lot comes from a few of the cars.

But the bus does run, and it begins its journey from the airport
to the hotel.  The woman who came with the man who's driving says
hello and introduces herself in English, then asks the Referee to
translate the rest of her schpiel.  It goes something like this:
although the water in Cuba is good, don't drink it, don't carry
more cash than you need to, don't take taxis without meters, please
tip bus drivers well.  This takes about 15 minutes, with her talking
to the Referee, and him repeating it in English to us.  And then they
turn out the lights inside the bus, and we watch the city of Havana
roll by.

There are still quite a few people up at that hour, hanging around
in front of their houses or on street corners.  Some can be seen
inside their houses reading or playing cards or dominos.  The city
is pretty dark, with few street lights.  Finally, sometime near
12:30am we reach the hotel, which is Hotel Neptuno/Triton, which
is two separate towers.  We're in the Triton tower.  We go in, and
a man named Alejandro meets us.  The woman at the desk doesn't know
anything about our reservations, it's all on a handwritten sheet
of paper Alejandro has.  Everyone must pay in cash, up front, for
their entire stay.  And he doesn't provide receipts.  That ill-at-ease
is returning, but once I have a key in hand, at least I'm going to
get to sleep, and that's all that matters at that moment.  I had
planned to stay in a single room, but Jed Dupree didn't have a
roommate and it saves us both money to share.  It's Tuesday night,
and he's going to be in the room with me until Sunday, and I'll be
in a single until Tuesday.  $50/night double, $65/night single:
$380 to Alejandro for my room.

They give us our keys, and a card with our name and room number,
which we need to get our free breakfast and dinner, and an "Asistur"
card, which we use to get our free socialized health care during
our stay.  Apparently $50/day is enough to cover food, lodging,
and health care in Cuba.