The Cigar, the Romance, the Cell, the Strip Search

(The Washington Post) — The knock at my door came shortly after 8 p.m., startling me awake. I sensed trouble. My nap had already been interrupted by two phone calls, each an apparent wrong number, the person on the other end mumbling something unintelligible in Spanish before hanging up.

It was Wednesday, May 30. I had returned to Havana’s Hotel Nacional a couple of hours before, just in time for my appointment with an American cigar smuggler who had invited me to accompany him to the home of Cuban boxing great Teofilo Stevenson. Stevenson supposedly knew Fidel Castro, and I had been told he might be able to help me wangle an interview with the president at some future date. But the American had already been by and dropped off a note saying he’d be back later. Fine with me. After a week of nonstop sightseeing and interviewing, I needed a breather. Exhausted, I had drifted off while waiting for the smuggler to show up.

Still feeling groggy, I opened the door warily. In the hall stood three armed men, accompanied by an austere officer with "Security" emblazoned across the shoulder of his gray uniform. They said they wanted to talk. I asked them to give me a couple of minutes to change, and closed the door.

I had a pretty good idea why they were there. Over the past seven days, I had met with a number of independent Cuban journalists — journalists, that is, not employed by the tightly controlled government press. Talking to these people is an activity that can swiftly arouse the suspicions of Cuban authorities, who tend to regard them as dissidents, a term that at its most extreme means "enemies of the people." Quickly, I retrieved the notes from my interviews, shoving half of them into the seat pocket of my shorts. Then I kicked into a pair of long pants, inserting my wallet into the back pocket, over the pocket in the shorts that contained the notes. I hurriedly stuffed the other set of notes under the mattress, just as a harsher knock sounded.

I opened the door and the men rushed past me. One headed straight for the mattress, where he found the notes almost instantly. The others tossed my belongings into the open suitcase on the bed and ordered me to come with them. As we drove off into the night, it suddenly occurred to me that I might not make my 1:15 p.m. flight to Montreal the next day.

I had come to Cuba primarily for a vacation, lured by the prospect of seeing the "Pearl of the Antilles" up close. But I was also interested in learning how ordinary Cubans lived, and one of the best ways to do this is to talk to independent journalists. So as I prepared for my trip, booking an Air Cubana flight through a Canadian travel agent, I also called several U.S. news agencies to get the names of some contacts I might interview in Havana. On arrival, I specified on my immigration form that I’d come to Cuba as a tourist.

A visit with one journalist quickly led me to others. I could picture writing an article or two about them. So I asked plenty of questions. Most independent reporters in Cuba, I found, turned to journalism after losing their jobs for criticizing the government. They sell their stories mostly to Castro-unfriendly outlets in Latin America, Spain and Florida, particularly the anti-Castro Radio Marti and online news sites such as CubaNet, which recently ran pieces about Castro’s denial that he imported arms from China; a hunger strike by doctors demanding better pay, the right to rest after on-duty periods and the freedom to travel; and allegations of dog meat being sold as mutton at a local market. Such stories irk high-level Cuban bureaucrats, who fear that too many negative news reports could undermine public confidence in the regime, as well as the all-important tourism industry and the badly needed dollars it generates.

I soon realized there are really two Cubas these days. There’s the Cuba of romance: the largest and probably least commercialized country in the Caribbean, with its potent rum, thriving nightlife and intriguing subculture, its vintage Mercurys and Plymouths, its revolutionary monuments and sparkling beaches. And then there’s the Cuba of everyday life, the one most visitors don’t experience. It’s a country perpetually on the brink. Before coming, my impression of this Cuba had been softened somewhat by the Elian Gonzalez affair; it didn’t seem that life on the island could be as bad as portrayed in the shrill rhetoric of Miami’s Cuban Americans. Indeed, the health care and education systems are comparatively good. But the government can’t adequately feed its people, can’t provide them with decent housing, and apparently can’t even trust them. It keeps them in line by assigning informants to every block and putting policemen and two-way radios on virtually every street corner.

This second Cuba is the one that independents write about, though not without difficulty. To control them, security police routinely tap their telephone lines and physically prevent them from meeting in groups of three or more. They harass and threaten them on the phone and sometimes in person. And they regularly detain them, typically from one to four days. In some instances they require them to perform forced labor. At least two of the 14 independent journalists with whom I spoke told me they had been beaten. Another had ended up spending a year and a half in the slammer for the crime of "disrespect," after some notes confiscated from a Spanish reporter revealed him criticizing Castro.

The huge police presence in Havana had made me wary from the start about making phone calls from my room, or taking taxis from my hotel or saying anything that eaves droppers might construe as controversial. Even so, a man who looked like he might be a police agent had followed me to my room on only my second night. So I had spent the next couple of days relaxing around the hotel pool, visiting the museum at the former home of Ernest Hemingway in San Francisco de Paula and hanging out with a group of American women travelers at a jazz club.

But my attempt to lie low didn’t matter. Here I was, on my last scheduled night in Havana, in the clutches of government strongmen, being spirited away under cover of darkness.

We arrived at what turned out to be immigration headquarters. I was ordered to take off my belt and remove the laces from my shoes. The searchers yanked the wallet out of my back pocket but failed to find the extra set of notes concealed in the shorts beneath my pants. They asked routine "name, rank and serial number" questions, then escorted me to a holding cell with three small, pillowless beds, a wall mirror, a black and white TV set and a darkened adjacent room containing a toilet. I knew this was no time to be found with anything else even mildly controversial. When the guard left, I tore up my remaining notes and submerged a large wad of the scraps in the toilet tank.

A guard appeared a short while later and led me to an air-conditioned interrogation room, where two immigration officials, who later identified themselves as Frank and Juan Carlos, set to question me about my "true" purpose for being in Cuba. With Frank translating into English, they intimated that I was up to no good and carefully noted down my increasingly exasperated replies. They seemed determined, driven and, in the dim light, even a little demonic, though in a civil sort of way.

After about an hour, they ordered me back to my cell. Left alone once again, I fished soggy bits of paper from the toilet tank, transferred them to the bowl, then flushed the whole mess down the pipe with a bucket of water. A short while later, the guard brought me upstairs for round two. Frank and Juan Carlos read out some names I’d never heard before and asked if I recognized any of them. When I said no, they asked again and again — as if the constant repetition would eventually get me to say yes.

As I was being escorted back to my cell about an hour later, a burly official stepped from his office and spoke to me threateningly in English. If I expected to leave on my scheduled flight, he said, I had better start talking. I insisted that I had told the truth and offered to take a lie detector test to prove it. "I am a lie detector," he responded menacingly, "and you’re a spy. Now go back and think about that."

After more time in the cell, the guard brought me upstairs for round three. This time, the burly man, named Eduardo, joined the original two interrogators. The questioning got loud and spirited, as I denied any wrongdoing and they insisted they knew all about me and my "mission." Eduardo accused me of being a spy, and mentioned that Cuba’s penalties for espionage were long and severe. He told me they had known I was coming and had been waiting for me. He mentioned my encounter with the first Cuban journalist, down to the red shirt I had worn when I met him. He was especially suspicious because I live in Washington. Juan Carlos and Frank chimed in with questions about my connections with Cubans in Miami. I told them, as is true, that I had no Cuban connections and knew no Cubans, period. Finally, Eduardo ordered me returned to my cell. On the way, the guard pulled me aside and strip-searched me.

In round four, an hour or so later, it was only Juan Carlos, Frank and me. Though not as bullying as Eduardo, they nevertheless hammered away at me, focusing on the familiar themes: where I worked, whom I had met and my alleged ties to Miami. I told them that I worked for myself and that I was simply interested in meeting local journalists — just as I have done in many of the 100 or so countries I’ve visited or lived in over the years. But they kept insisting that if I didn’t tell them "the complete truth," Cuba might become my home for a while.

Eventually, Juan Carlos ordered me returned to my cell. After an interval of another hour or so, he summoned me for one final round. At the end, Frank said I would be required to sign a statement and that if I did, I could probably make my flight home. I pictured being forced to make some sort of confession. But Frank, with whom I had by now developed something of a rapport, appeared two or three hours later with handwritten points that focused only on why I was in Cuba, whom I had spoken to and what they had told me. Frank wanted me to make negative remarks, particularly about certain journalists. But after three drafts, I ended up with a statement saying simply that I had come to Cuba to vacation and to meet with independent Cuban journalists, that one of these journalists had mentioned seeing Che Guevara as a 14-year-old, and other essentially innocuous declarations. Frank came to collect it and, without even taking a look at it, announced I was free to go.

After another long delay, the jailer escorted me from my cell to a clerk who gave me a receipt and most of my belongings, among them my wallet, minus $5 to pay for my overnight stay and $1 for a pork roll I hadn’t eaten. Frank and Juan Carlos said they needed to hold onto my remaining interview notes. I realized later that they had also kept my two disposable cameras, and had wrenched apart the rim of my plastic sunglasses, as if they thought they might find a hollow space for microfilm.

It had been 14 hours since that knock on my door. As I headed for the van that would return me to my hotel, Frank and Juan Carlos came to see me off. They shook my hand and said that if I ever decided to come to Cuba again, I’d be welcomed back. In the sunlight, they seemed oddly more human, nice even, just two regular guys caught up in a 42-year-old political tug of war. But reality had reshaped my perceptions of Cuba. There may be no McDonald’s or Burger King to blight the Havana skyline, but there is nothing romantic about the iron fist that looms over it.