I've known Ray for almost thirty years and we've always had a great time schmoozing and laughing over just about any inane topic. I have not seen Ray since he moved to south Florida twelve years ago but we stayed in touch through mutual friends. Last Christmas, Ray was in the area briefly but we didn't hook up due to scheduling problems on both sides. My loss. But Ray regaled those aforementioned mutual friends with stories of Havana in the `90s. The dinosaurs were on the move again but this time with much smaller footprints.
    Ray had made a minor career move and was actively involved in cigar smuggling. I recently spoke with him at length by phone and he definitely got my attention. According to Ray, "Five years ago when I first arrived in Havana, fifty beautiful Cuban girls would chase my cab every time I left the airport. It was just like we were the Beatles on our first tour." OK, but what about the cigars? "The cab drivers took care of everything. Five years ago, Cubans were eager to sell their best cigars to anyone who had US dollars. Greenbacks was all the Spanish you needed to know." What about the authorities? What's the Cuban name for secret police? "Cab drivers," Ray laughed.
    "It's all screwed now. Even a year ago, you could count on your Cuban contacts to provide the best cigars at a fixed price. Now all you can count on is to be sold crap at higher prices. But even the crap is good." There was a strange lilt in Ray's tone. He drifted off and I imagined him thinking of Cuban cigars like I once thought of sex: there's good sex and there's great sex but there is no bad sex.
    And maybe therein is the allure of Cuban tobacco. It's a tropical sexual kind of thing: dark, forbidding, sultry, seductive. On more than one occasion (and usually after a well-aged single malt or six and an Havana Montecristo), I've declared that great cigars are in fact like women: you can't live without them and you can't keep them lit. And add this aside to parlor Freudians: a cigar is just a cigar when you pay less than five dollars for three of them. Despite the "new ethics" of the Cuban black market, Ray still paints a romantic picture of Havana. Like a dim memory, the colors of the city are faded at best. "They ran out of paint thirty-five years ago." Ray's picture of Havana is like my memory of Miami in the `50s, complete with ancient Chevys that prowl the streets and refuse to die. With gas in short supply and at a premium, Cubans have prioritized their fuel consumption accordingly. Weedwackers and power mowers are unheard of and apparently manicured greenspace is as rare as genuine GM parts for `55 Chevys. Mother necessity has shown the way for swapping out Chevy rearends with Lada parts (a Lada is an insipid little Russian box/car that gives ample testimony to all things useless borne of bureaucracy).
    Ironically, the colors of Havana today are strangely reminiscent (albeit muted) of American car colors of the `50s when we had our own love affair with tropical pastels. Flamingo pinks, heliotrope greens, and sunshine yellows are transformed over time/neglect to fleshtones, hint-o-mint, and Jersey cream. But nobody goes to Cuba to redefine the color spectrum.
    And your arrival is not unexpected. Castro and friends have made a concerted effort to import US dollars in exchange for the prized island fruits: cigars and young women. This policy is unofficial at best and as obvious as the large tourist buses marked "Havanatour". Busloads of Brits and Italians (with no government embargo s against Cuba), as obvious as punchbowl turds, are on the prowl like roving bands of rock tour roadies, seeking sex and cigars. On the Cuban side of the equation, the attraction of the tourist trade is in the numbers (dollars) so let's run some Cuban embargo numbers.
    Cuban doctors earn $20 per month. All staples are in short supply. Rationed monthly foodstuffs for a Cuban family have a total caloric yield equivalent to the weekly diet of a medium-sized American family dog. Primo Havana cigars historically sell for $250 for a box of 50 ($5 a pop) and wholesale at $10 per in south Florida. By the time that $5 contraband reaches New York, that same cigar fetches $40, or twice the monthly salary of a Cuban doctor. And, according to Ray's observations, $50 will readily purchase a teenage female companion (with nodding parental consent, no less). And, in theory, that teenage partner will be faithful to you as long as your greenback offering feeds her family. The economics of Cuban communism coupled with the American embargo has reduced the Cuban people, in one short generation, to a nation of jiniteras (hustlers). "You can grease anyone in Havana," Ray tells me. "A five dollar bill makes a lot of friends." While the Pope was in Cuba recently, Castro himself pronounced that everyone is welcome in Cuba and "if President Clinton wishes to come to Cuba to debate the merits of capitalism, he would be welcome." Do the hustle.
    While official rice and beans are in short supply, all things American are not. A pack of Marlboros and a can of Coke is as readily available in Havana as at an interstate truckstop here. And, just like here, all menu prices in are printed in US dollars. The two biggest marketing icons in Havana are the faces of Hemingway and Che Guevarra, printed on everything from Tshirts to maraccas. Ray tells me that the image of Che looks like Jim Morrison the morning after a lysergic acid binge. The irony of marketing this new jurassic park with pictures of dead folk heroes from the `60s is not lost on me.

    In all fairness, I thought it worthwhile to balance this travelogue with the official US government read on the embargo. So I called the Treasury department to speak with someone from Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) concerning the official word on Cuban cigars. I was directed to the US Customs office and forwarded to a public relations officer who in turn sent me to the Office of Foreign Assets Control where I was redirected to the Treasury Office of Public Affairs. I left my name and number on someone's voice mail. Ten days (and no return call) later, I abandoned my phone tour of Byzantium. It became clear that it was far easier to circumvent the Embargo Act than to explain it. It takes less time and effort to travel to Havana from south Florida than it takes to find a US government voice on the phone to give me chapter and verse as to why I should not (and cannot) travel there.
    My working theory is that given the fact that our sitting President has expressed in so many ways his predisposition toward good cigars and young women (note to Clinton's spin weasels: NOW I understand his soaring popularity ratings), there is the distinct odor of official benign neglect of the embargo. Castro's bureaucratic ennui is matched on this side of the Florida Straits by Clinton's petit bourgeois malaise. You just gotta love it because a waste is a terrible thing to mind. Smoke `em if you've got `em.