The changing face of travel to Cuba

This week Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power as he underwent surgery, spurring much speculation about post-Castro Cuba or at least for me. Here at Adventure Beat I wondered what a change in leadership might mean for American travelers, who for years have been frustrated in their curiosity about our near-neighbor in the Caribbean. I once read a book by Tom Miller that gave a insight on the matter. The book titled, "Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba," is as close as most of us have been able to get to Cuba.

For decades now, long before I was even born the quickest way to get a laugh on the streets of Havana has been to tell a joke about Fidel Castro — his policies, his temper, and, yes, his longevity. Even the jokes that don't mention him criticize life on his island. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" the little Cuban boy was asked. "A tourist!" he replied. HA HA HA this jokes comes to us via the NY Times, you know that ultra left leaning newspaper?!

And why not? Tourists have access to much of Cuba that natives can't enjoy. Canadians and Europeans and Australians arrive by the charterful, whisked to Club Med-type resorts where the only Cubans they run into are the help and the entertainers. However for Americans like me I can go but I can not spend a dime for it is against the law to spend a penny in Cuba. Why is that? Industrial tourism has overtaken sugar and mining as the country's leading hard-currency earner, second only to cash sent by overseas relatives. More inventive tourists come in smaller groups or solo, to catch a whiff of one of the only Communist countries around. Bicyclists, scuba-divers, naturalists, vintage car enthusiasts, Marxists, Hemingway devotees— they crowd the streets of Havana and Santiago, they linger in small towns, they pause in coastal villages to inhale the salty Caribbean air.

Among the many questions I have is this: now that Castro is closer to death than life (go ahead, Fidel, prove me wrong) is this: How much of travel to Cuba will change? Will I be able to travel and spend my money on Cuba? I have always wanted to go to Cuba, in fact I once purchased a autobiography on Fidel - I always respected the man and his policies.