Cuba in the Dark

Remembering a visit to the island nation and praying for it

Havana

Cuba is a remarkable place. A forbidden nation full of life and wonderful people, literary and revolutionary history. I’ve been only once, but that is all it took to fall in love. I had been infatuated with her from afar, but when we first met, love happened.

But Cuba is also a desperate place. It has been for decades. Recently power blackouts have reminded me of the precarious cliff on which Cuba rests. It seems to always be on the edge of despair. Yet, its medical system is well regarded. Its educational system is the best in the Caribbean. And its people are joyful, kind, and even remarkably hopeful. But its power grid is abysmal. Recently it collapsed several times, creating widespread blackouts, sparking small protests, shutting down businesses, and forcing officials to cancel school and government services. As many as ten million people were left without power. Havana was barely visible under the lights of small generators humming in the night.

Cuba suffers in the dark, the dark created by its antiquated power system, and the darkness of an antiquated American embargo.

But that’s another essay.

The one I want to share now is one I wrote several years ago after a trip to the island. It is one of resilience, hope, and family. It was first published in my book of essays The Consequence of Stars, a revised edition of which was published a year ago in September 2023.

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CUBA

The road to the beach was closed. A white police vehicle was parked on the shoulder, another partially blocked the street, and a trio of Cuban authorities, members of the Policía Nacional Revolucionaria—the National Revolutionary Police Force—in gray and black uniforms, stood nearby, one in the middle of the road. He watched us move closer, pointed an index finger at the car, and motioned sharply to his left. We were being ordered to pull over.

“Hmm,” said Renaldo, our driver. “Something’s up.”

My two sons and I had just arrived in the Cuban city of Trinidad after several days in and around Havana and were hoping to swim in the clear sea along the beach at Ancón, one of Cuba’s more beautiful stretches of coastline. In the previous days, we had immersed ourselves in cigars and rum, silky black beans and sweet plantains, the sights of strikingly beautiful women, giant ceiba trees, royal palms, and the taste of sugar cane. We walked in Hemingway’s footsteps and drank the liquor he drank. We had swayed to Cuban rhythms at every turn and had come to Trinidad to see the centuries old colonial city, climb its towers, and stay with a Cuban family in a small cement home painted Caribbean green on a cobblestone street near the Plaza Mayor. Renaldo was our guide, a pleasant man in his 40s, fast to notice what he referred to as a “cañón”—a young Cuban woman with plenty of curves, explosive, and “fumar calliente.” He was also quick to smile, but that smile now seemed like a mask as he moved the car in the direction of the policeman’s finger.

“Is everything okay?” Casey asked, turning toward Renaldo. My oldest son, the tallest of us, had taken the front passenger seat for the long, bumpy drive from Havana to gain as much comfort as possible.

Renaldo hesitated, his eyes remaining on the road and the officer. “I don’t know,” he said.

While planning this trip, my sons and I had joked about being arrested by the Cuban “Federales,” which is not the word for the Cuban authorities or even correct Spanish. “Federales” was popularized in movies like The Wild Bunch and The Treasure of Sierra Madre. In the Spanish language the word is “federal” with the stress on the last syllable and Mexican authorities are called Policía Federal, not the “Federales.” Each of us had traveled to many places before, separately and together, but Cuba was still in many ways a forbidden land to Americans.

The officer approached the driver-side window, and Renaldo rolled it down. The heat rolled through the opening like an ocean wave.

For what seemed like several minutes, Renaldo and the officer spoke in Spanish. Casey, Graham—my younger son—and I remained quiet, eyes on their mouths as if we might somehow be able to translate. We knew little Spanish, although Casey was recalling some of what he had learned in high school years ago. Still, not enough to discern what was occurring before us.

I had been long for Cuba. Since my university days studying Hemingway’s writing, fishing, and his tumultuous love life on the island, I had been in her charms. Cuba—its violent and passionate politics, its revolutions, its dictators and freedom fighters, the lure of its vices—had me good. My man-crush on Ernesto “Che” Guevara was not love at first sight. It came to be cemented only after reading The Motorcycle Diaries, the story of his revolutionary coming of age, traveling in South America in 1952 as a 23-year old medical student from Buenos Aires on a gasping and stammering 1939 Norton 500cc. He and his friend, Alberto Granado, planned to see the land and the people they had read about in college history books. Instead, they unexpectedly discovered the oppressed, the marginalized, and the sick. It changed Ernesto. It changed everything. He joined Fidel Castro to liberate Cuba from a military dictatorship. Like so many others, Che’s idealism made an impression on me, although the realities of his revolution never matched the dreams. Still, with all of this, I knew I wanted to visit Cuba before it changed. Fidel was dead. Raul, his brother, was now in power and appeared more open to the world. The U.S. was slowly loosening fifty-year-old trade embargoes. Time was of the essence. Get to Cuba while it was still magically trapped in a bottle, before Starbucks took over every corner in Havana. 

“Gracias,” said Renaldo, rolling up the car window. “Chao.”

We sat in anticipation as Renaldo turned the car toward the short road to the right.

“So?” I asked from the rear seat.

“Drugs,” Renaldo said. “They found cocaine. Packages all over the beach.”

Graham sighed. He had wanted most of all to swim in the warm waters.

“They are checking everything, everyone,” Renaldo said. “But, no worry. This is a beach here.” He pointed out the windshield. Some three hundred meters down the road was another beach—rockier, less sandy than Ancón. “It’s for the locals,” he said.

“I’m okay with that,” I said. “I kind of prefer it. Don’t you guys?”

“Let’s do it,” Graham said. Casey nodded.

“And we’re all okay, right?” I asked.

Renaldo gave the thumbs up.

The beach was narrow and covered in small stones that looked like gray coral and crushed shells. Casey took photos with an antique Leica camera he’d purchased for the trip and found a spot to sun himself. Graham and I navigated ten meters of rocky ocean bottom before reaching soft sand, and for about an hour, we jumped over and over to avoid the rough waves. The water was clear and warm. The air smelled of salt. From a small cabana came salsa music. Three men and four women danced barefoot in the sand, rum swirling in the clear plastic glasses that they held in their hands.

Graham and I had forgotten towels, so we let the sun dry us as best it could and knocked sand from our feet before stepping into the car.

“Good swim?” Renaldo asked. He had been waiting near the car, probably admiring the “cañón.”

“Great,” I said.

“Perfect,” said Graham.

 Renaldo was again at the wheel and tried to exit the small parking area by a different road than before, but a rusted metal gate blocked us. He turned down the short road where we had earlier entered and again found the police. An officer, his uniform shirt unbuttoned several holes from the neck, motioned for Renaldo to stop.

“Una vex más,” Renaldo said.

“One more time,” Casey translated.

This was a different officer than before, and this time Renaldo greeted him with a handshake through the open window. Did he know him? Was it a sign of respect? I couldn’t imagine reaching out my hand to shake that of a state trooper during a highway stop on any road in America.

Again, there was a lot of Spanish, but this time the exchange was short and matter-of-fact.

“He wants to search the car,” Renaldo said. “Stay here.” He stepped out and shut the door.          

“Great,” Graham said.

“This is interesting,” Casey added.

I had been calm through the earlier encounter, but now it all seemed more serious, foreboding.

“We don’t have anything back there, do we?” I asked, thinking of the trunk, of any rum we may have purchased that was somehow, some way illegal. “Nothing, right?” I asked again, thinking this time of weed. Graham and Casey had smoked before in the U.S., so had I, but they had assured me they wouldn’t be so stupid as to try to bring any to Cuba on a cultural visa or so crazy as to try to buy some on the island.

“Jesus,” Graham grumbled. “No.”

“Dad, really,” Casey added.

“Sorry. Parent mode.”

None of us turned around to watch what was going on at the rear of the car. Instead, I kept my eyes forward, glancing at the rearview mirror. I could see the open trunk lid and shadows moving across the gap of light where the hinges met the car’s body.

With the swift sound of metal latching on metal, the car rocked slightly as the policeman shut the trunk. Through the mirror, I could see Renaldo smiling at the officer. I heard muffled Spanish, and in a moment, Renaldo was at the driver-side door.

“Gracias,” Renaldo said as the officer moved toward his previous post and waved us on. Renaldo slipped into his seat and reached for the seatbelt. As we pulled out to the road that would return us to Trinidad, he nodded to the officer, and just as the car sped up, Renaldo pointed his thumb at Casey.

“He’s guilty!” Renaldo laughed. “That’s what I would have told him.”

“That’s not funny,” Casey snapped.

“Then it was them!” Renaldo said, pointing to Graham and me.

I immediately thought of the new U.S. embassy in Havana. The city tour guide had pointed it out to us two days earlier.

The road to the beach at Ancón was restricted for the rest of the daylight hours and presumably into the evening, maybe even the next day. Police were said to have been all over the beach and in and out of the nearby resort for many hours. But the heart of Trinidad, a few kilometers away, was quiet and peaceful, and that night, on a patio under the sprawling branches of an ancient ceiba tree—the Afro-Cuban symbol of maternal healing—we ate our dinners of peppers and rice, black beans, pork, chicken, flan, and Cuban chocolate ice cream. The menu noted we could pay with American dollars, an unusual opportunity, but the proprietor insisted on a converted price that was exorbitant. We chose instead our remaining CUC—Cuban Convertible Peso. It seemed only right in the end. And before leaving for a night at our host family’s home, I signed the restaurant’s patron book, noted that we were Americans, and gave thanks for the food, the day’s bright sun, the warm sea, and the goodness of people. After all, we were in Trinidad, the city of the holy trinity.

* * *

Early the next morning, I met Casey on the patio of our host family’s house. He sat in a cane rocker, reading a book about American Indians. Near him was a rectangular table already dressed with three place settings. Tatiana and her mother worked in the tiny kitchen just off the small living space in the front of the house. Each day the summer air had been an espresso made with raw sugar, thick and heavy but still sweet and recuperative. And it was present again that morning. After several days of the cruelest temperatures, we had come to understand the Cuban heat. On that morning, it was no longer so blistering but instead, restorative, seeping into us like medicine.

“This is so nice,” Casey said, admiring the small patio space. The short cement walls were painted grapefruit yellow and parrot green. The floor was stone tile. A gecko clung to a wall.

“I’ve named him Marcus,” Graham said, emerging from his bedroom.

“Is that the same one that was on the ceiling above the bed last night?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “We know each other well.”

We took our seats at the table, and Tatiana placed small plates of fruit in front of each of us—papaya, melon, mango. She served us dark French press coffee and sweet plantains. She was barefoot and smiling.

“Ah?” she asked, hesitating through her English, her face becoming serious. “Eggs?”

“Si,” I said. The boys nodded and Tatiana’s smile returned.

We could hear the muted clinking of pots in the kitchen where her mother was working and a child’s soft voice filling the short space between the living room and the patio. Tatiana’s dark-haired daughter, maybe about five years old, sat on the floor of the narrow hallway, playing with balls on a string. Just behind her on a side table was a large framed photograph of her as an infant, dressed in white with a bow in her hair. Above it on the wall was a small wooden crucifix.

We asked for a bit more coffee.

“Best breakfast so far,” I said, spreading a dab of mango preserves on a small bread roll.

The boys nodded between bites.

“Definitely best coffee,” Casey said.

After a moment, Graham put down his fork. “Could you live here?” he asked.

I wasn’t certain what he meant. Could I live in this house? Could I live in Trinidad? Could I live in a place many saw as less free? I thought maybe he was talking about the heat. Could I live under the intense Cuban sun?

“We’ve adjusted, don’t you think?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Yeah, kind of,” he said. “The heat is one thing. But it’s more, like, I don’t know, like here, in this place, like this.”

It’s nearly always considered. When you visit a new place, you eventually ask yourself if it could be your home. Could you settle here? Vacation or deeper travel touring is not the best preparation for such questions. You need to inhabit a place for a time, let it soak into you, not just brush by it. A friend, who had moved a great deal for his job as a reporter, maybe every three to four years, once told me that each new place had its singular lure; it was always a mistress for a time. But then you had to go to the bank, get a haircut, do laundry, and every town he came to call home for those short stints soon felt like all the others. That seemed a dismal way to look at it. But he was probably mostly right. Still, when I visit somewhere, especially a place like Cuba—this outlawed country, alluring and mysterious—I don’t think of staying. I think mostly of coming back. When I say goodbye to something—like all the houses and apartments I once lived in—I leave a piece of myself behind, something I can’t have again unless I return. So, it’s the returning I think about, not the staying, and what it is that I might be leaving behind.

“I think I could be here for a time, sure,” I said. “The people are certainly warm.”

“It is a communist country, though,” Casey said, reminding us.

“The dark and menacing beast that is Communism,” I said.

“We are the Federales!” Graham said, imitating the authorities we met on the beach. “May we look in your trunk?”

The boys laughed. I asked Casey to pass the coffee pot.

It was an idle question, the thought of living in Cuba, only a notion that had little real meaning. We weren’t going to stay in Cuba. The boys knew that. I knew that. But it was impossible not to think about such a thing. There’s this long-held belief that men are born outside their proper place. An accident of birth hurls us to our hometowns but not our homes. Instead, we travel through life, longing for a home we do not know. The streets where we grew up, the schools we attended, the travel we’ve embarked on are simply doors to open. It’s an odd thing, but maybe the constant craving is what lunges us through our days in search of something eternal, the sojourner forever reaching for what’s not there.

That afternoon we visited an open-air pottery maker’s shop where the artist worked his wheel in front of photographs of Fidel Castro’s long ago visit to his studio. The potter allowed Graham on the wheel for a time. “Not his first,” the potter said, smiling. It wasn’t. Graham had thrown bowls in high school. In Santa Clara we spent time at the Che Guevara memorial and were told to remove our hats before entering the vault where the remains of the revolutionary had been entombed. Photos of the bearded, handsome rebel lined the walls. We drove near the Bay of Pigs and saw, along the road, the simple graves of Cuban soldiers. We watched farmers drying rice on the street’s hot asphalt—a common practice that drivers respected and maneuvered around—and we disputed Renaldo’s claim that we were only a short distance from Havana when we were at least a three-hour drive away. There was a dinner reservation we didn’t want to miss, but Renaldo appeared to be working on what we had come to call Cuban Time—an internal clock with no hands and no numbers, the principle that keeping time, some reasonable sense of schedule, was highly overrated. It was a trait we had come to understand about Renaldo and Cuba. Still, we made our dinner date, and later that night, in Old Havana, under the high colonial ceilings of the Hotel Raquel, we drank rum and smoked Montecristo cigars to commemorate the last hours in Cuba.

* * *

The next morning we had scheduled a taxi to the airport. The Plaza de San Francisco was damp from overnight showers, and the humidity was vicious. The plaza’s iron chairs were wet, and the water on the seats shimmered in the hazy sun. Standing near a puddle, lapping up water, was a small dog—a street dog—one of Havana’s many. We had seen the dogs each night while walking the cobblestone walkways. Dogs of similar size, weaving in and out of tourists and locals, some with ID tags the size of postcards, marked for care by an animal welfare organization. This dog, however, had no tag. It was stout, shorthaired, and dirty-white. Its ears stood straight up. It looked much like the one that had befriended us earlier in the week in the plaza not far from the ancient statue of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. The dog had found us sitting in the plaza under steamy street lamps, and it curled up under our feet. It did not beg for food; it did not lean in, hoping to be scratched about the ear. The dog simply wanted to be near, and he stayed with us for over an hour until we left for our hotel around midnight. Maybe the morning dog was the same one from the night before. Maybe not. But it was nice to think it might have been. Like the many Cubans who had asked us about America, about baseball, reminded us of their dislike of Trump and love for Obama, and several times had implored us to stay in their country, this dog, the one that may have returned to the plaza to say goodbye, only wished to be close to something more hopeful. 

As our taxi pulled away, the three of us—weary and silent—watched though the windows as Havana bumped and hustled into the day—the long lines at the bus stops, the pre-1960 American cars darting in central city traffic, a vendor selling large mangos on the corner, rainbows of laundry hanging from run-down second floor apartments, the image of Che at every turn. Everywhere that morning, like all the days before, Cubans appeared to be anticipating something, expecting some elusive change. This beautiful country—stalled in its own energy, running in place, enchanting and exasperating—was beginning to gradually stretch out from its isolation, shifting ever so slowly. It was seeking hope that something or someone would be its savior. Its people remained proud of the Cuban revolutions—the three against Spain to gain independence and the one led by Fidel Castro against a right wing, authoritarian government—and they were quick to find goodness in Guevara, the country's omnipresent spirit. But the people remained keenly aware that the hope born in these conflicts was never fully realized and because of this, Cuba is still reaching for something else, curling up under the feet of the world like the street dog, waiting to be delivered to the rest of us. 

José Martí Airport was air-conditioned. Still, the thickness of the humidity clung to us, weighed us down. The terminal was busy but not crowded. The policía were present but not at every turn. The signs for the gates were in Spanish but some were also in English. A few shops sold packaged food and bottled water. Graham and I stood in a short line and checked in for our flight to Florida, just ninety miles across a thin strip of ocean. Casey’s flight to Los Angeles, more than 2000 miles from Havana was scheduled for later at another terminal, so he waited for us nearby. At the currency exchange we counted our dollars and swapped the little we had left for Cuban Convertible Pesos in case we needed bottled water or to purchase some unreliable Wi-Fi time at one of the few hotspots available while waiting for our flight. And then we stood silent.

“I guess this is it,” I said. I put my arms around Casey’s shoulders and held tight. Graham shook his brother’s hand.

It unnerved me to leave Casey alone for several hours in Havana, still having to take a cab to another terminal. I wouldn’t be able to talk or text him until he reached California. Travel had been part of all of our lives, but of the three of us, Casey’s travel had been the most extensive—China, Iceland, Egypt, Fiji. He had driven across America, hiking on narrow cliffs and awaking to the sunrise at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He could more than handle a solo fifteen-minute taxi ride to Havana’s terminal-3. Still, there had been that police incident near Trinidad, and although I was confident there would be no repeat of such a thing, I worried like a father.

Sun-tinged and tired, Graham and I walked toward our gate’s security lines, rolling our carry-on bags behind us. Casey stood near the currency exchange, counting his pesos and readjusting his luggage bag. I wanted to look back to him, but I chose not to. I told myself I would see him again when he visited Chicago in a couple of months. So, instead, I walked straight ahead, letting myself relive our days as Americans in Cuba, visiting a once prohibited place. And I imagined again: Could I ever live here, as Graham had asked? I had fallen in love with this country so many years ago, and that affection had inspired longing, the melancholic desire for something unattainable and distant. There’s beauty in that. So, I did not wave goodbye to Casey. I did not wave goodbye to Havana, to Cuba, to Che, to anyone or anything. There were so many reasons not to.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.