Dispatch from Cuba: Cigar Smoke Doth Swirl

HAVANA — I am sitting across from the Malecon, smoking a Cohiba, drinking a Cristal and staring with across the bay with more than a decade´s worth of wide wonder at the Morro Castle Lighthouse.

And for once, I´m at a loss for words.

I'm not one to be struck breathless, but for more than 15 years, I have wanted to see this place, visit the world where Hemingway walked the Earth and time stopped 49 years ago. Now that I'm here, it's hard to describe it.

It's both more and less than I expected.

Cuba is not unlike other Caribbean countries, beautiful but impoverished. But everything is amplified. Both the beauty -- and the poverty -- is heartbreaking.

This is not your regularly scheduled column, in case you didn´t notice. For the next week, while I'm here, this will be part letter, part blog, these dispatches from Havana.

A contingent of us from the South Carolina Press Association are here on a study trip, a chance to see this place so close, yet so far from the United States. We are staying at the Hotel Nacional, a 1930s landmark, built by the man who did The Breakers in Palm Beach. It is here that Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper and Ava Gardner played in the days when this was America's playground for the rich.

What a difference a half century makes.

But the hotel has retained its atmosphere, as if the ghosts of the 20th century still haunt the halls.

Back when Jimmy Buffett was a poet, he wrote a song called "Havana Daydreamin'", and the last verse begins: "Ceiling fans stir the air, cigar smoke doth swirl."

He could have been talking about this place.

There's not much to report yet. We arrived by prop plane on Sunday afternoon, and I stepped on Havana soil at 2:38 p.m., years after I first wanted to do so. We came into Jose Marti Airport, a place that seemed deserted until we stepped outside, where hundreds of Cubans were lined up to meet their families, who were also on the plane. The man next to me on the plane carried a prize from the States, a window crank for some long forgotten model of American automobile.

On the bus ride in, we passed billboards with President Bush's face and the word Terrorista.

Dorothy, we are not in Kansas anymore.

They gave us mojitos when we arrived at the Nacional. They like visiting tourists, and the Cuban people are overwhelmingly warm and friendly. Our guide, Nelson Ramos, welcomed us with drinks, a quick tour of the Avenue Internacional, and a look at Vedado, which was and still is, apparently, Havana's finest neighborhood.

So far, without Old Havana to compare it to, the city harkens back to the '60s, not the '50s. The streets are quiet, the tourists European, and the water a deep blue. This is the same water where Hemingway fished and first heard tale of an old fisherman who once fought a great marlin.

It's a shame more people can't see it.

We're living on island time now, and don't even know our schedule for the week yet. We plan to see Finca Vigia, Hemingway's home for more than 20 years, and visit with government officials, talk to the locals about the new presidente, and maybe even take in a show at the Tropicana.

I'll keep you updated through the week, as time and technology permits, from what Ramos calls our home for the next week, here 90 miles south of Key West.

And now, Morro beckons.