Sketches From Cuba

HAVANA, Cuba Hanoi Meneses, a 37-year-old overnight bartender at the Hotel Raquel in Old Havana, can't wait for the freedom to travel outside Cuba. Like many in this island nation of just more than 11 million, he's hoping President Obama and the Castro brothers will make a deal. Soon.

But his first stop won't be the U.S. He'll be headed to Spain.

"I want to go to a country with a long and rich cultural past," he says, blending a daiquiri for a rare American guest savoring a final late night in town, glancing up with a look that suggests I hope that comment won't hurt my tip.

The old-fashioned cage lift elevator in the corner of the marbled lobby has ferried the last Dutch and German guests to their rooms. And there are still some tourists and ordinary Cubans on Calle Saint Ignacio, just outside, as he explains that he wasn't the only child named after the capitol of North Vietnam.

"There were Hanois running all over the place at school," he says.

. . .

Because it's a poor country, there is very little for a tourist to buy in Cuba to bring home, which is probably just as well because your money disappears as soon as you land at Havana's Jose Marti International Airport.

All foreigners are required to exchange their currency for Cuban Convertible Pesos -- CUCs -- with the Castro government taking 20 percent off the top.

Cubans themselves spend National Pesos at peso stores on subsistence items. In this dual economic system, tourists are spending CUCs for hotel rooms, meals, entertainment, taxis, cigars, and rum. And since regular Cubans can't stay in hotels and can't afford to eat in tourist restaurants, they drive the taxis and are the entertainment. Like everything in Cuba, it works most of the time -- but barely.

. . .

Peter Loman is a Finn, married to a Cuban woman. He is an accomplished professional jazz trumpeter, and known all over Santiago de Cuba as the unofficial mayor in the country's second largest city of 470,000, some 250 miles across the water from Haiti.

Like many Cubans, to make ends meet, in addition to his music, Peter works a second job as a licensed tour guide, bringing in groups from Finland throughout the year. And for years he has been slowly and painstakingly renovating his 1920s-era row house, two hilly blocks from the city square -- historic Parque Cespedes, the site of the oldest building in Cuba.

Frustrated by the unpredictable availability of building supplies at the government stores, he's been buying cement and nails on the black market. In the process, a jealous, anonymous neighbor turned him in, which resulted in a visit by a government official, a slap on the wrist, and a small fine -- as well as a refusal to name the snitch.

The situation was repeated -- and when the mildly irritated inspector returned the second time, following the perfunctory wrist slap and fine, in return he passed along the neighbor's name. Détente was reached in the neighborhood.

The house is finished now -- and beautiful -- and by law he has no right to sell it even if he cared to. But at night, shirtless on his roof in the sticky heat, he plays his horn.

. . .

You can't use a credit card in Cuba. Your cell phone and BlackBerry won't work. Forget Twitter, YouTube, and posting on Facebook. There's limited Internet access and you can smoke almost anywhere.

Heaven or hell?

. . .

I am sitting in a third base line box seat in Guillermon Moncada Stadium on a scorchingly hot and humid day under thick, slow-moving tropical clouds the color of granite, watching the hometown Santiago Avispas -- the Bees -- take on the Havana Mets. There is a beautiful -- really beautiful -- young Cuban woman standing at the railing in the aisle behind me. She has dark skin and dark eyes and a striking figure. There are two more like her, equally exotic, at the two sections of seats farther down the foul line.

They follow the game, but I notice they are watching the crowd, in our case, three young guys from Slovenia, me, my American buddy, Davison, and an old Cuban man with an ear piece listening to the radio play by play, the kind of fan who wouldn't look out of place at any American ballpark.

The Bees sport red and white uniforms, the Mets, solid red. The stunning women with the half smiles and red lip stick? They're uniformly military green, standing in spit shined combat boots with patches over their pockets that read: Ministerio de Interior. They're unarmed state police.

As the Bees roll on to a 10-6 victory, the pretty militia seem bemused by the Americans while occasionally stepping into action: On this day, shaking down a young boy to return a foul ball and telling another fan to take his feet off the railing by the field. You get the feeling they'd really rather be somewhere else.

. . .

Orlando Pirez makes guitars and repairs all manner of "sick" stringed instruments in his cluttered workshop in his walk-up apartment on narrow Calle Acosta near the train station in Old Havana. At 78 and retired -- and a bit famous from his appearances on Cuban television in the '70s and '80's with his band, Los Montunos -- the Matanzas native no longer performs musica campesina, or country music professionally, but works hard to get by, scrapping for the basics needed for his craft.

Out of necessity he has cobbled together a lathe-like machine to make guitar strings that he sells to other Havana musicians on a daily basis. And although he would prefer wood from the Cyprus tree for his guitar bodies, and Canadian pine for the tops, Orlando must scavenge the many crumbling buildings of Havana for old beams and boards. The dryer the better.

When a visitor sitting at his kitchen table set modestly with a bottle of rum, strong coffee, and fresh fried sweet potato gifts the old man with a never-played guitar that belonged to a beloved late son, Orlando apologizes for the stiffness in his fingers, then plays and sings for 20 minutes, accompanied by an inefficient plastic table fan, finishing with Dulce Embeleso by Santiago musician Miguel Matamoras.

Through a translator, his cheek against the guitar, he smiles sweetly and says, that "this guitar will have a good home here."

William Gerald Hamby is a Richmond public relations consultant and writer. He last wrote for The Times-Dispatch about competing in the 2008 Ernest Hemingway Look-a-Like Contest in Key West, Fla. Contact him at