This article is bullspit. The author can get away with this because not many readers have been to Varadero. I have been going for almost 60 years, most every summer, to this wonder of the world. Under the previous regime, my family owned land abutting about 12 miles of the beach. Today, my brother lives in our old house there, right up against the beach, in a simple neighborhood (although our house is an old grande house and tourist attraction in its own right).
The sand is wonderful, warm, and soft like angel dust, as they say. The sky is clear and blue every summer day and the beach is wide open... not a hotel, not a restaurant, not a bar, not even a grocery for miles. Perfection!
At the far eastern end, the government has allowed Euros to build some seriously ugly hotels. Germans mostly, but even a Canadian businessman or two may be found drinking late at night in one of the tasteless and tacky bars.
Many myths abide about Cuba, especially in this land, my adopted country, where Fox News dominates the public perception of reality. We may say that this is freedom, but it is freedom to listen to crap. In Cuba, our people also have the freedom to listen to crap. Or to turn it off and make love, dance, play music, play baseball, go to the beach... the most beautiful beach in the world.
I know this because I have its ancient sand in my very heart, in the cells of my body. It is sacred and so long as American trash does not litter Cuba, it will be nothing if not lovely. Lovely.
Paradise Lost
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I have photos of Cuba's Varadero beach from when my father was growing up there in the 1940s and '50s. They are remarkable mostly for what's missing: high-rise hotels and their tangle of tourists. Instead, the camera captured wide expanses of sand, palm, and cocoplum.
I grew up in Tampa, far from that mythical beach. Every year the extended family vacationed on the Atlantic, and every year we children endured complaints from the elders about how inferior Florida beaches were to their beloved Varadero.
In 1997 I finally traveled to Varadero and found that it bore little resemblance to the beach of my imagination. The water was cloudy. The shore was littered with block hotels, and well-fed European women suntanned topless by the pool. Still, hoping to bring back some of the magic for my family, I packed an empty water bottle with the sand that was always described as white and fine as talcum powder. When I returned to Miami, I distributed it in little flasks. Pouring some into their hands, my father and his siblings were aghast. "What's this?" cried my aunt. "This is not our sand!"
I still tell the story for laughs. But Cuban exiles are not the only ones who have spent the past 50 years romanticizing the island. The moment an American learns of my background, the first comment is usually, "I want to visit Cuba before Castro falls and it's ruined"—the implication being that U.S. capitalism will flatten paradise. It's an assumption that carries a double irony. First, these are often the same people who think the embargo should be lifted. And second, Cuba didn't have to wait for the Americans to turn it into Cancún. Spain and the rest of Europe beat them to it.
Last spring President Obama fulfilled a campaign promise to allow unlimited family travel to the island. And last month a senior State Department official visited Cuban authorities in Havana to continue talks. For moral and practical reasons, these are the right steps to take; just a few years ago, they would have been impossible. But Cuban-Americans have grown weary. Like others in their generation, my parents, now in their 60s, have lived most of their lives as Americans. Obama's overtures mean little to them. Even if the Castro brothers fled today, my parents would not return.
When I brought back sand from their beloved beach, I robbed my parents of a protective nostalgia. As relations with Cuba improve, Obama may end up doing the same for the ordinary American.
Menendez's latest novel is The Last War.
© 2009
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