The extent of my world traveling has been two trips to Canada, probably 36 hours of combined time out of the country. Places like London and Paris have stunningly cheap airfare to them. Australia would be just as exotic, and English-speaking. It'd be quicker to fly to the Bahamas. It's probably safer to go to the rim of a volcano. But, somehow, Cuba is the easiest trip to go on.
Chris Nicola was doing all the grunt work for this trip. He's the founder of the hard-to-say acronym UAYCEF, the Ukrainian-American Youth Caver Exchange Foundation. The Ukraine has some of the biggest caves in the world, including the world�s second-longest. (The longest is Mammoth Cave, in the faraway land of ... Kentucky.) He plans an epic trip every August to the Ukraine. He also books trips to several other parts of the world.
The past few years he'd been going to Cuba every spring. Cuban caves are enormous from what I've heard, warm enough to wear T-shirts and shorts as caving gear, and full of formations. I'm used to caving in the Northeast: small, cold, wet, muddy holes that have nothing to look at and sap your body heat as long as you're in there. The rest of the world's caves are Hiltons compared to the Northeast.
He works out permission from the U.S. government, finds cheap flights there and back, works out an itinerary and cave visitation with the Cubans, and brings a group of cavers. It's all completely legal. Plus, a prime feature of a caving vacation, UAYCEF and otherwise, is that it's dirt cheap.
I've tried to get some friends together for a group vacation, but all my friends have 1. No vacation time 2. No free time to take a vacation or 3. No money. Most of them are all three.
Taking a trip by myself was out of the question. From business travel, I've come to know what I do when I'm in a new city by myself. I'll make one long walk to get food each day, seek out the cheesiest tourist destination a city has, and watch local TV the rest of the time. It's fine for making the best out of a work trip, but not when I'm voluntarily paying airfare and hotel costs to watch French TV for a week.
So I asked Chris last summer what steps/shots/sucking up was necessary to get on this group for next year. "You're on it! Easy enough, huh?" he said.
How do you get to Cuba, you ask? You never hear any flights to Havana announced when you're at the airport. Well, it's not illegal for Americans to go to Cuba, it's just illegal for them to spend any money there. That's why Chris's permission from the trip comes from the Treasury Department. For Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean countries and every other country on earth, Cuba's just another island with regular flights to and from. Temporary passports can be bought in these countries, so future international trips won't be slowed or stopped by "You went to Cuba, you commie?!"
Previous cave trips had a lot of general interest cavers. There were photographers, some scientists collecting biological specimens, and some cavers just going to look around. This year was going to be more of a focused trip on science. I was actually looking forward to playing scientist, and actually helping out on collecting specimens (although not so much killing the specimens).
Permission from the Treasury Department always took a while. It might be intentional bureaucracy. Foot dragging might cause Cuba trips to be cancelled without having to officially ban them. It might also be the unintentional bureaucracy all politicians rattle their sabers against (until they get elected and make it worse). Permission came at about the time Chris's plane was taxiing from the runway last time.
Best case scenario was complete government approval. This sometimes came with vouchers, so you could not only spend money in Cuba, but bring a certain amount of goods legally back across the border. I've never smoked so much as a cigarette in my life, but if I got that voucher, it'd be nothing but cigars coming back. There's some moral issues with passing around addictive carcinogenic items, but I'd be the star attraction at the next baby birth and bachelor party.
Worst case scenario was a flat out denial of our license. If we didn't get permission (or if permission wasn't going to come until past the point of no return for booking tickets), we could always do a fully hosted guest trip. We fly to Cuba, but don't spend a penny there. Chris's Cuban contact pay for everything. We'd keep track of the money spent, and put an equal amount in an American amount. When the Cubans visited America later, they'd spend that money, and it would equal out. This isn't the most desired way to do things, since how do you prove to customs that you didn't spend money? Blank receipts?
The whole idea of the economic embargo is to starve Cuba into tossing Fidel Castro out of power. It's like forcing your fat friend to eat healthy by not sharing your Oreos. They can get Oreos from other countries, but we yell "Hey, Fatso needs to lose some weight!" at them. The problem with the analogy is that the fat guy in question will always have enough food to keep his beard growing, but not necessarily enough to keep his body alive.
The trip was set for March. It would be Puerto Rico for four or five days, and Cuba for the rest. That worked out great, since in Puerto Rico I could appreciate the general feel of the Caribbean, the geology of its caves, and the general atmosphere. Once I had a couple days of acclimatization, then I'd puddle jump to Cuba, and not be distracted from the economic conditions since the trees were really pretty.
The trip was scheduled for March. Perfect timing. I didn't have anything crucial to do for work, I didn't have any weddings or other events I'd be missing in March, and it was about damn time I used some vacation weeks.
I got the little passport pictures of me taken, filled out the passport application at the post office, and coughed over the better part of a hundred bucks with my birth certificate. A few weeks later, I got my passport in the mail, along with my birth certificate back. It's hard to look at a passport without hearing the MacGyver music starting.
I got a Spanish dictionary, and started boning up on vocabulary. All I did was keep the dictionary in the car and translate advertisements when I was at red lights in Union City. Union City technically has more Cubans living in it than Havana, so I've heard. I can pretty much translate Don Quixote now.
In January the Cuban part of the trip got moved to April. Working out airfares and backup airfares was just too logistically difficult. Puerto Rico was now a standalone trip in March, and Cuba was a standalone trip in April. I picked the Cuba and skipped on the straight Puerto Rico. Hell, I didn't even need a passport to go there.
My magazine does production on the even months. We slowly write during the odd months, but even months are those crucial days when the magazine gets put together. It'd be tough to take a vacation week in April.
A few weeks later, the April date got pushed back to May. That cleared it of the production timetable, but it dropped the trip in a very busy month for me. I had a probable work trip to Chicago immediately before hand. I had two big caving weekends I'd be missing out on. I had a family reunion, planned since last year, right in the middle of the trip. And I had a less probable work trip to Amsterdam right afterward.
If I had known the trip would be in the middle of every interesting event I'm doing in 2003, I wouldn't have signed up for it. I hoped it would be pushed to later in the year, but the dates were finalized: May 10-20.
At this same time, America continued the downward spiral into war with Iraq. Our foreign policy was greeted with the reception normally given water balloons filled with urine. Most all of the world hates us, despite no one caring the slightest bit if Saddam Hussein eats a bullet. And America treats I personally wasn't too concerned about the treatment in Cuba, but I had major reservations about getting an $8000 fine for not having enough proof that I didn't break the law.
At the same time, the license application got a lot tougher. Credentials of everyone going on the trip needed to be listed: on previous trips, the applicant didn't even need to list who he was going with. And my credentials as a scientist are limited to two semesters of Bio in college and reading the Hot Zone.
At the same time, new security legislation lets customs hold Americans coming back from Cuba for 48 hours, for questioning. Our existence is reason enough to be jailed for two days.
The fates were conspiring to not have me go on this trip. But it was the only vacation I've planned in two years (the last one being a trip to the faraway land of ... Kentucky). I didn't want to back out of it, but at the same point I wasn't thrilled about having to go on it.
I didn't know what to do. So I asked my friends if I should go. Normally when you ask a question like this, you're looking for them to say one particular answer. But I legitimately didn't know what to do. Their knee jerk response was to go. You regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did, so doing everything that came across your plate is a simple way to lead a more satisfying life. Normally I'd say the same thing, but this particular thing on my plate would cost the better part of a thousand dollars and might classify me as an Axis of Evil.
I asked my mom. For the love of God, don't go, she said. That's what I was expecting. Moms would lock their kids up in padded houses if they didn't complain about it. And, as it turns out, that was the answer I was looking for.
I wanted permission to drop out of this trip. What I really wanted was for Chris to cancel the trip. That way, the decision wouldn't be mine. But I couldn't count on it. I emailed Chris and said that I wasn't feeling too good about it. I didn't 100% cancel, since there was always the option that Chris would cancel it himself.
Chris cancelled the trip himself last week. Phew. There were just too many negative factors piling on. (One additional one was that the airfare was $250 higher than expected, thanks to fuel costs, flight cutbacks and safety surcharges.) He's looking to reschedule for October or November. I'd love to go then, but October is the biggest production month we have, and it leads to a trade show right in the middle of November. The only Cuban sandwiches I'm expecting to eat in the next year are going to be made in Union City.
I looked forward to the Cuba trip on the novelty that it was completely legal. But there's legal, there's illegal, and there's a gray area that might get your phone tapped. Most of my life has been led on the legal side, and going gray for a vacation would only give me more gray hairs.
In the meantime, there have also been two Cuban hijackings in the past few weeks, so I'm glad I wasn't on those flights.