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Cuba: A Dry Run (cont.)

Cairbarién at last. It's a quaint port town with pink and aqua houses and an ancient Spanish church. The cross streets end at smooth water, the dark cays laying along it like sleeping seals.

But the officers at the Guarda say we can't paddle the coast, not even with our fishing permits. We can, however, head inland to Lake Hanabanilla, a ten-mile-long reservoir surrounded by steep jungly hills. Why don't we take our boats there?

In Cuba, even on a lake, you don't just shove your kayaks off the shore and paddle. You get permission from a state-run resort hotel. You pull up the circular drive and a bunch of uniformed porters carry your boats through a green marble lobby and down to the dock.

We paddle hard for a few kilometers, glad to stretch our muscles. Then we drift, weightless at last, and the quixotic nature of our expedition dawns on us. I look at Adam. We start to laugh.

"And then we went lake paddling in Cuba," Adam says. "Cómo se dice 'idiotic'?"

But it is beautiful here. The water is silk-smooth, and the mountains are lush and cradle the lake. Egrets perch in the trees along the shore. We hear salsa drifting across the cove from a shack covered in bougainvillea. We hop out of the boats into the cool water. We splash around and dive for the bottom. The kayaks drift away on the warm breeze and we have to swim after them. A few miles farther on we meet a decrepit ferry crowded with Cuban tourists. They hang off the rails and wave. It looks like a refugee boat, and the irony doesn't escape me: Three oceangoing vessels passing each other on a tiny, bounded inland sea.

That night before I sleep I imagine we are paddling out from a sandy beach. The boats are red and the water is clear and green. Inches below us, we can see purple sea fans, black anemones, the translucent green shadows of schooled fish flashing to silver as they turn. The sun is hot, the trade wind is rising. I can feel it on the back of my neck. I think about the vacuum cleaner salesman Wormold in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. He is recruited by the British Secret Service, and he proceeds to make up all of his Cuban intelligence reports. He invents a host of paid informants. It's a lot easier that way. Soon his reports are given terrible credence by the police and spy agencies of several nations, and people are murdered as a result.

I wonder about the meaning of our expedition. I wonder if, at this point, imagining it might be just as fruitful as the real thing. The story seems to have become the act of trying to get on the water. What if we never actually get there? I can make it up: "Adam flips the heavy tuna into his cockpit and pries out the hook. The cay just to the west must be Cayo Nansanillo, for I remember the clump of cedars and the sweet spring marked on the map by the old soldier..."

As I drift to sleep I conjure the vast country just 90 miles across the strait to the north. The United States has lost so much that Cuba still has. I see it everywhere on the faces of Cuban children: a kind of secure sense of self, an innocence. Yet from this small room in Fernando's house the freedom of the United States seems wild, intoxicating. Nobody writes me a ticket for laughing on the train. A few years ago I rode a horse from my doorstep in southern Colorado all the way to Wyoming, and nobody asked for my papers. There will be a time, soon, when Cuba is like that, when its mountains and thousands of miles of wild coastline will be open to adventure. Castro will be dead then, the embargo lifted, and, I fear, much of the country's strange charm washed away in a tide of commercialism from the north.

Before we leave Cuba, Fernando takes us fishing. He drives us to his father's cabin in a muddy hamlet carved out of the mangrove called Playa Francisco. He stops at the whitewashed Guarda station and buys our permits. The three of us wade out into the warm water, up to our waists. We bait weighted hand lines with shrimp and whip them over our heads. The sun is straight in our faces. The sand fleas are terrible. Across the slick-calm water a few fishing skiffs move slowly. Beyond them are the dark shapes of the cays.

I get a tug on my line, and then another, and I'm hauling in, hand over hand. The fish is fighting hard. I pull him in and lift out an eight-inch triggerfish.

"Hey, Pedro!" Fernando whoops. He's smoking a Montecristo and he looks happy, in his element. "El Viejo y el Mar!" The Old Man and the Sea.

Three weeks after we return to the States, I get a startling e-mail. It's from Commodore Escrich: "Congratulations. The government has approved your project..." I laugh. Perfect timing. I think about what many Cubans told me: that Castro is the ultimate micro-manager and that a proposal for an expedition of this nature, so novel in Cuba and so off the beaten tourist track, would end up on his desk for approval. He's an avid free-diver and I think how this trip might appeal to the old athlete. We're going back in October.

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