Obama says current U.S. policy towards Cuba ‘doesn’t make sense’

[Lydia Leftcoast]

16. There are now many legal ways to visit Cuba, and I urge you to do so if you can

I went with a church group, and it was a fascinating experience.

You're completely cut off from the U.S. That's a rare experience in today's world. Your cell phone won't work unless you bought it in Europe and it has a European SIM. Internet is dial-up only and too slow to be worth the cost of renting a station.

The island is beautiful, the people are friendly, and the music and art are incredible. Yes, people are poor, but also resourceful. We visited the ecumenical Protestant seminary in Matanzas, located on a hill with a gorgeous view of the city and the bay, and learned how, during the "special period" after Russia cut off assistance, they started a full-scale farm on the grounds. We had lunch at the seminary: roast chicken, salad, beans, and rice, with everything except the rice grown on their farm.

A couple of surprises. Yes, there are old American cars, but a lot more European and Chinese ones. Restrictions on religious activities have been loosened in the past twenty years--we heard this from both Christians and Jews. In fact, one of the events on our schedule was attending an ecumenical meeting of the various Christian denominations, featuring an American speaker from the World Council of Churches and the presiding bishop of the American Episcopal Church. Santería, the African-derived religion with a Catholic overlay, is widely practiced, and you see the white-clad initiates everywhere. There are no pictures of Castro in public places, since he wants to avoid the kind of personality cult that prevails in North Korea and used to prevail in China and the Soviet Union. You see people with cell phones.

We stayed in a convent in the Old City, which was spared the bulldozer precisely because of the revolution. (Batista planned to raze it and build a "modern" city.) Parts of it are rundown, but it is gradually being restored, starting with the plazas and radiating outward, without displacing the residents permanently. There are tourist-oriented restaurants and lodgings in the Old City, but real people live there, too, and one afternoon, I saw kids from the local school having soccer practice in the Plaza Vieja in the afternoon, and Cuban teenagers hanging out in the evenings. We saw several old buildings that had been gutted and were being restored on the outside and modernized on the inside.

There are some inconveniences. You can't drink the tap water (I got violently ill from the ice after drinking a mojito at a non-tourist establishment on the last night of the trip), and very little English is spoken, so my high school Spanish and dictionary got a workout. In many places, the toilets have no seats and cannot deal with toilet paper, so there's a stinky wastebasket in each stall. The food was rather monotonous, even in the tourist places, consisting of meat or fish, rice, and beans. We were happy to discover a Middle Eastern restaurant in the Old City for a change of pace. The coffee and desserts were good, though.

If you can't go with a religious organization, you can go with a number of cultural institutions or educational travel outfits such as the Smithsonian or Elderhostel.