Half the fun of Cuba is getting there.

I was there in the 1990s with about a dozen financiers from Europe. The contingent from England, Norway, and Switzerland came over together from London, changing planes in Miami for Panama. When an impertinent customs clerk asked one of them where he was going, he innocently responded "Cuba." All six men were hustled into a locked room, with all kinds of armed and uniformed types milling about, and were detained there for two hours while agents ran background checks on them. The government couldn't have cared less if they missed their connection. Your tax dollars at work, winning friends and influencing people for America.

It used to be there were no restaurants, no shops, no cars, and few hotels in Cuba. People were malnourished, and even at a couple of official receptions, the staples were olives and Spam because that was what they were able to barter for.

That was 1994, and things were especially grim because the recent collapse of the USSR was starting to bite in earnest. The bankrupt Soviet government had been subsidizing the even more bankrupt Cuban government for the equivalent of billions of dollars a year for several decades, in a historic example of the blind leading the doubly dismembered. The cutoff of Soviet subsidies resulted in an acute depression within the chronic depression Cuba had experienced since 1960.