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Exclusive: Fonda's CNN/God/government anti-drug deal
Salon's six-month-long investigation into the religious conversion of Jane Fonda reveals it to be part of a CNN/government advertising swap.
By Gary Kamiya
[01/14/00]

Propaganda for dollars
When the White House and the TV networks got together to put anti-drug messages in prime-time television, were they breaking the law?
By Daniel Forbes
[01/14/00]

Indiana Dan vs. Dr. Evil
The congressman trying to prevent Elián González's return to Cuba, Rep. Dan Burton, gets more campaign funding from Florida's Cuban exile community than from his own folks back home in Hoosierland.
By Daryl Lindsey
[01/13/00]

Political child abuse
Miami's Cuban-American community is playing out the trauma of its exile by exploiting 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez.
By Bruce Shapiro
[01/13/00]

Washington script doctors
How the government rewrote an episode of the WB's "Smart Guy."
By Daniel Forbes
[01/13/00]

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Like the early days of the Internet, there's a frenzy to be first, even though no one is making a real profit. Perhaps more revealing, almost all of the new hotels are being built to American fire and safety codes, so they can one day be sold to the Ritz Carltons and Hiltons of the world. "We're all waiting for the Americans," conceded a Spanish developer.

Since the Pope's historic 1998 visit, U.S. officials in Havana concede, the country has become more porous. The sale of food and medicine to non-governmental agencies is now permitted, Clinton has eased travel restrictions and Castro is even flirting with private enterprise by allowing Cubans to open paladares, family-run, home-based restaurants.

Last year 1.65 million tourists visited Cuba, generating $1.8 billion, making tourism Cuba's number one industry. British Airways will soon begin flights to Cuba and there's even talk of a Hard Rock Cafe-style restaurant in Havana.

The dollar is already the country's "real" currency. Images of Che Guevera compete with the face of Ernest Hemingway for tourist T-shirt dollars, but Papa wins, hands down. At the famed El Floridita, one of Hemingway's many watering holes, tourists pay about a third of the average Cuban's monthly income to sip one of his beloved daiquiris.

Ordinary Cubans seem happy about the influx of foreigners to their island. Certainly as a journalist reporting from the Eastern Bloc during its final days, I rarely witnessed such warmth. If you asked for a towel in a Moscow hotel, you were met with a scowl. In Havana, I returned to my hotel room each night to find a new "sculpture" by the maid on my bed. Sometimes she arranged my bath towels in the shape of a swan, or a heart or a sailboat.

When Kmart took over the state run department store Maj in Prague, some employees found the notion of customer service so repellent, they quit rather than have to smile at the customers. But the Cubans employed by Havana's growing tourist economy exude a warmth, and a desire to please that can't be faked.

While sampling a plate of traditional Cuban hors d'oeuvres, a waiter earnestly approached me to inquire which was the correct description; pork rinds or pork cracklings. I told him both were correct. But which sounds more "elegant" he implored. Not wanting to steer him down the 7-Eleven path, I ventured "cracklings?"

Still, Castro's disapproval is evident, though it cannot quite spoil the party. While well-dressed foreigners sip cocktails amid photos of Hemingway hob-knobbing with Spencer Tracy at the El Floridita, a prominently displayed poster declares that Cuba "blossoms" in spite of "the menaces and tight circle of the U.S. blockade." And in a humbling gesture to foreign investors, Castro's forces have slapped posters demanding "Return Elián to his school desk" on all new hotel construction sites.

Many developers are convinced Clinton has been laying the groundwork to lift the embargo before he leaves office, and might move quickly if not for U.S. politics.

"If he didn't have to sacrifice Gore, I think he'd do it right now," says Dick Zebo, a Florida-based tour operator and property developer who has deals with 27,000 hotel rooms in Cuba.

But politics figures front and center in the Clinton administration's deliberations over Elián's future, as well as the future of U.S. and Cuban relations. Abandoning their usual family values rhetoric, every Republican candidate has used the case to accuse Clinton of appeasing Castro. Even Al Gore has attempted to distance himself from the INS decision to return Elián to his father.

And U.S. diplomats in Havana are quick to dismiss hopes of lifting the embargo anytime soon. "We took a lot of hits for this embargo, we're not going to give up something for nothing," a senior government official said.

What will it take?

"How about free elections?" he said.

Next page | Is Elián suffering from the Stockholm syndrome?