I’ve been to Cuba several times. I went at least once as an infant, although I don’t remember any of those trips, I was just too young. I also went once when I was four years old, with my father, just before he died, one of only two memories I have of him. The only thing I remember about that trip was climbing up on his lap to look out the window at a vast field of palm trees spread out below me, and I remember getting off the plane in Tampa on the trip home wearing the cowboy outfit my relatives in Havana had bought for me. This was before jets, DC-4s.

I went twice more on summer vacation to visit my relatives, once in 1956 or ’57. I stayed in Havana with my father’s family, I remember that trip distinctly; I was 9 or 10. My last visit was in 1958. This trip was special because the plane dropped me off in Havana where I stayed with my aunts and uncles in the capital for a week or so, and then I traveled with my widowed Aunt Carmela to spend the rest of the summer in her country house in Camaguey, deep in the interior of the island.

I distinctly remember the experience, her house was a beautiful hardwood structure surrounded by lush tropical gardens, with a huge flamboyan tree in the front yard. (Aunt Carmela had bucks, she had married into money!). The house had a windmill and a water tank on a tripod, which fascinated me, and was surrounded by the huge red clay pots, or tinajones, the cisterns Spaniards had scattered around everywhere to collect rain water in the olden days. Their purpose is mostly decorative now, yard art, Camaguey Province is famous for them. I also remember the big green lizards coming in through the tall open windows and how they crawled around on the ceilings, and at night, cucujos, huge black click beetles with bright green luminescent spots on their backs would fly in and walk around on the mosquito netting over my bed.

I remember quite a bit about my summer in Camaguey, there was the neighbor kid I played with, and the colored lady that worked as a cook and housekeeper for my aunt. Carmela bought me a toy pinhole camera and I took lots of pictures (mostly of the local reptilian fauna), which I still have stashed away somewhere. I also remember she bought me a model of the Spirit of St Louis airplane, which I glued together because we saw the Jimmy Stuart film together when it came to Camaguey and I was very impressed by it. She had been a young bride when Lindbergh flew the Atlantic…We went to the movies often that summer, and while watching “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates” one Sunday the rebels blew up the empty supermarket next door to the theater. There was broken glass and canned goods all over the street, but fortunately, no one was hurt.

The rebels also cut the electric wires to my aunt’s house one night while I was there. I understood there was a revolution going on, although I didn’t really grasp what that actually meant. At any rate, I got back to Florida in time to go back to school in September, and Castro marched triumphantly into Havana on the following New Year’s Day.

But one thing happened that trip I do not remember, and it has bothered me ever since. My aunt hired a car (a VW Beetle!) and driver to take us from Havana to Camaguey, a trip of several hundred miles, right down the spine of the island. It was the trip of a lifetime, 300 miles down the country roads of pre-Revolutionary Cuba, fifty five years ago, and I remember absolutely none of it. I couldn’t have slept through the whole trip, it must have taken all day. But I remember absolutely none of it, those beautiful landscapes and picturesque country towns, mountains and farms, forests and wilderness. I remember none of it.

Well, I take that back. One brief memory survives; I vaguely remember being in a crowded narrow street in a little town, bumper-to-bumper traffic, lots of shops and signs and crowds. It could have been anywhere on the route. And that’s all that stayed with me. Youth is wasted on the young…