Salut! is off on holiday.
Cuba is the destination, on a tour promoted by the operator as Revolutionary Road. It takes in Havana, of course, and that is a city I adore on the strength on one brief visit, and also the provincial capital that bears the name of Guantanamo.
No one has suggested packing orange jump suits or enough books to withstand a delay of several years before being cleared of any wrongdoing, followed by several more years before the US chooses to act on such exoneration. I hope that means we should be OK.
Best of all, we are not going to Varadero, a truly wretched resort - or so it was when I was there 15 years or so ago - full of all-inclusive hotels where no one with the least taste would actually want anything that's included.
Alas, I cannot make a return visit to Gregorio Fuentes, the man who inspired Hemingway's novel, The Old Man and The Sea. He died a year or so after I paid his son, probably then around 80 years old, a dollar for the right to be photographed with his dad.
I did suggest to a friend and colleague, David Sharrock, who was being sent by The Daily Telegraph to cover a Sinn Fein visit to Cuba before Christmas 2001, that it might be worth retracing my steps to write about Fuentes.
David's delightful account started ...
Gregorio Fuentes is 104 years old and laments that he can no longer stroll down the hill from his little bungalow to the restaurant where he and Ernest Hemingway used to eat a little fish and drink a lot of whisky. Fuentes is the last living link between the heroic, hard-drinking age of Hemingway and the down-at-heel fishing village of Cojimar, a few miles east of the Cuban capital, Havana, which is now an important staging post in the communist regime's crusade for tourist dollars. But the old man is tired and seems no longer willing to play his role of fishing foreign currency from visitors' travel belts. Between 1935 and 1960, when Hemingway was at the height of his literary powers, he and Fuentes were like brothers. The Nobel prize-winning author of The Old Man and The Sea even took his Cuban drinking and fishing pal with him when he went hunting big game in Africa.
... and can be seen in full at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/cuba/1366333/Hemingways-old-friend-of-the-sea.html?mobile=basic
Virgin Atlantic may or may not provide enough legroom for limbs that often feel a little 104-ish (it is a long time since I had the ear of Richard Branson). But I am looking forward greatly to Cuba: being there, forgetting here and absorbing the sights, sounds and smells of a country that has done such a great job of sticking up for itself.
If that doesn't get me an invitation to mojitos with Raul or Fidel, nothing will (late update: it didn't).
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