Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals by Wendy Dale

an American.”
    The other one was Mayra, a lovely, pale twenty-eight-year-old Cuban physician we had befriended while strolling through the streets of Havana on our second day in the country. She represented yet another of Umberto’s failed pickups. This was a peculiar habit of my Mexican acquaintance: Instead of discarding women when they refused his advances, Umberto simply accepted the rejection and had them tag along and join us as platonic companions. But that’s not to say he was happy about it.
    â€œHow come all I ever meet are intelligent women?” he growled that evening over drinks at a posh hotel bar when Mayra and I attempted to include him in our conversation on U.S.-Cuban relations.
    Even the previous night had ended without success by Umberto’s standards. Every woman in the pizza place had either been too tall or too young or too lacking in passion. So he’d sent them away one by one, cursing his luck and consoling himself by glaring at me and adding, “Don’t look so smug. You’re not getting any either.”
    Perhaps I can forgive my Spanish dictionary for failing to include the words “vagina” and “penis”; however, neglecting to insert a translation for “hangover” seems to me a great omission in a book that boasts over seventy-thousand entries. Nor is there a listing for the phrase “to have sex.” To the dictionary’s credit, it does include “to make love to,” which is translated as
“tener afición a,”
but somehow telling a red-blooded Cuban that I want to have an affection (or was it an infection?) for him didn’t seem like it was going to get me very far.
    Luckily, getting laid in Cuba is easy, a lot easier than making tacos. (On one of my ventures out of my hotel room in Guadalajara, I had walked past a restaurant with a sign in the window that said: “Taco maker wanted. Experience necessary.”) And finding a bed buddy is especially easy if you are either a man with lots of money (I hear it helps if you’re not named Umberto) or a woman with two arms, two legs, and a head.
    Considering that I possessed all the essential limbs and (in spite of his unfortunate name) Umberto was well endowed in the wallet department, he and I left the hotel bar with Mayra and headed out to explore Cuban nightlife.
    In a packed club blaring salsa music, I realized that the moment had finally come—I was actually going to get my hands on some real Cuban rum. However, I had not planned on the political dilemma I would face at the bar. What I wanted was a rum and Coke, called a Cuba Libre in most of Latin America, but as I thought it over, I wondered whether this name (“free Cuba”) was in fact the rest of the world’s ironic jab at the communist nation where I currently found myself. I remembered that one Latino acquaintance of mine laughed every time he heard someone order that drink. “Well, in Honduras,” he claimed, “we call it a Cuba Oppressed.”
    Not wanting to create any problems for myself, I asked for a “rum and some Coke,” which reminded me of the days of alcoholic ignorance years ago when not knowing what the different cocktails were called, I used to order all of my drinks by their ingredients instead of their names. Instead of a Bay Breeze, I’d ask for vodka and cranberry; in place of a Greyhound, I’d ask for vodka and grapefruit juice; instead of a gin and tonic, I’d order—well, that one hadn’t changed any.
    Halfway through my first drink, a thin Cuban man suddenly appeared at my side and asked me with a timid smile if I would like to dance. I gave Umberto a rather large, victorious smirk.
    â€œI’m sorry, were you two together?” the man asked, watching Umberto glare at me. “Do you mind?”
    â€œYou don’t have to ask me,
compañero,
” Umberto answered. “You just might have to ask your