Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals by Wendy Dale Page B

performance in the first two areas, who the hell wanted them to spend the night?
    I woke up the next morning in a foul mood. I was still exhausted from the previous evening and the amount of effort it had taken trying to get Alberto into my room—not because I had found an unwilling partner (after all, I had made sure he was pretty liquored up by the time we left the club) but because of the strange law that forbade any Cubans from staying in my hotel.
    It had been a ridiculous scene. Earlier that evening, we had persuaded the hotel manager to let Alberto join me for a drink in the restaurant on the fifth floor, on the condition that he didn’t accompany me back to my room. But as the empty glasses piled up and the image of the wall in front of us became more and more blurred, so too did our understanding of the Cuban government’s logic.
    Laws, as I saw them, were good for things like preventing robbers from entering my house, stopping gang members from shooting my neighbors, and keeping shirtless people from being served in restaurants. The law, however, was not supposed to infringe on my innocent attempt to have a good time.
    Besides, how hard could it be to sneak Alberto in? All we had to do was quietly pay the bill and saunter out, go down one flight of stairs, and turn the corner. Who would have the nerve to follow us? It was a question I would repeat five minutes later as we headed toward my room.
    â€œWho would have the nerve to follow us?” I asked again, this time not rhetorically. Someone was definitely trailing us.
    â€œI don’t know him.”
    â€œShould we run?”
    â€œI think we should run.”
    So we sped up our pace and continued out of breath until I slammed the door of my room shut behind us, slightly aware of how ridiculous it was to be twenty-five years old and still trying to sneak men into my room. What could they possibly do to me? Ground me? Deprive me of Cuban TV for a month (not much of a punishment, I might add)? They couldn’t take away my drinking rights, could they?
    There was a pounding at the door that left Alberto and me unsure what to do. The knocking came again. We looked at each other and with a deep sigh, I realized that the moment of truth had come. Now my mom was gonna call his mom and they were going to talk about the condom they found in the backseat of the Plymouth Voyager—wait, I wasn’t a teenager anymore. I was a grown woman leaving condoms in the back of Plymouth Voyagers. No one could do a damn thing about it—except maybe that guy pounding on the other side of our door.
    Feeling like an adult forced to confront the high school principal, reluctantly I removed the bolt and looked out into the hall. The hotel manager was there, looking very communist.
    Alberto muttered some excuse about having come up to explain to me the finer points of Castro’s agricultural plan and then with his head facing toward the ground, he quietly allowed himself to be led out of the hotel into the early morning rays of a humid Havana morning.
    The rules at the hotel where I was staying were pretty much in force throughout Cuba. Hotels, restaurants, and shops that admitted tourists wouldn’t allow in Cubans and vice versa, a result of the double economy that functioned on the island. Visitors had to purchase everything in dollars; Cubans patronized stores and restaurants that only accepted pesos and where the tab was about twenty times less than what a tourist would pay, which made me start to rethink this sneaking-around-hotels thing. If one of us was going to be entering every establishment clandestinely, we might as well be sneaking me into Cuban places, where our bill was going to be one-twentieth of the price. I wouldn’t have to change my dollars on the black market—I’d get the best exchange rate on the island by handing all my money to Alberto and having him pay for everything.
    The plan worked brilliantly. My former