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Vamos a Cuba!

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Fear and cynicism plagued the happy populace. People believed they were being spied on by their own government and that their property might well be seized for making George W. Bush look bad at the Versailles coffee counter.

Eddy sat with his feet kicked up on the cash register of the most lascivious sex shop on the planet.

Built roughly like a high school sophomore, the middle-age man had smoothly plastered his black hair over a sizable bald spot. His little cheeks drooped down at the sides of his face and stretched, often, into a boyish grin. His loud party shirt opened to the middle of his stomach, revealing a wealth of gold chains and chest hair. Eddy looked like the kind of guy who might hit on your girlfriend at a bus station.

Behind him a galaxy of cock rings, lubes, whips, and beads (for your asshole) hung from hooks on the wall. Butt plugs the size of garden gnomes stood in a row, like sentinels, on a shelf below his feet.

Eddy said he's working on the paperwork to bring his true love over from Cuba. "She's gotta stay with me for two years, as I understand it," he said. "Hell, I'd be a happy son of a bitch if she stayed two years."

He boats to Cuba, but only in the summertime. "If a cold front comes through," he said, "you could end up with 10-foot swells out on the ocean, and then you're trapped down there for a week."

During the winter, Eddy flies to the island. Which is a pain, because he first has to drive all the way to the "Miami fucking airport." Eddy hates Miami and associates it with only bad things.

Sometimes he jets into Havana through Costa Rica, where he enjoys cheap, pretty young women as well. "They don't hassle you as much," he said. "But everything in Costa Rica costs twice as much."

Cuba can cost big too. In response to Bush's new policy, Eddy said, Castro now forces Americans to change their dollars to pesos for an exorbitant fee. Moreover, everyone you meet there tries to steal from you. Eddy imagines he would steal whatever he could too.

While he ruminated on the economics of being an international pervert, tired, unshaven men wandered in to purchase tickets to the store's numerous jerk-off booths in the rear. Eddy, ever the pleasant shopkeep, obliged them all with smiles and kind words.

He never moved from his position at the counter, a fact he thoroughly prided himself on. Even the arrival of his miserable grandpa of a boss, Bob, didn't seem to irk Eddy at all.

Bob, a retired jeweler from up North who got into the adult-store business out of boredom, was dressed in typical bland snowbird fashion. Unlike Eddy, he took little joy in life. "Key West," he grumbled, "I can take it or leave it."

Bob, too, had been to Cuba — under Batista. "It was a giant whorehouse," he recalled. "You could get anything you wanted."

He pleaded with Eddy to stay away from Cuba and stick to the "señoriters" in "Cahsta Ricka."

Eddy could not. "I miss my sweet little girl," he said flatly.

Bob fumed. "She's a whore, bitch, conniving whore."

Eddy smiled, unfazed. "Everybody's entitled to his opinion."

The next afternoon, I eyed the Garrison Bight Marina, just across Overseas Highway from the VFW. Charter fishing boats pull out in the mornings and return in the afternoons to hang huge grouper on a row of hooks. A world-weary attendant at an information booth on Duval Street had insisted someone at the marina would be crazy enough to take me to Cuba.

Nothing stirred in the quiet along the docks. The sound of opening beer cans drew me to the back of a sizable fishing boat, the H2O Bilge Management, cluttered with a miniature Zen garden, a bicycle, and a potted rosemary bush.

Standing on the deck of the mighty vessel stood Papa Hemingway himself, pouring Silver Bullets into a humongous coffee mug and squinting out into the early afternoon. He said his name was Ed Gully and he was pissed he couldn't take me to Cuba.

"Another one of our freedoms gone down the tubes because of bullshit politicians," he muttered.

Gully had been part of a notorious 2003 race to the island that led to the ruination of a pair of local lives. "You go and see Michele Geslin," he advised.

Geslin and her husband, Peter Goldsmith, had become legendary on the island after federal agents dragged them out of their beds and indicted them on criminal charges for running a regatta between Key West and Cuba.

Since then, they moved their sail shop from downtown Key West up to Stock Island. So I abandoned Key West and made way for their shop. I arrived to discover a two-story warehouse. Its walls were lined with reams of colored synthetic materials. Breezes poured through cracked windows, and tunes sounded from a small radio.

"Michelle's not in," called a voice in a soft Southern-hippie drawl. "Why don't you sit a spell?"

John sat cross-legged and silver-haired on the floor, cutting material for a huge blue spinnaker. He said every two or three days someone eager to get to Cuba comes through the shop with a broken sail.

John retired about 10 years ago as an engineer at Ford. "Every industry I've worked in has been outsourced," he said, tossing the sail onto an old Singer sewing machine and stepping on the foot pedal. "Shit, all the materials you see on the wall are flown in from elsewhere. Boy, we buy everything from communist China. The only thing this country manufactures anymore is debt and bullshit."

The retiree still has friends — mostly Frenchmen and Canadians — who go to Cuba. "A 30-foot sailboat with a fiberglass hull is still pretty hard to pick up on radar," he said. "But if they put that eye in the sky on you, then you're fucked.

"If they want to get you," he added gravely, "they'll get you."

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