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Vamos a Cuba!

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John doubted I'd get a ride. "It's like the Sixties around here, again, son," he laughed. "You don't know who's ridin' on your boat — you might be a damn government snitch for all I know."

He was interrupted by the arrival of Geslin. Standing a little more than five feet, snowy haired and clad in a red sweater, she looked like she could be featured smiling on a biscuit tin. She spoke sweetly and seemed to have come to a place where she could finally laugh about her ordeal.

But not too hard.

She and her husband had run a regatta to Cuba since 1996 as a fully funded group hosted by the Havana Yacht Club. The race took about a week, alternating between days of sailing and partying. The Cubans were even allowed to take their boats out past the border buoys and sail alongside the racers. Geslin made sure her hosts always won.

Upon their return from the 2003 race, their boats were searched by OFAC agents aided by dogs and local police. They confiscated maps, cameras, and trinkets. "Anything that looked like it had to do with Cuba," Geslin recalls. The following morning, armed officers dragged the couple out of bed (Geslin was in pajamas) and booked them on charges of conspiracy and trading with the enemy. In November 2004, a federal judge in Miami threw out the criminal case but didn't close the door on civil fines.

Indeed the Department of the Treasury has hounded them like a junkie relative.

"They wanted $11,000," Geslin said. "Then they wanted $6,000. I just got a letter last week demanding funds."

Geslin handed me a free T-shirt and gave me a hug goodbye. The blousy white tee read "Conch Republic Cup 2003" below an American sailboat drifting into the Hemingway Marina.

She couldn't help me get to Cuba.

After making a few phone calls to a couple of wayward Frenchmen, John threw his hands up as well. "People hate having someone along that doesn't know shit about sailing," he said.

All signs pointed to Stock Island's tragic shrimping community, a poor population locally associated with crack-smoking. No one really thought catching a ride with a shrimper would be a good idea, but time and money were running out. If they couldn't take me, no one could — and I would resign myself to living in Miami.

As I made my way past trailers and abandoned furniture, weird glares and long leers followed me down the road. A battered red Ford Escort veered onto the swale in front of me. The passenger side mirror had been smashed off, and the windshield wipers were broken.

A tire and a nurse's jacket occupied the back seat. A muscular 35-year-old man with odd scars on his cheeks sat drunk behind the wheel. His name was Joel, he wore nothing but blue swim trunks, and he told me to get in the car.

I climbed in and explained the Cuba plan. He flew into a tizzy.

"Come on, man!" he pleaded. "What did you do? It can't be that bad, man! I've gone to jail, man. It can't be that bad."

When I told Joel about the white suits, he insisted I accompany him to his house full of booze.

"You're an American," shouted Joel, cranking up AC/DC as the car swerved onto the road. "Stay an American."

At his palm-lined duplex, Joel began pouring tall glasses of rum dabbed, ever so slightly, with drops of Coca-Cola.

"You don't want to go to Cuba," he continued. "Look at it this way: You do a crime in America, you get locked up, it sucks. You do a crime in Cuba ... see what happens. Especially to us Americans. Castro hates you. If his boys catch you, they'll fucking murder you!"

Joel's mother was French, and his father killed himself when Joel was a boy. He got several DWIs in Concord, New Hampshire, and a judge urged him to leave for good. After finding his wife in bed with another guy, he decided to move to Key West, arriving seven years ago on a Greyhound bus with $650 in his pocket.

Joel claimed to work only a few days a week tending bar. Today was his day off.

"If I had to guess," he said, smoking and smirking, "it was a higher power that made me pick you up today." Plus, nobody likes to drink alone.

He suggested I make up a resumé — writing wasn't really good for anything — and hunker down in Key West.

Joel poured more rum into a pair of plastic cups and asked me to take a walk into the fuzzy, orange afternoon.

Families strolled happily through the brilliant sunshine toward a long concrete pier that jutted out into the crashing waves. Joel took pictures of a Japanese family, demanding they say "Key West" before he snapped the shot.

The pier stretched out into an infinite horizon of whitecaps, alight in the early flames of a fantastic sunset. Joel plopped himself down on the edge, careful not to spill his drink, and pulled his dick through one leg of his swim trunks.

"That's the way to Cuba," he sang, pissing into the ocean. "Swim, motherfucker! Swim!"

I sat down next to him and looked out at the horizon.

"If there's a country that dominates, don't you want to be on that side?" Joel asked, playing Socrates. "I know part of you doesn't. But don't you? We're a power country. We have every brain. We're a country of mixed wits.

"If you go to Cuba, you idiot, you're going to die," Joel concluded gravely. "You're going to fucking die. We got a whole embargo on that country. They all hate us. We don't fuck with Cuba. We don't buy Cuban coffee; we buy Colombian coffee and fuckin' Arab ... er, Arabia coffee. We buy that shit...."

Joel's wisdom and rum filled me with a patriotic fervor. He was right! My bad-ass government knows best.

We finished our drinks and raised our empty plastic cups toward the sherbet-colored heavens: To our irascible Uncle Sam — so wise and powerful he can arbitrarily decide where we go and how we get there.

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