Mark four days of the Cuba trip as spent in and out of Havana. Tour operators working for the People to People Ambassador Program work the same way the agents do for the Museum of Natural History or the Smithsonian Institution. There's the selling phase and the actual trip itself. Trips into Communist countries are difficult to plan ahead, as different areas become off-limits for visitors, so no one on the American side knew for sure where we would be going once the Cubans took charge.

Much to my surprise, on the first morning in Havana, the 50-member delegation loaded right on the two buses on time, eager to go to the first professional meeting. Fifty people are enough to make up three tour groups with five standbys to spare. I was impressed. I don't think on any given day six percent of Mertzon's population could be loaded on a bus to San Angelo by 8 a.m. unless there was a football playoff in town or a major weather evacuation at hand.

Rows on the bus were assigned by our names written on notebook paper, hanging on the overhead rack. For the trip, and all day, I rode on the inside. "Good manners reserves aisle seats" is the law of the road. My mother's advice to be polite limits you to seeing the world from a bus over the driver's shoulder or under your seatmate's chin. Wheeling across the city, the only sights visible were when I was pitched high enough in the air over a particularly wide pothole to see the scenes on second-story balconies coming down.

We spent the morning at a tropical research station. The meeting opened on the patio off a reception room. Smart waitresses passed around rum drinks and mango nectars. With the open friendliness of the Americans and the polished demeanor of the hosts, the setting could have been anywhere in the Caribbean Islands. The embargo seemed remote, the animosity between the countries forgotten.

The group moved from the patio down a double lane of tall palms and hedges of flowering vines draped across plastered walls. The compound for the research center was an old military post dating before the 1890s War of Independence from Spain. Passing by a huge mirror, I made a hasty shirttail and zipper check, doing a neat pirouette to examine all sides of the body. I utilize mirrors wherever I land. Taking road attrition in small shots reduces the shock of getting home and facing the deterioration all at once.

We filed into a cramped, dreary classroom, fronted by a small stage with the usual screen and podium. Speakers and translators immediately launched a lecture on the fungus and bacteria being developed in the laboratory to inoculate plant seeds and increase crop production, thus to alleviate the food shortages and export deficiencies. The minute the director ended her presentation, the American professors began to hammer her with questions.

After the leader halted the interrogation, I asked the scholar in the next seat if fungi were the same thing as the "toadstools" growing on the ranch. He answered by saying, "Fungi are thallophytes; toads are amphibians, Mr. Noelke. I am unsure of the connection of 'stools' to either family." I brushed away his disgust with a deep feeling of gratitude that he wasn't marking his grade book. However, no science honors were necessary to understand that Cuba was out of fertilizer and needed the dough, or needed the credit to put it on the thumb to buy some abroad. (We'd already heard the economy was in such bad shape from defaulting on international loans that short-term money was costing 22 percent.)

The next stop at the actual laboratory lapsed into more questions and more scoffing by the American experts. Our leaders toned down the discussion. The grumpy seatmate from the lecture room asked on the way to the bus if Texas cowboys break horses by the whispering method. I told him the only cowboy I personally knew who whispered to man or horse was Jim Johnson, who used to work for the Quarter Circle Y. After being thrown so hard a couple of years ago that the thud of his body hitting the ground was audible on the closed circuit walkie-talkie clipped on his belt, ol' Jim whispered his regrets to his boss flying above him in an airplane. Before the story ended, the good doctor turned to another delegate to talk about his fungus research.

On my last pass by the big mirror, I felt so lonesome and left out, I shot a picture of my reflection. It would have been good for relations to have had a sheep or cow herder admit how many things we needed and couldn't afford. But no better than my story about Jim when over, I don't guess I'd of been the one to do the job.

December 7, 2000