People are continually asking us questions. Look at the people' Not that everything's perfect in Cuba, of course. We need to take the emotion out of this. Americans, whose views of communist societies these days may be drawn mainly from movies, decades-old wars and personal experience with surly Eastern bloc waitresses before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, never seem quite prepared for Cuba. The island, for all its pervasive poverty, does not reek of misery, like so many Latin American countries.
Streets are relatively clean.
Passersby bumming dollars often speak two languages. Children are in school. Doctors make house calls. And families occasionally go to the beach for the weekend, drink rum and eat ice cream. No hard feelings Most important, to the surprise of American visitors, Cubans show no hint of bad feelings toward their neighbors to the north.