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Photo by: Christopher P. Baker

 I'm in the mezzanine bar of Havana's chic, new Hotel Saratoga. The hotel has been open barely a week, and I'm admiring its 21st-century sophistication, reminiscent of trendy digs in New York or London. The elevator doors part, and a muscular young man steps out. He's naked except for a towel around his waist, and water from the rooftop pool puddles up as he slips fish-like through the bar and into the lobby. Slack-jawed, I look on as he saunters toward the front doors, intent, it seems, on exposing himself to Cubans strolling along Paseo de Martí. The hotel's desk clerk runs an intercept.

"Excuse me, sir," the clerk says respectfully in near-perfect English. "We don't allow guests in the lobby dressed in towels."

"Yeah, I know!" the guest, a yanqui, replies with disdainful dismissal.I feel the yin and yang of déjà vu and premonition: The farcical scene recalls the BBC's hilarious hotel-based sitcom Fawlty Towers, even as it portends possible things to come as a U.S. tourist invasion hovers on a not-too-distant horizon.

Cuba on the Horizon...

Travelers visiting Cuba today do so at a fascinating historical moment. The Democratic takeover of Congress in the U.S. has emboldened anti-embargoforces, and in January, a bipartisan bill was introduced to end existing travel restrictions to Cuba. While President Bush has promised to veto any such legislation, a Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential elections may virtually guarantee change. And then there's Fidel. When Cuba's octogenarian leader became incapacitated by a potentially fatal illness, his brother Raúl (Cuba's de facto new head of state) extended an olive branch to Uncle Sam. Possibility hangs in the air like the intoxicating aroma of añejo rum. After more than a decade of traveling to and reporting on Cuba, I'm suddenly feeling quite giddy. While authorities in Florida prepare for a possible flood of émigrés fleeing Cuba after Fidel's demise, the island is preparing for a tidal wave in the other direction. A recent study predicts that five years after restrictions are lifted, 3 million U.S. citizens annually could be laying their towels on Cuba's sugar-fine sands.Unbeknown to most U.S. citizens, tourism to Cuba is already huge. More than 2.3 million visitors arrived in 2006, second in the Caribbean only to the Dominican Republic's tally of 4.4 million. Canadians overwhelmingly lead the charge, followed by Brits. Visits by U.S. citizens, however, are currently restricted to Cuban-Americans visiting family (limited to one visit every three years), plus journalists, sports figures and a handful of other categories that qualify for licensed travel. Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. citizens end-run the restrictions – at the risk of a hefty fine – by hopping planes to Cuba via Canada, Mexico, Jamaica or Costa Rica. What those millions of visitors find leaves them spellbound.

With all the hoopla about politics, it's easy to overlook the sheer beauty of the place: the talcum beaches shelving into bathtub-warm waters of Maxfield Parrish hues; the bottle-green mountains and emerald valleys full of dramatic formations; the ancient cities with their flower-bedecked balconies, Rococo churches, and palaces and castles evocative of the once-mighty power of Spain. And, not least, on every block the "yank tanks" of yesteryear – Edsels, Hudsons and Kaisers – conjure up the decadent decades of martinis and mafiosi.

After thirty-odd visits to Cuba, I'm still enraptured as I watch José Pérez Pereiso swing his 1957 Dodge Coronet around and gun it, rumbling up the riverbank beneath the shadow of the Sierra del Escambray mountains in the town of Trinidad, four hours east of Havana. The car is a metallic-gray, green-blue peacock, as shiny after a bath in the river Táyaba as the day it rolled off the factory floor in Detroit. The passenger door swings open, heavy on its creaking hinges, and in I jump. We set off, the Coronet's wedge-shaped tail fins slicing the hot air. I slide around on the slick, vinyl-covered bench seat while José, a lanky fellow with a handsome bronze face and jade-green eyes, shifts the gears with a push-button TorqueFlite selector.

Cuba on the Horizon...

We cruise through Trinidad in land-yacht luxury, a late-'50s luxe that generates in me a sense of Twilight Zone incongruity that echoes Trinidad's even more ancient mystique. The town was founded as one of Cuba's original seven cities in 1514. The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage site, second in magnificence only to Habana Vieja (Old Havana), the capital city's remarkable core. The entire town of Trinidad is a lived-in museum, its cobbled plazas entirely restored. Its setting is no less remarkable: Sitting astride a hill, the town of some 40,000 people catches the breeze and gazes out over the Caribbean against a backdrop of the verdurous Sierra del Escambray.

Out the car window I watch a sunburned French tourist scurrying through the main plaza. "Mon dieu!" she exclaims, raising her camera toward a toothless old Cuban poised on a donkey, adding another mantle to the multi-textured layers of a temps perdu. That's Cuba. Everything looks so nostalgic. The island has a flavor entirely its own: an amalgam of colonialism, capitalism and communism. When walking Havana's streets, I feel like I'm living inside a romantic thriller. I never want to sleep for fear of missing a vital experience. It's intoxicating, still laced with the sharp edges and sinister shadows that made Ernest Hemingway want "to stay here forever." Cuba was a salacious environment in which to pursue writing, a lusty and libertine place. It still is.

I settle myself at the bar of La Bodeguita del Medio, Hemingway's favorite watering hole half a block from Havana's antique cathedral. Troubadors move among thirsty turistas as I savor the proletarian fusion of dialectics and rum. Seduction, however, keeps creeping in. I sip a mojito, the rum mint julep that Hemingway brought out of obscurity. It's strong and, as a sultry Cubana stares into my eyes, I feel a glimmer of the "other charms" to which Hemingway had succumbed.

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Cuba on the Horizon...

Online Editor's Note: To read more about Cuba by this author, check out www.christopherbaker.com or www.cubatravelexpert.com.