Well, folks, we're now in the virtual age, so I have to make this a virtual Museum Hawk, all done by remote control. In other words, I'm going to give you a Museum Hawk report on the Havana Car Museum in Cuba without having visited it - yet.

Yes, I have been to Cuba, for a long weekend in May 1956, to research a book I was going to write about gun smuggling. This was B.C. - Before Castro, the bearded revolutionary in surplus U.S. Army fatigues who chased out the dictator Fulgencio Batista the last day of 1959. Curiously, Batista's son was a college classmate but I was not acquainted with him.

Because I lived through this period and probably most of you reading this were too young, let me first give you my own capsule history of Cuban-American relations.

Havana  |  

Egged on by recent Cuban exiles who felt betrayed by Fidel, in 1961 the U.S. sanctioned and financed the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. This was followed by the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the stare-down by Kennedy of October 1962. For years later, financed by the Soviets as part of the continuing Cold War, Castro was a constant thorn in America's paws in Latin America and even Africa.

Yet long after we've kissed and made up with Russia, China, Vietnam and (almost) North Korea, Cuba is still on the U.S. s*** list. This seems mainly because of the substantial political pressures brought by the Cuban exile population concentrated in Florida. Let's hope it will be easier for George W. Bush to bring about more normalized relations with Cuba just as Nixon did with China 30 years ago.

In the meantime, individual normal Americans, not left-wing kooks, are conversing with Cuba. A few are visiting, often via Canada or Mexico, though I am told there are daily flights from two or three American cities. Generally these travelers seem to be Cuban family members or those with other compelling reasons.

Havana via Toronto

From March 4 to 11, a group of 25 American and Canadian car nuts, about half of them journalists, traveled to Cuba via Toronto on a tour led by Lee Frederick, a Milwaukee tour promoter who has arranged numerous trips for sports teams to compete.

Havana car one  |  

Now I'll tell you what they saw at the Deposito and a little about its director, Eng. Eduardo Mesejo Maestre, with whom I have been having a lively e-mail exchange - in English. The Eng. signifies, in the European fashion, that he holds an engineering degree, indeed a Mechanical Engineers degree, specialist in automotive transport obtained in 1985.

Sr. Mesejo related to me that, just like typical norteamericanos, in high school he taught himself to repair cars. His favorite is the brown and white 1953 Dodge sedan which was his father's, in which he learned to drive, and which he has retained. He was pleased when I responded that my father, too, had owned a '53 Dodge, though it long ago passed out of the family.

Sr. Mesejo, 39, was employed by the Cuban National Transport of Goods Company for ten years after finishing university, then in 1995 went to work for the Havana historical department. He was made director of the Deposit of vehicles a year later, so he's now an official five-year veteran of serious car collecting.

Waiting for reality