A dream deferred

For the better part of my junior year in high school, I looked forward eagerly to the annual Spanish class senior trip to Havana.

It never happened. Fidel Castro came swooping down from Cuba’s mountains and overthrew Fulgencio Battista and his government.

(I was always enamored of Battista’s first name: Full-HEN-see-oh. It rolls off the tongue so fluidly.)

The class ahead of me at Hermitage High School -- the class of 1959 -- was the last to make the trip, by train and boat, to visit a country where the populace spoke Spanish and the students could practice their own language skills.

A year later, when I was a high school senior, all trips to Cuba were off. Castro’s government effectively closed the island.

I had been seriously looking forward to going to Cuba. The trip would have been packed with new experiences. I had never ridden a train before. I had never been on a boat larger than a rowboat. I had never been out of the country. It was to be a trip full of new adventures. I was to be the first in my family to travel abroad.

I didn’t quite know what to expect. I had my fantasies -- based on what returning seniors had told us about their trips -- but there was nothing in my life at that point to base those speculations on. I so wanted to do and feel and live such an exotic experience. But it was not to be.

Now, today, 55 years later, it looks like it might just be possible after all for Americans to take a trip to Cuba in the not too distant future.

That travel experience I never had as a 16-year-old kid was probably the spark in coming years behind my desire to know what it was like to visit and even live in other countries, a longing that grew and matured by the time I was in my early 20s. Since then, I have been to London and Amsterdam dozens of times. I have lived in Germany and traveled extensively in Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. I have visited most of the Caribbean islands and enjoyed the foods and colors and wonders of crowded Caracas.

It’s been quite an experience, one I never expected to have and would not trade for all the tea in China.

But I still haven’t been to Cuba.

Now, it’s a possibility. Would I book a trip tomorrow if it were possible?

I don’t know. I am 72 and travel isn’t as easy and breezy as it once was. I can still do it, but travel has become more and more of a pain in the tuccus since 2001.

Cuba, however, would complete the circle. It would be the journey that never was.