CUBA, SI!

It's about time: "Defying a threatened presidential veto, the Senate joined the House Thursday in moving to end four-decade-old restrictions on travel to Cuba." Maybe sanity will prevail, and not the politics of South Florida, where Gee Dubya Shrub needs to curry favor with the Cuban emigré community for the next presidential election.

I went to Cuba with a group of tourists in 2002 on a cultural trip arranged by the Seattle rock museum Experience the Music Project. The fact that the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control, which is supposed to be fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, devotes 10 percent of its budget to tracking down "little old grandmas" who've arranged "to bike in Cuba" is beyond belief.

Worse is the president's pledge "to step up enforcement of the travel ban, by increasing inspections of travelers and shipments to and from Cuba." And worst is the Department of Homeland Security's immediate reaction that it would direct "'intelligence and investigative resources' to identify travelers or businesses that circumvent the sanctions against Cuba." That's just what's needed, Tom Ridge's minions busily terrorizing American tourists in the war against Fidel Castro.

I was only in Cuba for 10 days, not long enough to get more than a surface impression. But as I wrote at the time, "waking up in Havana feels wondrous." I took a lot of notes and turned them into a three-part travel story, "Where time has stopped." It began:

From the look of the cars, or what's left of them, it's the 1950s. And nobody is hurrying to work. The hush of dawn lasts until 10 in the morning, when the grocery stores finally open. But the faint odor of petroleum from the nearby oil refineries already hangs in the air. It will last all day, until a fresh sea breeze washes it away at evening.

It's not only the sight of American-made cars from an earlier era -- a 1951 Chevrolet parked on its axles, a 1955 Studebaker in need of a paint job, a 1954 Chrysler cab in front of my hotel -- that lends Havana a feeling of stopped time. It's the sleepy pace of daily life.

There's no big-city bustle in Fidel Castro's capital, population 2.2 million, unless you count the crowds that pack the bus stops under the midday sun or the tourists that jam the clubs and hotels at night. From every corner you can see empty stretches of impoverished streets paved with dirt, dilapidated buildings with once-ornate facades now crumbling and blackened with age.

Though hardly a cure for the poverty, joyous Cuban music can be heard everywhere day and night. I've come to think of it as the holy order of the clavé, and it may be something of an antidote to bitterness. I have no other way to explain the graciousness and openness of the Cubans I met. Even the persistent street hustlers selling cut-rate cigars and the pretty, equally unavoidable prostitutes in the dance halls were remarkably pleasant, their aggressiveness just a form of friendly persuasion.

Then, of course, there's the stopped-time image of Che Guevara in his military beret, a distant if famous memory of the '60s, but still seen everywhere in today's Cuba. Che's handsome, bearded face — on billboards and postcards, on T-shirts and posters — is not just an emblem of the Revolution. It is the symbol, some would say relic, of a state religion.

If you go to Che's shrine in Santa Clara southeast of Havana, where he is buried beneath a gigantic Soviet-style statue that commemorates both his decisive military victory over Fulgencio Batista's army in 1958 and his departure for Bolivia in 1965 to foment another (this time unsuccessful) revolution, you will see him heroically outlined against the sky.

The words "Hasta la victoria siempre" ("Always to victory") are inscribed on the statue's huge granite pedestal. He carries his rifle in one hand. His other hand, wounded in battle, is wrapped in bandages. The dimly lighted crypt beneath the monument, where Che's bones are interred in a wall vault along with 30 others who died with him in Bolivia, has the sacred aura of a martyr's burial place.

The great man himself, Fidel Castro, far from being preserved in amber, is a constant living presence with his own aura of grandeur and mystery. Yet the 75-year-old father of the Revolution -— whose ideas are law and, however dubious, communist policy -- is nothing if not a reminder of the past: a walking, talking embodiment of stopped time.

I went on to point out that the pleasures of Cuba are many, its famous cigars in particular, "but fine dining is not one of them. The food I ate was tasty (leagues beyond, say, Czechoslovakian cuisine). But we were invariably served a monotonous diet of the "Cuban trilogy," our tour leader's phrase for chicken, pork or fish (always red snapper)."

I noted, too, that music is a daily devotion. "Because there are about 14,800 well-trained professional musicians, most of them concentrated in Havana, the city's restaurants and cafes, hotels and dance halls come alive with the joyful sounds of swinging bands and lilting singers. In my experience, only Vienna (though decidedly more sedate) can match the Cuban capital for its devotion to music in daily life." And finally, when some in the group were mugged after a baseball game as they left Havana's main stadium -- a mugging that sent one of us to the hospital -- it was a too-vivid reminder that even where time has stopped and the music plays on, poverty and violence still lurk like evil twins.