In the 60-seat turbo-prop that provides charter air service from Miami to Havana, Domingo Delgado, a man in his 60s sat by a window looking down at the Straits of Florida. He was silent for the hour-long flight, except for that moment when the coastline came into view. He turned to the passenger squeezed into the seat next to him and said one word: “Cuba.”

When the plane touched down at José Marti airport, many of the Cubans aboard smiled and clapped. Not Delgado.

For Americans, Cuba is one of tourism’s final frontiers. Only those with licenses to do business or academic work can travel to the country. Those with immediate family can visit once every three years, the result of U.S. economic restrictions aimed at bringing change to an island that is less than a year away from celebrating a half century of rule by Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul.

Aside from the license, getting to Cuba involves a few extra steps. Certain destinations catch the attention of the Transportation Security Administration. “Cuba’s one of them, oh yeah,” said a TSA agent at Miami International as she waited to direct Havana-bound passengers to a bomb detector. The device blows jets of air at travelers who step into its glass and metal shell. Sensors detect any residue left by explosives.

After carry-on bags are run through the X-ray machine, a TSA agent opens each one, runs a hand-sized paper disk over the items inside and slips the paper into another machine to analyze the residue.

Just as the U.S. government is concerned about what’s carried on out-bound flights, the Cubans give their attention to what’s coming in.

In the spartan terminal building at José Marti, a young immigration officer with his cropped hair gelled to modest peaks sat at battered counter behind a single pane of glass. It may all have been new in his grandfather’s time, but the only concession to change was the small computer monitor mounted on the worn countertop. It doesn’t take long to figure out that what they say about Cuba is true: it’s a land frozen in time.

After immigration, carry-on bags are screened as passengers move through to collect their luggage. The Havana airport, with perhaps a dozen or so aircraft on the ground, and many of those cargo planes, doesn’t do the volume business in security that Miami does. Inspectors are not harried, and welcome a hand at pushing the trays packed with belongings though the X-ray machine.

Cubans arriving home, like Domingo Delgado, have their bags weighed after they pluck them from the conveyor.

Cubans coming from Miami don’t travel light. An LCD television and a handicapped toilet seat frame were among the items brought over on one flight. Passengers were blissfully ignorant of the carry-on limits that are second nature to U.S. travelers. Computer hardware and small appliances are cradled on laps and only surrendered reluctantly to flight attendants who promise to stow them carefully.

One of the flight attendants said it’s always like this. She said she travels the route regularly, but added, “as seldom as possible.”

Returning flights are greeted by crowds of people who gather outside the terminal. There is little traffic. As one tour guide explained, there are three types of people in Cuba: those who own cars, those who don’t and those who think they do. The first category is the smallest.

Maybe Domingo Delgado is one of them. But as he pushed his baggage trolley out of the terminal he still wasn’t smiling.

Ava Gardner slept here.

So did Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper and Fred Astaire.

And when one of the knobs on the closet door in a room at the Hotel Nacional came off in your hand, you can only marvel that this was genuine brass, heavy enough to make you put it back on carefully.

The hotel sits above the Malecón, the road that runs parallel to the seawall that holds the Florida Straits back from this section of Havana. It was built in 1930 by American mob money.

It is like spending time in the home of a older relative. It has the smell of a room that isn’t used much, but that still has its dignity and charm. If it was a relative, the Hotel Nacional wouldn’t be a maiden aunt, but a bachelor uncle, with the odor of mystery and glamour and perhaps something shady in its past.

The section of Havana surrounding the hotel is called Vedado, an archaic word that means “forbidden.” It was once a gated community for the Spanish, an area closed to their Creole neighbors.

That tradition continues at the Hotel Nacional. Foreign tourists are allowed in, but it’s off limits to Cubans unless they work in the tourist sector. It’s part of a dual economy that has grown up around the expansion of Cuba’s tourist industry. There are even two currencies: the peso for Cubans and the CUC, or Cuban Convertible Peso, for tourists.

Tourism has grown dramatically since the 1990s, the Americans play a very small part in that growth due to government restrictions on trade and travel that are intended to maintain pressure on the Cuban government for democratic reforms.

The restrictions irk the Cuban government, but have not prevented investment by other countries in its nascent tourism industry. One place where this is most evident is Old Havana. This is the core of the colonial city, protected by a ring of solid stone fortifications, and now under siege by hundreds of workers who are rebuilding and restoring its historic buildings.

The value of tourism in Cuba exceeds $2 billion a year, according to the U.S. State Department. That’s about four times the value of Cuba’s limited trade with America. It is Cuba’s principal source of hard currency, providing the cash that helps the country import basic foodstuffs and raw materials.

If Cuba was open to U.S. tourists, the revenue would allow Cuba to raise its imports of U.S. commodities and manufactures, says Pedro Alvarez, CEO of the state-run trading company.

If the 48-year-old trade embargo continues, Cuba will continue to make progress toward rebuilding its historic districts, but more slowly, according to Alvarez.

“Of course, we need to make a lot of improvements,” he says. Cubans “realize our defects as well as our virtues.”

In Havana, those virtues include a rich tradition of architecture that ranges from baroque colonial to Art Deco modern. Among the defects are some big problems, like a crumbling public infrastructure, and those little things that tend to annoy tourists, like knobs that pull off closet doors and hot water taps that always run cold.

On the fourth floor of the building on Calle Industria, tucked up behind the capitol in Havana, you can savor the sweet smell of success. Nothing says Cuba like a hand-rolled cigar.

The Partagas cigar factory has produced cigars here since 1845. And if Jaime Partagas walked into the factory today, he would find few changes to the business he founded. On the ground floor, they still separate and flatten the leaves, separating them from the stems. The three men wear tank tops and T-shirts, but they sit in wooden chairs with leather backs and seats.

The marble treads on the stairway that leads to the first floor are chipped now. The thick wooden railing atop the scrolled wrought-iron supports is worn smooth and dark.

When Partagas opened his factory, it was also an election year in the U.S. He may not have worried about the result, but José Gonzalez does. He’s one of the guides who lead tours of the factory. That’s not his real name. “Please don’t get my name in the article,” he asked. In Cuba, that’s not an unusual request.

Gonzalez wonders about the 2008 presidential election. He worries about the Republican nominee. “McCain is very close to Bush politics,” he said.

He wonders about Barack Obama. “I don’t think the U.S. is ready for a black president,” Gonzalez said.

But like many Cubans he sees the end of the Bush presidency as a reason to hope that economic sanctions against their country will ease. He sees that as the best chance to increase trade in items such as cigars.

Cuba manufactured 150 million cigars last year. The industry is growing at the rate of 2 to 3 percent a year.

There were some tough times after the 1959 revolution, but cigars endured. Photos in the factory lobby show Fidel Castro with the cigars that became as much a part of his image as military fatigues.

“Socialists took power, and we were not good a business,” Gonzalez said.

But they got better. China is a big customer now, taking up the slack from smoking bans in Europe.

Cuba’s cigar industry has succeeded in spite of the U.S. embargo on imports, but how much better things would be if the embargo was lifted, Gonzalez said.

But back to the cigars.

One the second floor of the factory, women sort the leaves. There are 700 workers in the factory and 70 percent are women. As the leaves are sorted, they are laid on the worker’s thigh, which is covered by a canvas apron. There is a lot of chatter and gossip in the sorting room, giving it the air of a sewing circle.

Climbing to the third floor, on a stairway that is now wooden and somewhat narrower, you reach the area when the leaves are weighed. Partagas knows exactly how many cigars a pound of tobacco will produce. There is no waste.

Narrower still are the stair that reach the fourth floor, home to the cigar rollers. It’s hot in Havana, so the higher up you are the more chance of catching the breeze from the ocean.

Each roller is assigned to produce a style of cigar according to her, or his, abilities. Depending on the size of a cigar, the daily quota can vary between workers.

Cigar rolling is an art even if it comes with a quota. There is no talk, but there is music. Once Partagas employed men to read newspapers to the rollers.

Gonzalez was never a roller himself. He was trained as an engineer.

“Engineers make no money,” he said.

Though he works for the cigar company, his real business is tourism. He can make as much in tips from talking one tour group through the factory as the average Cuban earns in a month. And the end of U.S. restrictions will help Gonzalez by increasing the number of tourists.

It is estimated that up to 5 million U.S. citizens will visit Cuba within five years of the lifting of the travel ban. And it’s a sure bet that many of those will go home with cigars in their luggage.

There are more forms of transportation in Cuba than most other places. Just within the genus omnibus, there are dozens of species. There is the bright yellow school bus, built by Bluebird, just like you see in South Carolina. And they are probably just as old. There are inter-city buses, tired and jammed with passengers. There are the new Chinese buses that are the size of two ordinary buses. The Chinese also provide many of the buses that haul tourists around the island. They come with DVD players and air conditioning.

The species at the top of the food chain is the “camel.” It is a twin-sized bus pulled by a semi-truck. It evolved after the economy crashed in the early 1990s after Russian aid evaporated.

Buses are a necessity because Cubans cannot own cars, at least not any cars built after 1959. The Oldsmobile, retired in the U.S. in 2004, lives on in Cuba. Along with Fairlanes…

Some of these cars are, in the vernacular of the classified ad, “lovingly restored.” But most are held together by ingenuity and desperation.

This was the case with the blue 1951 Chevy that raced across central Havana this week with a group of Americans late for a business meeting. Behind the wheel was Areal. He has a last name, but it is unknown because he broke the law when he turned the key.

In America, Areal’s car provides more than enough probable cause for a traffic stop. In Havana, it’s one more car on the well-worn street. And Areal is one more entrepreneur able to cash in on the growing number of foreign visitors – even if these visitors had found themselves stranded without their tour bus.

Where Areal crossed the line was in packing six passengers into the Chevy, which may actually have been a ’52. Taxis in Cuba are limited to four people: the driver and three passengers.
Of course Areal doesn’t have a taxi license. He doesn’t need one, because he’s not in that line of work. That would have been the second strike against him if one of the city’s numerous police had seen him giving a group of foreigners a lift.

Areal would have also had to explain how a he came to own a car that was built long before he was born.

With four men in the back seat, even a car from the 1950s feels a bit cramped. There was some doubt whether one of the doors was actually closed. It was hard to check because the inside door handle is lost to history. So is the door seal. The view of Revolution Square was as clear through the gap between the door and the frame as it was through the window.

The red imitation leather upholstery in the Chevy has held up well. The passenger seated closest to the door hardly put a dent in it, even with his white-knuckled grip.

If Areal was concerned, he didn’t show it. He maneuvered the car easily through the late afternoon traffic. The diesel that had replaced the original gas engine never complained, though the springs whined at every pothole.

It took two hands to spin the wheel enough to make a lane change. Being a careful driver, he always kept both hands on the wheel. Except to change gears. Or to reach under the dash to blow the horn. Or to switch off the ignition at a traffic light.

Areal made more money than a regular taxi driver would have made for the trip, even if a licensed taxi driver had been around. But more important to his country’s growing tourism economy, Areal made six visitors very happy.

On the north coast of Cuba, about 75 miles from Havana, is a peninsula of white sand beach lapped by the blue and green waters of the Atlantic. Fronds from the coconut palms cover beachside huts in front of the resort hotels. You can play in the sand or the ocean or sit in lounge chairs and soak up the tropical sun. It’s all there to enjoy, unless you are a Cuban.

Cubans can work in the hotel, but they are not allowed to stay in them. That seems unnecessarily strict, since few could afford to stay in them anyway.

Nevertheless, the resorts of Veradero are thriving, filling a void in the economy left by the collapse of sugar growing and Soviet aid.

Down the coast from Veradero, in the port city of Matanzas, factories built by the Soviets are crumbling. Railroad tracks are overgrown with grass and the low trestle over the Rio Yumuri provides a shortcut for pedestrians.

Though it had been a popular spot for summer homes for Cubans in the 19th century, the idea of turning Veradero into a resort began when Alfred DuPont started buying up land there in the 1920s. The oldest hotel was built by Americans in the 1950s just before Fidel Castro came to power. The revolution brought tourism to a standstill. While the area was popular with Eastern Europeans before the breakup of the Soviet Union, a boom in hotel construction started in the early 1990s.

The Cuban government, ostensible owner of all property, entered into partnerships with foreign firms to expand its tourism industry. Typically, government provided the land, private companies built the hotels and they shared the profits. Foreign firms also manage many of the countries hotels.

“That is one of the ways foreign companies are participating in tourism development,” said Miguel Alejandro, an advisor to the minister of tourism. That helps Cuba compete for tourists with other countries around the Caribbean, he said.

Of course Cuban nationals aren’t the only ones who can’t stay in Veradero’s hotels. U.S. citizens are restricted from traveling to Cuba unless for academic or humanitarian purposes. Canadians account for the largest number of visitors to Cuba, about 700,000 a year.

Canadian visitors say they can’t figure out why the U.S. has developed relations with China, but not Cuba. And the Cubans add that the U.S. is also negotiating with Libya and North Korea.

The U.S. ban on travel to Cuba “has an impact on American companies,” Alejandro said. The government estimates that impact at $565 million a year.

In tourism, as in other things, the Cubans say they will continue to develop, but would like to restore relations with the U.S. in order to grow more quickly.

If that happens, there might be Americans on the beach at Veradero again. There might be some Cubans there, too.