The empty midafternoon lobby was vast and square-tiled and full of the drone of floor waxing, and the 6-year-old spilled into it laughing, her mother racewalking behind her, trying to catch her. They saw me at the bar and ran over. “We have to show you this,” the 6-year-old said. She was pulling on my wife’s purse. Mariana pulled out her phone and pushed play on a movie, handing it to me. At the aquarium, a little boy had celebrated his birthday, and his parents had gone in for the dolphin special. You put the kid on a raft and pushed it out into the pool. Shortly thereafter, one of the aquarium’s giant 500-pound dolphins started jumping over the kid and raft, in great looping leaps, one after the other. The splash was considerable. The kid looked terrified, he was face forward, clutching the raft at the edges. The repeating image of the dolphin — frozen massive and pendulous directly above him — got better every time. The audience laughed and clapped in the concrete bleachers, you could hear it on the video. My wife was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes. “You wouldn’t see that in the States,” she said proudly.

We scanned for the Chinese-built oil platform the next day, and thought we saw something once, though it may have been a ship. To ride along the coastal road with the windows down was sublime. The gaps between houses kept giving you glimpses of the sea behind. There weren’t many other cars, but the few that passed left a heavy, organic smell of exhaust in the air. You could taste dinosaurs in it. It carried that precatalytic-converter nostalgia. We were driving down the spine of Cuba, into the vast green interior of the island. Hitchhikers were scattered along the highway, as were people selling various things — garlic, strings of fish. They ran at you as you passed, yelling and seeming to come too close to the car.

I woke up the next day to the sounds of morning pool activity. Water splashing on concrete. Insistent, unfamiliar bird song. Sleepy murmurs of people rubbing lotion on themselves. Hotel carts rattled by outside the double glass doors. It was about 8 a.m. in Varadero on a warm spring day, which I’m pretty sure is literally Utopia, in some vague historico-linguistic way: the northern shore of Cuba, that supposedly moved Columbus to call this the most beautiful place human eyes had ever seen. My wife has a thing about going to Varadero when she goes to Cuba. I don’t know if she even likes it. She does it for her family. To them it would seem insane to skip it — it was the place they most wanted to go when they lived there — not to go, on returning, would be like taking a trip to Keystone, S.D., and not going to see Mount Rushmore.

Sitting up in my twin bed, I looked over at the queen bed — they were already gone. The massive cafeteria operation swung into motion for only a couple of hours each morning. You had to be there for the stampede. We were moving through different micro-Cubas so quickly; too quickly, really. The day before we rode horses through the jungle to see the ruins of ancient coffee plantations and the stone huts where the slaves were kept. We passed cooperative villages of campesinos in the forest and heard political speeches coming from loudspeakers, something about the new agriculture laws. The previous night, coming in on the suddenly pitch-black Cuban highways, zooming up to unlighted “Road Closed” signs at 60 miles an hour, swerving to miss car-killing potholes and horse-drawn wagons . . . that was already dreamlike. And now we were navigating the omelet and cereal stations, in lines of mainly European tourists: Germans, Italians, Central Europeans and also Brazilians, Argentines and Canadians. (You know when you’re meeting a Canadian, because they always ask, in the same shocked tone, “How did you get into the country?” It’s an opportunity to remind you that you can’t go legally, and they can. And by extension, that they come from a more enlightened land. “You need to grow up about that stuff,” one guy that I met at a nature preserve said, to which I wanted to tell him to get a large and powerful population of Cuban exiles and move them into an election-determining province of Canada and call me in the morning.)

The cook at the omelet station, when he asked where I was from and I told him, put up his fists like a boxer, as if we were about to have it out, then started laughing. He told me that he had family in the United States, in Florida. That’s what everyone says. You can’t understand the transnationally dysfunctional, mutually implicated relationship between Cuba and Miami, that defies all embargoes and policies of “definitive abandonment,” until you realize that the line often cuts through families, almost always, in fact. People make all sorts of inner adjustments. I told the man I hated the embargo (the blockade, as they call it) and thought it was stupid, which was both true and what he wanted to hear. He gave me a manly clap-grasp. I didn’t go on and say, of course, that I disliked the embargo most because it, more than anything, has kept the Castros in power for half a century, given them a ready-made Goliath for their David. Thanks to the embargo, when the Castros rail against us as an imperialist enemy, they aren’t really lying. We have in effect declared ourselves the enemy of the Cuban people and done it under the banner of their freedom, hitting Cuba in a way that, after all, makes only the people suffer, and far from punishing those in power, rewards them and buttresses their story. As for the argument that to deal with tyrants would render our foreign policy incoherent, we deal with worse every day — we’ve armed worse — and in countries that don’t have a deeply intimate history with ours, going back centuries. All this because a relatively small but highly mobilized exile community holds sway in a state that has the power to elect presidents. There was no way to gauge how much of this the man would agree with. We left it at mutually thinking the embargo sucked.

Out by the pool, where my wife and daughter were swimming, I lay on a chaise in the shade, feeling paler and softer than I ever had in my life and unlocatably depressed in the way that resorts do so well. I read “Doctor Zhivago,” a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (the husband-and-wife team who have been retranslating the Russian classics for more than 20 years). “Zhivago” isn’t on the Tolstoy/Chekhov level, but there are wonderful passages, including one that I thought spoke to the gruffness you often encounter in Cubans, the excessive suspicion of introductory small talk they sometimes demonstrate. “The fear known as spymania,” Pasternak wrote about Russia after the revolution, “had reduced all speech to a single formal, predictable pattern. The display of good intentions in discourse was not conducive to conversation.”