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And though Bev Gray said in her report that there were fewer soldiers than she’d seen on previous visits, I hadn’t been to Cuba (or pretty much anywhere else) before, and remember plenty of armed men in uniforms, surveillance and the unfamiliar feeling of being watched, and German shepherds and their handlers patrolling the beach at night.

I also remember the other significant group of tourists, those from the old Soviet Union, and how the crazy Russians sunbathed standing up. I have no general rule about avoiding activities while standing up, but getting a suntan was never among them.

Over the ensuing decades, I never returned to Cuba, but plenty of other Canadians did. The handful I know who went regularly always took goodies for the locals — used clothing, geegaws and electrical appliances you couldn’t get in the stores there, simple things that were gratefully received.

From a distance, it seemed to me the Fidel Castro government managed to build an exceptional health care system (it still appears to be, too) but little else

In this way, Canadians reckoned, they were alleviating the deprivation and poverty — especially acute after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s ended subsidies to Cuba and ignited a major economic crisis — of the ordinary Cuban, while managing to put on the back burner of the conscience the fact that it was also a repressive state which at one point (2008, I think) even had the second-biggest number of imprisoned journalists on the planet.

From a distance, it seemed to me the Fidel Castro government managed to build an exceptional health care system (it still appears to be, too) but little else.

In one of the last remaining bastions of communism in the world, there is little opportunity for that exquisitely well-educated population to flourish and the promise of a long life, which may feel even longer because it’s not a free one.

I imagine that with that JetBlue flight from Florida this week, Cubans were not recoiling in dread, but rather rejoicing, in their hearts at least. It’s not just the symbolic contest between some cast-off Canadian clothes versus a McDonald’s or two; it’s the tantalizing prospect of choice, abundance and someday maybe even freedom.