After the departure meeting, Jim suggested we walk down the few blocks to the Nacional for a drink. The Hotel Nacional was the festival headquarters, where we had registered and picked up our badges, and where we stopped by almost daily to get the film schedule. In fact, The purpose of Jim's trip was to pick up the film schedule, but in Havana, that calls for a drink.

So I went. The Nacional is a classic, grand hotel, formerly the best hotel in Havana. It is beautiful and massive and imposing, and like most hotels and clubs near our Hotel Vedado, it figures in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres.

Out in back is a lovely tropical garden, green grass, chaise lounges, palm trees, artificial waterfall. Perched above the Malecón, it affords a view of Havana Bay all the way along to the El Morro fortress. It looks a lot like the backyard of the parador near the entrance to the bay in Cádiz, forming yet another connection between Havana and the city whence Columbus sailed.

The little bar in the garden is called Guarapo. I know from reading Cecilia Valdés that Guarapo is the fresh-squeezed juice of sugar cane, before it is further processed. It is also a drink they sell here, running the cane through a little electronic press on the spot and mixing the juice with rum, another gift of the tropical grass called sugar cane (which was actually imported from Spain...Eduardo Galeano, anyone?).

We try one. We take a seat near the pathway and ponder the afternoon sunlight on the bright blue water. I feel like Silvestre and Cué in the latter chapters of TTT. Jim is a professor of political science in Hawaii, and pretty soon he starts to ask me about my trips to Taiwan.

Which I take as an invitation to launch into a pet theory, one I have been nurturing since I began reading about Cuba, but have not previously revealed: Taiwan is the mirror image of Cuba--the same, yet exactly opposite. Moreover, if you start digging in Havana, and dig straight down long enough, you actually come up on the grounds of the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei.

It's not too crazy if you think about it:

• Island nations
• Located across a narrow straight from a continent-sized enemy
• Ruled by a patriarch from inception until his death
• Established at points close to but on opposite sides of the middle of the twentieth century
• Like a museum of the 1950s

Only the smell of the pollution in the street differs, but then Taiwan can afford good petroleum, and there we are starting to get into the opposites.

True, it is only official Taiwan that is still like a museum of the 1950s, and that more so on my first visit back in '90. But if we talk about Taiwan's economic dynamo and accompanying change, we are again starting to get into the opposites.

Jim chuckles. "I can see your point."

Thank you, Jim.