It's a hell-hot night in the Sol Club Rio resort near Holguin on Cuba's north shore.

The master of ceremonies, dressed in a silly Hawaiian grass skirt and no shirt, bounces onto the stage to recorded music and announces in excellent English, French, Italian and Spanish that there will be games tonight. Not any games, he promises. Spectacular games. The finest games anyone, anywhere, has ever played.

He laughs at the extravagant promises and shakes his ageing hips to the music and the young women in similarly silly Hawaiian skirts who are his backup group laugh with him and they prance together for the tourists who pay to watch.

Much later that evening I share excellent rum with the master of ceremonies who is Enrique, has a couple of master's degrees and is professor of philosophy at the local university by day. He works from eight in the morning at the university to somewhere around midnight when the resort bus drives him home to his wife and family.

I ask him why he does the two jobs. "I earn three times as much making a fool of myself for tourists as I do teaching philosophy." He shrugs. "It's because of the American boycott."

Why hasn't Cuba simply become a capitalist democracy like the Americans have demanded for some 40 years?

"Once we open Cuba up like a normal democracy, the Americans invade us. Not with guns. With money. We do that at midnight tonight and by dawn tomorrow the Americans buy the whole island. Everything. We are so poor and they are so rich. We'll be back where we started under Batista. We'll be an American brothel again."

Enrique smiles sadly. "It is a matter of saving our souls" he says and shakes my hand and leaves to catch the bus to take him home to his wife and family.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)