In the tiny, tattered pro shop where he presides, Johan Vega hangs a black-and- white photo of a famous twosome. It shows the pair in action on a shaggy green. One man wields a putter, the other watches, a mundane golf scene marked by a dress-code violation. Instead of collared shirts and spikes, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara wear boots and drab fatigues. Both could also use a shave, but Vega has no interest in their fashion sense. He prefers to focus on Che's poor form.
"Look at his hands," he says, pointing to the image of the guerrilla icon. "He holds them too far forward. You can tell that he doesn't really know how to play."
Vega earns a living dispensing swing tips, but he has few outlets for his expertise. As the sole instructor at Havana Golf Club, a lonely nine-hole track in the Cuban capital, the 38-year-old watches over a course that averages no more than a dozen rounds a day.
That the club operates at all makes it an exception. Built in 1953, it is one of just two golf courses in Cuba, and the only one that predates the revolution that swept Castro to power 50 years ago and purged the island of its capitalist playthings. Casinos were closed, country clubs shuttered. The Havana Golf Club, formerly known as the Rovers Athletic Club, was permitted to stay open as a small concession to British diplomats, who cared for the greens and accounted for the bulk of play.
Half a century later, the club is both a time capsule and a paradox — a scruffy, forlorn layout from another era that caters exclusively to elites. The odd expat or tourist who ambles to the first tee encounters a course that is only a course in the loosest sense. Flagsticks are fashioned from bamboo poles and red rags. Tee boxes are hardpan, and the greens are as rough as the fairways at most munis. There is no driving range. On the rare occasion that Vega gives a lesson, he drops some battered balls along the tree line of the first hole, and shags them himself after the session.
"It's a humble facility," Vega says. "But in Cuba, golf culture simply doesn't exist. If you talk to people here about birdies and bogeys, they have no idea what you mean."
Yet if golf is a game of infinite hope, Cuba is a country of perpetual promise. And the latest assurances from overseas are that golf's fortunes on the island are about to change. For more than a decade, foreign outfits have been cutting through red tape and courting government officials in a push to create courses along the island's largely untouched coast. Nearly a dozen projects are in the pipeline, and though they still face hurdles — not the least of which is Cuban law, which forbids land ownership and complicates plans for real estate leasing — their architects insist that the finish line is in sight. They point not only to symbolic gestures, like the headline-making visit of Fidel's brother and successor, Raul, to an Italian golf course in 2007, but also to Cuba's increased openness to outside investment and tourist infrastructure, prompted by its ever-growing need for funds.
"Look at the Berlin Wall," says Wally Berukoff, CEO of Leisure Canada, a Vancouver-based development company with plans to build three courses an hour east of Havana. "It took a while, but it fell."
Ask him for a timeline, and Berukoff predicts a golf course ribbon-cutting "within three to five years." But he is not the first to offer upbeat forecasts, and some observers refuse to hold their breath. Put the golf course question to Johan Vega, and he smiles wanly. "When the new ones open, show them to me," he says. "Then I'll know it's true."
Any talk of golf in Cuba's future invariably reverts to talk of golf in Cuba's past. In the 1950s, Havana alone had two quality courses in addition to the Havana Golf Club, and the city hosted a stop on the PGA Tour. The island's reputation as a hedonist's delight was reflected in the spirit of the Havana Invitational, which was held at the posh Havana Country Club and infused with a strong scent of rum.
"That's where we learned to drink them mojitos," says Bob Toski, the 82-year-old former Tour star who won the event in 1953. "Some of us found out that we played better drunk than sober."
The year he claimed the crown, Toski shaped a 4-iron to two feet on the closing hole to avoid a four-way playoff, a shot he calls "the greatest of my career." He was swarmed on the fairway by a crowd of buoyant Cubans that included the club's head pro, Rufino Gonzalez, a scrappy, homemade player who later fled the island. "The Cubans were real down-to-earth people and they appreciated a guy like me who had come up from nothing," Toski says. "In all my years of playing, I don't think I had a reception quite like that."
Though the tournament attracted a host of marquee names, from Jimmy Demaret to Arnold Palmer, its days were numbered. By 1958, Castro's forces had descended from encampments in the mountains and the island echoed with unrest. Billy Casper, who won the Havana Invitational that year, recalls that in the run-up to the event, fellow Tour standout Frank Stranahan was warned by playing partners to steer clear of Cuba; they worried that Stranahan, whose multimillionaire father founded Champion Spark Plug, ran the risk of being kidnapped and held for ransom.
"We all knew about Castro and what was going on," Casper says. "When you drove around the island, there was tight security and armed checkpoints. But you didn't sense it on the golf course. You got to the first tee and you just played."
Within a year of Casper's triumph, Castro assumed power. The Havana Country Club was bulldozed, replaced by an art school. Later, in an act of historical revisionism, the PGA Tour erased the Invitational from its records, along with recognition of Casper's win.
In the 50-plus years since Casper struck his final putt in Cuba, the most noteworthy match to unfold on the island featured two outsize figures who could barely play. The pairing of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara took place in the spring of 1961, at Colinas de Villareal golf club in Havana, a month before the failed American-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Portrayed by the Cuban regime as a sporting event, the match was actually political theater, a thumb-nosing exercise intended as a mockery of the U.S.
