In the kitchen I had a long, interesting conversation with Jean, one of Michael’s co-workers. She’s a jolly woman in her thirties, with shoulder-length dark hair, no makeup. She’d just gotten back from a trip to Cuba, and talked about a documentary she’d considered doing on a relative who was “not a red-diaper, but a crimson-diaper baby.”

The relative’s parents had not been actual party members, but only because her father was the bureau chief at Tass in the American city where they lived, and needed to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity. The parents, Jean said, combined their Communist views with an especiallky virulent form of New England puritainism, and as a result her relative had a constrained, paranoid, and isolated childhood. Her memories of the Red Scare were especially terrible, of government agents following her and her parents, of tapped phones and other forms of harassment. By the time she was twenty, she found herself virtually unemployable in the U.S., so she’d gone to Czechslovakia to live, then ended up in Cuba, where she remains. Now an older woman she is, Jean said, like most American expatriates in Cuba — intense, neurotic, and dogmatic.

Her life was tragic in ways Jean said she’d rather not discuss, and Jean decided not to do the documentary. It might have upset her relative and the story might distract viewers from what Jean wanted the documentary to be about — life in Cuba. Her relative, she said, seems to be one of those people who lives someplace, not because she loves the culture or langauge (her Spanish is still terrible) but because it appeals to her politically. Jean mentioned another interesting ex-patriate, an ex-CIA agent who had a crisis of conscience and defected. He’s now a travel agent in Havana.

At that time, it was still illegal for Americans to visit Cuba.