Meeting a Russian Spy in Havana

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Havana Good Time, Boys?
by Mad Dog

Over the next few days she managed to appear in the most interesting places, places we’d never mentioned so she had no way of knowing we’d be there. And some of them were places she shouldn’t have been allowed in.

I met my first and only Russian spy in Havana. At least I think she was a Russian spy. A couple of us were sitting at the bar at the Melia Cohiba hotel when she looked over and smiled. She was pretty, friendly, and well dressed with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a heavy Russian accent. Her name was Ivana.

She told us about how she’d fallen in love with a Cuban man when he was in Russia, they got married, moved to Havana, and subsequently got divorced. She was still living in the city but looked forward to returning to Russia as soon as she had the money. We talked about her life in Russia. We talked about ours in the United States. But she was particularly inquisitive about what we were doing in Cuba. In a very casual way, of course.

The next day we ran into her at the hotel swimming pool. And again that night in a restaurant in another part of the city. Each time she was alone. Over the next few days she managed to appear in the most interesting places, places we’d never mentioned so she had no way of knowing we’d be there. And some of them were places she shouldn’t have been allowed in. The hotel, like all of them in Havana, was very careful about letting prostitutes in. Single women weren’t even allowed into the bar unless they had a room key to prove they were staying there. Yet nightly Ivana occupied a seat at the bar like she owned the place. The swimming pool was for guests only—maybe off-duty employees too, I don’t know—but she was neither. Yet there she was, laying on a lounge chair in the middle of the afternoon when—you guessed it—we happened to stop by for a few minutes.

Images of all the James Bond movies I’d seen flashed through my head, not the hot steamy sex scenes where her name would have been Ivana Havu, but the ones where tarantulas crawl down a sleeping stomach.

Over the five days we were in Havana we ran into her six or eight times. All different hours, all different places. She didn’t seem to work, never propositioned any of us, and was always very talkative, the conversation casually steering around to what we did in the U.S. and what we were doing in Cuba. It was tempting to romance her, after all, when’s the next time I’d get a chance to possibly go to bed with a Russian spy? But images of all the James Bond movies I’d seen flashed through my head, not the hot steamy sex scenes where her name would have been Ivana Havu, but the ones where tarantulas crawl down a sleeping stomach or a poisoned needle shoots out from under a long, painted fingernail.

So I missed my chance. I lost the opportunity of a lifetime because I had flashes of a tiny cigarette lighter camera recording us for posterity and me not getting a cut of the action on when it was seen on the Internet. But maybe I’m just overly suspicious. Maybe she was just being friendly, after all, it can get lonely living in a foreign country. Then again, she might just have been looking to get her green card. I’ll never know.

Š2000 Mad Dog Productions, Inc.

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