Years after fleeing Cuba, some suburbanites long to visit

The memories, for Clara Stone, are as vivid as the glossy black and white photos she so prizes.

She was 9 years old living in Havana in 1960, a year after Fidel Castro became prime minister of Cuba.

Frightened over the communist changes being implemented, her family was preparing to flee.

Stone, along with her older brother and sister, were forbidden to tell anyone. In secret, they made plans to give away their toys. That summer, the family boarded an ocean liner from Havana to New York, where a sponsor met them and drove them west, helping them make their eventual home in Mount Prospect.

Now, for the first time in more than 50 years, she's contemplating going home, thanks to the advent of charter flights from Chicago to Havana. While she sees it as a chance to visit long-lost relatives, others of Cuban heritage vow to stay away until Castro's influence is gone.

Stone's late father felt that way. He was distraught when Castro took over, and he never had a desire to go back to his former home, the place where he met his wife and started his family.

A half-century later — though Castro's communist regime is still in place — the chance to return is different for his daughter.

“I'm not feeling political,” said Stone, who now lives in Arlington Heights. “What does it have to do, really, with the people? I'm visiting the people. I'm not visiting Castro.”

While the United States' commercial and economic embargoes, imposed the same year Stone's family left Cuba, are still in place, the importance of family ties over politics is emerging as travel arrangements have eased.

New charter flights are now being offered from O'Hare International Airport to Havana each Friday. Beginning Jan. 9, the charter service, C&T Charters, will add another flight on Mondays.

The added ease, however, doesn't matter to Aurora resident and Cuban native Ophelia Hernandez. She has vowed not to return until communism has ended.

“I remember a little bit of Cuba,” said Hernandez, who left when she was 6. “I tell people Cuba had everything the United States had. We weren't lacking in anything. ... So to see Cuba as it is today depresses me because people don't realize that that's not how Cuba was.”

These new flights, she said, “are just feeding the communists. It's not helping the people. It's not putting food on the table.”

Still, the flights are there for those who want to go back.

Previously, U.S. Customs and Border protection had restricted flights between Cuba and the United States to Miami, New York and Los Angeles.

The change is one result of the Obama administration's 2009 move to loosen travel and shipping restrictions. Along with recent decisions by the Cuban government allowing Cubans to open small businesses and own cellphones and computers, news reports in recent months have talked about a physical transformation in the bonds between Americans and Cubans.

Last year, a record 320,000 people flew on charter flights to Cuba from Miami, according to the Miami-Dade Aviation Department. That number is expected to increase this year.

But in Chicago and its suburbs, change is coming more slowly, despite more than 20,000 Cuban residents living here, according to Latino Institute data.

Only seven passengers were on board the Nov. 25 charter flight from Chicago, C&T Director of Operations Erica Marie Serrano said. Even fewer were booked on the following week's flight.

“We're not well-known, and I think that's probably why our flights haven't booked up,” she said.

Yet, Serrano, who opened the two-person C&T Chicago office just two weeks ago, says she fields more than 40 calls a day from people like Stone, inquiring about traveling to Cuba in January and February.

The flights cost $995 per person for a round-trip ticket, which includes taxes and the government insurance required once passengers land in Cuba.

The American government currently grants licenses for a handful of different types of travel to Cuba — among them, visiting close relatives who are Cuban nationals or U.S. government employees, official business travel, journalistic activities, professional research and educational or religious activities.

Ray Carlsen, a former Inland Press Association CEO who has taken nine different groups of journalists to Cuba over the last 15 years, said that at government functions he has attended over the years Cuban officials have felt seemingly “obliged to give us the pitch on the embargo and the imperialist tendencies the U.S. has,” even going so far as orchestrating a chant of “socialism or death” in one particularly memorable instance.

That said, Carlsen added, “most Cuban people would not have exposure to this official line” and were very welcoming to his group during their visits.

DePaul University professor Felix Masud says after a nine-year hiatus, DePaul's history and business program, which allowed groups of students to travel to Cuba, will be reinstated this June. He calls the program “different and unique because it pairs two disciplines that are crucial to understanding contemporary Cuban society at this important period in Cuban history.”

It's personal history that could draw Clara Stone back to Cuba. So she is investigating the possibility of taking a direct flight from O'Hare to Havana.

She hopes to see the “Jewban” — Cuban Jewish — community her uncle Abraham is still well known in, and the places where her aunts, uncles and cousins lived and worked before they, too, left for the states.

“I would just like to go back,” Stone said. “I'd like to see the food and the culture and the beaches. The big city. I've said that for many years.”