And so we stood there together in the small building at the airport waiting for the flight to Havana, and after a short spell we were out the door and onto the runway, clutching our phony papers and our real tickets and taking our fair share of elbows from the rest of the passengers as we all scuttled onto the plane.

The airplane was an old passenger jet. The seats were worn and not quite as clean as they could have been. Chutsky —I mean Reverend Freeney —took the aisle seat, but he was big enough that he still crowded me over against the window. It would be a tight fit all the way to Havana, tight enough that I would have to wait for him to go to the restroom before I could inhale. Still, it seemed a small price to pay for bringing the Word of the Lord to the godless communists. After only a few minutes of holding my breath, the plane rattled and bumped down the runway and into the air, and we were on our way.

The flight was not long enough for me to suffer too much from oxygen deprivation, especially since Chutsky spent much of the time leaning into the aisle and talking to the flight attendant; within only about half an hour we were banking in over the green countryside of Cuba and thumping onto a runway that apparently used the same paving contractor as Miami International. Still, as far as I could tell the wheels did not actually fall off, and we rolled along up to a beautiful modern airport terminal —and rolled right past it until we finally came to a halt next to a grim old structure that looked like the bus station for a prison camp.

We trooped down off the plane on a rolling stairway, and crossed the tarmac into the squat grey building, and the inside was not a great deal more welcoming. Some very serious-looking uniformed men with mustaches stood around inside clutching automatic weapons and glaring at everyone. As a bizarre contrast, several television sets hung down from the ceiling, all playing what seemed to be a Cuban sitcom, complete with a hysterical laughter track that made its US counterpart sound bored. Every few minutes one of the actors would shout something I couldn't decipher, and a blast of music would rise up over the laughter.

We stood in a line that moved slowly toward a booth. I could see nothing at all on the far side of the booth and for all I knew they could be sorting us into cattle cars to take us away to a gulag, but Chutsky didn't seem terribly worried, so it would have been poor sportsmanship for me to complain.