Birds on the Brain

None of that, though, is what makes the Miami-to-Havana flights strange. It’s that this most obvious route, more than any of the much longer workarounds by which American citizens can get to the island, lets you feel most fully the truth of Cuba’s sheer proximity. It’s one of those flights in which, almost as soon as you reach your maximum altitude, you begin your descent, and within minutes you’re looking down on a diorama of palm trees growing incongruously in green fields, and within seconds you hit the ground and everyone bursts into applause. The country you land in is too unlike your own to have been reached that quickly, all but instantaneously, and is after all, you recall, on hostile terms with your own. As if you’ve passed through a warp.