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Inevitably, when I say I’m going to Cuba, somebody says, “Mmm, yummy! I love Cuban food.” And after watching Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" season premiere episode on Cuba, you might be tempted to think something delicious awaits you on the island.

But here’s the honest to God truth: Most food in Cuba is awful.

Oh, sure, you can get a decent meal in a hotel. And in a casa particular – a private home that rents room – you might luck out with an especially talented owner who can whip up a yummy breakfast.

And, yes, there are paladares – private, family-run restaurants – that run the gamut from terrible to exquisite (and crazy expensive, and cash only), but to quote Frommer’s: You don’t come to Cuba for fine dining.

Generally speaking  the food is starch-heavy, greasy, and not particularly flavorful. Service is all over the map, from the terribly obsequious, to the obnoxious jerk who once served me and took his smoke break before serving the friend across from me, so that our meals arrived exactly 20 minutes apart – and hers was cold. No apologies.

Yes, part of the problem is that there are scarcities. Even the most upscale Cuban supermarkets (no, not all markets are created equal in Cuba), the variety is stunted.

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When I first came to Cuba in 1995, cell phone service was so scarce that, after a meeting in which an official had flashed a cell phone from the podium, I turned to Abel Prieto, then the president of the writer’s union, and asked if he had one too.

“Oh, no,” he said, “I’m not high enough to be part of the celucracia.”

The cellucracy!

In later years, of course, Abel became the minister of culture and acquired a pocketful of cells, and I began to know people – rarely connected with government – who had one too. But the stories behind their cells were always complicated and strange.

The reason was that Cuba did not allow its citizens to legally own cell phones until 2008. That’s right, 2008 – 45 years after its invention, Cubans finally got a chance to own a cell.

Prior to that, to have a cell phone meant you were either very high in or very important to the government, or you had an European or Canadian connection – a foreigner willing to get a phone and cell service in her name and let you use it. It was an exclusive club, and pulling a cell out in public elicited envy, awe, and not a little bit of fear.

After 2008, though, cell phones have become ubiquitous.

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Made it to Havana after all, on a full but fleet Aeromexico flight that landed in Cuba well after one in the morning. Cubana de Aviación is back on my shitlist, its agent in Havana insisting the airport people had to change my ticket, the airport people throwing their hands in the air, then pointing to the computer screen that showed access denied.

Landing at José Martí airport in and of itself does not actually end the anxiety of travel to Cuba. In some ways, this is where it reaches its apogee.

You see, Cuban authorities do not see all travelers equally. If you’re American or some other foreigner, you will breeze right through the document check point.

But it’s entirely possible that your baggage will be checked down to its minutiae. Two summers ago, when I first brought my wife here, the customs agent took a sealed bag of Bic pens, opened it, then proceeded to unscrew every single pen individually. An eternity later, she was allowed out on the streets once the pens were cleared of all possible wrongdoing.

Cubans, whether local or diasporic, don’t get off quite so easily.

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If things had gone according to plan, I’d be writing this from Havana, the first of what I hoped – and maybe still hope, I’m not sure now – would be a brief series of blogs from the city in which I was born.

But instead I’m writing from a dreary non-beach hotel in Cancun, Mexico, listening to the rain come down like a machine gun on the roof. The streets are inundated from the avalanche of water, a fact I discovered on my little jaunt downtown to the Cuban consulate.

See, supposedly, as a Cuban citizen with a duly recognized Cuban passport, a trip to Cuba shouldn’t be much of a trial. Sure, Cubans – like most Latin Americans – love a good bureaucracy, but between my own resigned experience and most of the bureaucrats’ own growing experience, it’s been getting better.

Normally, I travel to Cuba via Jamaica, on what I now think of as a great airline, Air Jamaica. I recall they used to have a champagne breakfast en route to Havana. But I digress … the poor suckers went bankrupt and got reorganized and, in the process, friends recommended the Cuba Network. It’s basically a German travel agent that administers business for Cubana de Aviación, the Cuban national airline.

Normally, I try to avoid Cubana.

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Barack Obama is now the last living Democrat whom anyone ever believed was progressive who’s not on board for same sex marriage.

Except, of course, that he used to be.

Back when he lived here in Chicago and went to dinner with his gay pals and celebrated their anniversaries and such.

Back around 1996, when he told Outlines (which later purchased and merged with Windy City Times): “I favor legalizing same sex marriage, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

Nothing ambiguous there.

But just days ago, in response to New York’s legalization of same sex marriage, all the president could muster was that it was “a good thing” it had happened.

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About 30 of Barack Obama’s neighbors gathered at the Hyde Park Treasure Island Wednesday night, deliberately ignoring his big Afghanistan speech, to take on a much bigger task. Huddled in the downstairs community room, they separated into four smaller groups to break down their project into manageable bites: phone banks, canvassing, signs and other such down-to-the-ground matters; one group came up with a slogan: “I’m in.”

It was the first meeting of the Obama Campaign Grassroots Planning Sessions, or the Obama GPS, in the president’s home neighborhood, just a few steps from the 55^th Street Walgreen’s where he was once a common late night cigarette buyer, back in the day when he smoked and went places alone.

Folks had found their way here because they had some grassroots tie to the 2008 election: they were former volunteers, or referred by a volunteer, or they’d taken the initiative to find the meeting on the campaign website or via some other means.

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Last weekend, I went to Iowa to perform and celebrate a heterosexual marriage. A friend of mine, on hearing the news, wrote me a quick note: “Are you already post-gay marriage?”

As my mother likes to point out, I used to be “against” marriage – or, more precisely, with marriage not available to me as an option, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time imagining what might have been. I signed on instead to the idea that if you love, you don’t need a piece of paper from City Hall.

Of course, marriage is more than love. It’s a contract, a deal to live a life together, openly; it’s also a tacit acceptance of membership into mainstream society – it says, we will abide by your rules in exchange for certain rights and protections.

Which is what brought me around, philosophically, to marriage, long before I signed on to it as a possibility for myself. If marriage is available to some – with its rights and protections – then it should be available to all. Isn’t that what democracy is about? (And, no, as sweet as Illinois civil unions have been, the state law is separate but equal – and not good enough.)

Some queer activists decry the prominence the issue has taken, derailing the focus on more radical societal change.

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