Instead, she spent five days sitting in a Havana prison cell, choking down watery soup and brown rice, wondering how her beach adventure had turned into every tourist's worst nightmare.
"They held me for five days while they investigated the case and they didn't let me call a lawyer," Ms. Ross said from her Ottawa home. "It was an undignified way to be treated over essentially a bureaucratic mix-up. When you're in Cuba you have no rights whatsoever."
She also said she was manhandled by her jailors and suffered bruising and scrapes. But worst of all was the psychological trauma. "This is what a police state is like."
………………………….Ms. Ross says the experience saddened her as she realized how terrorized Cubans are. "They are so scared of the government and are scared to talk to you. One of the guards apologized for treating us harshly, saying he would lose his job if he didn't." She said she is speaking out now because she wants the half million Canadian tourists who visit the Caribbean island every year to be aware of the country's dark underbelly. "Canadian tourists don't see what is going on in Cuba because they're only taken to the resorts. They don't see the reality," she said.***
Venezuelan information minister Andres Izarra was even forced to issue an apology to the press after accusing them Tuesday morning of reporting false ''rumors'' of the Castro visit.
Describing the energy summit as ''an historic encounter,'' Castro said he had decided to attend at the last minute, after feeling ``embarrassment that it might seem I wasn't coming because I had too much work.''
He added: ``Everything else is secondary -- for me, Venezuela and the Venezuelans come first, which also means the struggle for my country, the Caribbean [and] the peoples of Latin America.''
The visit is unpopular with anti-Chávez groups, who have accused Cuba of interference in local affairs.
They are particularly incensed at the recent choice of Castro as patron of a class of Venezuelan officer-graduates.
Venezuela, which has the largest oil reserves in the western hemisphere, already provides more than 80,000 barrels a day to Cuba and large quantities to other Caribbean nations under highly advantageous financial terms.
The Chávez aid has helped Cuba continue to recover from its economic collapse following the end of Soviet subsidies in the early 1990s.
Chávez said the two-day summit would ''deepen'' the energy relationship with the Caribbean by setting up an ''energy arc'' that would help protect member nations from the ''squandering'' of resources by rich countries. …………***