" I Love the Embargo,"  said Bob Walz as our bus hurtled east of Havana. " As soon as it's lifted, it'll be an Oklahoma land rush that'll result in a lot of Cancun-like commercialism."

  It was several days before we'd get to escape in kayaks, and the sportsman were going fishing.  Walz sat next to Trey in the front of the bus, his voice booming over the rattle of the engine.  The 15 others, most of them badly hungover from a long night of rum and $100 Partagas cigars, lit up morning stogies.  I was awed by their stamina.

  Walz is lumbering, white-bearded, with the red and richly corpuscled face of a conscientious drinker, the sort of man who signs his e-mails "Be seeing you, Old Boy."  He's got the living-on-borrowed-time charisma of a disenfranchised nobleman, and he's magnificent storyteller. He was in one of the early battalions of marines sent into Vietnam, where he fought one extended tour.  His mother, Pat, followed him there in 1967 to write a series of acclaimed articles for the Associated Press called "War Is for Mothers."  After the war, Walz worked for a time as a labor relations-manager at a container-ship company in the Bay area, and then opened two contemporary-art galleries in Seattle, one of which was the first to exhibit John Lennon's erotic-lithograph series in 1982.  He's been to Cuba 212 times. He's lunched with Castro.