An American sports promoter had arranged my match there and developer named Bob Walz. A burly, bearded fifty-year-old who looks like a cross between Raymond Burr and Ernest Hemingway, Walls operates an Aruba-based adventure-travel firm called Last Frontier Expeditions and, when we went to Cuba earlier this year, was making his 125th visit t the island sine 1992. Quietly but legally maneuvering around the thirty-five-year-old U.S. embargo an the Helms-Burton law of 1996 (which, among other things, prohibits any American corporation from making money in Cuba), Walz has shuttled a stream of Americans into the country, including scores of businessmen, cigar lovers, scholars and celebrities. A few came for the kind of macho adventure Papa Hemmingway enjoyed, but most came to try to assess firsthand the investment potential of an island just shaking off forty years of isolation from Western influences.

(continued . . . from Golf Magazine)
Yet even that may change. Meet, for instance, a 50-year-old Coloradan named Robert Walz, president of Last Frontier Expeditions. He has just completed his 106th visit to Cuba, all since 1992 as part of an ambitious export promotion effort. From an office in the Toney Copacabana Hotel in Havana's diplomatic district, his Aruba-registered company brings together small groups of business prospectors looking to strike up joint-venture agreements with Cuba ministries and sports organizations.

An avid golfer, Walzís latest coup involves a number of golf-related projects. A group he brought to town in mid November attended the start-up of the Cuban Golf Federation, held on opening night of Havanaís first cigar club, Le Select, Earlier in the day, 28 Americans and 12 Cubans teed up in the Havanaís first invitational golf tournament, Cuba's first public golf competition in nearly 40 years. The fact that the event was conducted in a scramble format detracted nothing from its significance.

Recently, Walz brought together a group of investors from Scotland and Canada with the Cuban enterprise, "Cubalse." They agreed upon ambitious expansion plans for Club de Golf Havana. The project, to be called Havana Diplomat Golf and Tennis Club, includes upgrading the existing nine and incorporating an additional nine-hole loop. Financing will be private, with additional capital designated for surrounding residential and commercial real estate. The hope is to provide a meeting ground for the new wave of business, diplomatic and leisure activity expected to develop in Havana.

Nor is this the only golf project afoot. Some 80 miles to the East of Havana, on a coral Peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Mexico facing the Florida Keys, is a sparkling new $80 million resort facility called Varadero.