We've thought about that for years, Orchid. We've come very close to selling our house and buying one in Cuba, living there for most of the year and coming back to Canada for a few weeks in the summer. But up until a few months ago, when a "foreigner" bought a house in Cuba, it had to be bought in the name of a Cuban...and when you buy a house, you don't own the land, which means that the government can come in anytime and confiscate the land without warning and without compensation. So whatever money we would spend buying the house (including lawyers, translation costs and reams and reams of forms) has to be considered to be a gamble.

We haven't given up yet, the laws are changing there to make it easier for us to buy a house if we want to, so it's still something we're keeping as a possibility. We'd love to live there, though life would be vastly different there as a resident than it is as a tourist. I don't know if we would be subject to the same rationing and restrictions as the Cubans (eg, the penalty for a Cuban caught buying more beef than their allocation is 20 years - yes, 20 years - in prison. Beef is strictly rationed and the bulk of it is reserved for tourists).