With only three months in Cuba, His Excellency Domenico Vecchioni has made up his mind to get to know this island nation through an approach to its culture and its people’s traditions. Thus, touring this Caribbean country has turned out to be one of his hottest desires. A meeting with tobacco planter Alejandro Robaina and other encounters with historian Eusebio Leal are some of the early steps taken by the Italian ambassador to Cuba, a man who’s grateful of the Cuban people’s loving and enjoys his strolls around Old Havana.

“Discovering this island in a piecemeal, unhurried fashion is my pleasure. Even though I read about what this island nation is all about before coming here, I think visiting the country, traveling and knowing the Cuban people are the onlyways I can possibly grasp their culture.” In this effort, Mr. Vecchioni was lucky enough to start his diplomatic mission in late November 2005, when Havana was hosting the Seventh Italian Culture Week –an event organized by the Dante Alighieri Society and sponsored by the City Historian Office and Cuba’s Ministry of Culture. An assortment of shows –some of them devoted to song singing and jazz performances- marked the celebration that included the filmmaking industry, literature, the fine arts, the performing arts and scientific lectures on Italian immigration to Cuba. The Dante Alighieri Society, a center keen on spreading the Italian culture in Cuba, is to Ambassador Vecchioni a place where academic improvement through language courses for both children and adults on the one hand, and the proliferation of cultural projects on the other, melt into each other in perfect harmony.

This institution also joins the annual Cinema Festival , the International Book Fair and other events held in the city. And the point is that culture is the core of cooperation efforts and relations between Cuba and Italy that hark back to 1902. Ambassador Vecchioni remembers that before 1902, an Italian army member named Francesco Federico Falco born in Abruzzo, Mr. Vecchioni’shometown, in central Italy, had come to Cuba to fight in the Independence War and was appointed Honorary Consul when he returned to Europe. “That was the beginning of these relations that are over a hundred years old.Mutual self-esteem between the two nations was also witnessed in the admiration toward Garibaldi, about whom Jose Marti uttered very touching remarks. Even though some historians doubt about the Italian hero’s visit to Havana, the old part of town shows off a plaque that proves this century-old admiration.”

A number of reasons has driven the arrival of Italians in Cuba since a long time ago. From celebrities and not-so-famous people to others that have kept this amount rising steadily throughout time. “There wasn’t a huge migration of Italians to Cuba. According to what I’ve found out, the number of settlements after the Independence War are pretty similar to today’s, somewhere around 2,500 residents. Maybe that hasn’t been a considerable presence, but it’s been steady. Domenico Cappolongo has written four volumes about this issue and his writings have shed significant light on the history of diplomatic and trade relations based on Italian migration. Some kind of social interaction has been established. A case in point is the nearly 1,000 marriages between Cubans and Italians that tie the knot every year, and the 15,000 Cubans living in Italy.”

Tourism lays bare itself as one of the sectors that annually lures roughly 200,000 Italian visitors to Cuba, drawn by the charms of this Caribbean land. Links range from state-to-state economic and trade relations to collaboration through partnerships forged with municipal and local authorities. In this process, Italians have shown their fondness for Cuban cigars, to such an extent that organizers of the Habano Festival have been prompted to dedicate them the Night of the Dealer, a gala dinner to be attended this time around by Ambassador Vecchioni.

This will surely be a great opportunity for Mr. Vecchioni to take a closer look at other expressions of Cuba’s culture. High on the aroma of a good cigar, Ambassador Vecchioni will move beyond one learning notch in a peculiar reality. With a long diplomatic career under his belt, Mr. Vecchioni fesses up his passion about writing. As he puts it, “a diplomat always wants to be a journalist, and a journalist always wants to be a diplomat.” Out of his tenure in Buenos Aires he wrote A Biography of Evita Peron, a book that compiles some memorable moments of this beloved Argentine woman’s social and political life. Other volumes authored by Mr. Vecchioni have to do with Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, a man who saved the lives of many a Jew during World War II.

Perhaps his stay in Cuba will goad the Italian ambassador into starting a new literary adventure to put his impressions on the island in black and white. In the meantime, he’ll continue scouring every nook and cranny of a city that boasts a whimsical renovation, like the one described in An Utopia Challenger, a book that takes you on a grand tour around the history of Havana.