We met Santos Artas and his daughter Gretchel sitting in a sea of rubble as they waited more than two hours for a bus. Back then, it seemed like every block in Old Havana was littered with piles of fallen buildings. Now with foreign investors lining up to develop projects, new bars, restaurants, and hotels are rising all over the city. Ghost-like facades of the old colonial buildings are embraced by ivy-covered scaffolding, waiting for final handshakes and rumbling construction vehicles.

During The Special Period, when gas was hard to find, there were few cars on the road, compared to today. Now restored American cars are everywhere----sharing dusty country lanes with ox-drawn carts in Viñales, bouncing over rutted streets in Havana, and lining up for tourists in front of the Capitol building.

Workers loaded Indonesian rice, bound for the provinces, onto trains in Havana Port. Banned from US markets, Cubans still buy most products overseas. Today you can find cans of American Coca-Cola imported from another country, but the diet version is Cuban-made.

In the 1990s, the wait for a journalist visa was long or often futile. Sally and I instead flew to Cuba via Canada. Shortly after we landed, we were intercepted by government officials and escorted to a press center. They let us stay in the country, but we were assigned a government "minder" everywhere we went. As often as I could, I would slip out of our hotel before our minder arrived and wander the city looking for scenes such as this.

For this trip, we received official journalist visas after only four weeks. We had no government babysitters and were free to travel and talk to the Cuban people freely. In 1994, the decay of Old Havana was of the first order. For a game of hoops, two boys painstakingly hammered a tire rim to the peeling façade of a Spanish colonial building. A soccer ball would suffice as a basketball.

Our translator for the 2015 visit told us how as a child growing up during The Special Period, he did not taste chocolate for five years. Many things that American children take for granted, such as amusement parks, were unsustainable without imports and electricity.

Cubans waited in line for everything, especially food. In Cuban kitchens, staples included “grapefruit steaks” and “banana burgers”---baked or fried grapefruit rinds, and ground rounds of banana peels. In 1994, we ate in only one newly legal private restaurant. In 2015 there are hundreds to choose from, and we sampled a new one each night.

We met Maritza Tirador and her son Rodny, who had no soap or detergent. Cubans often used salt or rocks to wash their clothes. We brought many travel-size bottles of soap, toothpaste, and shampoo to give as gifts. This visit, there were more of life's little necessities around. Only one woman approached me outside our hotel to ask for soap or shampoo from our hotel rooms.

Eight months pregnant Luvia Diaz, lined up in the middle of the Malecón hoping to hitchhike back to her home. The Castro government had decreed that all state vehicles stop for hitchhikers during The Special Period. Today, with so many more cars on the road, it would be too dangerous to line up on the Malecón. It would be like standing in the middle of Storrow Drive.

While the government let us travel freely, they also said they were “too busy” to give permission to people in schools, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies (all controlled by the government) to speak with us. Twenty-two years ago, this pharmacy had nearly empty shelves and much of what was available was alternative herbs. The pharmacies we visited this trip looked essentially the same, but without our official minders, the people inside wouldn't speak to us.

Then as now, Cubans wait in long lines for everything: food rations at stores, Internet access at the state-controlled phone shops, buses, and at banks. These people were waiting for their turn at a department store lunch counter to eat plates of cosue---a mealy mixture of flour and sugar costing a half peso.

As foreigners, we attracted attention both then and now. But on our first trip I remember being approached by people more aggressively to buy whatever they could sell. These three men came up to our car window and tried to sell us a gigantic crab.

Three years into The Special Period, hundreds of plants and factories opened late or not at all, leaving nearly half the workforce underemployed. At the corner of San Rafael and Galiano streets, a man was offering a shank of pork on his car for $20.

In 1994, the loss of trade with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc forced farms to resort to techniques of an earlier era. Tractors were replaced by oxen dragging wooden carts across the fields.

On this trip, as we did 21 years ago, we witnessed agriculture planted and harvested by hand. Even on today's famed Cuban tobacco fields, oxen are used to pull an arado-- plow-- to break up the soil.

There is still no such thing as throwing something away just because it's broken. This man opened up a fan repair shop as part of the burgeoning state-supported enterprise in the early 1990s. Cuba's fans continue to age in a uniquely Cuban style. On this year's trip, we found the strangest-looking fan we'd ever seen: The top half was Russian and the bottom half was Chinese. I called it a “Frankenfan.”