Vanessa Bauza

HAVANA · Shipments carrying tons of American food have slipped into Havana's port this year as trade between the feuding nations grows. But this month another kind of U.S. cargo arrived -- not food for the body, but for the music lover's soul.

It is a container of 27 pianos from Oakland and Brooklyn destined for conservatories across the island where pianos are ravaged by the triple threat of time, termites and humidity.

The donations represent the latest effort by Benjamin Treuhaft: Piano tuner by trade, anti-embargo activist by vocation.

In 1995 he founded Send a Piana to Havana, a New York-based organization that has shipped 237 pianos to the island, despite a $3,500 U.S. Treasury Department fine for "trading with the enemy," which Treuhaft has refused to pay.

The son of the late activists and one time communists Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford, Treuhaft first came to Havana 10 years ago on a trip to protest the U.S.
travel ban. He brought along the tools of his trade and "tuned every piano in sight."

When an official at the Cuban Institute of Music explained that what the island really needed were new pianos to replace cacophonous old Soviet imports, Treuhaft's
first response was "that's easy!"

He soon learned that few things in the U.S.-Cuba impasse are easy.

"It's been quite an odyssey," Treuhaft, 56, said in a phone conversation from his New York home. "Fund raising is difficult, collecting the pianos is difficult and
dealing with the American bureaucracy has been incredibly difficult."

Treuhaft's piano donations are licensed by the U.S. Commerce Department's Office of Strategic Trade, but he is not allowed to travel to Cuba legally to tune them.

As part of a crackdown on illegal travel to Cuba, the Treasury Department, which enforces the U.S. trade embargo, recently has begun the first judicial proceedings
against such travelers as Treuhaft who have been caught visiting the island without a license. While he has not yet been contacted for a trial, he said the crackdown
will not keep him from coming to Cuba or from poking fun at pro-embargo politicians such as Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, who tightened sanctions against the
island.

"I go anyway because I don't believe in that law, the travel ban," he said. "I always send a postcard to Jesse Helms from the José Marti Airport" in Havana.

Over the years, Treuhaft's donations have included 1920s Steinways, baby grand pianos too big for their tiny New York apartments and uprights donated by
parents or spouses of players who have passed on.

Each piano has a story, said Treuhaft's Cuban partner, Armando Gomez, who teaches piano tuning and repair at Havana's prestigious National School of Music and
is in charge of distributing the instruments.

"This project is like our baby," said Gomez, 49, who works with his wife, Julia, also a tuner at the school. "All the students have to take piano lessons here no matter
what their specialty. So, the pianos are used from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. This is a great help."

Since working with Treuhaft, Gomez has repaired 40 donated pianos for the National School of Music and delivered dozens to elementary and high schools across
the island. In one case it took four years just to arrange the transportation for one piano to a conservatory in the town of Baracoa, nestled in the mountains 500 miles
east of Havana. Some pianos are also awarded to individual students as prizes in music competitions.

At Gomez's cramped workshop, the walls are lined with drawers and shelves full of old ivory keys, shanks and screws, pedal hardware, springs and cannibalized
parts from pianos that were beyond repair.

With the donated replacement parts Gomez last year founded a piano repair school, graduating the first six Cuban piano tuners and technicians since the 1960s.

The latest shipment of donations includes an entire tuning workshop willed to the school by a New Jersey piano tuner who died earlier this year.

Like Treuhaft, Gomez has also gotten caught up in Cold War politics. He has twice visited the United States. But in July, American authorities turned down his
request to travel to a piano tuners convention in Dallas, marking his passport with a stamp that claims he is "highly dangerous to the national security of the United
States," he said with a chuckle.

Vanessa Bauzá can be reached at vmbauza1@yahoo.com

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