Tony speaks to Overhead Bin about why he wanted to take the show to Cuba.

In the season premiere of “No Reservations” airing tonight, host Anthony Bourdain visits Cuba for the first time. He spends the hour falling for Havana’s old school charms, from its retro cars and architecture to its passionate baseball fans to its so-called “sleeping” beans, which are eaten only after they’ve sat overnight.

U.S. tourists who have long dreamed of visiting the communist country should take note. Now that the Obama administration has issued new rules for traveling to Cuba, average Americans can visit the country provided they do so with tour operators that provide educational experiences.

Bourdain talks to Overhead Bin about highlights − and the politics − of his first trip to the country. “No Reservations” airs this evening at 9 p.m. on the Travel Channel.

Q: You said in the show you expect to get a lot of grief over going to Cuba. Has the hate mail started trickling in?

A: No, but I think I’ve seen some stuff on Facebook. There are Cuban Americans with a zero tolerance policy as far as anything to do with Cuba, as long as any Castro is alive. It is heretical for any American to visit. It is an emotional position that I understand and that I’m sympathetic to, but obviously I went anyway.

Q: For the benefit of your viewers?

A: No, because I wanted to go. I don’t know that I have a lot of virtues, but one of them would be an intense curiosity about the world. I think my expectation is that things are going to be changing in Cuba very soon and I wanted to see it before they did.

Q: Was there anything that you wanted to see firsthand? 

It was the buildings, the cars. You really are walking into 360 degrees of another era. It really feels untouched. It is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen in Latin America or anywhere in the Caribbean. There’s nothing like it. It’s gorgeous. Even as it crumbles, even given the very evident state of disrepair, it is beautiful.

Q: Is this the most politically charged destination you’ve visited?

A: For some people it’s going to be. I just don’t really care. I’ve been to a lot of countries where we have differences of opinion, to say the least, or bad histories or even places where they see the world very differently than I do. It was not something that I was looking to concentrate on, but at the same time, I was very aware that it was worth mentioning often that Cubans can’t leave Cuba, that they’re not free to say what they want. That even in this incredibly wired age, that Twittering or communicating freely over the Internet are things they can’t do.

Q: Speaking of free expression, what did you make of the legally permitted street corner debates over baseball?  

A: I think there’s a lot going on there that I don’t know in the sense that you could argue publicly about baseball, but it’s probably ill-advised to argue about other things, though I do understand that politics do creep into the discussion at times. I wanted to mention repeatedly in the show certain obvious facts about living in Cuba, which is something that other travel show hosts, perhaps, did not do and I think got a lot of grief for it. If you’re eating in a fine dining restaurant it is worth mentioning that chances are, you won’t be seeing any ordinary Cubans there.

Q: You’re infamous for calling people out for idiotic behavior. Did you find any of your experiences in Cuba aggravating?

A: No. We met ordinary people, we met people who had been assigned by a government agency to help us. Right across the board at every level, people were shockingly frank with us as far as how they thought things would go. We were not shy about talking about these things. I get to come back to New York and say whatever the hell I want.  The people who were good to us and spoke frankly to us, they have to live there. We’re not looking to hurt anybody with the show.

Q: It looked like you ate well there. What was the best thing you had? 

A: I ate some really good food in a high-end tourist restaurant, a Spanish-Basque place, but I have to tell you the “sleeping” beans were really extraordinary. I’m a guy who is very happy with just some good beans and some decent rice, and that was quite good.

Q: Do you feel like the next few years will be transformative for Cuba?

A: I think everybody there is tangibly holding their breath. They know something has to change. Even the noises coming out of Raul Castro − he breached the subject of term limits. Just the fact that he would utter those things in public, it doesn’t mean they’re getting any nicer, but they’re recognizing a changing reality on the ground. It’s not a viable system and I think everybody knows that. People have to struggle and sneak and improvise and that’s what they’ve done their whole lives. How long can that go on when the they know the rest of the world is talking to each other having thousand of conversations?

Q: Some people go to Cuba and fall in love with it like some people fall in love with, for example, New Orleans. Do you feel like Havana has your heart?

A: I feel it has my heart in really significant ways. It’s not my country, where New Orleans is. It’s not my system, whereas New Orleans, for better or worse, is. But it has my heart in the sense that I’ll always care a lot about what happens. I feel interested in what happens and how it works for the Cuban people in ways that I might not care in other places. It’s just so damn beautiful. It’s like Venice or Naples in that sense.  All of the things that don’t work, the fact that it is a dysfunctional system … is also what has kept it un-ruined. There’s not a lot of strip malls or the usual buildings you get for being too close to the Soviet Union; they managed to avoid that for the most part in Havana. It’s still beautiful and that’s something.

http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/07/11/7044293-anthony-bourdain-on-taking-no-reservations-to-cuba