In Havana, A Page From McCain's Past

Barral said he conducted a cursory medical examination and found that McCain had difficulty rotating his arms. McCain told him that he had not been subjected to "physical or moral violence," Barral noted at the time.

In his small, precise handwriting, Barral noted that cookies, candies, teacups, oranges and cigarettes were on the table. McCain, who had suffered multiple fractures after ejecting from his plane, walked in leaning on a cane, Barral said.

Quickly dispensing with the pro forma name, rank and serial number, the men talked about McCain's family, his aspirations and the shootdown of his plane, according to Barral's notes. In his book, McCain writes that Barral asked "rather innocuous questions about my life, the schools I had attended and my family."

"He was only interested in talking about himself," Barral recalled. "He had a big ego."

The son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals, McCain lamented in the interview that "if I hadn't been shot down, I would have become an admiral at a younger age than my father," Barral's notes state. Barral said McCain boasted that he was the best pilot in the Navy and that he wanted to be an astronaut.

"He felt superior to the Vietnamese up there in his plane, with all his training," Barral recalled.

McCain did not ask questions about news from abroad, Barral said, but did ask the psychologist to get a message to his then-wife, Carol McCain, and provided her address in Orange Park, Fla.

"Tell her I'm well," Barral noted McCain saying. "Tell her I wish her all the best and that she shouldn't worry about me."

Though McCain says he did not discuss military matters with Barral, a U.S. commander in the prison later issued an order forbidding U.S. POWs to be interviewed by visitors, McCain wrote in his book. The decision was "a sound one, even though it deprived me of further opportunities to demonstrate 'my psychic equilibrium' to disapproving fraternal socialists, not to mention the extra cigarettes and coffee," McCain wrote.

Barral's interview with the son and grandson of U.S. admirals was considered a huge coup and "newsworthy," according to the 1970 Granma article. The communist party newspaper ran a close-up of McCain's face on its front page.

"I'm not sure if it was for propaganda purposes," Barral said recently of the 1970 interview. "But I accept it if I was an instrument for propaganda."

Barral's life since that flash of celebrity has unspooled like that of many Cubans. He retired with a tiny pension in the mid-1980s and said he barely had enough money to get by until opening his paladar in the mid-1990s.

His family, like those of almost all Cubans, is fractured. One of his sons, Ernesto Barral, became a successful doctor after fleeing the island, making the unsubstantiated claim that he windsurfed to Florida.

Barral said he follows U.S. politics in clippings sent to him from friends and relatives abroad, and has taken a shine to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) because he "represents change."

"I don't know if McCain would be a good president," Barral said. "And I don't care."