What do actors Sean Penn and Michael Douglas have in common? Yes, they’re both Oscar winners, but more importantly, both were in Cuba a few days ago; Douglas for a “walking tour,” and Penn for a meeting with local artists, including possibly, an interview with Fidel Castro himself. Penn wasn’t there as a filmmaker though, rather he was there as a “journalist“ reportedly “on assignment” for Vanity Fair.

The exact purpose of Douglas’s visit to Havana was not known, but his sight-seeing tour did include a stop at a state-run tobacco shop, ”where employees showed the actor the finer points of rolling a Cuban cigar,” reports the AP.

This isn’t Cuba’s only recent brush with Hollywood lately. A two-part biopic entitled “Che” (obviously, after Cuban Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara) was released in 2008, starring Benicio Del Toro and directed by fellow Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh. The film series wasn’t filmed in Cuba, though; Campeche, Mexico, among other locals, acted as a substitute because filmmakers were banned from travel to the Communist nation by the U.S. embargo. Director  Oliver Stone, on the other hand, was allowed to travel to Cuba to shoot his Castro-featured documentaries Comandante and Looking for Fidel there in 2003.

We recently wondered, along with a lot of other people, whether cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Cuba are positive for relations. . .  Would allowing U.S. filmmakers to more freely film in Cuba qualify as a good step in that direction?