A month ago, spontaneous and angry demonstrations erupted along the entire length of Cuba, as people took to the streets to protest the lack of food and basic medicines, daily blackouts and other miseries that have beset the island for over 60 years, and have been recently aggravated by a rampant Covid-19 pandemic. If the extent …
Author: Alfredo Lanier
My husband and I live on an off-the-grid ranch outside San Miguel, along with the challenging but dear company of four off-the-street dogs and three cats. My interests lie in politics, writing, photography and sundry forms of spirituality.
The heartbreak of chewy, tasteless sweet corn
One fond memory of living in the Midwest is the taste of freshly harvested sweet corn, from the field to a pot of boiling water, as the saying goes. I've tried to replicate that here several times, with mediocre to lousy results. One year we got a great harvest of corn smut, which in Mexico …
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The Russians did it!
On Wednesday night, as Stew and I settled in for another dose of the serial Occupied, a terrific thriller on Netflix, something very odd happened. The critically acclaimed Norwegian-produced show that by now had us hooked, disappeared from the Netflix streaming menu with no warning or explanation. Fans of the show are already flapping their …
What or who is killing San Miguel's trees?
Though the landscape now is a brilliant Irish green, thanks to about 14 or 15 inches of rain so far this season, there are dozens, probably hundreds of white cedars and certain types of pines all over San Miguel and in our ranch that are turning up dead, as if struck by lightning. Hey, has anyone …
Mao says "Let a thousand (wild) flowers bloom!"
During the past three weeks vegetation around the ranch has gone through a startling yin-yang cycle, swinging from somber brown to a myriad shades of emerald. Trees and bushes have leafed out, and hundreds of wildflowers appeared everywhere, each a unique celebration of the near-constant rain we've had. In years before I have tried to triage the …
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Wondering about the inevitable: Who's going to take care of us when we can't?
While on a cruise to Antarctica in 2007, we had the good fortune to befriend a woman from San Miguel with whom we have remained close even as our life situations have changed. It's those kinds of friendships that make San Miguel a special place. Sadly, about three years ago she had a stroke that initially …
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Early spring brings blessings along with caution
Forget the old "April showers bring May flowers" ditty. In San Miguel that seasonal sequence is backward; summer heat comes early in the year, anywhere from March through May, and the springtime showers, and the flip-of-a-switch greening of the landscape and burst of wildflowers, don't arrive until late June. This year the rains started in late …
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Sad migration stories from the U.S.-Mexico border and closer to home
Driving to San Antonio, a 12- to 14-hour tiresome but otherwise unremarkable marathon, takes a grim turn as one nears the Colombia International Bridge over the Rio Grande, the last stretch before entering the U.S. Up to that point, the roads are mostly first-class expressways, particularly Mex 85, north of Monterrey, recently resurfaced though repair crews can't …
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Momma Lucy's final wiz
This man-meets-dog story began with a puppy in a rusty birdcage. While I volunteered at the Sociedad Protectora de Animales, a local animal shelter, an impatient young Mexican woman walked in and matter-of-factly placed the birdcage and the puppy on the reception desk, as if it were a FedEx package. She said she had found a cardboard …
Travel during the pandemic on the Netflix Express
Compared to the worldwide suffering wrought by the Covid pandemic during the past year, our personal complaints may stand as frivolous, even self-indulgent: Stew and I miss traveling. So albeit a poor substitute, Stew and I have turned foreign television serials and movies into a vicarious travel jamboree. So far we've visited Brooklyn, Iceland, Finland, Denmark, …
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El Rancho Santa Clara 