At age sixteen, two years after my arrival from Cuba in 1962, I got an after-school job as a bagger at a Safeway grocery store in Long Beach, New York that paid one dollar an hour plus random tips of dimes and quarters from shoppers impressed with my expertise at keeping the cantaloupes and canned goods from smashing the …
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Is that aging that I hear?
If during a romantic dinner your mature date keeps craning his neck over the table it may not mean he's trying to steal a kiss or ogling your chimichangas. It could be the old coot just can’t quite hear what you’re saying. Or if you’re a preacher at one of the expat temples in San …
Teach the children (to input) well
My latest project may be one of those foolers that turns out to be far more complicated than one figured at the outset: How to escort a timid six-year-old child into the realm of computers, particularly a girl who has never as much as pressed a letter on a computer keyboard and whose parents's exposure …
Doing the U.S. immigration two-step
About a year before President Obama's announcement that the U.S. would seek to reestablish diplomatic relations Cuba, one of my cousins still in the island began lobbying me to help his daughter Odette and her three kids get out of the socialist island paradise. The more pronto the better.My cousin, also named Alfredo, and I hadn’t …
Protests on the road to nowhere
Driving back from two weeks at the beach with our dowager mutt Gladys, Stew and I were trapped in a seven-hour live demonstration of the Mexican art of futile political protest: A lot of sound and fury—perhaps justified—but ultimately signifying very little except that our trip to our friends’ place in the beautiful colonial town of …
A brief, horrible tale
Bicycling back from lunch today our gardener Félix, who has an unnatural sense of hearing, picked up some noise coming from a plastic bag quivering by the side of the road.He stopped and inside the bag found seven puppies, a day or two old, with the eyes closed and one with its umbilical cord still …
When Brad almost came to San Miguel 2
[A reposting of a previous blog that may have been jumbled during uploading]There he was, Brad Pitt, in the lobby of our one local cinema, if only on a huge poster for “Fury” his latest movie which premiered in the U.S. almost three months ago.On the poster Brad seemed to be brooding about war and …
High Noon by the Trash Dump
It’s been said that politics is not a spectator sport but a rough-and-tumble affair. Mexican politics, at least as practiced in our little town of San Miguel, seems to combine both elements—silly stunts and fun spectacles. A couple of postings ago I mentioned the battle over the billboard by the town trash dump, a mano-a-mano …
When Brad almost came to San Miguel
There he was, Brad Pitt, in the lobby of our one local cinema, if only on a huge poster for “Fury” his latest movie which premiered in the U.S. almost three months ago.On the poster Brad seemed to be brooding about war and peace or some similarly weighty topic, with his arms resting on the …
Cracking the door open on Cuba
The announcement that after nearly 54 years the United States is re-establishing full diplomatic relations with Cuba has been cheered by most countries around the world, particularly in Latin America.That’s no surprise. On October 28, 188 members of the U.N. General Assembly voted in favor of a non-binding resolution urging an end to the American …
El Rancho Santa Clara 