Given that the last time I saw the southern port city Cienfuegos was fifty-one years ago, when I was thirteen years old, my memories of it proved to be amazingly vivid. I recalled that my maternal grandmother and my spinster aunt lived in a traditional home near El Prado, the town's main boulevard, and around the corner from …
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Cuba's Age of Invention
Cubans have a knack for pithy descriptions, particularly when referring to economic problems.So, resolver, or "to resolve" or "to make do" refers to the adaptation one makes to get around shortages or other life hurdles. Indeed, shortages, standing in line and rationing cards have been the only reliable staples during the 54 years since the …
Name that relic!
You step out of the airport in Havana and its muggy tropical air hits you. Then as you head toward the city your attention shifts from the stifling heat to the roads and highways filled with impossibly old cars, most of them American from the 1940s and 1950s. If at first the landscape looks like a …
A tale of two enemies
Two good indicators of the surreal lunacy in the relations between Cuba and the U.S. are the "mountain" of flagpoles in Havana and the butter patties we were served with our breakfasts as we traveled throughout the island.The mountain, or more properly, jungle of flagpoles, many of them rusting and no longer operable, stands across …
A two-week magical mystery tour
Though thousands of foreigners visit Cuba every week, for most Americans the island remains a mysterious corner of the family attic where, for the past fifty years, they have been told not to go. They may have heard some reasons why--something about Communism, missiles, bearded revolutionaries and terrorists--but it's been such a long time it's …
Wedding bells dilemma
Weddings have always made me uncomfortable but surely the fact that I can't dance is the least of it. I perceive them as foreign rituals like Hindus bathing in the Ganges or Muslims going 'round and 'round their holiest-of-holies in Mecca. I never quite know what to feel or do at weddings, particularly if I attend with …
Mirror, mirror? Nah, never mind
Never been one for admiring myself on the mirror except perhaps for my thick, formerly dark brown mane, especially after most of my friends began losing theirs regardless of the color. Losing one's hair is a clear sign of creeping, or galloping, old age, one that makes you concentrate on the sink drain rather than …
Impotence at the border, with no pictures
Short of being locked up in a Turkish prison on charges of smuggling heroine, nothing makes you feel smaller or more powerless than crossing an international border even if one of the sides is your own country.Last week on the way to San Antonio Stew and I congratulated ourselves on making such good time, about …
Broccoli and universal health care
During oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court two weeks ago Justice Antonin Scalia derisively compared the mandated insurance requirement of President Obama's health care law with a theoretical government mandate for Americans to buy and presumably eat broccoli. If the federal government can impose one mandate, why not the other?It was supposed to be …
Bloody Week
Although I consider myself a triple-plated Roman Catholic, one who attended Catholic elementary and high schools, plus college, and was even attracted—albeit very briefly—by the idea of joining a Benedictine monastery, I’ve never fully understood the RCs’ obsessive fascination with suffering. Not suffering as a concept, as in Buddhism which posits that suffering is an …
El Rancho Santa Clara 