The heat, exhausting, and magnified by constant rain and the lack of even a wisp of a breeze, made our third and last day in Santa Clara a long one. Sweat stuck to our skins, and in turn, our clothes to the sweat.For me it'd been an emotional visit and for Stew a revealing one. He'd …
Wartime diary
The small brown notebook, a diary I kept for only four months beginning in November 1958, has been with me for fifty-three years, faithfully traveling along with some family pictures and a gym tee-shirt from grammar school. I wrote it when I had just turned eleven years old, but had never looked at it again. …
Going home to my memories
'Going home' is one of the most durable dramatic themes, going back to the Prodigal Son, and from there weaving its way through countless poems, stories, songs, TV shows and movies. Toni Morrison's latest novel, "Home," deals with an African-American veteran returning to Lotus, Georgia, the segregated hamlet where he grew up and which he …
Revolutionary mechanics
If you think fixing car a is tricky racket, imagine it if you didn't have access to spare parts, manuals or even the proper tools. That's exactly the predicament car owners in Cuba face when their old '57 Oldsmobiles or '49 Plymouths cough, shudder and then glide to a stop with a sorrowful sigh.Due to--in …
Architectural Digest: 1958 Edition
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 …
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 …
El Rancho Santa Clara 