Twenty years ago, when I worked for the Chicago Tribune, I maintained contacts with a few genuine Cuban communists, in particular a comely young couple who fervently believed everything Castro had ever said, thought or done. Any attempt at debate with them was about as pointless as arguing with one of Trump's disciples today.Once they …
Continue reading May 20, 1902: Cuba's unresolved independence
I don't need my old LPs butsomehow I can't let them go.In the beginning there was the vinyl LP recording, and the LP became high-fidelity, stereophonic, quadraphonic, "360 Stereo" and more, with a detour for tape cassettes, compact discs and most recently MP3 files. Except for cassette tapes, I still have most of these media …
I won't pretend to add anything to the torrent of obituaries marking the death of Fidel Castro, Maximum Leader Emeritus of Cuba, at age 90. For the definitive good-bye, read Anthony DePalma's piece in today's Times.I can add some very personal reminiscences, though, because for nearly 58 years I've lived with Castro's words and deeds …
What began as a relaxing retirement-type project, to digitize stashes of family photos and documents and convert them into an online photo book, has instead turned into a replaying of the hard times my family went through after the political whirlwind of 1959 and the subsequent installation of the Communist dictatorship in Cuba that survives to …
When I visited Cuba in 1998 to cover the visit of Pope John Paul II for the Chicago Tribune I stumbled onto a few surprising branches of my family tree, including relatives I'd heard about but had never met and who appeared to be loyal and highly placed apparatchiks. They lived quite comfortably in an …
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 …
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' 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 …
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 …
El Rancho Santa Clara 