Hattie's Web

Homecoming

Some sadness: Friend and neighbor Carol Severance has died. She was in my ceramics class. She had been ill for some time. 

There will be no service and donations to Hospice of Hilo are requested. We similarly did not have a service for Terry's mother, Helen. Hospice did a lot for Helen in her last days.

I don't think I would want a service for myself or Terry, either. Funny how at a certain age one accepts the reality of death and is not particularly frightened at the prospect. Carol had a good life and she was well liked and loved. Still, I feel very sad. She was unique and had such a joyful nature and it's hard to think that she is gone. 

I'll be posting photos and commentary on Cuba all week and Mexico the week after.

 

It's hard to do things  on the Internet today,so this is just another placeholder. San Miguel is very beautiful, as always, and expensive by Mexican standards. I don't know how tourism and real estate are faring. The altitude and  latitude mean the light is strong,and colors pop. Pictures will follow. Home tomorrow. Should be back to my regular posting schedule by Monday.

Memories are fading fast, but I did take some notes and Terry took lots and lots of photos.

A few of the famous old American cars they keep running.

 

Our Chinese-manufactured bus. China sent 50 of these to Cuba. They are comfortable, equipped with tv monitors and a toilet and used only for tours. Cubans ride in crowded old busses. See Che on the building in the background?

There were complaints about the high cost of this Nation Tour. As you can see by looking at us and other participants, we could not have handled a less expensive tour. Code Pink decided to do it cheaper, and they booked a cheaper hotel and a cheaper bus. The sanitation was bad in the hotel and the bus was always late. Several of them came over to our hotel to clean up, because they maybe never in their entire lives had gone for three days without a shower. Viva la Revolution!

Our first lecture was with Miguel Coyula, an architect, who filled us in on some stats and concerns about the future.  He noted that Cuba imports 80 percent of its food. There is no property ownership, but leasehold only. Cuba, he said, is not prepared for mass tourism.  He expressed the fear that full on capitalism could turn  Havana into a megacity like Shanghái. Right now it's kind of a lawless situation without much sense of who's in charge.

Coyula believes that solving the problema of society starts with improving daily life. Not  just dealing with things as they come up but improving infrastructure, etc. The country has experienced a "long-lasting crisis."  It has been egalitarian but very poor. Now there is more money but more inequality.  He talks about the way the crisis of poverty has narrowed people's visión.

Racial polarization has increased because the money coming into Cuba from the U.S.is from a community that is 95% White, whereas Cubans in Cuba are 65% non-White.

So the dilemma is to get richer and more equitable at the same time.

So this is a beginning. I will try to post more tomorrow.

 

When I get to an Internet cafe I will get caught up with all of you, my blogger friends. 

In San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

It's restful here: pretty, not dynamic, a good place to read books, relax poolside,work on my notes on Cuba.  Local ex-pats assuage their guilt feelings at living cheaply here by involving themselves in worthwhile causes directed at the poor, but this  is silly and potentially even dangerous in a country where one has no political power. Mexico is a kleptocracy, after all. Make Carlos Slim part with some of his billions. 

I think we reached the cultural nader with the Academy Awards,which I was forced to watch as the guest of friends. Yes it was broadcasted in Mexico. Poitrus and Greenwald looked awkward collecting the Oscar for Citizen Four as best documentary of the year, as in this can't possibly be happening. My minority opinion is that Citizen Four is interesting but not all that great. That's an opinion, not a review, so take it for what it's worth.

This phenomenally bad pop culture  offering,the Academy Awards, led me back to  another reading of Dwight MacDonald 's masterful essay, Masscult and Midcult. Right now what particularly strikes me is the Masscult appropriation of "causes," from racial justice to feminism to gay rights to environmentalism. A whole set of fatuous pre-digested correct opinions about these matters has come to replace serious  thinking about them, let alone any substantive change. Furthermore,conversation is dead in America.  I might not have noticed this  if I hadn't had a  good conversation with someone a while ago to provide me with a sense of what that is. He was English,and the English do pay more attention than Americans do to language.

Well this is something of a placeholder but I have limited Internet capabilities right now. 

 

 

 

Back in the U.S.A.

Already missing Cuba and our travelling companions. Exhausted and starved in Tampa. When we got to the hotel we met a woman who was  looking for a room because her flight to Boston had been cancelled.  These are unbelievable times and we are  feeling overwhelmed. More when we  get to Mexico.