Castro's Cuba

[Osolomia]

(Note: Next week a bipartisan majority in the House is expected to vote to lift the Cuba travel ban despite a threatened veto by Bush.)

Sunday September 07, 2003
By Joshua Clark
Contributing writer

HAVANA -- The air was so thick and blue I wanted to swim in it. Mango juice rolled off my palm as I savored the last bit of pulp before tossing the pit into the misty valley below.

Diego, our driver, handed me a brown cloth to wipe my hands. While driving the rented Fiat, he had eaten a whole mango without spilling a drop, peeling it from the top with his teeth. A man with a cloth sack walked by, nodded, then disappeared around a bend in the cracked mountain road. Che Guevara stared at us from a billboard.

"La tierra de los dios," said Diego, the land of the gods. He had fought alongside Che in these very mountains. We had hired Diego three days earlier to drive us from Havana to Santiago on the opposite side of Cuba, paying him by buying food and bed.

"The most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen," Christopher Columbus reportedly said upon arriving on the island. For almost four centuries, it was the gateway to Spain's vast American empire. In the 19th century, Spain modernized Cuba's sugar industry until it accounted for a third of the world's production. By the end of the century, U.S. trade with Cuba was larger than the remainder of all of Latin America.

Much more...
http://www.nola.com/living/t-p/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1062912342293300.xml

[Judi Lynn]

1. Interesting that his observations are so similar to others I've heard

from people who've visited Cuba!

Found this very interesting, as I've heard about this quite a bit, also. Funny how this kind of information is ALWAYS excluded from any of the right-wing's ravings about the Cuban government:

(snip) The next day, riding in the car again, mountains became hills and the land was flat again. Cubans were on the road, selling birds, cheese, flowers, you name it. Diego said the intermittent crosses on the road marked places where bodies had been dumped by Batista's troops. We must have passed hundreds of them.(snip)