Embargo Mambo

The was a story in the paper about a plane that took off from Key West and thirty minutes later the twin engined private plane landed in Havana. Embargo be damned. It is a source of growing frustration for people other than me who want to be free to visit friends and relatives in Cuba that we still have the preposterous embargo in place. It's an anachronism, a left over from a bygone era and it serves no purpose. Except...

As usual some few people make money out of it while others make political hay. There is as a vociferous group of Cubans in Miami who style themselves exiles as their parents fled Cuba after Fidel Castro installed himself in power and decided to take a turn toward Communism. It's an emotive subject but it grows increasingly weird to me, as the Cuban émigrés have made excellent lives for themselves in the US, as a community they prosper and their children are assimilated into all the opportunities the US offers (and Cuba never did) and yet they insist the wrongs of sixty years ago must be righted today and at the expense of the American people who have hosted them so lavishly and generously.

Fidel Castro's description of the exile community isn't so far off the mark, he calls them the Miami Mafia, and they rule by intimidation. The reason the embargo endures toadyism because of their cohesive political votes and the balance ofpowerthey hold, or used to hold, making Florida an important swing state. Piss off the Cuban émigré community and you lose The Sunshine State, they say. Fundamentally that's why the embargo exists today. There's no arguing with the fact that some Cubans lost everything in the revolution of 1959/60 but Casto won power by self sacrifice and determination, two qualities not apparent among his Miami foes who spend a lot of time complaining and demanding the US government pull their chestnuts from the fire of their own making. They didn't choose yo home back to Cuba to fight for what was theirs, and now they want the bystanders to keep fighting for them. For my part I feel more strongly about China taking US jobs and selling us crap than I do about Cuba's version of Communism.

At one level I would like to be able to jump on a commercial plane for lunch in Havana, or roll my motorcycle on a high speed ferry from Stock Island to arrive in Mariel three hours later and go for a ride in the mountains of Cuba. All of which sounds lovely but at some level frivolous. However the embargo prevents US companies from trading with Cuba, hotel chains from developing resorts there where Canadians and Europeans now rule, and our farmers from selling food there. The embargo creates vortexes of inanity when foreign ships have to plan their itineraries to avoid offending either country, and all this because a few Cubans living the good life in Miami think revenge is their's not the Lord's.

 

And let's be honest the embargo makes life unnecessarily harsh for people living in already harsh conditions in an impoverished communist state. Mind you looking at how people live in impoverished capitalist states friendly to the US, think Honduras, life ain't so terribly grand for them either. But Cuba is made extra dreary by the embargo. And then there is the very obvious fact that anytime anything goes wrong in Cuba, which it often does we are told, they simply blame the Yanqui Capitalists across the water. In short the embargo deprives us of money, it deprives them of hope and daily necessities and it strengthens the hand of the Cuban government and their repression. Pretty smart huh?

But wait, because people are also making money off this imbecilic fiasco. That would be because some few cracks in the embargo's facade have appeared over the years. It is possible to get a special exemption from the US Treasury department and travel to Cuba for cultural, journalistic and religious reasons if you want. The Miami Mafia controls the means of access, special charger flights now scheduled from Miami, but their services are specially sanctioned so they have no competition and prices therefore get jacked up. You can peruse travel websites looking for deals. Besides all of that I would still like the opportunity to ride the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, eat realCuban food in Cuba and do it all legally and above board. Access to Cuba would cover the major shortcoming we find in the Keys: no interesting roads to ride!

So I found it to be a delicious double irony reading about a plane full of unnamed local one percenters taking off for Havana, defying prohibition as it were, and getting front page treatment. Who they were and what they did on arrival we know not. But there used to be active trade between Cuba and Key West of fruit exports and tourism, not always of the most salubrious kind Little wonder American mobsters got seriously pissed off when Cuba was lost to Communism and they lost their brothels and casinos. It is no small irony today that sex tourism is reviving prostitution in Havana as Cubans, desperate for foreign currency sell themselves to opportunistic visitors.

While we have the chance to jet set there, they have no chance at all to visit us in turn unless that is they fly a plane and deviate north, or have influential friends, or the skills to build a raft and risk life and limb for a chance at a full life over here. And that is the final and most lasting disgrace of the stupid embargo; it helps push Cuban citizens, fed up with life on their politically dingy island into the remorseless waves of the Gulf Stream in order to come over here to enjoy those daily treats we take for granted, like food, freedom and credit card debt. If the Cuban exiles in Miami cared about anyone or anything in this mess other than lining their own pockets they'd end the embargo before one more life is lost in a raft. And if President Obama finds his backbone before handing his office over to Hilary Clinton perhaps he will sign a piece of paper and end it himself. But I doubt that will happen.

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Sculpture Key West At The West Martello

I may be stereotyping here just a it so color me a cultural Imperialist but I'm pretty sure most of the people sunbathing on Higgs Beach earlier this week had no idea there was an art exhibit right next door in the old brick fort. Perhaps my opinion is supported by the quantity of beachgoers versus the handful of people inside the fort, or perhaps they spent their morning enjoying the flowers and sculptures, and by the time I got there on my lunch break they had all finished with the artwork.

I like the West Martello Tower, a 19th century brick coastal fortification designed by an Englishman of that name. There are two in Key a West along the southern shore bad this one is rather less well preserved than the East tower near the airport, which houses a museum. The West Martello Tower houses the Key West Garden Club, which gives it a rich tropical air.

This tower is much closer to the Fort Zachary Taylor state park, also home to a fort at the southwest corner of the island. As the West Martello was unoccupied the artillery soldiers at Fort Zachary amused themselves by using it for target practice. The 19th century canons did a fair bit of damage to the Martello Tower and townspeople used the bricks for their own building projects. The military housed soldiers here in the Spanish American war and used the fort as a radio base in World War Two. In 1947 the Navy handed it over to Monroe County and instead of levelling it they gave it to the garden club in 1949 and there they still are overlooking the Straits of Florida, and as it happens the White Street Pier.

It is a lovely spot and it is free, though they do ask for a donation, whatever that might be. I like this place a lot.

Some idiots like this place so much they profess their love in graffiti.

There are indigenous plants in the fort and other weird looking plants as well.

God knows what they think of these in Timor but I like them a lot.

Anyway the sculptures: Adam Russell's watchmen:

Justin Long's long winded It's better to burn out than fade aweigh.

These brilliant creepy Shadows by Liliana Crespi in crotcheted wire were my favorites.

They were creepy too but very effective and thought provoking I thought.

Darryl Lauster's Homage to Brancusi in porcelain.

John Martini's A Blakean Tale in welded steel. To me it looks like it was inspired by Munch's Scream but Blake had plenty of nightmares of his own.

Every annual sculpture exhibit seems to have a piece or two dedicated to exploring circular shapes and this year we have this, Semi Circle 1 by Simran Johnston.

I've photographed local sculptor Bill Lorraine's pieces previously at the Studios of a Key West, and here I took picture of Man Looking Up. This one puts me in mind of Easter Island.

Gran-ANT by Craig Gray in steel concrete and granite. I was thinking about the movie Mant set in Key West starring John Goodman.

Eric H Trofkin created steel tubing in the form of Communications Vine. They put it in the perfect spot.

Ursula Clark's Palm Goddess was to my mind a much richer sculpture when seen in three dimensions. A photograph doesn't do it justice. It has height and a "full figure" with lots yo attract the eyes all around. In the picture it looks a bit like a paper cut out.

I have missed out a bunch of stuff on display and I guess that means I will go back. Or better yet if you are in Key West before April go check it out.

I really like this place. Check a few random pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

Yup. It really is worth a visit, anytime of year.

Key West on Dwellable

 

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A Finite World Is A Problem

When President Reagan's regressive economic policies were bruited at the beginning of his reign I wondered why a rising tide that raised all boats was a good thing. I mean if you were in a lifeboat a rising tide simply raised your...lifeboat. It didn't help you into a yacht. Not that I wanted a yacht for the asking but if the tide was good for the people at the top already in their yachts it should do more than simply lift my lifeboat, no? It turns out, no surprise to me that reducing taxes and increasing costs by all Presidents, including Reagan himself, screwed the national economy for a start. Off-shoring production, destroying unions (the people that brought you the weekend among other things you take for granted in the workplace) and holding down wages and benefits leave us where we are today. The promised pensions that corporations looted for shareholders are unfunded but shareholders are doing fine with their gambling on a Wall Street, finally throw in a few wars paid for with blood and credit cards and here we are.

I am grateful every day for my job, I like dispatching and I like working for Key West PD; I get good pay and great benefits, and I live in a part of the world that I have slowly come to love warts and all. I have my own financial problems, thank you Wells Fargo, and change is in the air, but neither my family nor my blog is going anywhere north of the seven mile bridge. I know there are people in this country, never mind further afield that are suffering horribly and unnecessarily. They are our neighbors and they live in a world where less than 3,000 people own half the entire planet's Gross Domestic Product. Half of all wealth produced. And you aren't the least bit pissed off? Is it still envy if you and I are doing okay, but the unemployed have no jobs, no dole, no hope? I am astounded how powerfully the message of "class warfare" has been spread through the proud people of the US whose children face a bleak future in a playing field no longer level, while at the same time many of the people they live next door to, White, Black and Hispanic are on the ropes.

Then I read this clear concise well researched essay (below) and I thought to myself, someone is explicating clearly and unemotionally what I feel. One of the most profound divides I have felt with the right in this country since 1981 has been the notion that economics is zero sum. When the movie Wall Street accidentally put about the mantra that, intended ironically, "greed is good" the notion that selfishness was worthwhile took off among my fellow baby boomers. And because of who we are, boomers went to the ends of the Earth to prove the fictional Gordon Gecko right. I always understood that if I have a dollar, it's a buck you can't have. It seems to me that's unarguable but argue it milton friedman did. The notion that there is only so much wealth to go round was laughed off by the greed is good crowd.

Since I was born in 1956 the population of the world has doubled to seven billion. Bearing in mind pre industrial agriculture supported a world population of less than two billion and bear in mind also that energy is costing more to extract and refine and the idea of zero sum (defined here: Investopedia) should gain traction if it weren't so scarey. I know there are alternative technologies being promoted and promises of some deus ex machina to alter the course of the future, but history has a habit of biting in the butt those of us not paying attention. Check it out, it's not difficult to read:

Why a Finite World is a Problem | Our Finite World

These kinds of ideas always have one wondering what should I do? And as far as I can tell all we little people can do is hope for the best, coping as we are with climate change by ignoring it. I think those of us outside the five percent have to accept we don't count, which as a middle class white male raised in the seventies is hard to do. Yet I don't see our leaders, who clearly understand the extent of the problem, don't want to deal with it, quite likely because they also don't know how to start speaking about an issue that will provoke panic and revolt. The only way to deal with a finite world is to ask questions that require hard answers. And no one quite knows what those answers really are so we bumble along.

My answer is to try to stay aware and keep on living. I have a job, I have no kids and I have lived well. I have absolutely no fucking clue what comes next and I keep hoping I will be dead before the bozos in charge have to fess up and admit they screwed the world while the world slept.

From me to you, wherever you are, Happy New Year and let's all hope the ball of wax keeps rolling...

 

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Durian, Tapioca And Melting Clocks

Cheyenne was ready for a walk at some ungodly hour, which was not surprising as she had filled the motel room with loud deep rumbling snores from an early hour the evening before. By 5:30 Sunday morning she was ready for her walk, and when a Labrador is ready she is very ready indeed. I tried to pretend I wasn't but she wasn't having any and she nuzzled me into total consciousness. We set out to explore the suburbs of St Petersburg, but lacking as we did any semblance of warm clothing I wore short sleeves and short pants which in the ordinary course of things do me quite well but a temperature somewhere shy of seventy degrees on a brisk winter morning this far north was not entirely to my liking. My dog wrapped in thick yellow fur was fine and we walked briskly through miles of empty streets, a reminder of how many people there are in the world and how few of them live in the Keys.

There are, let's face it certain drawbacks to living in the Keys and if you start to get hung up on them the list could become interminable so let me just say sometimes I like to try different foods than those on offer in Key west. It is a happy fact that since World War Two foreign travel has broadened a lot of people's minds in this country, and rash promises made to foreigners by governments of this country have led to an influx of people displaced by US military efforts in some of those countries. The fiasco that was the Vietnam War has led to the settlement of a large number of Vietnamese in this country, non more so than in San Jose California near where I used to live. And when you are an immigrant equipped with an education from some foreign land in some foreign idiom the easiest path to earning a living here is opening a restaurant or driving a cab. Happily for us it turns out the Vietnamese as a whole are better cooks than drivers so we are now permitted to enjoy Americanized versions of Vietnamese food and I did a great deal of that when I lived in Santa Cruz. That was why I ended up eating an indifferent pho this road trip in pursuit of my culinary past. That was also why my wife hunted down a dim sum restaurant in St Petersburg on the last day of our trip.

Ha Long Bay got mixed reviews on Urban Spoon, but my wife, an inveterate shopper checked all the reviewers and came to the conclusion it was worth a try. It was five minutes from our La Quinta motel and we found shady parking for Herself to lounge in the car and recover from her early morning forced march. We found the restaurant in a long strip mall filled with Asian businesses as though we were in some sort of small China Town in this quintessential retirement community in Florida. We figured it was a good sign when we got inside and found a preponderance of customers were Asians, as one likes to think they are connoisseurs of their cuisine, though whether or not that is an idiotic thought I cannot be sure.

All I do know for sure is there ain't no dim sum in Key West and I miss it. My wife and I used to keep our sailboat in San Francisco Bay for the more interesting sailing than in Monterey Bay and we got used to exploring the many and diverse Asian cuisines in Oakland and the East Bay. We have vivid memories of being the only Europeans in rooms filled with Chinese families on Sunday mornings pointing at trays of food and hoping for the best. We have never forgotten the plates of chicken feet loudly slurped by elderly Chinese grandmothers looking for all the world as thought why were smoking multiple pipes at once, animated feet bouncing around in their mouths like puppets as they sucked the goodness out of them. Tripe and feet are two body parts I have never come to terms with, as sources of nourishment.

They did things proper style here, bringing carts around and ticking off our choices on a menu chart, three bucks for the small plates up to five bucks for highly prized crab balls (fried balls of crab, not testicles of crustacean). We spent twenty six dollars with tea and soda and managed to stop before we burst. The only thing I would have liked to see and didn't was a green vegetable dish as mostly the offeringsw ere fairly starchy. However my wife had spotted a Vietnamese coffee shop further up the strip mall and I was advised in no uncertain terms we weren't having pudding. I love the sweet custard tarts and sesame balls offered for dessert at dim sum... It was a great lunch, much enjoyed.

THUY CAFE offers Boba Tea, which because I live in the isolated Keys I have read about and not tasted. Until last Sunday that is. After the dim sum orgy we waddled down the shopping center and and got intimate with Boba Tea which of course I love now. Big rubbery balls of tapioca at the bottom of the cup get sucked up a huge pea shooter of a straw which you stick down into this thick fruit slush that covers the tapioca balls. It is a custard loving child's dream, and as I am that child I was in heaven.

That is until I saw the little chilled plastic bags filled with something labeled...could it be? I asked the young Vietnamese woman behind the counter if indeed it was...? And she nodded smiling. I grabbed a bag and fondled my holy grail, my ark of the fruit convenant, a flavor I had sought and not found in years of persistent hunting. I had tried to mail order it, and I had traced rumors of its presence in Miami, the tropical fruit center of North America. And here it was, I found it in St Petersburg of all places: durian. It is a fruit known and hated in Southeast Asia by some people and adored by others. The reason is it smells like shit. Literally.

Let me modify that, for me it smelled like long dead socks well persperated and crusty; the mother of the woman who sold it to me said she thought it smelled like rotten vinegary onion, other people say it smells of shit and some poor unfortunates think durian smells of corpses long dead. Take your pick. The flavor, now that is a different story. Some countries ban durian from public transport and confined spaces because it smells so bad but my little bag only gave a hint of the foulness and the taste was like the sweetest, softest vanilla custard you ever put on your tongue. My wife had to wrestle it out of my hands to get a taste herself.

Above you can see my tea in a sealed plastic cup with the black rubbery tapioca balls at the bottom and some oh so gay song and dance show in some impenetrable foreign language. The best part is television is so universally mind numbing you just know what's going on by watching no matter what they are saying. Sunday afternoon on TV is the same stupid stuff everyday apparently.

All good things come to an end, even Boba Tea and durian and in the end we had a date in downtown St Petersburg to. Check out some Art, but first I had a little nostalgia to take care of before we went there. The municipal Marina at Demens Landing was looking good under the sun and it made remembering my time there living on my boat that much more pleasant. Peter Demens was a Russian emigrant who took a bet with John Williams, the story goes and the winner got to name the new railway terminus by Tampa Bay. Demens won the bet and named it for the city in Russia, Williams got the consolation prize and named the new city's first hotel after his hometown of Detroit.

St Petersburg was always known as a retirement community, God's waiting room they called it when I lived there, all the old pensioners sitting on the city's famous green benches in the city. This was where they filmed Coccoon the fantasy about a source of eternal youth. Then the boom years got ahold of St Zpete and the city gained a dynamism sorely lacking. The Dali museum was a dowdy white cube lost in the industrial zone of South St Pete. Two years ago they opened the new digs of the Catalan painter's largest collection of works in North America.

The obvious design element is the triangular glass dome which "grows" out of the cement. The literature insists the structure is weather proof and the priceless art collection is safe from hurricanes. I noticed the glass panels are not actually covering any of the galleries, and in the event of a storm the pictures can be sealed off inside the concrete walls of the structure.

It is an impressive place and don't imagine I broke any rules by taking pictures inside the galleries, the place was crawling with guards and members of the public...but let me tell you this place is worth every penny of the twenty one dollar entrance fee.

They include an audio guide with the fee and you put on the headset and are transported into a world that you think is familiar from the famous images that represent Salvador Dali's works but in fact you will learn that there is so much more than what you think you know of this man and his painting.

I knew nothing before we went in and I know only a little bit more now but what I learned whetted my appetite. I now want to know! I will say this: the tour does not fill in a lot of the painter's biographical details. They are supplied as they impact the painting you are looking at but there is no proper history of the painter's life. The good news is you can buy one of many books in the gift shop to fill those shortcomings.

Awesome is a much over used word among modern youth but tell me this staircase isn't just that? It's practical and surreal just like Dali.

We spent a couple of hours wandering through the well behaved crowds of amazingly considerate people packed into the galleries. There was also a guided tour with a loud booming voice so it was quite chaotic in there. Yet for all that it was an amazing experience simply wandering, listening to the headset and through it hearing the incredible paintings de-coded for ordinary mortals. What I got from this experience is that Salvador Dali was an enormously talented technical artist and painter who allied rigorous technique to a crazy imagination.

I was worn out by the tour and was quite ready to be done by the time the exit was in sight. I find two hours in a museum is about as much as I can take and then I'm toast. I cannot imagine how the couple who collected all these works didn't have their heads explode in a home crammed with the works of Dali. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse met and befriended the artist, made a fortune, lived mostly and gave Mitch of it away, including leaving us this astonishing legacy. When you compare them to the one percenters who currently infest our country you have to wonder why they were so cool and our current crop are so worthless. Eleanor Morse, co-founder of Salvador Dali Museum, dies at 97 | Tampa Bay Times I read recently that Bill Gates the philanthropist is now proud owner of the worlds largest fortune at 78 billion dollars. I wonder what the Mores family would have done with that kind if money?

I couldn't take pictures inside the galleries but I got this shot of the posters to make up for it.

Outside it was a gorgeous day and a perfect contrast to the dense tapestry inside.

We sat for a while to enjoy the day before we had to start the six hour drive home.

A quick spin round Demens a Landing where I bored my wife with memories of living here in this fabulous marina set in a city park. I was in an unhappy place all those years ago but even then I enjoyed my surroundings, I sailed a lot and got to know Tampa Bay as well as I got to know San Francisco Bay under happier circumstances years later.

It still gets dark around six o'clock and we didn't get home till ten. The stray tree growing on the old Flagler Seven Mile Bridge is still illuminated festively by some wild unknown benefactor to humanity.

My wife is back at work after her Christmas Break, and I did right by her she says with my carefully unplanned road trip. Good trip or not its good decidedly to be home in the Keys.

 

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