Cuba Inches Toward Change

Washington (CNN)President Barack Obama recommended Tuesday that Cuba be removed from the U.S. government's list of state sponsors of terrorism. Long sought by the Cuban government, Obama's decision, expected for weeks now, will likely expedite plans to re-establish embassies in both Washington and Havana.

In a brief message to notify Congress of his recommendation, Obama explained his action was based on specific criteria that warranted Cuba's removal from the list.

"The government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding six-month period; and the government of Cuba has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future," the President said in the message.

Exploring Cuba's old world charm10:17

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Obama's move drew criticism from Republican contenders in the 2016 presidential race.

"We're not a step closer to freedom in Cuba because of the steps the president is taking," former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told reporters after an event in Ohio.

But Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, said it's wise to remove Cuba because "that list ought to mean something," and that it could help diplomatic relations with Cuba.

"I know [Republicans] don't agree with me on this issue, but I think it was the right move to make and I'm glad the president did it," he said on CNN's "The Situation Room."

Cuba was placed on the state sponsors of terrorism list in 1982 when Havana was busy supporting armed insurgencies in Latin America, during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Last December, Obama announced his intent to normalize relations with Cuba, insisting that previous U.S. efforts had failed to topple the governments of Fidel and Raul Castro through diplomatic isolation. Instead, the President argued a new approach of engagement was needed to ease tensions between Washington and Havana.

9 questions you wanted to ask about the Cuban embargo

Almost as soon as the new discussions began, however, Cuban officials complained their nation's placement on the list of state sponsors of terrorism was unfair and outdated.

Last week, the State Department recommended to Obama that Cuba be removed from the list, concluding Havana was no longer a sponsor of terrorist activities abroad.

"Circumstances have changed since 1982, when Cuba was originally designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism because of its efforts to promote armed revolution by forces in Latin America," Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement on the President's decision.

"Our Hemisphere, and the world, look very different today than they did 33 years ago," Kerry added.

The most dramatic sign of the improved U.S.-Cuban relationship came last Saturday, whenObama and Raul Castro sat down for an hour long discussion on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas in Panama. It was the first such meeting between U.S. and Cuban leaders since 1959.

Congress has 45 days to pass a joint resolution blocking the President's decision. But a senior administration official said it was unlikely lawmakers would be able muster the votes needed to override a presidential veto.

Obama and Castro meet, launch new era of U.S.-Cuba ties

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And from Al Jazeera this commentary on the Internet in Cuba. Interesting stuff (that would drive me crazy!):

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/05/cuba-internet-cold-150525120242435.html

Rock Solid Key West

                           

The sun coming up on a few  Key West monuments. The San Carlos long a symbol of  the connection across the sea may get that status back one day. These days anything seems possible, even likely when it comes to Cuba.

              

The Strand was once a theater, now its just a lovely facade with a banal chain pharmacy inside. Oh well. Nothing possible there.

                                

Fausto's  Food Palace is a survivor in a world of conformity. Still there. LINK

                     

Churches everywhere.

                                   

Public laundries. Dog water water bowls too. Helpful institutions both.

                                

Flame trees burning orange to usher in summer.

               

The pineapple a symboil of welcome in Key West, now framing a godawful cheap ugly plastic Bugger Off sign. Irony and bad taste rolled into one. Keep Key West ugly.

                                

Pineapples were a Keys export on the railroad. Nowadays tropical fruit is standard everywhere but once it was an expensive thing to eat, a luxury. This vehicle has a Key West business on an out of state tag, thus not paying road taxes in the Sunshine  state. Thanks, but not exactly one human family.

                                  

Long shadows across what was once a  shrimp fleet harbor.

                                  

The view from Alonzo's into what is now a recreational harbor:

                     

Institutions come and go and new ones take their place. A short memory helps.

Bridge Sunrise

The color of sunrise, the land shaded in black the sky still dark blue and the sun promising a rapid and permanent change to the landscape at West Summerland Key.

            

The Old Bahia Honda Bridge is one of the more recognizable landmarks in the Lower Keys and yes, I still find it as photogenic as ever.

           

So I thought to myself I wonder what the textures would look like in monochrome (black and white).

            

I really like the "noir" setting on the iPhone camera as it gives sharp definition that suits the bright natural light of the sub tropics. Here the weathered chalk looked to my eyes like a lunar landscape.

                        

Even the mildest of cloud formations over the old pump house get a wildly mysterious and ghostly cast:

                  

The scene looks banal and pretty in color. 

                 

In black and white and even with Cheyenne, you'd have expect Orson Welles to come stumping into the scene. Which reminds me. its time to order the The Third Man disc  from Netflix.

                         

Great scenery standing on the shore.

                

A good walk.

                            

Keeping Key West Weird- A Meditation

                             

Picking up from my essay earlier this week on Cuba I saw that rather startling piece of art work. I think it was at the Gallery on Greene. It set the tone for my wanderings early in the morning. A man sleeping in the bus shelter on Caroline Street across from the Bull:

                             

The Blue Paper keeps stirring it up, even in the quieter season called Summer. They use oddly innovative bill board type news stands to promote their online paper:

                 

"Give the Gift of Fun" -  what a weird tagline for a product. What an odd place for an empty display box. 

                

I don't think much of cities that promote themselves with the tag "Keep So-and-So Weird/" I think by the time Portland or Taos or Boulder or Santa Cruz  has to invoke the activists to keep working to keep the place weird, the weird factor has already fled. 

                                 

I'm not sure how weird Key West really is. The stores aren't even that unique  and far too many are chains. The gay community, a bastion of weirdness in decades past is not only properly amalgamated in Key West, its also a shrinking community thanks to the silly cost of housing and besides being gay in America is hardly of itself, weird any more. High time of course, but still the mainstreaming of homosexuality has left a weirdness gap in the popular culture.

                   

I think Key West is pretty, especially when the sun is barely over the horizon. I think Key West and the Lower Keys still manage to offer a certain amount of what matters most to me, being allowed to live on my own terms. I can wear pink Crocs, I can ride a scooter and not raise any questions about my sanity even if I choose to commute 25 miles by said scooter. The fact that I am boringly mainstream in Key West pleases me. This past weekend when outsiders flooded the road I had to take to my motorcycle to avoid being run off the road. Idiots from Up North could not stand the idea of being followed by a faggoty scooter on the highway, an attitude I don;'t have to deal with normally and I found myself offended by the attempts to run me off the road. So I defended myself by riding my motorcycle and the harassment stopped. I had to modify my behavior to accommodate the youn g bucks from Miami. What a drag.

                     

Keep Key West weird, sure. When I grumble that I'd like it cleaner too, they grumble at me sating shabbiness is home to the off kilter. If that is the case I suppose I shall have to submit to the tyranny of filth.

The 100 block of Duval, abandoned, graffitti'ed, scrofulous paint peeling, chickens shitting, palms fading. Weird or not it sure is ugly and the city doesn't care. Now that's weird.

Home Sweet Home

                                         

Stock Island has its moments and its places. Above I saw a row of neatly parked covered jet skis. Wholesale jet skis. That struck me as slightly bizarre until I remembered they rent these things. Wholesale sales for fleets I suppose. Only on Stock Island. 

                                            

Then you have Oily's shop. My wife likes bringing her Fiat here as she grew up in California and Mike came to Key West from Santa Barbara, so they have that in common. Mike relives his youth with his muscle cars. Imagine cruising the other Highwsy One in those primary colored toys. And then there are the dreams of childhood still being created on Stock Island:

                                             

Mind you this is a place that makes no concessions to beauty. Joy is how you make it under the Christmas Tree of wires overhead:

                                             

Remember, dogs are only as bad as their owners make them.  People are bad, dogs don't rob pillage or murder. This one at least isn't trapped on a chain. Cheyenne ignored him of course. 

                                               

I loved this truck. "Runs good." I posted it on Facebook because it made me smile. The eternal hope of humanity. Runs good, ungrammatical, probably not true but always hopeful. 

                                                 

I also posted this picture of a dashboard ornament powered by solar energy. God forbid  we should be encouraged to power our homes with renewable energy. Dashboard ornaments?  No problem!

                                                  

Sanford is alive and well on Stock Island. This is a front yard, not normal but not a total outlier. This nightmare represents a messed up psyche to me! Perhaps it's just money in the piggy bank.

                                                 

A friend of mine bought a house on Stock Island. She is over the moon. It's affordable and means a secure future for her dogs no longer threatened by unsympathetic landlords. She and her fiancé and their three dogs are counting the days until they move in. Worker housing.

                                                 

Stock Island home to some, home to the people who make Key West work. Cool. 

Key West and Cuba

I walked at night and I took pictures and because doing this clears my mind I spent some time thinking. Cheyenne was there of course, darting as well as she can, and because it was after the bar  closing time of 4 am, but well before sun up she was off leash and free to let me walk and  think,so I spent some time immersed in my thoughts.

The subject floating around these days is the apparent end, the possible end, the likely end of the Embargo. There are a few cluttered Cuban protests at such an idea but the older generation is dying and the younger generation, used to the comfort and ease of South Florida is pushing for common sense to surface and for relations to be opened up with the Godless Communists across the way. A sailboat race to Havana, officially sanctioned at last, paved the way for this sort of free thinking. The possibility of open traffic and free trade with Cuba in the near future is freaking some people out in Key West. Freedom has that effect it turns out as liberation brings consequences.

What seems obviously desirable to me causes some people in Key West to worry that somehow the Southernmost City will lose out to tourism in newly approachable Cuba. For my part I long for the day I can roll a motorcycle onto a roll-on roll-off ferry and roll off three hours later into Havana for lunch and a weekend riding actual tropical mountains. If this actually happens I will be able to be in Havana in about the time it takes to get to Fort Lauderdale. And believe me the riding is not all that exciting between Key West and Ft Lauderdale. 

So the argument goes cruise ships will call at Havana, a world class heritage city filled with color light  music cigars and exotic attractions, roll in your grave Meyer Lansky, that will outshine Key West, a  city unable to offer gambling, whores architecture on a  grand scale and historic structures preserved in aspic by lack of money and lack of motivation to sell out and cheapen everything. Havana is a beautiful city they say and no doubt it is worth a  view.

There is however a phenomenon I have noticed about Key West that will I think serve to preserve a helathy tourist trade on this side of the Straits of Florida. Key West has never really been the jumping off point for adventures due south. Certainly some people jump off from Key West to explore the Caribbean but for most people here in the city, this is the adventure, as much adventure as they can handle. Adventure in Key West is measured by image not necessarily by reality. Key West is, let's be honest, a safe adventure which is a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless its a very real contradiction.

Key West is by definition exotic, a  city blessed with tropical weather that creates an ambiance unique to the mainland US. Key West has coconuts and history, alligators and mangroves, Bohemia in English and familiar currency. Here you can safely view men dressed as women, you can ride a scooter secure there are American medical facilities nearby, cab drivers are regulated and the police speak English and don't take bribes...this is a safe place to drink and get drunk, to go parasailing and sunburn, this is home or as close to home as you can get and still feel abroad. Key West is the Disneyland of foreign exotic travel. It's make believe on an island that is a peninsula, tropical in the sub tropics,  Caribbean in the Atlantic and only as laid back as high expectations of modern service and facilities will allow. 

Havana by contrast is the real deal. They use weird money, speak foreign, have a dictator and are genuinely oppressed Over There. Sure things are changing but I remember when my wife and I went sailing in Grenada a full decade after Ronald Reagan's War people in California looked at us as though we were crazy to take such a "risk." Were Cuba to melt down next week and embrace religion and democracy and Freedom next week I dare say in a decade from now the timorous among travelers, which is to say the majority, would still fret about their safety in such an alien environment.

And so I doubt Key West is suddenly going to become a tourist desert when cruise ships can cruise to Havana and when flights will be opened up to all operators, not just the Cuban Cartel in Miami which charges disgraceful fees to ferry distraught families half an hour across the water. I don't think all those Citizens of the Day in the newspaper with their well scrubbed Mid Western innocence will suddenly decide that their Indiana blood is ready to seek out adventure and profit at the Floridita or the Fabrica de Arte Cubano or see them guiding ghost tours in English from the Hotel Nacional. Nor do I believe that the people who enjoy secure adventures with predictable outcomes will flee Key West to take a buggy ride on the Malecon over a pedicab on Duval.

This is of course all idle speculation at this point as everyone is busy telling us that substantively noting has changed yet and travel to Cuba is still severely restricted for us peons of freedom in the Land of the Brave. But I am going to bet not much will change here, If I were organizing cruise ship itineraries I can see no reason why a ship from Ft Lauderdale could not include both Key West and Havana on its way to Mexico or Grand Cayman. Indeed I see no reason why winter visitors with a bit of spunk might not want to puddle jump to Havana for a weekend and why stores on Duval might not sell Cuban stuff legitimately and everyone makes a living.

Honestly I find this fearfulness tiresome just as I find the general vague and politically induced  fear of terrorism to be craven in country that used to pride itself on being afraid of nothing. So what if Key West faces some serious competition? Does this mean we will have to have a serious conversation about an actual real vision for the city? I think stronger leadership might actually be a good thing if it brings purposeful change to this city. The constant withering decline in the unique factor, the presumption that money will always roll in no matter how  much tacky-ness litters the streets its not a good thing. Key West needs to guard against becoming a cookie cutter Florida city like Naples or Sanibel where every last vestige of anything interesting has been trampled by lust for money. But at the same time perhaps the Southernmost City could actually take an interest in preserving its impressive architectural, social and cultural heritage. I don't  think the oldest house is improved by having drunks piss on it or by being forced to live with crude wit-free t-shirts that mistake vulgarity for humor. Anyone who thinks Sloppy Joe's has any connection to Hemingway the writer will probably need to check out the real bar he propped up in Havana.. Or check out the home he adored at Finca Vigia. Cuba gets criticized for not spending money to sustain its monuments. Well, perhaps that's one way to preserve history compared to what we do to it.

Opening up Cuba is the right thing to do and managed properly will be  a good thing to do  for Cuba, the US and the Conch Republic. Time to get on with it and let's be brave and enjoy the change.