My Time In Cuba

I’ve not been posting these first few weeks of this year because I’ve been traveling in places with little or no Internet access. Herman and I started the new year in New York City where we had a fantastic time chiming in the New Year with great Asian food and lots of walking around Manhattan. I’ve always love NY; it’s a city with fantastic energy and vitality.

On New Year’s Day we flew to Jamaica and boarded a ship for Cuba, then spent the next eight days visiting ports in Cuba. I have little good to say about the cruise ship—mediocre food, mediocre entertainment, lines for everything, filled with rude Americans—but Cuba was a fantastic display of colors and warm people and lovely, crumbling architecture. There was so much to love there.

I was expecting poverty, but what I saw was even more shocking than I was expecting. Cuba had been surviving well enough on the three billion dollar per year infusion of cash from the Soviet Union, but once the Soviet Union fell apart back in the Eighties and Nineties, that lifeline dried up, and the Cubans began to suffer extreme poverty. This US embargo is keeping the country on it’s knees with little hope of improvement.

When you see the results of this embargo first hand, you see how immoral it is, how immoral the United States is, how hypocritical all the Bible Thumpers in this country truly are. It does make one ashamed to call oneself an American.

Anyway, over the next few days, I’ll be sharing some pictures of Cuba. One of the fun things about the island are the vintage cars still in use all over the island. Here are some of my favorites.