For the love of Cuban cigars!
I currently have no need to leave the confines of my garage/home/room. My fridge is stocked. I have enough TP to last at least a month, I did my laundry and, therefore, have fresh underwear to live in and I just had DSL installed. I won't even have the pathetic excuse of going to Starbucks any longer unless, of course, I really wanted a Mint Mocha Chip Frappucino with real whip cream.
I mustn't forget the simple rules of engagement here: lose 10 pounds so you can fit into the dress pants you bought in January so you can spare the medical establishment the horror of seeing you in flip flops and denims.
It took but just an hour before I became connected to the World Wide Web. I feel scandalous and espionagy, and can almost, but not quite, leap over buildings with a single leap but for my extreme lack in stature and superhero gifts.
Coursing through the rituals of being "set-up" and trying not to look as bored as I feel, I make an observation that Cable Guys like José have the fondness of assuming that nobody knows anything about their computers. He is navigating through my Mac's various many isles as if he knew what was on isle thirteen or where to find the Network pane. I try not to scowl or let my jaw hang loose as if ready to bite, but it is hard not to assume what is only natural. Nevertheless, there is no blood-filled coup and no strewn body parts about my accommodations and I can still turn on the computer. Lucky for José.
José can be said to be lucky in many ways. His unmistakable accent accounted for much of my interest in his origins, just as he was curious about mine, wondering if I shared Imelda Marcos's passion for shoes and her love for broiled pig feet. If we were in Arizona, I would have guessed Mexico but since we are in Miami, I would have to say the next logical thing: Cuba. And with a name like "José", how else was one to preposition the thought? It is a little pointless to me, as a total outsider of events in the sunshine state, that some force designated a geographical locale like "Little Havana" to lend some credence to the Cuban settlers that have swarmed the shores of Miami when all of Miami, it seemed like, is one huge Havana. The person who chopped off my long, straight, black hair smiled often and nodded his head often because he didn't understand 2 words I was saying. There was a lot of pointing and saying "no bueno" in the hopes that my mop of hair didn't turn out like a dust mop, or worse, a bristle broom. But it didn't. My landlady's mother says a lot of "Ah okay" at the words that are coming out of my mouth as I gape at my insufficient, kitchen spanish with a roughly 50 word vocabulary, consisting mainly of food names, as I try to ask her if she knew anyone who could alter my dress pants. Turns out she used to be a seamstress in her past life. It's shaggy around the edges but it summarizes human desire to want to reach out to other humans, whether for necessity or otherwise, that is debatable. So the next time I am reminded of rape and pillage, of death, gore and violence and of which idiot decides to detonate himself into oblivion for a cause I don't think he fully grasps, by the popular media that makes one think that there is no hope left in humanity, I will think of this.
And back to José's fortune who was fortuitous enough to escape Havana and all that Havana represents in Castro's eyes. Although this has been debated, said, discussed, and opined in ad nauseum, I will still say that he has eyes, but somehow, due to a servitude to an ideal long dead and proven by history capable of implosion, an ideal that has refused to be remodeled by progressive thought or perhaps due to old age and some sort of encephaly affecting the whole cerebral cortex; Castro has eyes, but he cannot see. Or at least he refuses to see, some type of willful cortical blindness, which is the worse evil. And for that he deserves the very appropriate Jumping Joe's Flaming Hot Sauce award of a man deserving to be Stupid. If life were that simple, if only they taught this basic concept in despotism school. But, of course, what naïveté.
José's father became a prisoner of conscience when José was just 45 days old (all this information in just one hour. Somehow I am guessing that José would rather there was some sort of blood-filled coup and he'd lost an arm rather than face the Asian inquisition). If I were José's mother, I would have smacked his father silly. As it turned out, I was born in another continent, on another island, in another time. Having been given the death penalty via a bullet to the skull for daring dissidence, Cuba would have gained another victim as a son were it not for a lawyer relative who commuted the sentence to 31 years. Must have been some lawyer. I was half expecting a life sentence and his father still languishing in an unknown cell but after serving his sentence, José's father took the family and left for greener pasture to Little Havana.
It's a tear jerker and I, for one, jerk a lot of tears. But José didn't ask me for charity so I have no cause not to believe in the validity of his tale. For one, he was just the cable guy, installing someone's DSL modem. I am guessing that Cuba cries of many stories such as José's. It is José's conviction that the Bay of Pigs, although another huge Kennedy fiasco, was an incident that could have saved Cuba from a long history of Stupidity but someone got cold feet at the last minute (and told Castro that a group of covert soldiers from the Special Forces was coming to end his life). It is the notion of ability but not one of willingness. I am no student of war or strategy and I am guessing that even if I tried to find out the "truth" I would have been faced with the courteous slap in the cheek by something named Classified Information. But despite it all, whatever the motivations, whatever the consequences, José's family found comfort and a new life in the US, with no hopes or desires of returning to the soil which gave them birth. There are also many stories of hope such as this, not just from Cuban dissidents, but of Albanian refugees and persecuted muslims from the former Yugoslavia, of economic refugees from Argentina and Mexico; they flock here, not to China or the Philippines, not to Russia, but here. We don't hear enough of their stories because the world is busy, in a frenzy to devour anything about how America has no right to go to war, how America is bullying the (qouting another author) "cesspool of humanity", the United Nations, how nobody in their right mind can like America and what America represents to the majority of Americans, adopted or native, of how America is eradicating cultures that have been in existence for thousands of years, people who were "happy" with their way of life until Coco Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken showed up at their doorsteps. That's what's newsworthy these days. But they forget that thousands upon thousands of people chose to come here because if it were not for America, American way of Life, the American "culture", they wouldn't have stood a chance.
For the fear of sounding like a "Come to the folds of America, all ye weak and homeless and penniless" campaign, I will say that the world is a two sided coin. Dare to flip it, for the love of Cuban cigars!
I mustn't forget the simple rules of engagement here: lose 10 pounds so you can fit into the dress pants you bought in January so you can spare the medical establishment the horror of seeing you in flip flops and denims.
It took but just an hour before I became connected to the World Wide Web. I feel scandalous and espionagy, and can almost, but not quite, leap over buildings with a single leap but for my extreme lack in stature and superhero gifts.
Coursing through the rituals of being "set-up" and trying not to look as bored as I feel, I make an observation that Cable Guys like José have the fondness of assuming that nobody knows anything about their computers. He is navigating through my Mac's various many isles as if he knew what was on isle thirteen or where to find the Network pane. I try not to scowl or let my jaw hang loose as if ready to bite, but it is hard not to assume what is only natural. Nevertheless, there is no blood-filled coup and no strewn body parts about my accommodations and I can still turn on the computer. Lucky for José.
José can be said to be lucky in many ways. His unmistakable accent accounted for much of my interest in his origins, just as he was curious about mine, wondering if I shared Imelda Marcos's passion for shoes and her love for broiled pig feet. If we were in Arizona, I would have guessed Mexico but since we are in Miami, I would have to say the next logical thing: Cuba. And with a name like "José", how else was one to preposition the thought? It is a little pointless to me, as a total outsider of events in the sunshine state, that some force designated a geographical locale like "Little Havana" to lend some credence to the Cuban settlers that have swarmed the shores of Miami when all of Miami, it seemed like, is one huge Havana. The person who chopped off my long, straight, black hair smiled often and nodded his head often because he didn't understand 2 words I was saying. There was a lot of pointing and saying "no bueno" in the hopes that my mop of hair didn't turn out like a dust mop, or worse, a bristle broom. But it didn't. My landlady's mother says a lot of "Ah okay" at the words that are coming out of my mouth as I gape at my insufficient, kitchen spanish with a roughly 50 word vocabulary, consisting mainly of food names, as I try to ask her if she knew anyone who could alter my dress pants. Turns out she used to be a seamstress in her past life. It's shaggy around the edges but it summarizes human desire to want to reach out to other humans, whether for necessity or otherwise, that is debatable. So the next time I am reminded of rape and pillage, of death, gore and violence and of which idiot decides to detonate himself into oblivion for a cause I don't think he fully grasps, by the popular media that makes one think that there is no hope left in humanity, I will think of this.
And back to José's fortune who was fortuitous enough to escape Havana and all that Havana represents in Castro's eyes. Although this has been debated, said, discussed, and opined in ad nauseum, I will still say that he has eyes, but somehow, due to a servitude to an ideal long dead and proven by history capable of implosion, an ideal that has refused to be remodeled by progressive thought or perhaps due to old age and some sort of encephaly affecting the whole cerebral cortex; Castro has eyes, but he cannot see. Or at least he refuses to see, some type of willful cortical blindness, which is the worse evil. And for that he deserves the very appropriate Jumping Joe's Flaming Hot Sauce award of a man deserving to be Stupid. If life were that simple, if only they taught this basic concept in despotism school. But, of course, what naïveté.
José's father became a prisoner of conscience when José was just 45 days old (all this information in just one hour. Somehow I am guessing that José would rather there was some sort of blood-filled coup and he'd lost an arm rather than face the Asian inquisition). If I were José's mother, I would have smacked his father silly. As it turned out, I was born in another continent, on another island, in another time. Having been given the death penalty via a bullet to the skull for daring dissidence, Cuba would have gained another victim as a son were it not for a lawyer relative who commuted the sentence to 31 years. Must have been some lawyer. I was half expecting a life sentence and his father still languishing in an unknown cell but after serving his sentence, José's father took the family and left for greener pasture to Little Havana.
It's a tear jerker and I, for one, jerk a lot of tears. But José didn't ask me for charity so I have no cause not to believe in the validity of his tale. For one, he was just the cable guy, installing someone's DSL modem. I am guessing that Cuba cries of many stories such as José's. It is José's conviction that the Bay of Pigs, although another huge Kennedy fiasco, was an incident that could have saved Cuba from a long history of Stupidity but someone got cold feet at the last minute (and told Castro that a group of covert soldiers from the Special Forces was coming to end his life). It is the notion of ability but not one of willingness. I am no student of war or strategy and I am guessing that even if I tried to find out the "truth" I would have been faced with the courteous slap in the cheek by something named Classified Information. But despite it all, whatever the motivations, whatever the consequences, José's family found comfort and a new life in the US, with no hopes or desires of returning to the soil which gave them birth. There are also many stories of hope such as this, not just from Cuban dissidents, but of Albanian refugees and persecuted muslims from the former Yugoslavia, of economic refugees from Argentina and Mexico; they flock here, not to China or the Philippines, not to Russia, but here. We don't hear enough of their stories because the world is busy, in a frenzy to devour anything about how America has no right to go to war, how America is bullying the (qouting another author) "cesspool of humanity", the United Nations, how nobody in their right mind can like America and what America represents to the majority of Americans, adopted or native, of how America is eradicating cultures that have been in existence for thousands of years, people who were "happy" with their way of life until Coco Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken showed up at their doorsteps. That's what's newsworthy these days. But they forget that thousands upon thousands of people chose to come here because if it were not for America, American way of Life, the American "culture", they wouldn't have stood a chance.
For the fear of sounding like a "Come to the folds of America, all ye weak and homeless and penniless" campaign, I will say that the world is a two sided coin. Dare to flip it, for the love of Cuban cigars!
posted by Hello, this is McKWong MD at 2:26 PM
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