PCFR: Canada's new Trudeau, Hydro-Quebec, New England ports, etc.

Feb. 12, 2016

To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com. We update the Web site frequently with news and commentary. Information in how to join (not complicated) may be found on Web site -- again: thepcfr.org

It was good to see so many of youat our Jan. 12 meeting to hear international-cyber-security expert Allan Cytryn.

And besides the officially scheduled speakers below, note that we plan in the coming season to have speakers on New England ports (see bottom of this memo), the geopolitics and economics of global warming as well as a look at global ocean-fishing issues. Also refugee, economic, security and other matters involving Germany,  probably with the German general consul speaking to us.

Speaking to us next, on  Tuesday, Feb. 16, will be David Alward, the former premier of New Brunswick and now the consul general of Canada to New England.

He’ll talk about the implications of the recent change in Ottawa under Justin Trudeau, international security issues, such big trade  matters as New England’s purchase of hydro-electric power from Canada and the idea of a common market encompassing Canada, the U.S. and Europe.

The international cities expert Greg Lindsay was to have joined us  Feb. 16 but he must go to Scandinavia then. He’ll join us Wednesday, May 11.

As usual, the Feb. 16 dinner will be at the Hope Club, 6 Benevolent St., Providence. Drinks start at about 6, dinner by 7, then the talk and a Q&A and the evening ends by 9.

Please let us know whether you will join us Feb. 16 by replying to pcfremail@gmail.com or, in a crunch, calling (401) 523-3957. Thanks very much to those who have already let us know! The Hope Club needs good estimates no later than the day before a PCFR dinner.

Dues and dinner cost information may be found at: thepcfr.org. Other membership information may be found there, too.

On Tuesday, March 22, comes the very distinguished Andrew A. Michta, professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Europe Program).

He’ll talk about European politics and security, including NATO, and has a special focus on Central Europe and the Baltic States. (I hope he talks about the Russian buildup in the enclave of Kalingrad.)

In 2013–2014, he was a senior fellow focusing on defense programming at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C. In 2011–2013, he was a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS) and the founding director of the GMFUS Warsaw office.

He is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.  

Columbia Prof. Morris Rossabi, who had been skedded for March and is one of the world’s greatest experts on Central Asia,  is  being rescheduled to September or October.

We have asked him to focus on Mongolia, whose ability to become a real democracy stuck between the great expansionist police states of China and Russia, has long fascinated us.

On Tuesday, April 12, celebrated author, TV documentary maker and former foreign correspondent Hedrick Smith will join us; he’ll talk about Russia, and the current state of America, too.

On Wednesday May 11, comes the aforementioned internationally known expert on cities around the world, Greg Lindsay.

Look at: 

http://www.amazon.com/Aerotropolis-Way-Well-Live-Next/dp/0374100195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279805811&sr=8-1

He is a contributing writer for Fast Company, author of the forthcoming book Engineering Serendipity, and co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. He is also a senior fellow of the New Cities Foundation — where he leads the Connected Mobility Initiative — a non-resident senior fellow of The Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, and a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute.

Theodore Sedgwick, former U.S. ambassador to Slovakia,  who had been skedded for May, is being rescheduled to September. (We take July and August off.)

On Tuesday, June 7, Michael Soussan, former UN whistleblower; acclaimed author; widely published journalist; NYU writing professor, and women's rights advocate, will speak. His satirical memoir about global corruption,  Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course In International Diplomacy (Nation Books / Perseus) is being adapted  for a feature film, starring Ben Kingsley and Josh Hutcherson

He will speak about the subject of his next book TRUTH TO POWER: how great minds changed the world. A brief history of thought leadership.

Evan Matthews, a key thought leader at the North Atlantic Ports Association and director of the Port of Davisville, has very kindly offered to talk to us on Wednesday, June 22, on changes in world shipping, including the widening of the Panama Canal and other changes of huge interest to New England ports. That would be two meetings in June. Can we have a show of hands on how many members can handle that? Or Evan could talk to usin the fall.

'Fleeting sensations'

"Pittsburgh, Carnival and Train'' (derail of a vintage chromogenic print), by Joel Meyerowitz in the show "Fragile Paper Timeships,'' at Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art,  South Hadley, Mass., though May 29.

The gallery says:

"'Fragile Paper Timeships' features a selection of vintage chromogenic prints by the  renowned photographer and explores his career following the publication of his influential book Cape Light in 1979.''

"In the following decade, Meyerowitz deepened his investigation of the descriptive power of the large-format view camera and learned, as he later reflected, 'to photograph without looking' and {to} trust his sensory reality. A master of color photography for more than four decades, Meyerowitz catches fleeting sensations in his images, rather than just objects of observations.''

'.

Save our wetlands

"Wetlands'' (oil on unstretched canvas), by  Liz Garagas, at E2 at Coastal Living Gallery, North Kingstown, R.I., through Feb. 26.

McMansions at sea

Work by Serena Perrone in the "Contemporary Mokuhanga'' show at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, though April 16. Mokuhanga is a traditional Japanese woodcut process.

Lesson in numbness

"Winter teaches us about detachment, numbness.  But it’s a way to get through.  From winter we learn silence and acceptance and the stillness thickens."

--  Gail Barison 

It only looks dead

"The day is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.

"Through clouds like ashes
The red sun flashes
On village windows
That glimmer red."

--  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Afternoon in February''

Behind language

"Hydrogen 1,'' by Sarah Hulsey, in her show "Schemata,'' at Chandler Gallery, Cambridge, Mass., through March 11. 

““Hydrogen 1,’’ by Sarah Hulsey, in her show “Schemata,’’ at Chandler Gallery, Cambridge, Mass., through March 11. ”

She says that printmaking, with its emphasis on "repetition, seriality and discrete marks built into larger forms, lets her "visualize the complex systems behind language.''

The gallery says "just as atoms are the building blocks of matter, Hulsey constructs names of chemical elements from their phonemes, the building blocks of speed.''

Maybe we should have headed south after all

Oil by Ellen Granter, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

Only if you're a farmer

"Winter is the time of promise because there is so little to do - or because you can now and then permit yourself the luxury of thinking so."  

--  Stanley Crawford

"Pond, through forest'' (oil on panel), by ROY PERKINSON, at Fountain Street Fine Art, Framingham.

Janet Redman: Enacting TPP would be a perilous bet

via OtherWords.org

From her home in Berks County, Pa., Karen Feridun is helping stage a growing citizen pushback against the expansion of natural-gas extraction. But a far-reaching global deal recently signed halfway around the world may make her job much harder.

Feridun got involved in this fight over concerns that fracking waste laden with toxic chemicals that could end up in the sewage sludge that some Pennsylvania towns spread on local farm fields.

Figuring her best bet for keeping the state’s water, food, and communities safe was putting a stop to fracking, Feridun founded Berks Gas Truth. The group is now part of a statewide coalition calling for a halt to fracking in Pennsylvania.

The campaign got a boost when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, after hearing a case brought by the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, ruled that local governments have the right to protect the public trust. The court also found that oil and gas companies must abide by municipal zoning and planning laws.

The decision was celebrated as a huge victory for local control. But, Feridun told me, “the Trans-Pacific Partnership could turn over the apple cart entirely.”

The day after we spoke, U.S. Trade Rep. Michael Frohman joined top officials from eleven other Pacific Rim nations in a New Zealand casino to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a sweeping “free trade” agreement aimed at opening national borders to the flow of goods, services, and finance.

The location couldn’t have been more symbolic. By entering into this deal, the Obama administration is playing roulette with America’s future.

The White House hopes to win greater access to raw materials, cheap labor, and burgeoning consumer markets in Asia for U.S. companies. What do we stand to lose? Nothing less than the ability to set rules and regulations that protect our families’ health, our jobs, and our environment.

The provision at the heart of this wager is something called an “investor-state” clause. It would let companies based in TPP partner countries sue governments over laws or regulations that curtail their profit-making potential.

It’s a risky bet. Here’s the White House’s simplistic calculus: The U.S. government has never lost an investor-state case.

The more we win, it seems, the bigger our next gamble. The TPP would be the largest free- trade agreement in history, covering about 40 percent of the global economy and giving additional countries the option to “dock” to the treaty later. It also adds thousands of companies that could potentially sue the United States in trade court.

Back in Berks County, the demand from newly opened overseas markets for U.S. gas may increase local pressure to frack. The TPP’s investor-state provisions would let foreign-owned gas companies challenge any statewide limits on the practice standing in their way.

If this sounds unlikely, look no further than our neighbors to the north. U.S. oil and gas company Lone Pine Resources is suing Canada using a similar clause in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) when Quebec passed a moratorium to halt fracking under the St. Lawrence River.

Now, TransCanada — the Canadian company behind the hugely unpopular Keystone XL pipeline — is bringing a $15 billion claim against the United States for denying permits to build it. That’s exactly the kind of legal action that makes people like Karen Feridun fighting oil and gas projects nervous.

Even if Washington wins the TransCanada suit under NAFTA, the fear of spending millions of dollars fending off litigation under the much larger TPP could have a chilling effect on future efforts to keep oil, gas, and coal in the ground.

Luckily, as Feridun and her neighbors know, Congress hasn’t approved the Trans-Pacific Partnership yet. If lawmakers care about protecting good jobs, clean skies, safe water, and a stable climate in this hotly contested election year, they’d be wise not to gamble against the public interest.

Janet Redman directs the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Just as long as he's a billionaire!

A zoological/sociological study of Boston jerks

This article elaborates on the various kinds of Boston, er, jerks.

'An imperial affliction'

"There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
’T is the seal, despair,—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ’t is like the distance
On the look of death."

-- Emily Dickinson, #82

Altitude sickness

"Elevation'' (acryllic on canvas), by Diane Novetsky, in her show 'EARTHSHIFTER,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through Feb. 28. She says the name of the show refers to "the materiality of paint as well as the way I manipulate space on a two-dimensional surface...{as well as} my focus on the land, skies and waters of our dynamic yet fragile planet Earth.''

Llewellyn King: The sustaining knock on the door

For some Americans today, tomorrow and the day after, on and on, a knock on the door is the high point of a lonely life. They are the old, infirm and shut-in; and they are a growing part of our aging society. Even though many of them have children and grandchildren, if you live alone and you are old, you know what it is to be all by yourself and lonely.

I think of them as the Alone Generation: people who suffer the privations of age and the dark place of loneliness.

The daily knock on the door comes from a volunteer for Meals on Wheels, and means a meal and little companionship. It is a public-private partnership that works: food for needy people.

That knock on the door comes a million times a day as Meals on Wheels volunteers fan out in their communities to deliver food. Some drive great distances in rural areas, some around their own neighborhoods.

The meals are tailored for the elderly, and often for diabetics. Sometimes they are delivered hot and ready to eat. Sometimes they need to be heated in a conventional or microwave oven. Sometimes they reflect regional tastes. All the meals are manna to the recipients.

According to Ellie Hollander, CEO of Meals on Wheels America, based in Arlington, Va., the average recipient is 75 years old or older, is usually a woman, takes at least six medications a day, suffers some physical impairment, and wants to live independently.

About a third of the organization’s funding comes from the federal government, and the other two-thirds comes from state and local governments and charities. There is a lot of volunteer labor.

Hollander says the money spent on keeping people at home is a national bargain: It keeps them out of expensive nursing homes, hospitals and other pricey warehousing.

You do not have to plunge into the statistics about aging – but Pennsylvania alone has over 2 million seniors, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Instead, just go to any rundown area of any town or city and you can see them asking grocery store employees about the price of everything, pulling wads of coupons out of their wallets before they hand over their money at the checkout, and struggling to carry their purchases.

My town in Rhode Island has an area called Arctic, which is home to a lot of old people. Their needs are palpable. I see them on the streets, in the drugstores and the grocery store. Some are bent over, nearly double. Others can walk only with canes and walkers. They stand in the cold without shelter, as they will this week, waiting for a bus that comes infrequently. Shopping is a burden without a car, and taxis are expensive. So my neighbors do things the hard way, the only way.

My neighbors are not derelicts. They have worked all their lives, many not in pensionable jobs. They live on Social Security and balance their spending between shelter, food, medicines, utilities and clothing. For them, and many millions of aged Americans, it is about staying alive.

There are studies and committees on the aging; the White House talks about it, Congress ruminates and appropriates a sliver of money. But the horrible truth is millions of old people, probably already undernourished and sick, choose daily between food and heat, food and medicine, food and rent or even clothes.

Retirement communities, assisted living centers, sunshine enclaves in Arizona, Florida and Nevada, are only part of the story of aging. Mostly age comes stealthily, creeping up on people in the communities where they have put down their roots.

I look at poor, old people everywhere and wonder what they were like when young; when they were full of love and joy and hope. I wonder how they make it now, staving off starving or freezing, or living with aching loneliness.

It is worth thinking about this when politicians attack “entitlements” and imply that those in need are there by choice.

The well-off avert their eyes and blame the old for not being better with money in their youth. Unfortunately, many never made enough money to save.

These winter days, as the snow piles up in much of America, fewer people will get that sustaining knock on the door.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is a long-time publisher, columnist and international business consultant. This first ran on  InsideSources.com

Chris Powell: Of Flint, Hartford and a stadium

With the city’s water system contaminated by lead, this was the headline last week on a news story from Flint, Mich.: "Mothers of Flint Very Frightened for Their Kids."   

The story lacked even one reference to the fathers of Flint, presumably because there are few if any fathers there, the city of 100,000 being, like so many other U.S. cities, more or less a concentration camp for the poor, hapless and fatherless.  

As a result since 2011 Flint has been operating in administrative receivership by Michigan state government. The city was also in state receivership from 2002 to 2004 but it did little lasting good.     

The catastrophe resulted from the current state receiver’s decision to save money by switching the city’s water supply from the metropolitan Detroit system to the Flint River, whose water leached lead from the city water system’s old pipes. As signs of trouble grew, Flint lacked the competent political class needed to take care of itself or evoke the concern of state officials.

So now many children in Flint are at risk of irreversible lead poisoning, a national scandal.   

But Flint’s circumstances, political incompetence arising from comprehensive and perpetual poverty, are common in many cities, including cities in Connecticut,  as indicated by the latest incompetence in Hartford, the $10 million cost overrun in the minor-league baseball stadium the city is building to steal New Britain’s team.  

Nearly everyone outside Hartford knew that the lack of minor-league baseball was not among the city’s problems and that city government would botch the project.  For like Flint, Hartford lacks the independent and engaged middle class necessary to make government work in the public interest. Instead, most ofHartford’s politically involved people are members of the government and welfareclasses -- the dependent classes.

While some Hartford residents have complained about the decision to build the stadium and the cost overrun, there are not enough to make a difference politically.  

Hartford’s new mayor, Luke Bronin, who had nothing to do with the stadium decision, has made what he says is the best settlement available for the cost overrun. The city will split the expense with the minor-league team and the mayor will pursue more financial aid from the state and federal governments to compensate for the city’s unplanned extra contribution.  

Thus Bronin, until recently an aide to Gov. Dan Malloy, inadvertently has exposed the dodge that his former boss hid behind when Hartford began contemplating  the stadium -- a statement that state government would not help fund it.

But like Connecticut’s other impoverished cities, Hartford long has drawn half its budget from state government reimbursement, far more than most municipal governments get, and thus for many years whenever Hartford has wasted money,  half the waste has been state government money.

With the stadium Hartford already has wasted a lot of state money, and if Mayor Bronin obtains more aid from the state and federal governments to reimburse the cost overrun, the city  will be wasting still more.   

The disaster might have been prevented if, instead of purporting to be indifferent to Hartford’s stadium plan, the governor had candidly acknowledged the city’s disproportionate financial dependence on state government, declared the stadium a luxury, and announced that every dollar the city spent on the stadium would be matched by a reduction in state aid to the city.

That instantly would have scuttled the stadium and brought much-needed clarity to Connecticut’s dysfunctional political economy.    Instead, exploding the governor’s pose of neutrality, state government now will be subsidizing not only Hartford’s theft of New Britain’s team but still more ofHartford city government’s incompetence, thus giving all municipalities more incentive for their own incompetence.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. 

Pending a no-school announcement

"Winter came down to our home one night
Quietly pirouetting in on silvery-toed slippers of snow,
And we, we were children once again."

--  Bill Morgan Jr.

Chris Powell: Paying criminal prof $60,400 to go away

What was more or less a triumph of public administration was announced last week at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, which obtained the resignation of an English professor, Ravi Shankar, who had amassed a long criminal record and even had received a promotion while serving a jail sentence, though the university said it had not known that he was locked up at the time.   

Even so, the university declined to fire Shankar, uncertain if the professors union’s contract allowed it. Noting that the professor's crimes occurred off campus, the union and a local state representative who is a union tool argued that they had nothing to do with his job and that criminality is irrelevant to employment in public education.   

But after getting away with making a scandal, Shankar was arrested again, this time accused of expensive shoplifting, prompting the university to suspend him without pay last August. Last week's resolution: Central has paid Shankar $60,400 to resign and he can never work again in the state university system.   

Of course, few criminals working in the private sector get severance pay like that, but since public administration in Connecticut long has been practically against the law, the university system probably achieved the best possible outcome for the public.

If Shankar had not been bought off this way, he might have sued for wrongful dismissal and, given the political composition of the state Supreme Court, in a few years he might have won a decision that no government employee can be fired for anything less than mass murder and that he was owed millions of dollars in retroactive pay and lawyer costs.  

While such a decision would have established formal precedent that criminality doesn't matter to employment by government in Connecticut, people who pay attention might have figured this out already from the newspapers.

xxx

SURPRISE! ALL TEACHERS ARE GREAT: Releasing the first summary of teacher evaluations in local school systems, the state Education Department reports that 99 percent of Connecticut's teachers have won the top two ratings, "exemplary"  and "proficient," with only 1 percent rated "developing" or "below standard." So either schools have the best class of employees of any industry in Connecticut or the evaluation system functions only as political cover for school administrators, school boards and teacher unions.   

Since individual teacher evaluations are exempt from the state's freedom-of-information law lest schools ever operate in the public interest rather than their own interest, there is no way for the public to verify any evaluation or to evaluate the administrators who do the evaluating. Besides, if evaluation summaries keep getting published, any administrator who rates a teacher "below standard" will risk getting questioned about his failure to replace him.   

Just as there's no sense in asking the barber if you need a haircut, there's no sense in asking school administrators if they are maintaining high standards with their teaching staffs. What else are they going to say?    The law requires the evaluations of all other government employees in the state to be public. So either open the teacher evaluation process to full disclosure and let students and their parents participate in it, or stop wasting time and money on the charade.

xxx

WHERE GUNFIRE IS NORMAL: Residents of East Windsor and Willington are alarmed that the state police propose locating a weapons training range in their towns.  The townspeople fear that the noise of pistol and rifle fire will be disruptive and diminish property values and ruin the character of their towns.    They don't know how lucky they are. The new range could go in Hartford, Bridgeport, or New Haven and the gunfire might not even be noticed.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Josh Fitzhugh: In Cuba, old U.S. cars as metaphor

Editor’s note: Insurance executive, lawyer, farmer, Vermont maple-syrup mogul and former editor and reporter John H. (Josh) Fitzhugh, sent us this piece the other day. By the way, New Englanders should be aware of the very long social, cultural and economic ties between Cuba and our region. The old Boston-based United Fruit Co. is just one example, not to mention the many New England firms  that made candy, booze, molasses and brown and white sugar from Cuban sugar cane, some of it grown on farms with New England-based owners. And yes, the slave trade. My paternal grandparents and parents went down there a couple of times to enjoy the raffish activities under assorted pre-Castro dictators/gangsters.

-- Robert Whitcomb

xxx

I traveled with my daughter, Eliza, on a Dartmouth College-led tour thinking that I should “time travel” to see what Havana and the island were like now before tourism and American business interests transformed it.

I needn’t have rushed. While change is certainly underfoot in Cuba, I left the island after a week with the conviction that the tangled relationship between the U.S. and Cuba will take decades to sort out absent some leadership change as dramatic as occurred a half century ago.

First, a bit about the trip. As required by the rules of the U.S. embargo of Cuba, the trip was organized as a people-to-people exchange to enhance “contact with the Cuban people, support civil society, or promote the Cuban people’s independence from Cuban authorities.” 

Dartmouth’s method for accomplishing these goals was to have us accompanied by a professor of Spanish; to organize numerous lectures by Cuban authorities; to visit various art and music venues; to eat predominately at small private restaurants called paladars; and to permit us to pepper our good-spirited and intelligent Cuban guide, Abell, with constant questions regarding the deficiencies of the vaunted Revolution.  Over the course of the week we toured old and new Havana; Hemingway’s residence, Finca La Vigia; the towns of Cienfuegos and Trinidad; and places in between. To say that we were exhausted by the time we left would be an understatement.

We also all learned a lot, and by that I mean that we all struggled on a daily basis to reconcile our growing understanding of Cuba with opinions as to how American (or Cuban) policy should change to better the lives of the people of both nations. Now that may sound kind of arrogant (who are we to assume such responsibility?) but it was the truth. As an American you can’t travel in Cuba without feeling some responsibility for the ways things are, including the country’s turn toward socialism. And President Obama’s initiative to press for closer contacts with Cuba have given these thoughts greater immediacy.

Now as to some observations. It would appear that over the past  50 years, Cuba has made great strides in health care and education (provided free of charge to the population) but at a cost of economic stagnation and tremendous deterioration of its physical structures. The government is quick to lay the blame for the latter on the embargo but in my opinion it has less to do with that than with the socialist mentality that has discouraged enterprise and private investment of any kind.

A good example is the deterioration that has occurred in old Havana, the location of many beautiful European style structures. Before the Revolution, according to a tour member who had been there, Havana’s old structures, mainly of cement and stone, were in pretty good repair. Today, one in ten is missing a roof; one in five have no windows. Three a day collapse, we were told. The reason? While families are permitted to live in the structures, they are not responsible for their upkeep, which is the government’s responsibility, and whether by design or lack of funds, it has not done so. The picture above is a good example of this decline.

Today, the only structures in old Havana in good repair are tourist spots (such as government-owned hotels) or small paladars snd small hostels, owned by families which under current rules can tap into and keep some of the profits from the burgeoning tourist trade.  Even major government centers, like the Museum of the Revolution, are shabby and decrepit. The Capitol building, designed to look like Washington’s, has been closed for three years (although that may tell more about Cuba’s one-party rule than its finances, frankly.)

Faced with the loss of its sugar daddy, the Soviet Union, Cuba in the mid-‘90s first went through a horrendous economic decline (they call it the “special period”) and then began to pull itself back with help from Chavez’s Venezuela and an increasing reliance on tourism. Today, China and Vietnam seem to have replaced Venezuela as major trading partners but tourism continues to grow, and with it major economic issues.

In short there now appear to be two economies in Cuba: the tourist economy, where taxi drivers, restaurant operators, hoteliers, tour operators, artists and musicians prosper; and the rest of the economy, which suffers along at $20 a month in government wages plus whatever black market income one can find. This income disparity is worsened by those lucky enough to have relatives overseas who send back “remittances,” and most of these are Cuban whites from formerly middle- and upper-middle-class families in Havana.

An example of this disparity was manifest in a dinner we had with some young artists. The young Afro-Cuban at our table has an art degree and has had some moderate success selling his work, mainly to tourists. He now supports his brother a dentist who is on the state payroll.  Another example was a young man whose father was ambassador to Paris in the ‘70s. Trilingual in Spanish, French and English, he worked in a restaurant until three years ago, when he began driving his family’s original 1955 Chevy as a taxi in Havana because his income prospects were better.

The lack of investment is also apparent in the country. Cuba nationalized the hated sugar plantations and mills, but after a disastrous attempt to maximize sugar production in the 90s, has now cut back on sugar production in an effort to diversify agriculture and reduce food imports. Despite efforts to privatize small farms and urban gardens, however, a tremendous amount of land remains fallow, land  that to my eye was probably cultivated before the Revolution. Coupled with the ongoing demographic flow from country to city and the lack of any environment for foreign investment, I don’t see much prospect for agricultural growth and believe Cuba’s goal of producing 70 percent of its own food a pipe dream.

In general we found the Cuban people well behaved, good humored and (as best as one can generalize such things) happy. They are proud of their independence and tolerant of their leaders. They seem willing to recognize mistakes and move on. While constantly reminded by their government that Uncle Sam is evil and untrustworthy, and that the socialist ideals of the Revolution should be venerated and followed, my sense is that most Cubans love American culture and take an attitude toward their government that “this too shall pass.” Many have become very adept at managing their immediate environment to try to benefit themselves and their families.

The prevalence of  old Chevys, Fords, and Cadillacs is a kind of metaphor for this attitude, I think. Keeping these vehicles going is of course a necessity due to the U.S. embargo and a real testament to the mechanical ingenuity of Cubans, but since they are so obviously a symbol of America, and of Cuba before the Revolution, they also bespeak(to me at least) a kind of protest with the way things are and a hope as to what may eventually return. So is the practice of using the dollar sign ($) to denote an item’s cost in pesos.

Like a divorced couple, Cuba and America have much history to remember and to forget, but will forever be linked in some fashion by their proximity to one another.

'Afternoon in February'

"The day is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.

Through clouds like ashes
The red sun flashes
On village windows
That glimmer red."

- ' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow