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If you walk the corridors of Old Havana, you can still see them gathered on the cobbled street-corners, these quiet old men. Grizzled and misty-eyed, often afflicted with PTSD, they sit in circles of plastic chairs and amicably discuss their pasts.

If you look into their eyes, you can see the memories of a war slowly fading into obscurity.

Veterans of Cuba’s fifteen year intervention in the Angolan Civil War, these viejos have seen their fair share of warfare- the most vicious, in fact, that the island nation experienced in its whole three decades of militarily supporting leftist movements in Africa.

But it’s all disappearing now. As these men die, the herculean drama once played out by the Cuban people- whose retrospective numbers totaled hundreds of thousands by the end of the war- against UNITA, Zaire, the CIA, and South Africa in the name of international solidarity and anti-colonialism, is being forgotten by much of the Western World.

Continue reading “Cuba Unveiled, Dispatch #2: The Cuban Intervention in Angola”

Next Sunday, March 12th, I will be boarding a flight to take a journey back in time.

Arriving before dawn at Orlando International that morning, two friends and I will check our bags, file through security, and board a JetBlue flight that will deliver us back several decades into the past.

Rearing up into the atmosphere as the first rims of sunlight break the eastern horizon, our plane will follow southwards along the Florida peninsula and, after that, cross the glimmering cobalt emptiness of the Florida Straits. Then, if we are angled correctly against the windows, “it” will slowly begin to materialize: at first as an etching against the horizon, then as a green, wavering, oceanic mirage, gradually rising up into the assured image of tropical mountains and a city- a Botero painting rising like bread out of the sea. We will skid down onto the tarmac and, a few minutes later, take in our first breaths of the thick, palm scented breeze.

We will be in Cuba, and our journey into the past will have begun.

Continue reading “Why am I going to Cuba? Cuba Unveiled, Dispatch #1”

Before there was Castro, before Batista, before the ’58 Revolution and all that’s conspired since then, there was Martí.

Jose Marti, considered by many to be the original Cuban revolutionary, existed long before  Castro’s Communist rebels, and yet he fought just as hard to warn of U.S. Imperialism as he did to free his homeland from Spain.

Throughout the tumultuous history of Cuba, the legend of this man- now regarded as the martyr, political hero, and patron saint of a nation- has permeated the tumultuous history of this beleaguered Caribbean Island.

Jose Marti died an early death, though he lives forever as the creator of a Nation.

Continue reading “Jose Marti: Martyr, Hero, Poet, Visionary”

Lew Barnes, 62, eases back into the wicker chair, sipping coffee in the frigid morning wind, and informs me matter-of-factly about how the new government will soon be leaving him to die.

 

Barnes, a surfboard maker and former businessman from Crescent Beach, is now in the fifteenth year of his bout with Leukemia. When he was first diagnosed back in 2002, doctors generously estimated that he had ten years to live; but thanks to four rounds of chemotherapy, he is still alive and well, talking to me here today beneath the oaks at Harry’s Café.

 

This, however, is by no means the end of his struggle with cancer. Surviving the disease has come at a costly price: paying for such expensive treatments meant losing $700,000 over ten years- nearly his entire net worth- draining both his bank account and his day-to-day energy.

Continue reading “In the face of Obamacare Dismantling, one man faces an uncertain future”

You wake up in the morning to the sound of rats skittering above you.

Their little feet make quite the racket against the thin, plywood ceiling of the barn, and after five agonizing minutes of rolling over endlessly, trying to get in a last little bit of sleep, you realize you’re playing a hopeless game. Reluctantly, painfully, you get up and stagger out to the main living room.

Evidently, you realize as you look out the broad wall window that faces the lake, the rats came in for a reason. The world outside is enveloped in white. Snow spirals down silently in fat, frosty flakes, and when you press the palm of your hand against the windowpane, the glass is astonishingly frigid.

It’s gotten colder inside. The furnace probably hasn’t been replenished in four or five hours, and in the time the building has lost a substantial amount of heat; the temperature, you think, can’t be more than sixty degrees.

Continue reading “Skiing in Northern Montana, Pt. 1”

When you gaze up to the top of Chief Cliff, you can almost see, in your mind’s eye, the image of a Blackfoot Warrior gracing the horizon. Head held high, horse hooving the parched summer grass beneath him, he saunters about restlessly on the distant promontory of granite, surveying the shimmering lake and valley below. In the
bronze afternoon light, you can see the sweat glisten on the musculature of his body, and perhaps, the occasional glint of an arrowhead; in the smooth summer wind that sweeps up from the lake, the soft, painted mane of his stallion flows loose.

Suddenly, though, the daydream is over. A tractor-trailer loaded with pine-logs rushes past on Highway 93, abruptly jolting you back to the present day.

The landscape remains unchanged, but the distant man has vanished. It is 2017, and the tribe of the Blackfoot Warrior- the noble, fierce nomads that once dominated a vast swath of the continent- has been dead for over a century, castrated by modernity’s onslaught, a faint shadow of it’s storied past.

Continue reading “An Obituary for the Blackfeet- and Ourselves”

In May 2016, I picked up a book that, unbeknownst to me, would become one of the formative tomes in my life philosophy.

I had ordered it off the Internet on an inspired whim, after reading an archived New York Times essay from twenty years ago that had heaped lavish praise on the now-forgotten book.

Finding this particular book was no easy task. It lay untouched in the backlog of Amazon, gathering dust without any ratings or reviews. When it arrived in the mail several weeks after I bought it, I slid my knife into the cardboard packaging with the perverse glee of a kid opening a long-awaited Christmas present. The tome that I now held there in my hands was thick, old, aging. It looked like an antique, and when I buried my nose into the binding, the thin, oiled pages smelled like ancient Egypt.

For the next four weeks I buried myself in the hypnotic perusal of its pages, which enraptured me with its story and subsequent essays, sitting cross-legged on a bench under the blaring sun at school, or nestled quietly with my dog at night. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could’ve pulled me away from it.

That book was Our Lord Don Quixote, by Miguel de Unamuno.

Continue reading “Don Quixote’s Philosophy of Immortality”

I‘ve tried and I’ve tried again, but even then, words still cannot communicate the sadness, frustration, fury, nor angst I feel when faced with the fact that Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States.

I’ve thought about this sobering reality many nights, and through many nights of troubled, uneasy, contemplation, I’ve lost countless hours of sleep. The image of an America run by Trump is an image I cannot erase from my mind:

A slimy, opportunistic billionaire, fanning the flames of racism and disillusionment as a means of consolidating his power; a nationalist propagandist and racial ideologue as the Chief Strategist of the Oval Office; a climate change denier placed like a gag at the head of the EPA, deliberately choking the one organization that has the power to curb the impending overheating of the Planet; and an entirely red Congress that will accept many of the policies laid forth by the Oval Office with complacency, maybe even happiness.

In the month since Trump was elected, I’ve thought about what the environment will look like when I finally have kids, ten, twenty years down the road. Will there even be an environment? Will it be one worth living in?

Since long before I was born, in the late ’90s, climate change scientists have been steadily unifying around the alarming fact that Earth has barely a few decades before complete ecological catastrophe ensues, engulfing all living beings on the planet and commencing what will be, as termed by evolutionary biologists, the most recent mass extinction in our history. The last time such an extinction occurred, the dinosaurs were annihilated.

But that’s talking theoretically about the environment. That’s to say nothing of what will happen to the environment on the ground during a Trump Presidency: to the forests, wetlands, and wildlands which I have so cherished through my life.

I’ve grown up exploring the wild lands of Florida. When I was a kid, I liked nothing more than to lay forward on the prow of our bass boat and feel the cold air rush past as we went down the St. Johns River, a watery mirage of herons, gators, and cypresses slowly sliding past.

Continue reading “Memories on the Election of Trump”

Two sources close to Trump revealed past Saturday that Rex Tillerson, Chief Executive of the oil-giant Exxon Mobil and longtime associate of Putin, is expected to receive the Secretary of State nomination this weekend.

This means two things: one, that Big Oil will has a newfound opportunity to tighten it’s decades-long chokehold on American politics. Two, that Vladimir Putin will be confirmed as one of the most strategic victors of Trump’s election win.

Rex’s expected nomination comes as unsurprising. Trump has been slowly betraying the populist, anti-corporate message he touted proudly throughout his yearlong campaign, during which he threatened to penalize companies for sending America jobs overseas, and has instead been appointing to his Cabinet an unsurprising series of corporate leaders (just last week he appointed Gary Cohn, the second-in-command of Goldman Sachs, one of the worlds largest financial groups, as the Director of the National Economic Council).

But the appointment of Tillerson has a deeper significance. Tillerson has personal ties to Vladimir Putin, the despotic Russian leader who has loomed over global politics the past fifteen years. He is an advocate of the same neoliberal policies that have screwed countless American workers, and is against political sanctions (especially in the case of Russia). Now that he could be Secretary of State, he has the perfect platform to expand the reach of his shady corporation. Everything about the man suggests conflicts of interest.

Continue reading “What the Secretary of State Nomination Really Means”