Archive - November 3, 2015

In USA Today, Monday, November 2, 2015, there is a full page article on this week’s business fair in Havana, the first such fair held since re-establishing ties with Cuba. The newspaper title reads: AMERICAN BUSINESSES FLOOD CUBAN TRADE FAIR. The first paragraph of the piece written by Alan Gomez reads: HAVANA: It was an unusual sight in this communist island that for decades was barred from importing most U.S. goods: an American owned, American-made tractor, ready for sale. Those of us who were just in Cuba for 8-days on the NPCA tour, traveling through four provinces, and as many towns, and across farmland, from east to west, north to south, will quickly and truthfully say: just in time. The farm tractor was built by Alabama-based Cleber and what Cleber is proposing is not to sell the American-made tractors to Cubans, but to shift construction from Paint Rock, Alabama to . . .

In 1939 when Martha Gellhorn went to Havana to join Hemingway he was still living at the Ambos Mundos and she was upset that he was living, as Kenneth S. Lynn reports in his book, Hemingway, “in the squalor of his room.” Gellhorn would say years later, “I am really not abnormally clean. I’m simply as clean as any normal person. But Ernest was extremely dirty, one of the most unfastidious men I’ve ever known.” She went looking for a house where they might life and came across a newspaper listing of a fifteen-acre estate called Finca Vigia on a hilltop overlooking the village of San Francisco de Paula, fifteen miles from downtown Havana. Lynn in his Hemingway book describes Finca Vigia this way: “The one-story farmhouse, a sprawling, Spanish-style structure with a sixty-foot living room, had most decidedly seen better days, and the furnishings were hideous. Further-more, the outdoor . . .