Miscellany

Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan has become one of three dozen colleges and universities around the nation–and one of only two in Michigan–to offer a Peace Corps Prep program that will build hands-on experience in the health work sector, develop leadership skills and focus on intercultural competence and service learning in healthcare settings as announced in Western News, for and about WMU faculty and staff. This Peace Corps Prep program, launched by the Peace Corps in 2007, will be offered as a minor open to students in any major at the University. WMU will be the first school in the nation to house such a program in its interdisciplinary health care program. Applications are being accepted now for the first semester in which the program will be offered. One goal of the  program is to attract students from all seven degree-granting colleges at the University. The only other Michigan . . .

Sarge with Colombia I, Summer of  1961

  The conditions of Cuba today are obvious from first sight. This is a land that stopped progress decades ago when the Soviet Union turned its back on the island. The topic that is on everyone’s list of concerns when meeting Cubans is housing. Their housing. There is nowhere to live, though the neighborhoods in greater Havana, and other cities, are full of abandoned and crumbling architecture, beautiful pre-revolutionary housing crying out to be saved. After the revolution of 1959, and the U.S. embargo, most of Havana fell into a dilapidated state. By 1968, all privately owned businesses were nationalized. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba lost billions of dollars in aid from Russia. And the U.S., 90 miles away, wasn’t helping them. Now, after fifty plus years, Cuba is turning to tourism to right this socialist country where an estimated 15% of all Cubans live . . .

Peace Corps: The Icon and the Reality is a 54 page ebook that you can get free off of Amazon. It was published in 2014. Take a look. Here is the copy of text from the Amazon page on what the book is about. Basically it looks at recent (since about 2000) changes at the agency and the deaths within the corps of PCVs. It is not kind to the Peace Corps administrations, at least not kind to former PCVs who became Peace Corps Directors, i.e. Aaron Williams (DR 1967-70), Ron Tschetter (India 1966-68). Mark Schneider (El Salvador 1966-68) comes off better, but, of course, Gaddi Vasquez (not a PCV) get beat up as usual. Here’s what the flap copy says: The body of literature critical of the Peace Corps is disturbing. The first real criticism of the Peace Corps in mainstream media came from the Dayton Daily News in . . .

At the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City now there is the first major museum exhibition devoted to Hemingway and his work. Most of Hemingway’s papers are at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. After Hemingway’s death in 1961, JFK, a reader of Hemingway, helped Mary Welsh get into Cuba and retrieve many of his belongings. She later donated Hemingway’s archive to the new presidential library partly in gratitude to JFK. This exhibition is entitled, “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars.” I remember clearly hearing the news that Hemingway had killed himself. I was still in graduate school, still in the Air National Guard, and I had come home from being a weekend warrior and my girlfriend at the time stopped by to see me and in the late afternoon and mentioned off highhandedly that Hemingway had killed himself, as if it was of little importance. Once before I . . .

(Thanks to Janet Lee (Ethiopia 1974-76) for the ‘heads up’ on this new book about the Peace Corps.) How the 1960s Peace Corps’ gendered modernization ideology shaped social movements across the Americas In a provocative cultural history of the 1960s Peace Corps, Molly Geidel argues that the agency’s representative development ventures legitimated the violent exercise of American power around the world and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. Peace Corps Fantasies illuminates the normative force and gendered imperatives of U. S. endeavors to fortify liberal internationalism against anticolonial struggles for freedom. -Quote from Alyosh  Goldstein, University of New Mexico Description of the book on the back cover To tens of thousands of volunteers in its first decade, the Peace Corps was “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” In the United States’ popular imagination to this day, it is a symbol of selfless altruism and the most successful program of John . . .

PHOTOS OF FINCA VIGIA Side view of Finca Vigia and tower built by Hemingway; Adriana Ivancich, stayed here, his last love Hemingway had something like 90,000 books in his home Hemingway and Mary Welsh, his fourth wife Cafe in the parking lot below the house where today you can buy a famous Hemingway drink the famous drink! Have one on us, Ernie

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 . . .

In Paul Hendrickson’s wonderful book entitled Hemingway’s Boat that focuses on his years–1934-61-in Cuba, Paul writes that in ’34, Hemingway paid two dollars a day for Room 511 at the Ambos Mundos Hotel. (If Pauline, his second wife, came to stay with him, as she did on two separate occasions, it would cost him a half a dollar more.) Often he would go to Cuba in those early days with Joe Russell, the owner of Key West’s Sloppy Joe’s Bar, on Russell’s thirty-two-foot cruiser, Anita. They would go for two-weeks but often spend two months fishing. It was here at the Ambos Mundos in Room 511 where Ernie would also carry on an affair with Jane Mason, the twenty-two-year old wife of G. Grant Mason, the head of Pan American Airways in Cuba and the owner of a beautiful estate in Jaimanitas, west of Havana. The affair did not last . . .

Last night in D.C. Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet, and Charlotte Kea from her office, and other RPCVs, including former Senator Christopher Dodd, were hosted by Boston University’s Scott Nichols, another RPCV so that the group could discuss raising funds to increase the number of PCVs overseas. The money raised, I presume, will be to lobby Congress to increase the Peace Corps budget. Nichols, I understand, is planning to hold a series of such dinners around the country before Carrie leaves her post at the end of the Obama administration. His aim is to make Peace Corps alumni, as he calls them, a more effective force for increasing the size of and funding for Peace Corps. As Carrie told her dinner partners, “many qualified applicants are turned away and several countries asking for volunteers cannot be accommodated because of lack of funds.” Some guests wrote checks on the spot. There were also . . .

Early on Sunday, those of us up for another long drive, left Villa Clara to visit the Che Monument. It was really our first opportunity to see the countryside of Cuba, and this region of the island is quite beautiful with soft green hillsides and rolling land. What struck this Midwest farm boy was the nearly total lack of cultivated land. We learned later in the week that less than 30% of the country’s land is used for farming. Cuba imports about 80% of its food which makes it vulnerable to price increases, changes in food supply and the impacts of natural disasters, i.e., hurricanes. Most of this situation (if not all) is due to the dependence on Russia and then the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  How Cubans live today in rural Cuba is obvious from just this photo. It is a photo that could have . . .

In our tour of four provinces, the first ‘city’ we visited was Trinidad in the province of Sancti Spiritus, in central Cuba. Together with the nearby Valle de los Ingenios, it has been one of UNESCOs World Heritage sites since 1988. It is a cobbledstone town, a fairly well preserved Spanish colonial settlement of around 75,000.  The center of town is the Plaza Mayor, an open-air museum of Spanish Colonial architecture. Dominating the square, and the town of brightly painted buildings, is the beautiful Santisima Trinidad Cathedral and Convento de San Francisco. We arrived in Trinidad from our nearby hotel Ma Dolores with the last of the summer rains. This ancient town does not have anything like a drainage system and we were forced to hug the sides of buildings as we navigate the few square blocks up side streets to the historic plaza area. Nevertheless, wherever you go in . . .

On Sunday morning we drove for two hours to the Che Guevara Mausoleum and Monument in Santa Clara. Here are the remains of “Che” and twenty-nine others, including one woman, who were killed in 1967 during Guevara’s attempt to spur an armed uprising in Bolivia. There is also a bronze 22-foot statue of Che in this monument complex. Guevara, who was born in Argentina, was buried with full military honors in 1997 after his remains were discovered in Bolivia, exhumed, and returned to Cuba. There is also an eternal flame lit by Fidel Castro in Che’s memory. Our guide told us that Santa Clara was selected as the site for the mausoleum and monument as a way to remember Guevara’s troops taking the city on December 31, 1958, during the Battle of Santa Clara. It was the final battle of the Cuban Revolution. After this defeat, Batista fled into exile. What is particularly . . .

Last week the first NPCA trip to Cuba took place, an arrangement with Global Exchange, an organization that promotes people-to-people contact. This San Francisco travel group is one of only 12 ways in which the United States permitted to sponsored tours to the island. Twenty-five of us went on this trip, including Glenn Blumhorst, the President & CEO of the NPCA. In all 18 were RPCVs, one was a former HQ staff, there was a former PCV & Staff (me!), a current staff person, and four family/friends. Also the group had one 2015 COS RPCV (Nepal) and 2 RPCVs from the first PCVs to Samoa and Ethiopia. A second June trip to Cuba is now tentatively planned by the NPCA and in some ways we were the ‘experiment’. Let me say first that traveling with other RPCVs (if you have to go in a group) is the only way to visit . . .