Posts Tagged ‘Cuba’

Letter From Claverack 09 29 2106 Musings at Twilight…

September 30, 2016

As I have been sitting here, listening to “Smooth Jazz” twilight has become almost night.  The last glimmerings of the silvery light are slipping away.

This week I have been dog sitting Marcel, Lionel and Pierre’s poodle, who will soon turn sixteen.  Every night, he takes me for a walk.  We leave my cottage and he marches me over to his house, across the street from mine and takes me for a tour of his yard.  He goes to the front door and looks at me uncomprehendingly when I do not let him in.

He is reluctant to leave once he is on his home territory; actually, he fights me.  He doesn’t want to come back to my house but eventually he realizes that he is not going home tonight and walks with me back to my place.

He is very smart, is little Mr. Marcel.  And sweet.  And I am enjoying his company right now though I realize my own time for pets is past.  I still come and go too much to give any pet like Marcel a real home.  And I am single.  Were there a partner, it would be easier.

There are soft sounds from woodland creatures that filter into my time here at the laptop, soft sounds from the night outside.

It is, this moment, a soft and gentle world that seems unconnected with all that is happening beyond me.  I feel, here, encapsulated, as if the outside world did not exist.

But it does.

The Syrians under Assad and their Russian allies have been brutally pulverizing Aleppo.  It has only become worse since the last time I wrote.  It is the kind of brutality we have not seen for a long time.  And, as I said before, I wonder about the poor boy in the ambulance.  Has he survived this assault?  I wonder about that day and night. I am haunted by wanting to know.

Here, at home, there was a horrific crash of a New Jersey Transit Train at Hoboken.  One person is dead.  100 are injured, some seriously.  I texted my friend Mary Dickey to check on her.  She had changed her plans today and did not take the train into New York City.  Just as something had diverted her the morning of 9/11 or she would have been under the Towers when one of the planes hit.

Congress overturned Obama’s veto of a law that would allow 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia.  Personally, I think it was a political move that will have unintended consequence.  The Saudis are rethinking their alliance with us and it opens the door for a lot of problems we don’t want to have.  Like everyone in Iraq suing us for our “meddling.”

Not quite knowing how to parse this but right now there are reports that Trump may have violated the embargo that was in place during the 1990’s with Cuba.  If true, it will wound him with Cuban Americans in Florida, which is essential in his path to the Presidency.

Trump has had both a good year and a bad year.  He is the Republican nominee for President, a reality no one thought possible six months ago.  His net worth, according to Forbes, has dropped by $800 million this last year but it still leaves him with 3.7 billion dollars, according to the magazine.  Forbes is generally thought of as a conservative publication.

Samsung, the company of exploding Galaxy Note 7s, has a new problem.  Its washing machines are also exploding.  So glad I did not choose to get a Samsung gas stove when I bought new appliances for my kitchen.

It’s a brand in trouble.  Big trouble.

We were facing a government shutdown tomorrow but it has been avoided.  The government is funded until December 9th, after the elections.  Zika funding was approved to the tune of $1.1 billion.

It is a quiet evening here.  I have looked into the world and now I am going to take myself to bed, watch a little video and go to sleep, happy. The way I woke this morning.

 

 

 

 

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Posted in 2016 Election, 9/11, Education, Elections, Entertainment, Greene County New York, Hillary Clinton, Hollywood, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Media, Political Commentary, Politics, Social Commentary, Television, Trump, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Letter From New York 09 20 15 Getting ready to go on the road…

September 20, 2015

Today begins three weeks of travel for me. I am heading down to the city this noon to attend a party for my friends, Kris and Eric, who now live in California. They are stopping by New York on their way to Martha’s Vineyard for a week.

Monday and Tuesday I am in the city, Wednesday I leave for Provincetown to visit friends, back to the city, down to Baltimore for Lionel’s birthday, off to Indianapolis for a conference and then on to Minneapolis to visit family and friends, circling back to the city before heading home.

I am squeezing in all of this, fulfilling promises to visit, before winter hits. I do my best not to go to Minneapolis when it’s freezing.

It’s a gentle morning here, temperature in the sixties with no rain forecast either in the Hudson Valley or down in the city. It has warmed enough that I am now on the deck with my coffee and my increasingly cranky laptop. It is now three years old and beginning to feel its age. Oh well, aren’t we all?

There is a touch of fall in the morning’s air, cool with no humidity, a desire to go put on a sweater. Yesterday young Nick and I discussed the need to fill the racks near the house with seasoned firewood from the piles out by the shed. I am settling in to a comfortable fall.

Not so in Europe where refugees and migrants find themselves trapped at borders, struggling to get around them. The nights are already cool and I doubt any of them are prepared for a chill walk across Europe. The seas will be getting rougher and therefore more dangerous.

Pope Francis has arrived in Cuba and is asking for more freedom for the church. If anyone can convince the Castros to loosen their grip, it’s this man. Tuesday he arrives in New York, one of the reasons I am choosing to be gone. It will be a little bit of chaos; no it will likely be a lot of chaos. Pundits think it will be worse than when the President is in town. But the town is revving up for him.

On the west coast, Seattle is getting ready for a two day visit starting also on Tuesday by Xi Jinping, President of China, in which he will immerse himself in all things tech before heading on to visit Obama in Washington on Thursday.

Ben Carson has declared a Muslim should not be President and The Donald has had to respond, which he has done in typical The Donald style, to not having corrected a man in an audience who said the country had a problem: Muslims and the President was not an American and was a Muslim.

Staggeringly, near thirty percent of Americans still believe Obama is a Muslim. It causes me to roll my eyes and despair of the electorate.

The Greek electorate is deciding today whether to return to office Alexis Tsipras, who was elected to defy the country’s European creditors and ended capitulating to them. The Greeks are weary; this is their fifth national election in six years. Ridiculous, says one man. It will be a very tight election.

The Conservatives are running neck and neck with Tsipras and his Syriza Party. We will know by the morning, at least, who wins.

Tonight are the Emmy Awards. Since I no longer have cable, I’ll not be able to watch them. I don’t have over-the-air service either. I’m interested in seeing if Jon Hamm will FINALLY get an Award for his iconic performance as Don Draper in “Mad Men.” A couple of others interest me too, but not terribly.

Increasingly, I feel removed from media except as a distant observer. I’ve had my fun.

Now I seem to be looking for other fun, closer to home, some still media related but on the very local level. It brings a smile to my lips.

Now I must go and get ready to go to that party…

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Posted in European Refugee Crisis, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Politics, Social Commentary, Syrian Refugee Crisis | 2 Comments »

Letter From New York 08 13 15 Of nice days and atrocities…

August 13, 2015

This morning I woke early and took the third train into town. It was stunningly beautiful at the cottage and I was regretful about leaving and coming into New York City. I’ve been away for a while and it’s always a bit of an assault when I get off the train for the first time after an absence.

Today was no different; Penn Station was summer madness and I felt jostled by the crowds as I made my way down 7th Avenue to the Greek Corner, the little diner I frequent at 28th. The Spanish waitress who serves me seemed genuinely glad to see me.

Eating my egg white omelet, I read a book and then went on to my noon meeting. Some of my day has been productive; some of it not so much. Though all of it has been pleasant.

In the morning, I have a breakfast meeting and then am off to the train, back to the country and a full weekend there. Lionel and Pierre are arriving for the weekend and on Saturday a couple of neighbors are coming to my house for drinks and “nibbles and bits.”

Hopefully, the brilliant weather will continue and we can stand and sit on the deck, looking over the stream. As I rode the train down into the city, the river glistened with the morning sun. I was reading the Times on my iPhone.

The story was horrific.

Yazidis are not Christian nor Muslim nor Jewish. Because they are not “people of the book” they have been targeted by IS for particularly harsh treatment. The Times reported on manuals that have been written for IS soldiers explaining to them that raping these women is an act of worship and brings them closer to God. They pray before and after the rapes.

In Yazidi towns that have been taken, men are separated from the women. Boys must raise their shirts and show whether they have hair in their armpits. If they do, they go with the men. Most of them are told to lie down in fields and then are shot to death. Women are bussed away, sold into sexual slavery. One woman who had been purchased was set free when her “master” finished his suicide training and had no more use for her. He gave her a paper, signed by IS officials, that allowed her to leave IS territory and reunite with what was left of her family.

The reality of this happening is almost beyond comprehension. But it is happening. Frankly, almost any horror seems within the ken of IS.

A Croatian national, Tomislav Salopek, working in Egypt for a French company, was kidnapped outside of Cairo by a gang that demanded ransom. Then nothing was heard until IS began to demand the release of Muslim women prisoners from Egypt in exchange for him. They now claim they have beheaded him. Everyone fears the worst while waiting for confirmation.

Then there is the news that IS has claimed responsibility for a bomb attack in a Baghdad vegetable market that killed 67 and wounded hundreds. IS has been busy this week, getting itself into the news, rejoicing in knowing their atrocities are being reported.

I clench my hands and wonder what I as one individual can do? I do not know but I wish there was something.

On a brighter note, tomorrow the US Flag will fly above our Embassy in Havana again. Kerry is on his way to Cuba to be present for the official re-opening of the American Embassy in Cuba.

Investors are fleeing Russia, just preferring to do business somewhere a bit more predictable. Everyone is trying to read the runes of Putin’s actions but a former Kremlin insider posits he just not that interested anymore. He acts like a Tsar but has no succession plan. Right now Putin is Russia and he is disinterested…

I was not disinterested to find out that “Sesame Street” is moving to HBO for its first run and then to PBS and it’s being cut from an hour to half an hour. I am still getting past it. Good if it keeps “Sesame Street” on the air. As my friend Medora Heilbron once said: no deal too strange to make.

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Posted in IS, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Social Commentary | Leave a Comment »

Letter From New York 05 29 15 Riding up the Hudson, ruminating on the world…

May 30, 2015

It is a stunningly beautiful day as I ride the train north, having slipped out of town early. To my left, the Hudson runs wide with sun glints coming off the silver grey surface of the water. It is sunny and warm, with a soft breeze blowing with low humidity. Saturday will probably be like this though there is rain in the forecast for Sunday with cooler temperatures.

My mood is better today; I feel less weighted by the world and its events. I feel more accepting that there is ONLY so much I can do individually and that as long as I feel I am doing that, I can breathe a little easier.

It is still a crazy world. In my home state of Minnesota, a Muslim couple was picking up their son at the home of one of his friends. While waiting for him in the car, they were approached by a woman with a rifle who forced them out of the car and marched them at gunpoint to the house where they told her their son was so that they could prove it to her.

The boy was there.

The woman is facing charges of assault, terroristic threats, terroristic threats-reckless endangerment and maybe some more.

This kind of occurrence just strikes me as so un-Minnesota like. You know, Minnesota nice, it’s baked into us.

She must have skipped that part of the cultural indoctrination.

Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert is being charged with lying to the FBI about cash withdrawals from banks that allegedly were going to “Individual A.” Apparently, Hastert was paying hush money to a man for inappropriate behavior years ago when he was a schoolteacher and a wrestling coach. Everyone who knows the Former Speaker is shocked as he always was a “stand-up” kind of guy.

He has made no statements but has resigned from his law firm and from the Board of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

In reading about this I was reminded that the Speaker of the House is second in succession for the Presidency. The thought of John Boehner being two heartbeats away from the Presidency is sobering, at least to me.

In the midst of probably the worst sports scandal in the last century, FIFA President Sepp Blatter was re-elected. While it seems unbelievable to me, he had a lot of support from Africa and South America, enough to propel him back for another term. The aftershocks of this affair will continue for a long time and there may be more arrests.

Cuba has been taken off the list of states that sponsor terrorism, paving the way for the normalization of relations. Visiting Cuba is on my bucket list, has been since I read Hemingway who had a home there.

Dressed in a burka, an IS devotee blew himself up at a mosque in Saudi Arabia, killing four, including himself.

In Pakistan, gunmen hijacked buses and ended in a battle with security forces. Nineteen civilians were killed.

North Korea, widely suspected of the hack attack against Sony Pictures, has something called Bureau 121, a cadre of 6000 hackers devoted to discovering ways to create digital trouble. Apparently, many of them operate out of China, some in the basement of well-reviewed restaurant.

Not a happy thought.

Out in California Michael Jackson’s fantasyland named “Neverland“ is for sale for $100,000,000. But now it’s called Sycamore Valley Ranch. It’s a stunning place for those who have a spare hundred mil.

The rain ravaged states of Texas and Oklahoma are going to be receiving drinking water from the breweries of Anheuser-Busch, which halted production of beer at one plant in Georgia and switched to canning drinking water, which is desperately needed. At least thirty-seven are dead in the two states.

Amazon is planning to create its own private label for a variety of foods. Called Elements, its first products were diapers and baby wipes. It is also opening data centers in Ohio that will employ about a thousand people. Amazon just keeps on growing…

Ross Ulbricht, creator of Silk Road, a dark Internet site for the sale of drugs, was sentenced to life in prison today.

The train is rolling into Hudson and I need to gather my things up and make my way over to my car for the short drive home before dinner at the Dot!

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Letter From New York 04 22 15 From robotics to singing in the rain…

April 22, 2015

Last night, on a balmy New York spring night, I went at 5:00 to Junior’s Deli on 45th Street in the heart of New York’s theater district and met Cathy, my middle niece, her husband and their two daughters, Clare and Isabel, for a pre-theater dinner. They were off to see “Matilda” and I was off to see “It’s Only A Play.”

Cathy and Michael live in Portland and my brother is there watching after their two sons who had just accompanied he and his wife to Machu Picchu. I don’t get to see Cathy and her family very often so it was a cheery visit and then we went off to our respective performances.

Amazingly, after the performance, as I threaded my way through a hideously congested Times Square, I ran into them on the corner of 44th and Broadway. We laughed and hugged and then moved on.

I curled up in bed and started to read a Peter Wimsey mystery but soon feel asleep, Kindle in hand, only to wake later to turn out the lights.

This morning I had breakfast with David McKillop, who recently stepped down as GM of A&E and stepped into the role of Chief Creative Officer at a new production company called Propagate, which is being funded by A&E. He’s partnered with Howard Owens who used to run Nat Geo.

It was a glorious spring morning and we walked around Union Square for a while after breakfast, strolling past all the vendors that form the Union Square Farmer’s Market, then walked over to 7th Avenue where we parted. He off to a meeting and me to day of talks called “Imagination,” being held in conjunction with the Tribeca Film Festival.

The morning was devoted to robotics. While Elon Musk is terrified of intelligent machines, all these speakers were gung-ho enthusiasts of artificial intelligence and robots, as long as every one followed Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics.

It was fascinating. The demonstration of Watson, IBM’s Supercomputer, was impressive. The video they showed reminded me of “Star Trek.”

Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL, spoke in the afternoon about the technology advances they are making in serving ads and video content to their 250,000,000 users and that was impressive, too.

After the 3-D printing talk “Eating Your Way Into 3D Printing” I had to leave to go view a cut of a sizzle reel my friend Todd’s company is working on.

While I was involved in all these fun and rather joyful activities, the world ticked on.

Yesterday the Saudis said they’d stop bombing Yemen but this morning bombs were still falling there, with the country lurching toward a humanitarian crisis as supplies are floating out at sea because of the Saudi embargo.

When I was in India there was lots of news about a land development law that the Modi government is attempting to pass. It would ease the government’s ability to expropriate land belonging to farmers for other uses. It is hugely controversial and hotly debated and stridently opposed by the Congress Party, the opposition to Modi’s BJP.

Today there was a rally in Delhi protesting the bill. At it, an Indian farmer committed suicide, hanging himself from a tree. He left behind a suicide note saying the recent extraordinary rains and hailstorms had ruined him. Rahul Gandhi raced to the hospital and the PM, Modi, is said to be “shattered” by the incident but probably not so much that he will withdraw the law.

Britain, which is facing elections on May 7th, is working overtime to figure out what is going to happen if the Tories lose. If the Scots become the power brokers in the formation of a new government, there is a concern about the results. “Constitutional crisis” is on the lips of a few.

Thousands of Ethiopians have taken to the streets to march in protest against IS’s killing of thirty of their countrymen for being Christian.

Prime Minister Abe of Japan paid slight attention to Japan’s wartime responsibility in a speech in Jakarta, which raised the ire of Japan’s neighbors but not so much that Xi of China wouldn’t meet with Abe. The two had a thirty-minute meeting and stressed their determination to continue working on their relationship. It almost sounded like an estranged couple continuing their therapy sessions.

The Vatican announced today that Pope Francis would stop in Cuba while en route to the US for his visit here. Cuba will probably go mad for the Pontiff.

The bright spring morning turned to afternoon clouds and rain, which has now stopped though the grey continues. I am off to dinner tonight with my friends David and Annette Fox, celebrating my return from India with take out from Indus Valley, our favorite neighborhood Indian restaurant. Will be a good time.

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Letter From New York 04 14 15 Working to see with tourist’s eyes…

April 14, 2015

All around me the city of New York is thrumming, filled with the sounds of a city growing, being alive. Sitting in the office of a friend doing some work for him, the street below is filled with the clatter and the clanging of building.

This morning, as I was waking and sipping my first cup of coffee, I decided that I wanted to look at the world a little differently, as if I was a tourist in spots that were well known to me, to keep my eyes and ears open for new sensations and experiences.

Walking to the subway, I noticed the play of grey light on the sidewalk, through a cloudy sky that was hinting of rain, which didn’t seem to want to come.

There is a plastic milk box between what was the Radio Shack store and the upscale mart for sports shoes. Every day there is someone sitting on that box, begging. But it’s often a different person and today it was someone I’ve never seen before. I wonder if it is first come, first seated or do they change shifts during the day?

Certainly, it’s been an interesting day out there in the world. I’ve attempted to keep up with the world while I’ve been hunched over my laptop, doing research for my friend/colleague Todd Broder.

I have discovered that we haven’t discovered any other life in the hundred thousand galaxies we have been searching. We thought that if some civilization had advanced enough that it could have a galaxy wide imprint, we might be able to detect them but no such luck. But there are more than a billion galaxies out there and a hundred thousand is just a small fraction of the possibilities.

It is also noted today that it’s Equal Pay Day though it remains to be seen if employers will step up to achieve equal pay for equal work for women. But we have a day to mark the effort to that goal.

And also today is the 150th Anniversary of the shooting of Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth, the first assassination of an American President but not the last.

150 years – an amazing amount of time and a huge chunk of American history has happened since then. The Republic wasn’t yet a hundred years old when Lincoln died.

The somber visage of Lincoln stares out at us from those haunting photographs, a window into a time long gone and just beginning to be chronicled by photography.

In Washington, Obama wants to set Cuba free by lifting its designation as a state sponsoring terrorism. If that happens, the floodgates will open. There was also a story of how ubiquitous the American flag has become in Havana, flying everywhere and on t-shirts and painted on jeans.

Currently at the Acela Club in New York, there was a huge delegation of important people heading out on the 6:00 Acela to Washington. There were police guarding the doors and the group and then they slipped out and down to the train. One was a military figure from some European nation. Everyone seemed to be paying a great deal of attention to him.

A great deal of attention is also being paid to what is happening on the first steps taken on the campaign trail. Hillary has driven to Iowa and is doing her listening. Paul Rand is back from a five state tour and Marco Rubio is facing scrutiny about his immigration and tax stands. No news of Ted Cruz today.

Today Space X successfully sent another capsule toward the space station, carrying supplies. Its first stage attempted once again to land on a platform at sea. It hit the platform but too hard.

Still, to me, it’s a step forward. Have to admire Elon Musk and his steadfastness to his vision.

The markets today seemed to do well though Google will likely face anti-trust charges in Europe.

The world in the Middle East is still very complicated. A drone attack killed a leading Yemeni Al Qaeda cleric. Russia is planning on selling missiles to Iran. Iraq’s PM was in Washington, where he got some money and a warning that Iranians in Iraq should be reporting to Baghdad.

And now I am going to go out into the streets of New York and do my best to keep my eyes open and see what I can see, with open eyes. I am off to get a martini and a bite to eat, while I continue reading a very good book, “The End of Life Book Club.”

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Letter From New York 12 18 14 Things groundbreaking and things not so funny…

December 18, 2014

When I was in high school, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA was required reading in one of my English classes. I was an adolescent fan of Hemingway though I preferred THE SUN ALSO RISES to THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. But it did cause me to think of Cuba, the Cuba of Hemingway, before Castro. I wanted to visit but I couldn’t because travel to Cuba was prohibited.

After a pleasant evening at the Red Dot with a varied group of friends, I retreated home to sleep, waking this morning to the news that President Obama was moving to normalize relations with Cuba, which has lived under draconian sanctions from the United States. As far as I have been able to tell, fifty plus years of this policy has resulted in almost no effect. A Castro still rules in Cuba and the island limps along. It is a treasure trove of ancient, classic American cars.

The decision to normalize will be hotly debated. Some of Cuban descent feel this is a betrayal; some welcome the change. GOP lawmakers threaten to make it as difficult as possible to accomplish.

It will be interesting to watch this change. My friends, Larry and Alicia, have just returned from Cuba where they were on a government-approved excursion. They will be among the last that will have seen the “old” Cuba – the Cuba before this pronouncement. It will all begin to change now, slowly but surely and, in my opinion, in a change that is long overdue.

The Pope facilitated the long overdue change; he wrote letters to both Obama and Raul Castro encouraging normalization. And they listened. A prisoner exchanged helped.

Fifty years of sanctions hasn’t done much good. It’s about time to try a new policy, don’t you think?

There were other items in the news that caught my morning coffee attention.

New York, to my surprise, has banned fracking, the controversial process by which natural gas can be extracted from the earth. A group that opposed fracking had a spontaneous celebration in Manhattan this morning outside some state offices.

The news was full of chatter about the scrubbed release of THE INTERVIEW. One reviewer who saw it back in October felt that Rogen/Franco could become the Hope/Crosby team for Millennials.   We might never know now.

The trail of evidence for the Sony hacking caper leads right back to North Korea having ordered it.

While I have found some aspects of the Sony hack story amusing, much of it is deadly serious. And not very funny. It has called into question the sensibility of the executives who agreed to make the film. More than one person in Hollywood is asking: what did they expect from making a movie about assassinating a real life dictator who has a known reputation for unpredictable actions of a nasty kind? And who has nuclear weapons.

Kim Jong-Un said it was an act of war to release the movie and he has attacked.

Now the question is: what do we do about it? Do we start the first cyber war? Probably not. Whatever it is thinking, the Obama Administration is holding its cards close to the vest right now. And probably keeping its options open. There have been daily briefings at the White House on the affair.

The reports out of Hollywood that I have been reading have been scathing toward Sony and its actions from start to finish.

I wish I could find some amusing turn of phrase to end today but whatever it might be, it is eluding me. North Korea has, apparently through proxies, attacked a major business and brought it to its knees. It is unprecedented.

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