The More Things Change...

Today, I looked back and saw that it has been nearly three years since I last visited Cuba - in February of 2016. I think a lot has changed, but much remains the same. I just landed in Cuba and soon will be visiting Havana as well as new locations in the western tobacco growing countryside as well as colonial towns in the center of the country. I'm here with photographers sponsored by Santa Fe Photographic Workshops and led by Arthur, Kip and Jennifer, as well as talented Cuban photographers Carlos & Jorge.

Back in 2016, there was optimism about President Obama’s efforts to “normalize” relations, Fidel Castro was alive, and his brother Raul was president of the country, but repressive laws remained on the books - even if most Cubans found a way around them. On the positive side, the country was having difficulty keeping up with the surge in tourism and Cuban citizens were scrambling to find a way to capitalize through small restaurants, apartment rentals, or just about anything they could think of. Foreign investors were putting money into badly needed building renovations, and for the time at least, the Cuban people were happy to see American visitors.

A lot was happening then, and quickly.

Today, both the US and Cuba have new presidents, and future relations are uncertain. Most of the US diplomats have withdrawn from Havana due to the “brain wave” thing, but US commercial airline flights are now allowed and cell phones from the US (may) work in many parts of the country. Visits by US citizens are still permitted, but rules have reverted to a time when access was more controlled. I have a few forms and a visa for travel that I need to carry, and the Cuban government adds a surcharge to my plane ticket to cover medical insurance. On a hopeful note - last month, Major League Baseball has just reached an agreement with the Cuban baseball authorities to allow Cuban players to sign contracts with US teams without defecting, and allow return travel to Cuba by those players (I think this is a positive development, but there's still a strong possibility that the deal will blocked by the US government).

And recently, Cuba has drafted a new constitution to be voted on by the people in February. When it passes (I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t) changes will not be earth-shattering; Cuba will remain a single party communist government and will continue to control major industries – manufacturing, sugar, mining, tobacco, rum, etc. – but changes allowing private ownership of property and business will be adopted. There will even be age limitations on the presidency – no older than 60 to initially occupy the office. Worth noting that the current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, is 58 and is eligible to be (re)elected by the Assembly under the new constitution. He sounds pretty bland in the Wikipedia  description as "a party technocrat who was little-known to the public before becoming president. Policy experts expected him to pursue cautious reform of his predecessors' economic policies, while preserving the country's social structure."

So, a lot is happening now, but a little slower.

I look forward to seeing what's up for myself in the next weeks.

Discoveries Close to Home

It's a beautiful day for an adventure close to home. I’m driving west from downtown Long Beach - ahead is the huge combined Port of Los Angeles + Long Beach and I am heading to explore it with my grade school buddy, Tom. The port is actually so close that I can see every day from my window, and I normally have no cause to go there, but we hope for new discoveries. I have a few high tech sites I hope to explore, but we will probably just do a lot of wandering. We drive towards Terminal Island and the route's a bit convoluted by detours around the construction of a new bridge to replace the existing bridge that is too old (only 1968), too narrow, and too low for the next generation of cargo ships - a huge project.

Making our way out of the construction zone, we turn off into the port and come across a huge white tent structure surrounded by fences and razor wire – it is the temporary home of the audacious project by SpaceX (Elon Musk) to build a huge starship for sending people to Mars. We drive in circles through the parking lot and I would love to peek inside but we see the guarded entrance and decide to continue on our way. Now we're driving on the Navy Mole, a large man-made peninsula that sheltered the former LB Navel Shipyard and we're between the waterline and an endless siding of train cars loaded with thousands of cargo containers on their way to who knows where. We stop for pictures and to soak up the sun.

 

At the end of the road is the now quiet home of the Sea Launch floating rocket launching platform – someone’s crazy, but once successful, idea to float rockets down to the equator in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for a better angle to launch communications satellites. It is quiet right now because after financial problems, I think it has been sold to a Russian company and they are gearing up to continue operations next year. Interesting.

It is Saturday but there is still truck traffic on the roads, but few cars. I keep wondering if we're somewhere we shouldn't be and I keep glancing in the rear view mirror to see if we are being tailed by port security, but almost all roads are open to the public. Areas that are off limits, and there are quite a few, are protected by security gates and guards - Coast Guard station, shipping company yards, water treatment plant, oil storage tanks and the like - even a federal low security prison. As we drive, Tom and I are sharing rambling memories of youthful exploits, catching up on what old classmates are doing, and sometimes moving on to our feelings about ageing and death. A lot to consider, but the conversation is easy going and often interrupted by discoveries along the way.

Along the way, in the middle of the busy port, we come across a small memorial and statue commemorating the site of a fishing village that was inhabited by Japanese Americans before WWII. At the start of the war the residents were removed from their homes and relocated to internment camps - the village bulldozed when the government took over the land. Recently, someone has placed fresh flowers. We see there are two other people here – a man and his wife, visiting from Chicago to celebrate her mother's 90th birthday, and I offer to take their picture. We chat a bit and they tell me that they came across the memorial by chance and they share the story of his parents who were relocated to a camp in Arkansas during the war. Some of his relatives moved west after their release by his family stayed in the Midwest. A poignant connection.

Moving on, I am looking for another spaceship venue that I had heard of but we discover that the SpaceX rocket landing platform, brilliantly named “Just Read the Instructions” after a sci-fi spaceship, is apparently not in port. Or maybe I am just lost. I had hoped to see it because it is an amazing project allowing rockets to be reused by returning and landing, Buck Rogers style, off the coast of Vandenberg Air Force Base. Instead, we see a gull watching a giant cargo ship being nudged towards the outer harbor by two tugs.

Soon, we come across a Los Angeles Fire Department fire boat station near the battleship USS Iowa, and we all the doors are locked but we can peak through windows into its shelter. It is quite a machine and we can see a few people in the pilot house, maybe having coffee. The boat’s main water cannon proudly boasts that it can furnish 11,000 gallons of water per minute. I do some mental division by 60 to get seconds and I am duly impressed.

On the way home, we stop at the Queen Mary in hopes of joining a tour of the engine rooms. Only a few problems – the tours are booked up until three hours from now, and the cost is $45 to even get on board. Disappointed, we look up at the side of the ship and imagine the effort it took to drive the thousands of visible rivets that hold it together.

A rewarding day, but I think we have just scratched the surface. I get home and look up information about the port and discover that the port of LA is the largest container port in the US and the LB port is second largest. But another remarkable fact is that the two of them combined only make up the 9th largest port in the world (ahead of them are ports in Singapore, South Korea and SIX from China, including #1 Shanghai which, on its own, handles almost three times the traffic of LA/LB). Food for thought.