HISTORY AS MYSTERY

Xanadú Mansion, on the San Bernardino crags of the Hicacos Pensinsula (present-day Varadero), Cuba, built in 1930 for Irénée du Pont I, who had purchased the land for less than one cent per acre. In the 1920s, Irénée was the president of the DuPont company, whose many gifts to the world include nylon, teflon, lycra, corian, kevlar, Agent Orange, napalm, and other varieties of toxic sludge that have fouled up Mother Earth forever. In December 1963, following La Revolución, Xanadú reopened as “Las Américas” restaurant, with Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the only woman ever to have been on a solo space mission, as guest of honour.

CUBA MI AMOR

Look there, where the wind is so peaceful now that it’s gone to sleep beneath the beds, over there, where the sun’s so bright that the sunflowers don’t know which way to turn.

Gabriel García Márquez, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”

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Cuba is one rare country that does not compete for the World Doormat Cup.

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

 

I’m not so sure about La Revolución any more …

However

Granma street vendor, La Habana, January 2014

Pero

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On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted its suffocating embargo against its everlasting enemy.

Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991)