Mitchell Hearns Bishop | Howard Besser's IS 208 | Information Studies, UCLA

Yeah, Yeah. I remember the Cuban missle crisis. The neighbors were building bomb shelters and we would watch the news and go to school and do drop drills and learn all sorts of silly nonsense that was going to save us or help us survive the nuclear holocaust. Fidel smoked cigars, and they grew lots of sugar cane. I knew about sugar cane because we were from Hawaii and we grew sugar cane there too. Later I would work with Cubans, smoke Cuban cigars read about the revolution and be bored and annoyed by the endless squabbling and political meddling of the Cuban exiles in American politics and the shameless pandering of both political parties to the wealthy Cuban expatriates.

I was a long time fan of Ry Cooder and an early fan of the Buenavista Social Club. I remember reading John Dos Passos ' novels and some of the scenes were ordinary Joes in Cuba right after the first world war. Ernest Hemingway, I have lot's of vaguely lefty conservator friends who went to Cuba to help the Cubans try to deal with conserving their heritage after so many years of this pointless feud that Uncle Sam has had with Cuba. I'm afraid my view of these things is pretty much the same as Wormold's in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, I would happily deceive all parties to the squabble since the Cuban people always seem to be the losers. The Batista group, Lucky Luciano and his friends certainly seem loathsome and like so many communist governments (and American democracy for that matter) Cuban communism looked very much like the system that never was. I don't remember the Maine and I suspect the whole thing was an excuse to annex Cuba.

Mitchell Hearns Bishop | Howard Besser's IS 208 | Information Studies, UCLA