Cuban Railroad

Cuba's Railways are TOTALLY CRAZY!
Nonstop Eurotrip

The narrator's cheerful demeanor is totally at odds with his environment. 10 hours to get a ticket and then 10 hours to make 5 hour trip?!? Google Maps says you should be able to drive it in three and a half hours. As if. This is Cuba after all.

Note that the pretty 1950's era automobiles shown early on are basically jalopies that are only still running due to the ingenuity and diligence of the Cuban equivalent of redneck engineering. That $10 bribe is likely the equivalent of a month's wages in Cuba.

Cuba runs on crime. People can't survive without it. Everyone has to give a cut of whatever they get to 'the beard' as Castro was known.

Havana to Santa Clara

Cuba is the only island in the Caribbean that has an extensive railroad. The Dominican Republic has some rail lines that serve the sugar mills and Puerto Rico has 10 miles of transit lines in San Juan, but that's about it.

Previous related posts about Cuba:

• Hershey Electric Railway
• Making Money in Cuba
• Cuba Cars

Note on temperatures at the train station:

• 35 degrees C = 95 degrees F
• 45 degrees C = 113 degrees F

Munitions & Rules

The FAL in Cuba: Left Arm of the Communist World?
Forgotten Weapons

I'm a bit of a sucker for FAL automatic rifles. While I do like the way they look, I think I like them because they are exotic, as in I have never seen one in person.

At the end of the video Ian is going to demonstrate shooting one of these rifles in full-automatic mode, but he can't show us because of YouTube's rules. I would kind of like to see that because Ian is not a big guy and the FAL shoots a 308 cartridge, which is substantial.

Then we have this video by Demolition Ranch where he was demonstrating just what kind of things YouTube allowed regarding automatic weapons:

Youtube Legal Gun Content...
DemolitionRanch

Okay, YouTube has rules, the government has rules and your friends have their own rules. Rules change. I'm not too worried about the rules.

Anyway, the business about the freighter blowing up in Havana harbor piqued my interest. Another case where the CIA might have been sticking their fingers in. Nice thing about explosions, any evidence pretty much gets obliterated.

La Coubre explosion 4 March 1960

On the page with the image I found this block explaining the rules governing the inclusion of this photo. Awful lot of legalese.

Licensing

	This work was created in Cuba and is now in the public domain because its term of copyright has expired. According to Cuban law #14 and subsequent amendments, copyright terms in Cuba are the following:
Type of material Copyright has expired in Cuba if... Copyright has expired in the US if...¹ Photographs Used more than 25 years ago First published in Cuba without compliance with US copyright formalities and used in Cuba before February 20, 1972 Anonymous works (not photographs) Used more than 50 years ago First published in Cuba without compliance with US copyright formalities and used in Cuba before February 20, 1947 Corporate and government works Never (perpetual copyright) Published before 1929 (95 years ago) All other works More than 50 years has passed since the 1st of January following the death of the author a) Published in Cuba without compliance with US copyright formalities, author died before 1947 or b) Published before 1929 (95 years ago)
Note 1: For a file to be hosted on Wikimedia Commons, it must be in the public domain in both Cuba and the United States.
¹ For a work to be public domain in the United States, its copyright must have expired in Cuba before Cuba joined the Berne Convention on February 20, 1997.
Note 2: Notwithstanding the conditions set above, the state of Cuba may decide to transfer to the state the copyright on works when the copyright term for the creator of it has expired, as set by the 48º article of Cuban Copyright law. Such works would not be free of copyright, and may be deleted at any time. English ∙ Español ∙ 日本語 ∙ русский ∙ 中文（简体） ∙ 中文（繁體） ∙ +/−

Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard

Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard

I picked this up at Powell's City of Books a couple of weeks ago. I was looking for something I could read. I browsed the Science Fiction section for a while, but nothing grabbed me, so I figured I'd pick up a couple of Murder Mysteries from authors I knew. Elmore Leonard usually writes pretty good, hard-boiled murder mysteries. A bunch of shows were based on his books. These four I remember clearly:

• 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
• Jackie Brown (1997)
• Get Shorty (1995)
• TV series Justified (2010—2015)

Morro Castle Havana

Cuba Libre isn't one of them. It's more of a historical adventure story. It opens in 1898 right after the USS Maine got blown up, which triggers the Spanish-American War. It's pretty great. We have heroes, villains, a pretty girl, guns and a sprinkling of factoids that make it seem very real.

Characters:

• Ben Tyler - our hero
• Charlie Burke - Ben's partner
• Roland 'Rollie' Boudreaux - sugar plantation owner, polo player
• Amelia Brown - our girl and Rollie's mistress
• Victor Fuentes - Rollie's factotum
• Novis Crowe - Rollie's bodyguard
• Palenzuela - Havana Chief of Police
• Rudy Calvo - investigator for Palenzuela
• Lorraine - Amelia's friend and the Chief's mistress
• Neely Tucker - reporter page 12
• Paulina Gonzales
• Gomez
• Osma - former slave and slave hunter
• Dr. Henriques - San Lazaro hospital for lepers page 330
• Mary Lou Jones - San Lazaro hospital for lepers page 330
• Tavalera - evil Guardia leader
• Isabela Catolica page 236
• Islero - insurgent general

A number of historical figures are mentioned:

• John J. Crittenden - American patriot
• Clara Barton - founded American Red Cross page 89
• Winston Churchill - junior British military officer page 85
• Evangelina Cisneros - Cuban imprisoned by Spanish authorities page 89
• Charles Crocker - railroad tycoon page 12 (Crooker)
• Richard Harding Davis - reporter page 12
• Frederick Funston - American artillerist page 297
• Calixto García - Cuban General page 85
• Máximo Gómez - Cuban General page 85
• William Randolph Hearst - Newspaper mogul page 87
• Julia Ward Howe - author and social activist page 89
• Fitzhugh Lee - American Army General page 87
• Narcisco Lopez - Cuban patriot
• Charles Dwight Sigsbee - Captain of the USS Maine page 85
• Valeriano Weyler - Spanish General page 87

Here's some pics of stuff that got mentioned:

USS Terror, page 190

Spanish cruiser Vizcaya

The Sims-Dudley Dynamite Gun
Uses compressed air to fire explosive rounds

Chapter 17, page 260, the cowboy and the marine set off to collect a debt from the owner of a sugar cane plantation. Naturally there are guns involved:

Minute of Mae: Spanish Mauser 1893
C&Rsenal

Minute of Mae: U.S. Krag–Jørgensen 1898
C&Rsenal

Minute of Mae: S&W No.3 Russian 3rd Model
C&Rsenal

Page 301. In 1898, trains and horses were the primary means of transportation. Sometimes you carried your horses on a train, which meant you had to raise the horse four feet off of the ground to get into the stock car.  For that you need a ramp:

Soviet Union, South.- Horses being loaded into a train." August 1942

Havana Cuba 1898

Cuba

I was able to find most of the places mentioned in the book. I marked them on a Google Map. The Cluster of blue markers are around Havana, the green ones are around Matanzas and yellow ones have to do with the war.

I wrote a couple of pages of notes about Cuba Straits, a murder mystery set in Cuba. Page 1 here. Page 2 here. And then there's all my other posts about Cuba.

Making Money in Cuba

'56 Ford Victoria

Twenty odd years ago, when Osmany was still living in Cuba, he was doing very well, making money hand over fist from several, probably-not-totally legal, enterprises, things like dealing in computer parts, modifying cars to go racing and gambling on those races. Today I asked him if things were going so well for him, why did he leave? He tells me that as long as you don't get too big, the government won't bother you, but if you become too big or too successful, the government will smack you down. One guy he knew was making and selling plastic flowers and became too successful, so the government arrested him, charged him as enemy of the state and confiscated everything he owned, his house, his car, his business and all the equipment. He saw too many instances of this and decided to get out.

Cuba Cars

An old American car passes by the capitol building in Havana, Cuba, on May 3, 2021. (YAMIL LAGE/AFP via Getty Images)

Saw this on Wretchard.com. I used to think it was cool that they had all these old cars in Cuba. Then I got the inside story from my daughter. They are 70 year old cars that have been beaten within an inch of their lives and they are only running because of the extraordinary lengths people go to to keep them running because they are the only cars they have.

Bone Collector

Knee Implant / Prosthesis

Once upon a time, back when Osmany was living in Cuba, he became acquainted with a guy who collected bones. He got these bones from graves in cemeteries (no details on the circumstances available). Of particular interest were bones from people who had been subjected to surgery to repair injuries. One prime example was a femur where the knee end of the bone had been replaced with prostheses made of platinum. The prostheses must have weighed a pound and in the free world that much platinum would be worth $10K, but since he was in Cuba where there is no free market, it was worth nothing except as a curiosity to be added to his macabre collection.

Last Thursday

Guantanamera - The Sandpipers
Driving down the road and this tune comes on the radio, probably KQRZ (the website is down). It sounds like they are singing 'for he's a guantanamera', but I check the lyrics and the only word I got right was guantanamera, which means 'a woman from Guantanamo'. No trace of "he's a", nor is there even anything in there could possibly be construed as "he's a". Huh. Just for grins, here's another link to a copy of the lyrics. This one goes to Google Translate and the URL contains the entire Spanish version of the song, which is just over a kilobyte.

Guantanamo? Haven't heard that name in a while. Wasn't it all over the news, what, a couple of years ago? With me it's a crap shoot whether I can come within a dozen years of being able to tell you when something happened. Mostly, something will come up in converstation and I will think it was a recent event, like a year ago and then I find out whatever it was was actually five or ten years ago.

Anyway, back to Guantanamo. Funny how the news only seems to capture our attention one crisis at a time. I suppose it's a form of entertainment, and possibly a little enlightening, even if it's only the light resulting from the flames from someone fanning the fire. Anyway, whatever happened to Guantanamo? Last I heard nothing had changed.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I went to the eye doctor this morning for a check-up and got my eyes dilated. Driving down TV (Tualatin Valley) highway and I see a traffic light up ahead. It's a little far away and I can't make out whether it is red or green. No matter, there is a pickup truck in front of me. If the light is red, he'll stop, so it doesn't matter if I can make out the signals on the traffic light. We get a little closer and now I can see that the light is red. So okay, I don't need to rely on the pickup truck anymore, which is very good because he just sails right on through the red light.

The speed limit on Jackson School Road used to be 35 MPH, but a couple of weeks ago they changed it to 25 MPH because of construction, but no construction has been done. I suppose they were trying to get it done before the construction starts, but this is silly. And very annoying.

Venezuela

Raul Castro, Vladimir Putin & Nicolas Maduro

With all the noise about Venezuela, one might be forgiven for thinking that Maduro is near the end and democracy will soon prevail. I have my doubts. Some semblance of democracy did return to Eastern Europe after decades of Soviet control, but it wasn't a civil war that brought their freedom. The Soviet Union simply ran out of money to pay their goons. We can hope  Maduro's government will also soon run out of money, but since Russia is supporting him, that might not happen.

I can understand Russia's interest in Venezuela: they have huge reserves of oil, as big or bigger than Saudi Arabia. Plus Maduro's government is of a similar, pseudo-communist, bent, so they are somewhat simpatico. Since the economic situation there has gotten very bad, and the West has universally condemned Maduro, Russia is his only friend. Let's not forget that the Western running-dog imperialists (to use an old, communist phrase) persist in sticking their fingers in Ukraine, so I can see why Putin would enjoy messing about in Venezuela. Tit-for-tat, so to speak.

But the problem isn't just Maduro. He isn't going to be able to maintain his position without support, specifically from the military. The Atlantic has a story by Moisés Naím from two years ago that paints a more complete picture of the situation. It's ugly.

Removing Maduro from power could be done peacefully if we could somehow cut off his support from Russia. I don't see how we can do that. We might be able to do some horse-trading, stop mucking about in Eastern Europe so much, especially the Ukraine, but I doubt that will happen. The political support for Eastern Europe is much stronger in the West than it is for Venezuela, which is mostly a jungle filled with wild-eyed revolutionaries, as we all know.


Don Henley - All She Wants To Do Is Dance (Official Music Video)
Don Henley

Update November 2021 replaced missing video.

Update June 2023 replaced missing video.

Cuban Doctors

Cuba-Brazil: The Battle of the White Coats

Posted on November 19, 2018 by Yoani-Sánchez

Cuban doctors who stay in Brazil will be forbidden entry to the island for eight years. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Generation Y, Havana, 19 November 2018 – We saw the conflict coming. From the moment Jair Bolsonero won the elections in Brazil, Cuba’s official discourse increased in rhetoric against him and prepared public opinion for the rupture that was imminent.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for the Plaza of the Revolution was the statements by the president-elect in which he warned that he would change the conditions of the agreement under which more than 8,300 physicians from Cuba work in Brazil’s Mais Medicos (More Doctors) program.
Last Wednesday, tensions escalated to their highest point when the Cuban Minister of Public Health announced that he was cancelling the contract and removing his professionals from the South American country. The official notice, read out on all of the island’s the news programs, repeated that Bolsonaro’s threats would not be tolerated but deftly ignored some of his words. Particularly those where the rightist leader insisted that the Cuban doctors should receive their full salaries and be able to bring their families to stay with them while they were in the program.
The Cuban government has made medical missions a lucrative business. With professionals deployed in more than 60 countries, the money raised by this practice is Cuba’s largest source of foreign currency, estimated to exceed $11 billion annually.
In the case of Brazil, Havana pockets 75% of the 3,300 dollar salary Brazil pays for each doctor, while the health professionals only receive a quarter of the total. On the Island, in a bank account which they do not have access to, their “Cuban” monthly salary of about 60 dollars accumulates, which they can only collect if they return to the island.
Those who leave the Mais Medicos program under their own will are considered deserters and are banned from entering Cuba for eight years. During the time the Workers’ Party (PT) was at the head of the Brazilian government, the doctors who escaped from their contracts were pursued by the Brazilian police and could be returned to the Island if they were arrested. None were allowed to bring their family members to be with them during their missions, and they were often housed in overcrowded hostels shared with other doctors, nurses and hospital technicians.
Despite so many difficulties and the low earnings, the missions were very much desired by the doctors because they were able to buy goods that are not available in Cuban markets, and to make contacts that would later allow them to return to Brazil privately, with a contract to work in some clinic.
Beyond its ability to provide healthcare for many Brazilians in the poorest areas of the country, the Mais Medicos program hid a political operation to build support for the leftist Workers’ Party and guarantee it the votes of the lower classes. It was clear that Cuba’s interest in this outcome was not going to continue with Bolsonaro in charge, thus it was only a matter of time before Castroism removed its healthcare professionals from Brazil. It only remains now to ask how many of them will actually return to the island.
The president-elect of Brazil has announced that he will grant political asylum to all Cuban doctors who request it and it is expected that a considerable number will benefit from this offer. Those who do so will lose the right to return to their homeland for many long years, they will be called traitors and, most likely, their families on the island will be under pressure. The battle of the white coats has barely begun.

Stole this article from Generation Y. My daughter's father-in-law is a doctor working in this program, although he is in Venezuela, not Brazil. He's been there two years and has another year to go before he can return home.

I find it curious that even though Cuba is essentially impoverished, they are still able to produce more doctors than they need. Or maybe they are just providing medical services to those who can pay for it and their own people will just have to do without, which makes them just like us imperialist running dogs,  whom they denigrate and despise.

Lomachenko vs. Rigondeaux

Vasyl Lomachenko and Guillermo Rigondeaux at Madison Square Garden

The kids went to NYC for a long weekend and Osmany managed to see one of his coutrymen in a highly touted fight (Rigondeaux is from Cuba). The fight was kind of a bust. Lomachenko is two weight classes above Rigondeaux. Rigondeaux retired after six rounds complaining about a broken hand. The entire fight is available on YouTube with a Spanish soundtrack.

Let's Build An Airplane

My daughter's father-in-law is a doctor on Treasure Island. It has some other Spanish name that I can never remember. Rumor has it that it was the model for the island in the book Treasure Island. I liked the book, so that's what I call it. Treasure Island is part of Cuba, and Cuba, being run by the commies, is impoverished. So I was thinking that the next time somebody goes to visit, they should take a package of medical supplies, you know, stuff that would actually be useful as opposed to trinkets and cute clothes and other such clap-trap as people see and want.

Catamaran Ferry Iris, Cuba

But then I realized that the contents of the package were immaterial compared to the difficulty of getting it there. You can fly to any number of cities on the main island, but getting to Treasure Island is kind of a pain. There is a ferry (a French catamaran, above), but space is limited, tickets are hard to get, you might have to wait a day or two to get on board.

Antonov AN-2 at the Rafael Cabrera Mustelier Airport

There is a semi-regular air service, but the plane is old and small and not all that regular. With demand as high as it is, they obviously need more capacity of some sort.

Now the first world solution to this kind of problem is to buy a ship or an airliner from an established manufacturer and then extract a continuous stream of cash from the sale of tickets. On one hand this makes good economic sense, but on the other, Cuba is impoverished. I'm not sure ticket sales would be enough to pay first world prices for first world equipment. I don't know how they paid for the ferry. Maybe somebody gave it to them. Or maybe I know nothing of communist finance.

What Cuba, and every other impoverished nation needs, is an industrial base so they can build their own stuff. Building airplanes might be just the ticket. Obviously they wouldn't be able to compete on the world market, because the world market wants stuff that is certified safe by the great government bureaucracies that certify such things. But for the parts of the world that are not part of the first world, a home grown aircraft might be just the ticket.

When I first started writing this diatribe, I was going to go off now on how it should be a simple matter for Cuba, with its highly educated workforce, to go into the aircraft manufacturing business. I mean the biggest part of building an airplane is putting the fuselage together and that's just a matter of sheet metal and rivets. Back in WW2 we put a nation of farmers to work building a glorious fleet of aircraft, and by glorious I mean enormous. I suspect that the USA produced on the order of 100,000 aircraft during WW2. So it really shouldn't be that difficult for Cuba to start building their own aircraft, especially since most of the 3rd world could use a nice cheap, sturdy, small airplane.

But then I read about the fastest ship on the block. Turns out it is made in Tasmania, an island off the south Coast of Australia, an island with no industrial base, no coal mines, no bauxite mines, no giant power plants. How could they possibly hope to compete on the world stage? What's wrong with these people, don't they know you can't do that?

Supposedly one of the reasons the USA has been so successful is because of its industrial might, and we were able to develop that because we have big iron and coal deposits. Tasmania doesn't have any of that. I'm pretty sure their aluminum is imported, maybe even from China, and they were still able to develop a successful industrial scale operation. And it is successful, they are selling their boats all over the world.

Maybe I'm thick, but I can't see any reason why Tasmania should be so successful and Cuba should be such a frigging disaster, other than the fact that the Castro brothers are made-men in the mafia founded by Stalin. It's enough to make you a commie hatin' redneck.

Update January 2023 Replaced a stinky link with better one and a dead link with a good one. See the whole story here.

Postcard from Cuba

Postcard from Cuba

We received a postcard from Cuba in the mail yesterday. The kids mailed it when they were in Havana for Christmas. That was six weeks ago. Still, that's a big improvement over no mail from Cuba.

Four Seasons in Havana

4 SEASONS IN HAVANA - Teaser Trailer
We started watching this series this evening. It's pretty great, though part of that greatness might be because it was shot in Havana, and when's the last time we saw anything come out of Havana? It's not like your regular 45 minute cop show, each episode is like an hour and a half long, so each one is more like a movie.

Passport Rules

Treasure Island in the foreground,
Mainland Cuba in the background.

The kids are going to Cuba to visit Osmany's folks over Christmas. They have been planning this trip for months, looking for airline tickets they can afford that won't have them spending umpteen hours in Atlanta, arranging for accommodations, travel to Treasure Island, deciding what to take and figuring out how to pack it all into bags that won't incur an excess weight penalty. We're looking good with only a week until departure and then dutiful daughter gets red flagged on her passport.
    It seems that if you are going to Cuba, you need to have two, full, blank pages in your passport. Daring daughter has used the stuffing out of her passport and if you combined all the blank spots that are left you might get two pages, but that won't cut it. So she needs a new passport.
    She might be able to get one if she drives up to Seattle and pleads her case. And then we might have to drive back a second time to pick it up. No telling. Plus, you need an appointment. Would she even be able to get an appointment? Once again, no idea.
     There is an outfit that claims to be able to get your passport renewed in one day, but they charge $300, and that is on top of whatever the government wants, which is somewhere north of $100. I hate being put over a barrel like this, but it might be the best solution. I'm wondering how they are able to do this, and then I realized that the appointment might be the gating factor. If they book an appointment every day then they can be sure of getting in. So their business model is basically paying for one person to hang around passport central all the time. Or maybe they split their take with the secretary of passport control and he sees that their clients get taken care of. Who knows? In any case, it's a stink load of money for something we shouldn't have to pay for at all, but like I said, this new rule has got us over a barrel.
    On the other side, if you count the missed time from work and the time and effort to drive to Seattle (possibly twice), the $300 begins to look almost reasonable.

P.S. No glasses in your passport photos anymore. Another new rule. I'm thinking we need a subscription service to tell us whenever they make a new rule, which seems to be every couple of months ever since Homeland Security took over.

New Dehli to Havana

Google Earth view of flight path from New Delhi, India to Havana Cuba

It's a little hard to make out in this image, what with the cloud cover and all, but this flight path takes you somewhat North of Iceland. Nobody actually flies this route. It would be possible with our newest long range airliners, like the Boeing 777-200LR or the Airbus A340-500. Ordinary Google Maps doesn't show this route going so far North, but if you create your own map it does. But then you don't get the global view like you do with Google Earth.

Looking at plain map of Earth, Madrid looks like good waypoint, but going through someplace like Iceland, will save you 500 miles and an hour of time.

Prompted by Britt's story in National Geographic India about Cuba.

King Carlos, aka Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and Modern Music

As the parade of the Guaracheritos de Regla passes with colourful carnival costumes, choreographed dances, and drums, the gathered crowd falls in behind the procession and joins the celebration.
Photo: Britt Basel

Back in colonial Spain, King Carlos made an ironic decision in his war against non-Christians: he banned slaves from Muslim areas of Africa in the new territory of Cuba. So the peoples of northern Africa were sent to other European colonies including the U.S., where their stringed instruments may have helped give rise to the musical tradition of the blues; while many of the first slaves who wound up in Cuba came from the forested regions of southern Africa, where the drum was, and still is, king. - Britt Basel

Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo By Ned Sublette

While former [Spanish] colonies gradually abolished chattel slavery after independence in the 1830's, the Cuban pro-slavery lobby succeeded in delaying abolition in Puerto Rico, and Cuba, the two remaining American possessions, until nearly the end of the 19th century. - Slavery in the Spanish New World colonies

Cuban Revolution

Fidel Castro (left), Fulgencio Batista (right)

A few items I came across in my reading about the Cuban Revolution:

1. 

In 1958, Cuba was a relatively well-advanced country by Latin American standards, and in some cases by world standards. On the other hand, Cuba was affected by perhaps the largest labor union privileges in Latin America, including bans on dismissals and mechanization. They were obtained in large measure "at the cost of the unemployed and the peasants", leading to disparities. Between 1933 and 1958, Cuba extended economic regulations enormously, causing economic problems. Unemployment became a problem as graduates entering the workforce could not find jobs. The middle class, which was comparable to that of the United States, became increasingly dissatisfied with unemployment and political persecution. The labor unions supported Batista until the very end. Batista stayed in power until he was forced into exile in December 1958. - Cuba

2. The embargo started in 1960, or did it?

"An arms embargo – imposed on the Cuban government by the United States on 14 March 1958 – contributed significantly to the weakness of Batista's forces."  - Cuban Revolution

What's going on here? I thought Cuba was our friend. Seems there was a minor kerfuffle where some students tried to take out Batista and got squashed. Typical schizoid American foreign policy.

3. Then we have this quote:

"I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear."—U.S. President John F. Kennedy, interview with Jean Daniel, 24 October 1963^[27]  - Cuban Revolution

It wasn't until a couple of years after the revolution that the government turned communist:

Fidel Castro made it abundantly clear that he was implementing a socialist order in Cuba. He did not start out as a communist, but was forced to go that route following the fallout with the USA when they refused to trade with Cuba. Fidel Castro then turned to the Soviet Union for help, which they gave, but with several conditions. The main condition was that Cuba should go communist. - Jamaica Observer

4.

Carlos Franqui. Now you see him, now you don't.

Fidel takes a page from Stalin's book. Franqui was in on the revolution up until 1968 when he broke with Castro and moved Puerto Rico.

Hershey Electric Railway

Electric locomotive and freight cars for hauling sugar cane

The Hershey Electric Railway first ran in 1917. It is a standard-gauge electric interurban railway that runs from the suburbs of Havana, Cuba, to the city of Matanzas, approximately 57 miles to the east. There is a station and depot at the town of Camilo Cienfuegos, better known by its pre-revolutionary name of Hershey. The railway was built by The Hershey Company to transport sugar to the port of Havana.  ~ Wikipedia

Cuba was the sixth country in the world to get a railway – even before Spain – and as a result has an extensive, although slowly declining, network. - Slow train across Cuba

Hershey sugar mill, Hershey, Cuba

Hershey built up an extensive empire in Cuba. Hershey's Cuban holdings were sold in 1946 to the Cuban Atlantic Sugar Company.

Bridge of Bacunayagua

Bridge of Bacunayagua, Matanzas, Cuba

The Bridge of Bacunayagua was inaugurated in September 1959, nine months after Castro came to power. I suspect that the bridge was finished in 1958, and it just took Castro nine months to get around to capitalizing on it. Kind of funny that the tunnel under the entrance to Havana Harbor was also completed in 1958. I mean all we hear about the Batista regime is how corrupt it was, but all these big construction projects were going on as well.

The bridge was designed by Luis P. Sáenz (Duplace), a very prolific guy. He was so talented that the CAACE (Cuban American Association of Civil Engineers) has a scholarship named for him.

Google Map here.

Cayo Jutías Lighthouse

Cayo Jutías Lighthouse - Dave Artioli

Cayo Jutías
1902 (U.S.). Active; focal plane 141 ft; white light, 2 s on, 13 s off. 134 ft octagonal skeletal tower with central cylinder, lantern, and double gallery, built on a screwpile foundation; original Barbier et Bérnard Fresnel lens. . . . This lighthouse is the only survivor of four towers of this class built in Cuba during the U.S. occupation; it was prefabricated in the U.S. by the Waddell & Hedrick Co. - Lighthouses of Cuba

Cayo Jutías Lighthouse

Just something I came across while looking at Cuba. Reminds me of the Lighthouse off Key West - Sand Key Light.