There's No Getting Away from Trump - Even in the Outer Hebrides

 

Before the Covid virus hit, I went on a cruise through the Hebrides Islands. Those wild northern shores of Scotland had long called to me. The swirl of birds above the rocky coasts; the distant skirl of bagpipes; the loneliness. I always thought it was in such a place that I could at last write some concentrate of poetic truth.

 Unfortunately, it seems likely it’s too late in life for me to pack up and relocate to a place so different from my accustomed Chicago. So I had to settle for an organized tour on board a cruise ship. Even though this was going to be such an abbreviation of my initial dream, I still looked forward to the trip. I especially looked forward to getting away from the endless drum beat of politics, of Trump, Trump, Trump, here in the States.

 It was no huge luxury liner that carried us. It was a smaller, more intimate ship wending its way through some of the Hebrides, through some of the Orkney Islands. I never do much research about the places I’m scheduled to visit on tour. I suppose I should, but I look on these trips as time away from research, as a respite from study, from getting my facts straight. When I tour, I prefer to just be surprised.

 I was indeed in for some surprises on this trip, as for example when I learned the northernmost of these islands were in fact close to the Arctic Circle. Despite that, we saw beautiful jellyfish floating, delicately fingering the waters around us, as if we were in the tropics. Their ability to survive here was likely due to the North Atlantic Ocean Current that threads its way to these farther shores. That current spreads a general warmth along the coastlines, perhaps incidentally enabling the famous “fairy gardens” of Scotland. These gardens are the remarkable, mysterious patches of lushness that some gardeners can wring out of the rocky substrate of this land and that they populate with all manner of gnomes and sprites.

 I was further surprised to learn how much Norwegian influence there was in these islands, especially in the Orkneys and Shetlands, some of which are almost within swimming distance of Bergen. (Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. They are over 200 miles apart, but still – surprisingly close.) Some enclaves of people in the Orkneys speak a dialect heavily influenced by the Norse language. Our group walked down “Hell-hole Road in Stromness on the Orkney Mainland Island. “Hell” is likely derived from the Norse word “Heilagr” meaning “holy.”

 We could all laugh that we’d been to Hell and back as we returned to the ship from that excursion ashore. There was in fact quite a bit of laughing and conviviality among our tour members. Because it was a smaller group, most of us got to know some of each other’s backstories – the parts that people cared to reveal – the parts that made amusing public fare. But, as is almost always the case, there was usually a sadness hiding behind the high joviality with which we all curtained the bulk of our lives.

 There was one particularly notable couple on board whose story everyone came to know due to the always slightly inebriated loquacity of the man. Joe circulated around telling how he and his partner, Lisa, had been dating for forty years. Then he whispered to each clutch of us in turn, “But things are going to change soon” and he winked. We wondered – what did it all mean? Was that wink intended to mean he was going to break up with her? Was he making jesting suggestions that he’d like to throw her overboard?

 But no. The wink was meant to signal the fact that he was finally going to pop the question. And pop it he did. He had forewarned the cooking staff on board and they baked an elaborate cake. He popped the question and presented a ring. Lisa accepted. They set a date. The cake was brought out on a silver platter, ablaze with candles, just like a birthday – the birth date of their new life together, finally as a committed couple. We all cheered and applauded. We all got a piece of the cake. I was glad to see my piece had an especially large chunk of pink frosting on it.

 Having accomplished that goal he’d set for the trip, the new fiancé felt able to chatter even more openly about the couple’s long dating history. He told how they had a ranch in Montana. Sipping on the margarita he’d ordered from the bar, he congratulated himself jokingly on how he managed to fob off most of the hard work of the place onto Lisa, while he “supervised.” Although he did concede that Lisa had good managerial skills and a good head for figures. She kept careful track of the finances of the ranch so that they showed a profit most years. They’d really raked in the money awhile back when it became apparent that their ranch was right in the prime path of the total solar eclipse. They’d rented out every room, every shed, every piece of ground where a tent could be staked on their property for top dollar.

 “Yes,” the man granted – “Lisa has a good head on her shoulders. But she’s such a flirt. Look at her. Look at how she’s working the room, as usual. Talking to all the men. She does the same at home. She does the same whenever we go ashore. If the salesclerk in the gift shop is a man, she’ll talk to him no end. But I’m not worried. At this stage of things, the men just don’t want to go there.”

 In all innocence, the older woman sitting next to me asked, “You mean they just don’t want to go to Montana?”

 All the rest of us laughed uproariously at her naivete. The man explained, in-between guffaws, “No, no. Lisa is, you know, over sixty now. Although it’s true, she doesn’t look it. But nevertheless – with a woman in her sixties, the average man just doesn’t want to go there.”

 My table companion caught on and blushed. We laughed again - at what had been her child-like obtuseness, and at the oxymoron of the man’s bawdy delicacy. However, news of the initial misunderstanding circulated amongst the select group of us who typically dined together, and it became our in-joke, our secret catchphrase. Whenever the topic of some failed Hollywood romance where the man had dumped the woman came up, we’d knowingly intone, “He just didn’t want to go to Montana anymore.” Soon we expanded the use of the phrase to indicate enthusiasm. Whenever we discussed a couple that seemed to be clicking, we’d lewdly predict, “Soon he’ll be going to Montana.”

 As it turned out, we in fact had occasion to use the phrase in that more positive sense quite a bit in the course of our trip. Our tour guide was a good-looking Scotsman in his late forties, a native of the Hebrides, which in many ways made him an ideal person for the cruise company to have hired to lead this tour. But in other ways, he turned out to be a little less diligent in his duties than he might have been.

 Most of the passengers were retirees, as is true of most cruises. But there was one young woman among us. She was a daughter who’d sort of been roped into the trip, dragged along under protest by an enthusiastic mother intent on seeing the Hebrides. This daughter was in her early thirties, statuesque, and quite attractive. She became the inevitable focus of our guide’s attentions. He gave the required narration of the landmarks and notable geographical features we passed along the way. He even demonstrated his resonant singing voice when he sang a hymn in Gaelic in the wayside Italian Chapel that had been built by WWII servicemen on one of the Orkney Islands.

 He did his duty. But it was plain his heart wasn’t in it. So then there were two people whose hearts weren’t in the trip. There was the pretty daughter who’d been more or less coerced into keeping her mother company, and there was the guide whose attention strayed to the pretty daughter keeping her mother company.

 The guide regaled us with a fair amount of his own biography. He’d been born in the Hebrides but had soon been sent to an orphanage in England. There was a whiff of Dickensian grimness in his upbringing as he told it. As soon as he’d come of age, he returned to the Hebrides where he felt he rightfully belonged. He’d started his own tour company. He’d accumulated his own flock of sheep and became a part-time sheep farmer. Through most of these dabbling endeavors, he’d had help from his “ex-girlfriend.” Whenever he mentioned her, he emphasized the “ex” part of her status, clearly wanting to signal his current availability to whomever on board might be interested – mentioning no names.

 Again, doing his duty, our guide circulated among us passengers, sitting at various tables in turn at mealtimes. Once when he made his requisite stop at the table where I and my two regular mealtime companions were sitting, he started to wax on again about the collaborations he had with his ex-girlfriend. They’d broken up as boyfriend/girlfriend fifteen years previous but remained on good terms. They lived near each other on one of the islands. So whenever our guide wasn’t away conducting tours, the two seemed to enjoy a certain abbreviated domesticity together. He said his ex-girlfriend would come over every morning and cook him breakfast. His ex-girlfriend would help see to the sheep. Yes, he and his ex-girlfriend…

 Finally, my table companion felt compelled to interrupt. She was the innocent who had initiated the Montana catchphrase. Now though she was showing just a trace of more worldly-wise irritation. She said softly, with a touch of sweet reproach, “After fifteen years, I think you could call her just ‘a friend.’”

 She clearly wanted to get the man off his jag of referring to the woman only in reference to himself. She wanted to strike a blow for feminism, for women being able to claim their own identities. After fifteen years of being old post-graduate chums, a man would hardly keep on referring to another man as “my ex-college roommate.” Similarly, a woman should have graduated to the independence of being simply “a friend” by that time.

 Our guide didn’t catch on though. He nodded and repeated, “Yes, my ex-girlfriend” and went on with his account of how she’d make the best pasties sometimes for his meals. Had we ever tried those?

 Ah, there are still wild and remote plains where the sheep graze free and where there never is heard a discouraging word – from the likes of Gloria Steinem.

 I hated to distract the guide from himself, but I had a question. Before coming on this trip, I’d happened to read Adam Nicolson’s book, A Sea Room: Island Life in the Hebrides. Nicolson told about his private ownership of a triad of tiny islands, The Shiants, in the stormy waters of the Minch Strait in the North Sea. The islands are beautiful, but problematic. They are overrun with rats. Sheep sometimes fall off one of their sheer shoreline cliffs and are killed even before they’ve had a chance to be taken by boat to the mainland to be slaughtered. The Islands are dotted with old cairns and the forlorn remains of croft houses that residents were forcibly expelled from in centuries past during one or the other of the King’s ordered evacuations.

 But Nicolson had found the remote inhospitality of the place just what he needed to concentrate on his own writing and to think his own thoughts. He looked forward to passing the Islands on to his son as the kind of retreat from the modern world that the boy would no doubt also need. I asked our guide if he knew of the Shiants and of Nicolson’s residency there.

 “Oh yes! I know Nicolson very well,” our guide flashed. My question triggered a spark of real fierceness in what had otherwise been his generally non-committal demeanor. It turned out that he intensely disliked Nicolson, almost to the point of having an on-going bloody feud with him. He disapproved of snooty, high-born Englishmen, or of anyone, gaining private ownership of any of the islands. What’s more, he vigorously opposed Nicolson’s philosophy of stewardship of the islands. Apparently regular meetings are held among the inhabitants of different groups of the Hebrides, and topics such as the introduction of new pig farms are hotly debated. Whatever side Nicolson was on in these matters – our guide was decidedly on the other side.

 But he said we’d be passing the Shiants. He said he might even arrange for us to land there briefly, if I was really interested. As it turned out, he did point out the Islands in the distance as we sailed by – and he pointed to the departure of a puffin from one of their rocky cliffs. I saw the bird only as a distant black dot in the sky, just about the only wildlife I spotted on the trip. But there was no thought of landing there. In his book, Nicolson had made it clear how difficult landings were with small, well-crafted canoes in even the best weather. It would have been a major project for a cruise ship to have off-loaded a handful of us onto a tender boat to go ashore. I don’t know why our guide had even suggested the possibility in the first place.

 So we cruised on. And the romance between the guide and the otherwise bored daughter progressed apace. Soon enough though, it became clear that their relationship was not going to be clear sailing. The young woman’s mother did NOT approve. Well, I did think it would be rather against Company policy for tour guides to “affiliate” with passengers. But the young woman’s mother took an especially Victorian form of offense to developments. When she joined us at our table one time, she made it known that she was going to write a searing letter of protest to the Company as soon as the trip was over. She was going to accuse our tour director of “moral turpitude” and insist that he be fired – forthwith! She was going to make it plain that he had launched on a campaign of seduction, corrupting her daughter – a married woman – with two children no less!

 These were all phrases that indeed haven’t been heard much since the Victorian era. “Moral turpitude, seduction, corruption of virtue” – the mother’s outrage was in full spate. All her anger seemed to do though was to drive the couple farther underground in their shipboard romance. Our guide became more discreet about his attentions. I think he bought the young woman a bracelet of Skye marble from a giftshop while her mother had let her guard down, lagging behind to look at some archeological digs. Then one of our more advantageously positioned cruise mates reported sotto voce that he had seen the young woman slip out of the guide’s cabin at 2:00 A.M. We concluded that some “going to Montana” had taken place.

 Even though the guide must surely have gotten an earful personally from the mother, he wasn’t much deterred. Making a second round fulfilling his duty of talking to all the passengers in turn, he again came to perch briefly at the table where I was sitting with the two women who’d become my regular companions. I was determined not to detain the man with any questions about Nicolson or anything else this time. But the Montana woman urged me to tell him the side-splitting story I’d just told the rest of the table about how the cows in Cuba had become so prone to committing suicide. (See my Blog “The Suicidal Cows of Cuba.”)

 Oh, I wished she hadn’t mentioned this. The guide clearly wanted to be up and away from us as quickly as possible. But there was nothing for it. I had to launch into a repeat of my story. I tried to cut it as short as possible. I told how all the cattle in Cuba were considered to be government property. Castro had issued a strict prohibition against the killing and eating of any cow consigned to a farmer for caretaking. As a result, cows started to “commit suicide” en masse, throwing themselves on upturned pitchforks, drowning themselves, etc. Any farmer who’d been assigned to tend one of these depressed bovines claimed he’d been forced to carve up the animal and eat the meat to avoid its rotting and going to waste in the field. Of course, Castro soon caught onto this ploy and added a severe threat of a coda to his earlier prohibition. He made it clear that the deaths of ALL cattle, whether the result of suicide or of intentional butchering, must be immediately reported so that the meat could be claimed by government officials.

 That was supposed to be the whole story. But as I started to tell it, a sort of rictus of a smile stretched across our guide’s face, indicating that he was straining himself to make a show of listening and being amused by my tale. Then, as I was right in the middle of my pitchfork sentence, our guide caught sight of the daughter, making some signaling gesture behind her mother’s back. The man made an excuse and hastily departed, going off into the wings of the dining room.

 The two retirees and I laughed, knowing only too well that suicidal cows couldn’t compete with the travel adventures he felt were in store for him. We laughed - but also, I inwardly cried. I sharply realized how now, and for the rest of my life, I was in the same boat as Lisa who would become a bride after forty years of dating, presumably having no prospects other than her rather less than gallant, long-time ranch-hand of a partner. Lisa, and me, and all women “of a certain age,” are unlikely to ever again have anyone eager to go to Montana with us. There’s nothing left to us but passive sight-seeing. And sight-see we did.

 We were ushered into one of the famous “black houses” that are preserved on the Islands as tourist attractions. That’s a house with a thatched roof that’s often been packed around with earth as protection against the sweeping cold sea winds. Some think they got the name “black houses” because their interiors became sooty as the result of having no chimneys. Smoke was allowed to just filter up from the fireplaces through the permeable wood-and-straw roofs. This style of building houses partially underground is getting to be popular again with our new energy-saving, environmental awareness. But on the Hebrides, the remaining restored black houses are symbols of a bygone era.

 The local tour guide who spoke to us in one of these houses tearfully reminisced about her own childhood in just such a hutch of a place. But really, I was hard-pressed to see how the inside accommodations were so very different from my current house in Chicago. My own home hasn’t been re-decorated since the 1950’s. I have a dining table covered with the same kind of checkered dime store oilcloth that I saw here. I too have a curtain walling off one corner of a room, to make the space serve as a closet. The only thing I lack in Chicago is the cozy, peat-burning fireplace that was in one wall of this house. I wondered if I could turn my Chicago home into a tourist attraction – a time capsule of the 1950’s.

 We drove away, past expanses of peat bogs. We were told almost no one burns peat anymore for warmth. Everyone has central heating in these modern-day Hebrides. But then we did see one couple, bent over in gnarled labor, wearing knit shawls, digging up some peat. They reminded me of some famous painting, maybe one of Van Gogh’s paintings of peasants digging in the soil or maybe Millet’s “The Gleaners.” We were told that peat is actually an ideal fuel source because it grows back so quickly. That surprised me. I had read that another tragedy suffered by Ireland has been the decimation of its ancient peat bogs. The bogs had been over-culled there, and so permanently destroyed. I’d read that it takes centuries, nay eons, for such accumulations of vegetable matter to grow back. So they are gone forever, irreplaceable in Ireland. Why were they considered such an easily renewable resource in the Hebrides? When I later mentioned this to friends, we speculated that maybe “They have a different kind of peat there.”

 We went on to another island where I was chilled to see the locals in the midst of building a big effigy made of wicker, wood, and other combustibles. A young resident bounced up to us and told us they were preparing for a Wickerman Festival.

 Could it be true? I thought The Wicker Man, one of my favorite horror movies, was purely fictional. The original movie starring Edward Woodward features him as an English policeman sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. He gets caught up in the terrifying sacrificial rites that are an ancient custom on the island. Now here I was faced with a scaled-down replica of the movie’s towering cage of a figure, which I was assured would be ignited that very night. “What? Does that really happen?” I gasped.

 When the young man saw that I was genuinely frightened, he reassured me. “Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry. We don’t really sacrifice anyone. We just decided to do it this year - you know, to capitalize on the movie. Some news crews are coming. We’ll have this big bonfire and pretend.”

 But there was something a little too ready and rehearsed about the young man’s reassurances. And there was something a little too menacing in the gleam of eagerness on his face when he described the imminent burning of the straw man. So I had my doubts that this was “all pretend.” I was glad our group was going to set sail and be well away from the island before nightfall.

 The following day brought us to a highlight of our cruise, a tour of Lewis Island, one of the larger islands in the Hebrides. We landed at its port capital of Stornoway and promptly got channeled into a gift shop. But from there we were taken farther inland to see something more authentic, the famous “Stones of Callanish.” These are a set of monumental stones made of local gneiss set upright in a roughly cruciform pattern stretching across the landscape. It’s a somewhat smaller version of Stonehenge, but this construction is two thousand or more years older than Stonehenge. Scientists haven’t been able to fathom its purpose. The stones may have framed some recurring astronomical event, but that possibility is not as clear as it is with Stonehenge. Some guess that the stones were a Viking, rather than a Celtic, devotional – perhaps placed in acknowledgment of the Jötunn, the Titan Norse Gods of mythology. The ancient residents perhaps wanted to greet those Gods with something that was on the Gods’ own scale – a massive offering made to massive power.

 The Callanish stones are said to have the same mystic, vivifying effect as Stonehenge. But not nearly as many hippie worshippers make their way out to this more difficult, distant spot. Our group saw a few though, quiet and awe-struck – seeking to absorb the healing vibes of these monuments.

 After we spent a little time ourselves trying to bask in the stones’ aura, we were let off to just explore the island on foot on our own for a while, with an agreement that we’d all meet up outside Stornoway in a few hours to go back to our ship. So I set off, over hill, over dale, in the place I’d dreamt of being since I was a child. I wasn’t here to settle into that brilliant writing career I’d imagined. I was just a common tourist being hurried from one gift shop to another as fast as feasible. But still, I was here. I was away from my Chicago routine, from all the clutter of my 1950’s house. Most important, I was away from the clatter of the daily news – with Donald Trump’s endless, inane tweets and the opposition’s endless enforcement of new rules of political correctness.

 I walked on along the road, with the sweep down to the sea on one side of me, and a clutch of black-faced sheep grazing placidly on the other side. This truly was “free-range” country. And I was ranging freely. It was a bittersweet sense of freedom I experienced though. I’d learned once and for all on this trip that I was too old now to get invitations to Montana. I was too old to ever hold the interest of a handsome Scotsman - even if I had a hilarious tale about the cows of Cuba to tell. But I comforted myself with the thought that age brings a new sort of freedom. I let the bracing sea breeze blow all the bickering political battles of present-day America and all the let-downs of my own private life out of my mind. I was free of all that, temporarily. I was here and away.

 Soon the road led into the outskirts of a hamlet. There were houses spaced far apart on each side of the road. Lewis Island is studded with hamlets. You walk across what seems like an endless grassy expanse, but then you go up and over the next rise, and there’s a cozy little village. I walked toward the town that our maps designated as “Tong.” An odd name for a Scottish town, I thought. But how removed from everything intrusive in my daily life, I thought. I paused in front of one of the town’s stone houses, set back behind a low stone wall. This house had, not quite a bay window – it had something that looked more intentionally utilitarian on its facade. It was a rectangular enclosure of windows, like a conservatory or solarium reaching out into the sun. I craned over the low wall, trying to make out if there were any plants growing in that sun-catcher extension.

 Just then, another passenger from the ship caught up with me. He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I see you’ve found the house.” When I looked baffled, he said, “Don’t you know? That’s Donald Trump’s house. Well, it was his mother’s – his mother’s birthplace. Trump’s cousins live there now. But I don’t advise that you go up and try to talk to anyone. They really don’t like tourists pestering them all the time. Actually, I hear they find Trump to be sort of an embarrassment. They don’t agree with his politics at all. I hear they think of him as the black sheep of the family.”

 

So I wasn’t so free and far from it all as I’d thought. Things always seem to catch up with you, no matter how determined your attempts at escape.

 After standing there a few more moments, trying to absorb the impact of this astonishing coincidence, my shipmate and I walked silently together out of the town. Just as we passed by one of the last houses that might have claimed being part of Tong - we saw a group of animals grazing. These weren’t black-faced sheep this time. This was a group of Highland cattle. We’d been told how the ancestors of this breed had been brought to the Hebrides in ancient times, in Neolithic days, perhaps near the time those Callanish stones were being set in place. Now it was rare to see any of these symbols of the Hebrides on the Islands. Here again, it had become too expensive and time-consuming to transport them to the mainland for slaughter. But there are still a few herds scattered around the Islands, and we were privileged to have found one.

 As we looked at this small herd, one of their number separated itself from the rest, turned, and stepped toward us a little way. It stood staring at us, with a look of baleful petulance. It seemed clearly put out that it had been banished in embarrassment to the fringes of the town. Its sweep of an orangish forelock threatened to drape down further to obscure its vision altogether at the first gust of wind. We recognized its mirroring of Tong’s most famous son. The resemblance was uncanny.

 

Covid Questions

 I’ve always been very much a stay-at-home person. I was largely home-schooled. I never had to commute to work because our family printing business was adjacent to our living quarters. I never had much ambition to go out shopping or to public events. So the Covid virus hasn’t made much difference in my life. But I think my perennial “shelter-in-place” approach did have negative repercussions for me in the past when it came to my susceptibility to the old run-of-the- mill germs.

 

When I would occasionally hurl myself out into the wide world, going on a “See America” trip or tours to other countries – I almost always would come down with some horrible illness. I’d usually arrange to arrive by myself at our target destination a few days early so I could explore on my own, off the beaten tourist track. But I almost always ended up wasting away those extra days in bed in my hotel room, in stuffed-up, fevered infirmity. I would have to use every ounce of will power I had to rally on the fourth day and join the newly-arrived tour group.

 

I’d always try to distance myself from fellow-travelers as much as possible and to take all precautions against spreading my disease to them. I would keep in touch with most of them for short periods after our trips, and as far as I know, I never once infected anyone else. It seems the germs that downed me were entities I was uniquely susceptible to, perhaps because of my general pattern of sequestration. I’d be at home, at home, at home – then suddenly abroad with a naïve immune system that hadn’t been exposed to low doses of whatever microbes were floating around. My system was therefore as unprepared as the systems of the Native Americans facing the European invaders.

 

Before Covid, we had just been getting to the point of recognizing that early exposure to a potpourri of germs might be a good thing, that it might be good to get out there occasionally and mix it up with the world so that our immune systems could gain some familiarity with whatever might later attack in earnest. Parents who were too fastidious about keeping a germ-free environment were being encouraged to loosen up a little. A friend and I joked that the ideal mother would be one who urged her toddler, “Why don’t you go out and play in that open sewer, honey?” Ma and Pa Kettle might make better parents than the spotless suburban housewife of 1950’s laundry detergent commercials.

 

Some doctors were suggesting that the toughening that would result from some exposure might even extend to making people less subject to allergies. A child who’d been exposed to EVERYTHING - to all sorts of germs, all sorts of unprocessed foods, all sorts of mess, in moderation - would not only be better able to fight off a variety of diseases along the way, but might be less likely to suffer from the likes of peanut or pollen allergies. Some have even suggested that broad exposure to low levels of pathogens might better enable an individual to tamp down rogue cancer cells as they spring up – all as the result of having developed a toughened up, street-wise immune system.

 

►So my first question is:

Are we setting ourselves up for contracting all sorts of illnesses when we finally do emerge from quarantine from the Covid virus? Will we be especially vulnerable to the remaining Covid germs floating around, as well as to all the usual garden-variety cold and flu germs? Just as many of my vacations were partially ruined, possibly because I had spent too much time out of life’s fray, will our first months and years back out in the world be fraught with hacking coughs, fevers, runny noses, and perhaps even more serious ailments?

 

I’m not encouraging people to go out and foregather in crowds now without masks or distancing. I am responsibly adhering to all health officials’ directions. But I’m just wondering…

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Then just before Covid hit, scientists had been starting to caution us against washing too often, especially with anti-bacterial soap. They pointed out how the widespread use of this soap was helping to give rise to superbugs, germs that have evolved resistance to the anti-bacterial agents we’ve been spreading through the environment. These soaps are also implicated in killing certain kinds of beneficial algal growth and at the same time in promoting other kinds of algal growth that are invasive or harmful in other ways.

 

All regular soaps will work to kill both bacteria and certain viruses, such as the Covid virus, that have a lipid outer shell. The surfactant action of ordinary soap rips apart that protective lipid shell. Anti-bacterial additives might give an additional kick-in-the-shins to bacteria, but they do nothing to help kill viruses.

 

So my next question is:

►Why aren’t health officials making it clear to the public that they should continue to avoid the use of anti-bacterial soaps?

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Then I wonder how much good wipe-downs really do. As restaurants, bars, and other venues are being allowed to open up again if they take certain precautions, I see staff members swiping over tabletops with presumably antiseptic pads. But is such treatment effective? Again, it seems possible that such cursory swiping might actually be helping superbugs evolve.

 

Hospitals have long tried to be conscientious about sterilizing their premises. But the necessarily incomplete job that’s done of killing germs has helped give rise to especially lethal infections such as MRSA. I remember when I volunteered in a hospital, a head nurse showed us the results of a little research she had done on her own. After a housekeeper had gone through her usual routine of cleaning rooms, the nurse randomly swiped some surfaces, rubbed off what her swab had picked up into a petri dish, and then waited a few days. She held up the resultant petri dish for us to see. Horrors! It was abloom with an effulgence of different-colored germs and fungi!

 

We have been so concentrated on the dangers of the Covid virus we have almost completely forgotten about the approximately 400,000 people that die every year in the U.S. as a result of medical mishap in hospitals. Many of these “mishaps” are infections contracted in the hospitals.

 

Yes, that figure is 400,000 deaths a year, every year! That number has been debated somewhat. Early reports on this largely ignored health hazard started by citing a figure closer to 100,000 deaths a year. But further assessments found that early cited total of needless hospital deaths to be too conservative. The definition of “medical error” was expanded somewhat and so the 400,000 number was reached. Perhaps that overestimates the problem as much as the earlier figure underestimated it. But either way, that figure only takes hospital deaths into account and doesn’t include the many thousands of people who likely die annually as a result of mistakes and misdiagnoses that take place in doctors’ offices and as the result of pharmaceutical errors outside hospitals.

 

Since such a large percentage of whatever shocking number of needless deaths are occurring are indeed due to infections that are contracted in the hospital, it seems likely that standard sterilizing and wash-down techniques don’t reliably work. Those blooms of germs that the head nurse found could likely be found in every hospital today. Hospitals are notorious hothouses for the growth of standard forms of old germs as well as for the cultivation of dangerous new hybrids and evolved forms of infectious agents.

 

So the question is:

►What kind of testing has been done to determine whether casual wipe-downs accomplish anything? How vigorous and prolonged should the antiseptic cleaning be in order to rid surfaces of a sufficient number of germs? How powerful do those currently advertised sanitizing UV lights have to be in order to do the job and how long do they have to be held over a surface in order to be effective?

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Finally, as a corollary of my above concern, I wonder about the extensive use of ventilators and the attendant intubation that Covid has occasioned. Our government officials were criticized for not having enough ventilators on hand when this pandemic hit. But any treatment involving intubation should be used only as a last resort.

 

My mother was subjected to weeks of intubation in the late 1980’s and no medieval torture could have been worse. Nothing could have wracked the body so thoroughly - all to no avail. People have suggested that current intubation practices carry less risk of infection and injury than they did in the 80’s. But I’m not sure that’s true. The intubation process itself and the need for suctioning introduces myriad opportunities for infections such as pneumonia to be introduced into a patient. The likelihood of lung, tracheal, and other tissue damage is also considerable.

 

It seems that doctors felt pressured to DO SOMETHING when patients presented at a hospital with the Covid virus. They were eager to demonstrate that they were being pro-active, and so they automatically put patients on ventilators and intubated them. But I doubt that was necessary or helpful in a large percentage of cases.

 

I’d like to ask:

►Have follow-up studies been done to determine how effective ventilators and intubation have been or can be in treating people with viral congestion? Has the use of this treatment been declining as the Covid virus persists and as evidence of some of its counterproductive effects has accumulated?

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There are any number of additional questions that could be asked. Have epidemiologists sequenced the DNA of the virus? If so, have they tracked the path it has taken through countries and host creatures? Is it as prone to mutating as the HIV and common cold viruses are?

 

The politicians and doctors who break into regular TV programming to give Covid up-dates hardly ever address any of these more interesting issues. These individuals, such as Dr. Fauci, have generally been immunologists, dealing with the effects of the virus on individuals. Perhaps epidemiologists who deal with the broader demographics of a disease could add some insights to the news updates, although so much of the research done by these big-picture scientists is retrospective – a charting of information after-the-act. But it seems there is so much more that both kinds of scientists could be telling us besides repeating the need to wash and distance. I want to get to know the virus in a much more precise, scientific way.

 

Every virus has a unique personality and profile and causes unique kinds of damage to its victims and to society at large. The pandemic of 1918 that killed between 20 and 50 million people worldwide had devastating consequences even beyond that immediate death toll. It is often called the “orphan-maker virus” because it primarily killed people in their prime, people who were new parents between the ages of 20 and 35. That influenza germ didn’t kill its victims directly. But it had the power to provoke such a strong immune response that people died from their bodies’ own reaction. In that way, it was like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and other autoimmune diseases. You died of the cure as your body attacked good cells as well as germ cells. So that earlier pandemic tended to selectively kill people whose immune systems were the most robust.

 

A friend of mine told me that his father was an orphan of that earlier disease storm. His father was born in Russia which was hit particularly hard by the epidemic. When both of his father’s parents died of that “Spanish flu,” he became one of thousands of orphans who were adopted out to families in the U.S. and Canada. That was before the day of background checks. Children were automatically sent to almost every family offering to adopt.

 

As a forlorn 6-year-old, my friend’s father was put on a boat and traveled to Canada in steerage. It was a particularly rough crossing. The main things the little boy remembered about the trip were the heaving waves and the fact that almost all the passengers were sick most of the way. After landing in Canada, the boy was sent by train to the plains of Saskatchewan where a Mennonite farm family took possession of him. As with many children adopted under these circumstances, he had been sought primarily as an extra pair of hands to help with farm work. He’d been brought over not for love but for labor. He ran away as soon as he got old enough to make his own way in the world.

 

Many, many orphans experienced that kind of Dickensian childhood as a result of the 1918 pandemic. The people who live through this pandemic will undoubtedly have their own, different stories to tell.

A Statue Statute

I’m not generally in favor of toppling statues. Historically, such action has too often been undertaken in the service of replacing one ruthless political regime with an even more ruthless regime. It’s been part of a 1984 erasure of those suddenly deemed to be politically incorrect. Trotsky is portrayed as a traitor to “The Cause” and a country’s iconography switches overnight, replacing his images with those of Lenin and Stalin.

Or else the shattering of statues comes about as part of an invader’s determination to eradicate the culture that is currently occupying the land. The destruction of statues betokens the slaughter of a resident culture by an invading army. Many times, the old resident culture is completely wiped away by the attacking hordes. Nothing is left to tell the story of the old culture.

What happened to the Olmecs? We see the huge basalt heads this pre-Mayan culture left behind, so many of them smashed and defaced. Was it some internal about-face that led to the destruction of these amazing effigies, some natural disaster, or did the razing take place at the hands of a conquering force? Archaeologists are still uncertain. But whatever the cause, the Olmec culture vanished into the mists of history.

So most of the time, I associate the toppling of statues with the end of civilized discourse or, worse yet, the end of a civilization. When I hear about an attack on statues by angry throngs of nighttime demonstrators, I shudder in fear. I wonder - who’ll be next? I would be in favor of removing any statues celebrating the likes of Hitler, Pol Pot, or Idi Amin. But even in the case of such unregenerate villains, I’d prefer that their statues be removed calmly, in the light of reason – not in the course of anything like the mob’s mindless assault on Dr. Frankenstein’s castle. Except when it comes to monuments erected to cater to the egos of absolute tyrants, I favor keeping statues in place. I favor a gentle continuity over the rush of revolution.

I live in an old building that used to be a series of storefronts. I have made a point of preserving remnants of the old ghost signs painted on the windows of those early 20^th century stores, even though some of the products they sold are now as much anathema as representations of Robert E. Lee. So I have a lingering inducement to smoke “Old Dutch Cigars” on my windows. I keep reminders of all the previous residents of my building in place, the good as well as the moderately bad – as a peace offering to those previous generations and as trail markers of the way we have come, as a neighborhood and as a society.

But I think we ought to augment our existing population of statues with the figures of individuals who made different sorts of contributions. I don’t know why political and military leaders have so often been deemed to be the only ones worthy of such elevation in the public eye. Scientists, writers, and incidental people who exhibited extraordinary kindness and courage should also be featured on public platforms.

I’d like to see a statue raised in honor of the parent who spent forty years lovingly tending to a severely autistic child. When, in my rush of self-importance, I get impatient at being detained by the shuffling pace of a blind person in front of me, I could use the figurative presence of such a parent to remind me of what’s really important and to inspire me to truly see in every moment the possibility of interest, adventure, and love.

There should be more statues dedicated to people who made more obscure, but nonetheless crucial contributions. Honor Elisha Otis who made compact cities possible because his safety elevators made high-rises possible. Honor Rosalind Franklin whose dedicated research with X-ray crystallography laid the foundation for the discovery of the structure of DNA. Honor Jane Jacobs, the woman who fought to make cities livable by putting into practice her insights into how to create lively diversity along city sidewalks. Honor my 95-year-old friend who, for sixty years, never missed a day of work cleaning toilets at various downtown hotels, including the Lexington Hotel, Al Capone’s one-time headquarters.

That last nomination might seem a little contrary to tradition when it comes to choosing people to be commemorated in stone and bronze. But I think such a choice would be more in keeping with rightful priorities. Which kind of person has served better to make the lives of thousands of us more pleasing and healthful – the conscientious restroom matron, or the General brandishing his saber from atop a horse?

If however, a statue to a maintenance worker strikes people as being a little too eccentric – I think I’ve hit upon the perfect recipient of such an honor. I was surprised when I came upon how apt it would be to erect a statue to – Robert Benchley.

Benchley is known as the author of short comic commentaries written for newspapers and magazines from the 1920’s through the mid-1940’s. He was an early Seinfeld, basing much of his humor on the observation of universal foibles. He’d launch into a characteristic “Have you ever noticed…” essay on topics such as the myriad ways in which family holiday gatherings predictably sour, causing the guests to be only too grateful to scatter back home after the requisite hours of overeating, ennui, misunderstanding, hyperactive children, and the inevitable uncle who indulges in too much of the grape. But his observations ranged beyond such common fodder for parody. His briefs covered everything from the anomalous reactions of people at theater matinees, to the tendency to over-annotate Shakespeare’s writing, to the deadly irresolution of the typical business conference. Then beyond that, he became known as one of those masters of the bon mot who gathered around the Algonquin Hotel’s “Roundtable” to bandy wit and whimsy.

But then I recently learned that there was still more to Benchley that would make him statue-worthy. Reading The Benchley Roundup, a collection of some of his articles, I was surprised to find several biting cultural critiques scattered in among the leitmotif of his humor. One very short essay entitled “Whoa” was especially startling. In it, he ponders what Paul Revere would have done if he’d been able to see into the future and witness some of the deadly follies in which our nation would engage. He cited a vision of the flying arms and legs severed from our boys as they fought in wars for some unspecified cause “To Be Determined Later.” Benchley opined that if Revere had been granted such foresight, he’d have turned his horse back to the stables and quietly let the British come. The editor of this collection, Nathaniel Benchley, adds a footnote here stating that the essay was written in 1924, just after the time when publicly issuing such opinions could very possibly have gotten his father arrested for “disloyalty.”

That Paul Revere article article and a few other uncharacteristic ones like it in the collection moved me to read up on Benchley’s biography. I learned that he was a pacifist, perhaps brought to that view by the pointless death of his older brother in the Spanish-American War. As a reporter in Europe during WWI, he made special note of the bravery of our African-American troops, fighting with so little recognition or consideration. Back at home, he took photographs of the horrendous results of some southern lynch mobs. He went on to champion anti-lynching laws, even testifying before a House subcommittee on the issue. These were unpopular stands for him to take. His insistence on making these departures from his usual breezy commentaries got him in trouble with the management of the New York Tribune that was running his column. As a result, he either quit or was fired from his post there.

However, he never became fanatical about any cause. He never became a member of any shouting, truculent crowd of demonstrators intent on promoting an “Us vs. Them” rift. His goal was not to showcase his own presumed moral superiority by being the most vehemently PC. While he stood on the right side of so many of the issues of racial inequality and injustice that are concerning us, the focus of his interest remained on the small battles that weather individuals bit-by-bit. His goal was to commemorate the struggle to keep your hat on in a high wind, to refold a road map, to find some sufficient retort to the person who asks if you’re managing to keep busy.

These struggles are pure Seinfeld, the only kinds of personal interest human struggles that occupy us in our daily lives. They transcend Communism, Socialism, Democrat-Republican, black-white, pro-con. They are the kind of apolitical, non-dogmatic concerns that would be completely alien to any radical partisan for a Cause – all those who shriek in indignation without humor or humanity. The struggles that Benchley documented were our personal struggles against discomfiture and embarrassment and the machinations of shoelaces that regularly untie themselves.

So I’m not for tearing down any statue. To further flummox Seinfeld’s pal Kramer as he got the words “statue” and “statute” mixed up – I’d pass a statue statute prohibiting the destruction of any public monument. I don’t think we should repudiate our past or erase it in a 1984 act of obliteration. Instead of razing old statues, I think we should raise some new ones. Let Robert E. Lee stand. But stand a Robert Benchley next to him in the park or plaza.

And as a pigeon perches on Benchley’s shoulder and relieves itself, we can just imagine how Benchley would wryly respond. When, from up high, he’d voice his mild, one-man protest of “Why does this always happen to me?” – he’d be speaking for us all.

The Suicidal Cows of Cuba

I went with one of the first groups of American tourists allowed into Cuba after our fifty-plus year embargo on casual travel there. Well, in 2012, our group wasn’t really supposed to be going for casual reasons either. We went under a strict “People-to-People” program intended for earnest cultural exchange only - not for frivolous junketing. We were not supposed to cavort on the beaches or go laughing along the Malecon. It was all supposed to be – Study! Learn! (However, some of our group did manage to slip in a little idle beachcombing along the way.)

Out guide was a friendly, non-dogmatic individual, obviously coached in how to walk the line between appearing pleasantly open to tourists’ political criticisms on the one hand – and remaining loyal to Cuba’s revolutionary doctrine on the other hand. Our itinerary was largely about the Revolution. We saw statues of Che Guevara everywhere, and banners extoling his heroism, quoting his slogans. “Hasta la victoria siempre!” When I asked why there were almost no statues of Fidel or banners containing quotes from him, I was told that it was traditional to only honor the dead in that way. (Fidel was still alive then, and, according to the newspaper in Havana, conferring daily with his buddy Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.) I wasn’t so sure that could be the reason for Fidel’s absence from any public displays though.

We stopped to contemplate the meaning of the Revolution in Revolutionary Square. We were taken through several Revolutionary Museums, one of which included somewhat unconvincing life-size papier-mȃché/plastic figures of Fidel and Che trekking through the Sierra Maestra mountains where they had landed after boating from Mexico. We saw Granma, the yacht that Fidel and his eighty-two fighters had crammed aboard for the voyage. We saw bullet holes in the Museum that had been the Presidential Palace, created as Batista’s government went under siege. We were shown the secret doorway in Batista’s office, allowing him escape. We also saw the bullet holes in the “Quick Delivery” truck that Castro had coopted as transport. We went to the town of Santa Clara, the site of Che’s most decisive revolutionary victory over the mobbed-up Batista regime, and the site of Che’s Mausoleum/Memorial.

My fellow tourists quietly mumbled among themselves about what a psychopath Che had been, ordering the torture and death of thousands of “opponents.” Before I’d gone on this trip and listened to my politically more aware companions, I hadn’t realized the extent of Che’s savagry. When I got home, I studied up on him a bit. I happened to catch an interview on a Spanish-language TV station, done with Benicio del Toro who’d played Che in the latest biopic about the man. Although my Spanish was limited, I could catch most of the exchange. The interviewer was very antagonistic towards the actor, asking him how he could in all conscience have sympathetically portrayed such a monster. Del Toro was clearly caught off guard by this attack. He twisted around in his chair, trying to beetle in on the agent or other lackey responsible for booking him onto the show. I could tell “Che” would be responsible for one more head-rolling after the program was over.

The interviewer finally put the question plainly to del Toro. “How could you favorably portray a man who committed so many atrocities, who was a mass murderer, who advocated murder on a grand scale?” Fumbling to get his mike off so he could depart the show in protest, del Toro shot back his final justification. “Che was not pro-murder! He was NOT pro-murder! He was pro-capital punishment!”

I laughed. I told myself I’d have to remember to invoke that defense the next time I hacked anyone to death. “I did NOT murder him! I committed capital punishment!”

Despite all this unsavory history I was garnering about Che sub rosa on the trip – still, it was touching to stand there in the Santa Clara Memorial and see the volume of Tom Sawyer he’d read as a lad in the comfortable, middle-class enclave of Argentina where he was raised. That was before he studied medicine - before the motorcycle tour that formed the basis of his Motorcycle Diaries – before he became a psychopath/icon on the world scene.

Everywhere we went there were refrains of the Revolution. When we took a vintage train through some suburbs, a little boy came out of his somewhat ramshackle mobile home where we could see “I Love Lucy” playing on an old black-and-white TV in the living room. (That was probably one of the few American TV shows allowed to be run in Cuba.) The toddler brandished a very real-looking gun (could it be?) and asserted himself for us. Getting meaninglessly, ironically in the spirit of it all, a few of us stuck our heads out of the train window and yelled, “Viva la Revolutión!” Our mocking support didn’t cause the boy to waver from his belligerent stance. He stood as rooted in the Revolution as all of Cuba has been since 1959.

We were also conducted to places representative of the current daily life of Cuba, but the spirit of Che and of the Revolution loomed large along the paths to most of these places. Our guide took us to a Catholic church in order to demonstrate that Castro had never prohibited people from worshiping as they saw fit. But our guide dismissively told us that usually only very old people were interested in attending church. We were taken through the church office to show that the place was indeed a going operation. The office had an old plastic wall phone dangling off the hook on its cord and a 1940’s typewriter sitting on a dusty desk. A dusty file cabinet and a tattered chair stood as the only other furniture in the place.

We were then escorted through Santería religious shrines and art displays, which truly did show signs of lively, ongoing observance. We were taken to musical/dance performances. A Buena Vista Social Club tribute band played during one special dinner held for us. We were reminded how music has been the soul and joy of the Cuban people, sustaining them through difficult times. We went to a sugar cane press operation and a cigar rolling factory where the workers, mostly women, sat, again, under posters of Che.

Whenever anyone of us stepped off the official walkways threading through various displays, a guard blew shrilly on a whistle and fiercely gestured us back on track. I was reminded of the piercing cry that Donald Sutherland emitted in the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to alert the other pod people that there was a remaining human still among them.

But there was a lot of genuine humanity along the way. For me, the most affecting place we visited was a print shop. The owner proudly took us on a tour of his manually operated flatbed presses, his addressograph machines, his paper cutter whose guillotine called for the weight of a hefty person to lower. All this equipment was from the 1930’s and 1940’s - just like the equipment my family had eccentrically stuck with through practically the whole run of the printing business we operated in Chicago. I almost cried to once again enter this world that had existed before computers, cell phones, and touch buttons.

In my lame Spanish, I tried to communicate to the owner how wonderfully happy and at home I felt in his shop. Those old machines that were run by repetitive manual movements were something the youngest child could help operate. So I’d been raised as an integral part of my parents’ work. I’d been a contributor, rather than just a consumer, from the moment I could toddle around. Those old machines also had the advantage of being fixable by the average person. They didn’t depend on abstruse circuit boards that called for “technicians” to repair. When anything broke on these old machines, someone could just go over and trace how a series of cams ended up driving a feeder belt – and it was done. In that sense, such a world was more truly democratic and interactive.

So that visit to the print shop was a highlight of my time in Cuba. But the thing that most fascinated me was the look that this trip afforded into the economy of a totally socialist dictatorship. Many people mistakenly hold up Sweden as a model of socialism that we should emulate. But Sweden is actually a mixed economy that is friendly to most kinds of smaller-scale private enterprise. By contrast, in Cuba, the government really does own or proprietarily regulate just about everything. When this is the case, some really ludicrous measures become necessary – as I found out.

Our guide told us that families were allowed to own a few small animals – a few chickens and sometimes even a pig – and to decide the fate of these animals. However larger animals, such as cows, are strictly government-owned. Any cow we saw out grazing in the field would not be owned by an individual. It would have been assigned to a farmer who would act as its caretaker. Before the advent of Castro, Cuban farmers often owned their own land and all the animals on it and could decide for themselves what use to make of those animals. But any such initiative was eliminated under Castro.

When his caretaker law regarding farm animals was first passed, a strange sort of epidemic of manic depression overtook the cows of the land. One after another, they “committed suicide.” A number of them were reported to have stampeded at full speed onto the upturned prongs of pitchforks, impaling themselves. Others drowned. One particularly inventive cow even managed to electrocute itself while in a transport of this bovine despondency.

When the government official responsible for any of these animals finally came out to take an accounting and found cows X, Y, and Z, missing from the pasture – the farmer naturally related the sad circumstances of each cow’s last moments. He’d explain how he’d noticed that Matilda had been notably down in the dumps, not eating well, not interested in going out into the field. And then early one dawn, he’d seen what this obvious dejection had come to. Matilda had jammed her head between the wires of the pasture fence - and had twisted. She had strangled herself. Sure enough, she had done away with herself.

Then the farmer would explain that there’d been nothing he could do but extricate the carcass from the fence, carve it up, and distribute the resultant parcels of beef. It wouldn’t have been good to simply let the cow rot there in place, all that good meat going to waste. The farmer advanced his plea - surely such profligacy would not have been in the spirit of the Revolution.

It didn’t take long for Castro to get wise to this gambit. He forthwith passed a law. Our guide read from the statute book. In summary, this addendum to the law of cow custodianship stated that the death of any cow, whether by suicide or any other means, was to be IMMEDIATELY reported to the appropriate government official. That official would then come out and collect the carcass. Anyone caught eating the meat of a deceased cow, or anyone who saw a neighbor eating such meat and failed to report it – would be subject to the severest penalties. A heavy fine and or up to five years at hard labor in prison would be the consequence.

Needless to say, the cows of Cuba seemed to cheer up considerably after that.

So Cubans are perforce largely vegetarian. Most of the meat that is produced on the island is saved for tourist consumption. But even tourists are often given short shrift on that score. It was plain the government wanted to put its best foot forward and impress us, among the first Americans to visit, by giving us their very best – showing us what largesse Castro’s Communist regime was capable of producing. But we often challenged each other to find any discernable piece of protein (fish or foul) in the paella dishes that were our regular fare.

On a couple of occasions, our group was treated with formal dinners in one of the old casinos that “the mob” used to run on the Island – back in the day. A few of these lavish casinos have been restored, or at least have been prevented from deteriorating in the way so many of the colonial buildings have been allowed to crumble. These scheduled dinners promised to be sumptuous affairs. In one case, mahi-mahi was on the menu. I thought – at last! We were going to get some solid servings of fish, an item I thought would have been one comestible available to everyone in this island nation.

The meal was okay, but the fish seemed to lack some savor and freshness. When one of the foodies on our tour quietly commented about this to the waiter, the waiter whisperingly confided that the fish had been imported frozen from Viet Nam some time previous. On another occasion, the fish we were served turned out to be Mrs. Paul’s fish-sticks, imported from Canada. All this while we sat virtually within view of the vast blue, unspoiled ocean waters.

Of course, then we realized the problem. Very little fishing takes place in Cuba – because no boats are allowed. As I looked out over the large arc of the Malecon esplanade along the waterfront, I was struck by the absolute absence of any boats in the waters as far as the eye could see. There were no marinas, no private craft putt-putting around the harbor, no pleasure boats. Being in possession of a boat is one of the most serious offenses a Cuban can commit. That prohibition extends to anything that could conceivably be made to float, including planks of wood. Brutal prison time will be your lot if you’re caught with a wooden storage pallet, a skiff, a canoe, even an out-sized rubber duckie. That’s all because any such device could, and likely would, be used to get its possessor to Florida.

There are a few licensed government fishing vessels, but it has been difficult to ensure that even the seemingly most ardent pro-revolutionary captain won’t turn tail and head for the U.S. once at the helm. In a few of the smaller towns we passed through, I did see some marinas where some relatively modest private yachts were anchored. But these belonged either to government officials or to rich German or Canadian tourists or expatriates whose wealth substantially helped to support the regime. No average citizen would conceivably be granted dispensation to possess such crafts. Ergo, it was Mrs. Paul’s fish-sticks again tonight.

Along with the residents of Cuba, we pioneering tourists were also under strict orders regarding what we could bring into or out of the country. For example, we were told we could not bring in for distribution any religious literature. For some reason, we were not supposed to take out any copies of the daily newspapers or any other literature that might have pro-revolutionary content. I think these latter orders might have come from our U.S. government.

We were also not supposed to bring back any novelty items or other goods purchased in Cuba, unless they had distinct “artistic value” – that is, unless they were in keeping with our “People-to-People” cultural exchange mandate. Most of us fudged on this point, or completely disregarded the edict and loaded up on tchotchkes, without any consequence. Selling these was one of the few ways Cubans had of making money off the tourists. Begging was strictly prohibited, and again, was something severely punished. Only a few individuals, elderly women, approached me for a handout during the tour, and they did so VERY surreptitiously.

One thing we had been positively encouraged to bring INTO the country though were school supplies. We were told the students of Cuba didn’t have sufficient pencils, pens, crayons, or even paper. Since we were scheduled to visit a typical grade school classroom in Cuba, our American organizer told us to bring some such supplies. We’d make a good-will presentation to the classroom teacher during our visit.

I bought some pens and pencils for the occasion, but then I also thought to pack a number of extra boxes of band-aids. We’d been told all medical supplies were also in very short supply. Bandages seemed suitable gifts for both classrooms and doctors’ offices. Unfortunately, I never got to personally give any of these gifts. Someone in our group created an international incident that prevented me from ever going into a classroom.

We were a large group, so when it came to the classroom tour, we were divided into two sections. The first section would visit the classroom while our section would take a walking tour of Havana. Then the following day, our sections were supposed to switch places.

But at the end of the first day, when my section returned from our walk around Havana, we were met with an obvious flurry of consternation in the hotel lobby. We were told to go to our rooms and wait there. The American tour organizer and our Cuban guide reassured us that everything could probably be worked out – that everything would probably be alright. Those “probablies” were frightening.

We never got the full story of what happened. But it seems someone in that first group going to the classroom had distributed either some religious literature or else some pamphlet copies of the U.S. Constitution onto the students’ desks. Although Raúl Castro was technically President of the country then, Fidel still made most of the decisions and he had reportedly been infuriated over this infraction of tourist rules. It seems he’d been on the edge of asking us to leave the country forthwith, and he was additionally leaning towards canceling the People-to-People program altogether.

He had been monitoring our visit closely. Our visit was to serve as a bellwether of how future groups of American tourists could be trusted to abide by the rules and be welcomed. For a few moments, chances for any further people-to-people exchanges seemed dim. That would have been a shame, but I was excited to know Fidel Castro’s eye had been on me. At least briefly, I’d been the equal of Barbara Walters.

As it turned out, things were smoothed over. We were going to be allowed to stay, but neither our section (nor likely any immediately following groups of American tourists) would be allowed into any classroom. Instead it was announced the following day that our whole group would be taken to view “the caves.”

Oh-oh. That sounded ominous. But as it turned out, the caves were not dungeons where political prisoners were to be indefinitely detained. No, these were the famous caves of Viñales, a UNESCO World Heritage site. In their geology and ecology, they are illustrative of the island’s prehistory.

It was a bit of a drive from Havana to Viñales. The road was surprisingly good, but it took us through miles of rather featureless scrubland. Along the way, we saw several more instances of what was a typical sight throughout Cuba. We saw old cars broken down on the side of the road, being worked on by creative owners who knew how to get the old vehicles up-and-running again with duct tape and all manner of improvised bits and pieces. Almost every car owner in Cuba necessarily had to be a kind of Humphrey Bogart working on his African Queen. A little judicious gob of spittle here, a kick there, a belt from off your pants made to serve as a fan belt – and voilà.

The ubiquity of old cars from the 1940’s and 50’s has become Cuba’s defining characteristic. When Castro took power in 1959, an embargo against most imports of large-ticket items from the U.S. and from many other non-Communist countries was put in place. Castro further made it illegal for citizens to privately own newer cars, newer TV sets, newer radios, newer anything significant enough to more properly be owned by the government. However, unlike many dictators, Castro didn’t confiscate whatever cars and other devices people already had. And so, Cuba’s streets are filled with lovingly maintained pre-1959 cars, and homes are filled with black-and-white TVs. A large part of citizen time is taken up scrounging the world remotely for old carburetors, old tuners, old tubes.

The repair of an old car is often the occasion for a social gathering. When a car stalls, men will gather around, push it off to the side, and exchange ideas about how to get it going again. I envied this spur to conviviality. I had spent many years restoring my father’s 1948 Chrysler, always hoping this would put me in the middle of some such jovial, educational confabs. It never worked out that way. But on this trip, I could live vicariously, looking at all the spontaneous, neighborly get-togethers inspired by immobilized cars.

A gathering around one particular such break-down on the road to Viñales caught my attention. A 1940’s car was off on the grassy verge, its hood up, three men leaning over, peering in at the car’s innards. As I watched, a cow in the nearby field stopped munching grass and came over to join the colloquy. It nosed its way in between the men and stood should-to-shoulder with them, peering down at the car’s engine.

Oh, how I wish I’d had my camera at the ready! Captions for that photo would have written themselves. “An Expert Mechanic Weighs in on the Problem.” “Mooooove Over. I Can Tell You What’s Wrong.”

The thoughtful intensity of the cow’s gaze did indeed give a person confidence that it could diagnose the trouble. But it made me worry a bit. On the off chance the cow wasn’t able to come up with a solution – would that send the cow into a tailspin of self-loathing and low self-esteem? Would it be enough to drive the cow to suicide? Then since suicide is contagious, would that one cow’s desperate act trigger another rash of suicide among all the cows of the district? If so, who would Castro blame for that? What addition to the law would he enact to address this new wrinkle in the problem of free-ranging cows? “No cow shall be allowed to participate in the maintenance or repair of any vehicle…”

POSTSCRIPT

It had been quite a trip, one of the most memorable I’ve taken. But back in Chicago, I was left with one problem regarding my Cuban sojourn. What should I do with my Che? Some acquaintances of mine, now superannuated hippies, had handed off their poster of Che to me as they’d down-sized. I’d conscientiously hung the poster on the side of my refrigerator, attached with magnets. It covered the whole side of my big Amana.

Well, truth to tell, it wasn’t only my feeling of obligation to use and conserve anything given to me, and it wasn’t only the magnets that kept the poster up there. The poster had stayed in place in my house for the same reason it likely stayed prominently featured in the homes of many people who had no real partisan feeling or awareness. We all sported the poster because Che was so handsome.

Would he have become such an icon if he had been just an average-looking man? So are looks everything after all? Do we give our interest, our loyalty, our fervor, to one man over another because the one is able to strike a move star pose? I looked at my refrigerator, wondering what I should do. Now that I’d learned how much true evil was at the core of Che’s character, how could I justify keeping him on display in my home? Was handsome going to win out over humanity?

I’ve deferred making any decision about taking down the poster. It’s not that I’m transfixed by the look of Che. No, that’s not the reason. It’s just that I’m too lazy to do any redecorating now. After all, I still have that strip of star-burst decals that was on the molding of my kitchen when I moved into this place, decades ago. I simply don’t get around to doing things in a hurry.

And so Che is still suspended there on my refrigerator – a magnetic image.

Hasta la victoria siempre!