She's Been to Cuba!

The goddess [Pasiphae] has been to the Moon. She goes there with men she likes.
(--From "The Crown of Ariadne," by R. Murray Schafer

I just found out that I have recently become acquainted with a young lady who's been to Cuba!

Though not herself Cuban in any respect that I know of, she went there without permission from anybody or their knowledge, including that of the Cuban hard-rocks. She waded ashore, mingled with the populace for days, and then leisurely left and came back home, while having been totally unquestioned, undetained, and only noticed in passing, as casually as if she had taken a little excursion to Florida's Sanibel Island, or the Everglades.

As if this young lady didn't already have plenty enough of the unusual going for her, though on a deceptively modest scale, this lifted my view of her several more notches.

She's been to Cuba and back! No fuss, no muss, and to hell with the "illegality" of the thing!

But because of the risk of raising howls of outrage among the emigres in Miami, who would immediately pressure the U.S. government to send agents to kidnap me, i.e. arrest me and cart me off to some otherwise dark room where that one chair sitting in its center with the one light hanging directly overhead is awaiting me and my disclosure of her name, I'm not even going to give you the initial that I otherwise supply to identify the guilty parties in this weblog.

I can't tell you how much her escapade means to me, because all these many years since Castro came into power, I have been intensely interested and sympathetic with the plight of the Cubans who are still there. I've been interested not because of the political system that he and his cohorts imposed upon the Cubans but instead because of how those who fled to Florida have ever since united with the regressive elements of the U.S. authorities to surround the island with the virtual prison fence of that surpassingly stupid policy called the Cuban Embargo.

I had thought that both the Cubans and the Americans had ships with firearms aplenty, constantly circling the island and on the lookout to keep anyone in a mere small boat from entering or leaving Cuba without plenty of tough questions being asked, and, more likely, worse.

This young lady, in the company of three other people her age, with some cash aboard but minus visas, passports, or any of that irrelevant kind of stuff, set sail from Florida in some sort of skiff, maybe like the ones that the Somali pirates favor for their high seas excursions.

She and her friends were fully aware of the dangers, and because they were somewhat scared they didn't approach Cuba directly. Instead they prudently took the long way around and came into the island on its backside, the southern coast. There they moored their boat, went ashore, and strolled around for about a week, while being completely unremarked, though this lady, for one, had at least one physical feature and most likely more that in my mind make her stand out markedly even here in the U.S., and should doubly or triply have done so in Cuba. She said she got a few whistles and that was all, and when they had seen all that they came to see they returned to their boat and leisurely sailed back home.

This was three years ago. Yet to her this event was so unremarkable that it wasn't till about the third time I have seen her that she thought that escapade was worth mentioning. I don't think that even her boyfriend knew that much about it till she brought it up a few days ago. She's still got pictures in some disposable cameras that she took in Cuba and never got around to having developed.

So what is all the fuss about Cuba all about?

Ask the Cuban emigres.

I think you will have trouble getting a sensible answer.

That's not surprising. They tend to vote Republican.

Yet, I still don't understand how she and her friends did that so uneventfully. So in that sense I'm still holding on to the tough situation there.

I like to think that they had some sort of special influence with the Cubans, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the fates. You, too, might believe that if you could see her. The Italian Old Masters wouldn't have hesitated in using her as a model for some of their innumerable angels.

This makes you wonder how many other young American adventurers have, if they have the means, engaged in the same kind of unauthorized backdoors diplomacy, keeping up good relations with our unjustifiably deprived neighbors on that always interesting island while the hardheads fade away in Miami and sanity and decency make a long-delayed reappearance in Washington..