« New Toys | Main | D.C. Circuit Court Strikes Down Gun Control - Cites 2nd Amendment »
March 08, 2007
Coast Guard Prepares for Massive Influx of Cubans
The Coast Guard is staging a little wargame down in the Straits of Florida in preparation for the next wave of Cubans. For the record, the state of Florida covers 54,252 square miles and 18 Million people. The island of Cuba covers 40,543 square miles and has a population of 11 million people. The island of Cuba is nearly as large as Florida, and has a slightly lower population density than Florida. So why are they anticipating a massive tidal wave of migration? Because Cubans earn an official government salary of $17.00 a month. (No, that isn't a misprint.) The annual GDP of Florida is roughly $500 billion. The annual GDP of Cuba is roughly $37 billion.
Cuba is a desperately poor country. And they don't have any welfare. They're so poor they can't afford to put people in prison, so they put them in the cane fields cutting cane by hand from sunup to sundown in August. Everyone has to work and the local CDR man (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) drives around looking for people not working and rounds them up and puts them to work.
Sadly, Gregorio Fuentes, of Cojimar, Cuba, won't be among them. Gregorio Fuentes was actually born in the Canary Islands. He emigrated to Cuba as a young child, and his father died on the voyage. So, when he showed up in Cuba, he was pretty much on his own. When Hemingway started making money from his books, at some point he divorced his wife in Key West and moved to a house near Cojimar, a little fishing village about 20 km east of Havana. Hemingway got hooked on Marlin fishing, used the funds from his books to buy a fishing boat, and then picked Gregorio Fuentes to be his skipper. Fuentes didn’t speak any English and Hemingway didn’t speak much Spanish, but the two were reportedly very close for about 30 years, from 1930 – 1960. During this time, Hemingway traveled extensively, covering the Spanish Civil War, going on safari to Africa. Occasionally they’d fly down together to go marlin fishing off the coast of Ecuador. When I met him, he was about 102 or 103, and dying of jaw cancer. He was actually kind of sad. He couldn’t hear very good, and he was clearly on his way out when I met him. They’d prop him up in a chair in this little house in Cojimar, and light a cigar and stick it in his mouth, and put a fishing rod and reel in his hand, for the occasional tourists to take photos of cause he was something. Cuba is very poor and the tourists poses were their only chance to get their hands on U.S. currency instead of Cuban pesos. Fuentes was like this vestigial remnant of himself…a real life, fading extension back to Hemingway, who’d blown his brains out back in Swan Valley, Idaho in 1960, 41 years prior. Hemingway killed himself with the same shotgun his father had killed himself with. Put his toes on the triggers of a doublebarrel and put the barrels on his forehead and that was that. When he died, the fishermen in the village of Cojimar wanted to do something for Hemingway. They wanted to cast a bronze statue of him in his honor. But, they had no money, so they melted down their boat propellers and cast their boat propellers into a statue of Hemingway.
Immortalized in Hemmingway's book The Old Man and the Sea, Fuentes passed away at the ripe old age of 103. I met Gregorio in December of 2001, and he died the following month in January of 2002. May he rest in peace.
Technorati tags:
Delicious tags:
Folksonomy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share web pages.
Posted by Peenie Wallie on March 08, 2007 at 12:24 PM
Comments