Word: cuba
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This was some time back, Betty Jane Curry was explaining, "back in the hippie days." A long-haired transient blew through town--the little town of Cuba in the mountains of northwestern New Mexico--and made the fatal mistake of sexually assaulting one of Cuba's young women. Betty Jane and her colleagues on the local paper, the Cuba News thought this worthy of note, especially after a knot of vengeful Cubans had their way with the vagrant. Trouble followed publication. As Betty Jane put it: "The local fellows didn't like it at all that we printed their names...
...Cuba is one of those low-slung New Mexican adobe towns, a wide spot in the road, really, up on the Colorado Plateau, insight of the Jemez and the Nacimiento ranges of the Rockies. This time of year the country is golden with rabbit weed and chamiza (when the Spaniards first crossed these parts, they called it tierra amarilla, or yellow land), and the deep blue sky above it has no ceiling. In the first issue of the Cuba News--"the first edition of the first newspaper ever printed in this area"--an editorial declared that "we believe by letting...
Autumn generally visits Cuba early, and Harriet had lighted a fire against the chill by the time the women arrived at her place to nail down September's issue. From 1915 until it closed four years ago, Harriet's place was called Young's Hotel. Built by her father John Young, it is hand-hewn pine and stucco, rough planks, notched banisters, Navajo blankets and deer heads on the walls--a set for any movie that goes by the name of Stagecoach. It had 16 rooms to let upstairs above the dusty front desk, rooms you let yourself into...
...third Tuesday night of each month, the Cuba News pages are put on the 11:55 bus and transported to Cortez, Colo., where the printer picks them up. Harriet will not stay up to meet the 11:55 bus anymore, so the women take the pages to a clerk at a local convenience store who gives them to the bus driver...
...news on this day, however, did not come from the box. A light plane that left Cuba for Taos a week before had disappeared. Also, Cuba had just voted, 84 to 68, to approve Sunday liquor sales. "Somebody was saying that you used to be able to buy enough on Saturday to carry you through," said Betty Jane, "and he doesn't see why they still can't do it that way." She added, "But the most exciting thing in the paper will be that if you won a blue ribbon at the county fair, your name will...