Word: havana
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...never saw it, but I knew it by its gravitational pull. I ate saffron rice and chicken al mojo de ajo; I listened to son, salsa and guaguanc? as it poured from car stereos on hot days. I nodded when Cuban exiles told stories about the raptures of Havana or the terrors of Castro. And I spent a lot of time looking south over the 90 miles of gray-blue water and trying to imagine what the Real Cuba was like...
...sharply and accompanied by two beautiful young women who were clearly neither his nurses nor his nieces. He wore his trademark white Panama hat and clenched a thick H. Upmann cigar in his teeth. And when he arrived to watch our band play at la Casa de Amistad in Havana, the entire crowd turned toward him and applauded, a long ovation that he shrugged off with a sly smile before sitting down with his escorts and ordering rum for the entire table...
...Inspired in part by the music they made, I put my fledgling career as a jazz saxophonist on hold and headed with my girlfriend to experience Havana firsthand. Before long I was playing with El Septeto Tipico de la Habana, a talented and remarkably underpaid group of musicians who played weeknights at la Casa de Amistad (The House of Friendship). The casa was a mansion that had been nationalized to become a cultural institute and was now hosting Puerto Rican socialists on solidarity junkets, Cuban black marketeers and bureaucrats, and the occasional stray tourist...
...That peace has long since disappeared. The spring of 2003 has seen a brutal crackdown on dissidents and independent journalists. Hijacked crop dusters and military planes are landing with increased frequency at the airport in Key West. In April, three young men who had hijacked an aging ferryboat in Havana Bay were executed by firing squad. This week, just days after Compay Segundo's death, two separate boat hijackings left 3 dead and a 10-year-old boy with a gunshot wound to the head. On Wednesday, Celia Cruz, the Cuban-born "Queen of Salsa" whom Castro barred from ever...
Oswaldo Paya is something Cuban President Fidel Castro has rarely, if ever, faced: a dissident as hardheaded as he is. When Castro took power in 1959, Paya was the only kid in his Havana primary school who refused to become a Communist Youth member. In high school, after openly criticizing the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he was sent to a labor camp for three years. Rather than escape to Miami in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, he stayed in Cuba to work for democratic reform. Now his doggedness has prompted one of Castro's most ironfisted crackdowns: scores of Paya...