Word: tourists
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...Johnny Depp) might be the patron saint of all such caretakers. A grocery-store clerk in forlorn Endora, Iowa, he looks after his retarded brother (Leonardo DiCaprio), who likes to climb things, and his mountainous mom (Darlene Cates), who, at an immobile 500 lbs., is something of a local tourist attraction. Nor does the need stop at his front door. Gilbert must satisfy the sexual desires of a tartly cheerful matron (Mary Steenburgen), even as he is drawn to newcomer Becky (Juliette Lewis), a teenager whose ease and freedom seem like fresh oxygen in the coal mine of Gilbert...
...however, as the city ricochets through its biggest boom since the Frank-and-Dino Rat Pack days of the '50s and '60s -- the tourist inflow has nearly doubled over the past decade, and the area remains among America's fastest growing -- the hypereclectic 24-hour-a-day fantasy-themed party machine no longer seems so very exotic or extreme. High-tech spectacle, convenience, classlessness, loose money, a Nikes-and-T-shirt dress code: that's why immigrants flock to the U.S.; that's why some 20 million Americans (and 2 million foreigners) went to Vegas in 1992. "Las Vegas exists...
...pall of smoke hangs over the city: the government, desperate to limit the daily 12- hour blackouts of summer, spent some of its precious cash on cheap, dirty oil to fire the electric plants. But nights are still dark and silent; only the light from the tourist hotels casts a faint glow over the ocean-front Malecon. Havana is a ghost of itself, its once vibrant life leached out by hard times...
...candor may stem from desperation. There are chronic food shortages (except in tourist hotels) and a virtual absence of such necessities as toilet paper and toothpaste. The capital's cityscape is bleak. "Havana is absolutely empty at night. There are no cars, no lights and no people on the streets, except for prostitutes," McGeary says. Yet most Cubans refuse to lose hope. Their vitality is what adds so much intrigue to the unfolding saga of the western hemisphere's last remaining Communist outpost...
...please, don't be a hindrance. I don't like to think of my home as a tourist attraction...