excerpt from Trading the the Enemy

So the last few days have been very full and I will try to put posts up in the next week. In the mean time here is an excerpt one of my friends just read to me from the book Trading with the Enemy:


"I went to Cuba because I was curious; because no one agrees on its strengths; because I’d read so much about it; because it is forbidden; because it’s heartbreakingly lovely; because so many people have championed it while so many others have abandoned it; because Cubans make great music and aromatic cigars; because they’ve thumbed their noses at their former patron for more than three decades; because I’d grown weary of writing about Latin American ‘democracies’ where forlorn illiterate campesinas sit on city street corners selling combs, nail clippers, and undervalued handicrafts while their malnourished barefoot youngsters turn their palms up and say “gimme” instead of learning how to hold a pencil or read a sentence; because of its rich literary tradition; because my favorite players on the Washington Senators in the 1950s were Cuban; because I’m an incurable romantic; because we still have a navy base there; because Cuban women are astute and alluring; because in the last five hundred years of travel writing few cities in the world have been so effusively praised as Havana; because Teddy Roosevelt led the charge up San Huan Hill; because I liked Our Man in Havana and The Old Man and the Sea; because I got a kick out of Desi Arnaz; because I was distrustful of Cuba’s bashers and its cheerleaders; because I liked the twinkle in Fidel’s eyes; because I’d never been to a Communist country; because I wanted to learn the rumba; because Columbus landed there; because it has hundreds of miles of unspoiled beaches; because of its mystique."
-Tom Miller