For Brayan

In my mother-in-law's version of the tale, Francisco came home the Friday before Mother's Day in 1980 and announced he was leaving: His girlfriend. His son. His mother and his sister. His country. They were the wake he left behind as The Green Girl pulled out of Mariel's harbor. His...

Once a day, Brayan and I stop by Hotel Parque Central, one of the few places with wireless internet access in Havana. “Are you connected?” one man asked today as I twiddled my thumbs waiting for my inbox to open. “I’ve never been more connected,” I answered, and though we spoke to each other...

The signs of the upcoming Mother’s Day celebration began last Tuesday. Men walked down the street with red and white checkered boxes adorned with Felicidades, Mama written in curlicued script, cakes carefully tucked inside, the pink icing trickling away in slow rivulets in the heat. Sidewalk vendors...

We hitched a ride out of Central Havana to the seaside town made famous by Ernest Hemingway to research a couple of articles I’m working on. The driver barreled up a dusty road speckled with potholes, noting, “This is the best road in town,” and dropped us off on a forlorn corner, pointing...

My 14 year old niece and I don’t have the best relationship. Even since the first time we met, we’ve circled each other with instinctive caution. For me, she’s a malcriada: her mom and grandmother let her get away with everything. She’s a picky eater, so they let her eat cake for dinner. She...

I love to cook. I just don’t normally do it. But with Francisco in New York, I’m left to fend for myself. Alone, my schedule and routine have become bizarre. I eat corn flakes at 4 AM while watching “Love in the Time of Cholera.” I make black beans and rice and eat the leftovers for lunch and...

I've been working on a couple of articles about local lingo this week, which got me thinking about cultures and customs. The popular narrative is that local traditions are eroding beneath the weight of globalization (which is not untrue), but as Eva wrote in a recent

I was in the middle of a dream, napping, when the rattling  upstairs finally worked its way into my consciousness and startled me awake this evening. The man who lives in 203 is elderly, doesn't like noise. I know because he once rapped on our door at 10 pm and asked us to please...

Mexico City is always a happening place, but today took the cake for sure.

This morning, Avenida Reforma was the stage for back-to-back celebrations: the first, a presentation of the British polo team, in town for the 8th International Polo Championship, and the second, a parade complete with floats...

Day three at immigration. I've become a regular. The lady at the information desk smiles in recognition when she sees me. The gap-toothed man near the door waves, saying, "I remember you!" Even the cool reserve and flat affect of Mr. Marcelo over at window A2 have melted considerably....

I caught a cab on Avenida Reforma this morning and immediately fell into a conversation about world economics with the taxista. We got onto the subject because yet another protest was making its way down the avenue, blocking our way. "Nuestra ciudad de protesta," the taxista said-- "Our city of...

Many of us who have been following "The Khonstamm Affair" this week (I, for one, lost most of Wednesday keeping up with it) have largely reduced Khonstamm and the hullabaloo into a few digestible bites, packaged and sold as follow:        

Option A:...

Don't get me wrong: there's no place I'd rather have my permanent address than New York City. Everything I love and that frustrates me about the world is packed into this one dense finger of land jutting into the ocean. As I write, Chicano music thumps my floor and the neighbor...

Back in February, David DeFranza had a great article, "8 Free Online Resources for Learning a New Language," published by Brave New Traveler. As someone who always has "learning a new language" on my to-do list, I visited a few of...

I watch a lot of documentaries. So many, in fact, that I've begun to identify a catalog of thematic categories into which I can sort almost anything I see. Here are a few I've come up with so far:

War docs: "Alive Day," "War Feels Like War," "Fog of War," "Baghdad ER," "En Route to...

Last week, I blogged about a series of CNN articles by Morgan Neill that detailed some of the changes instituted by the Cuban government since Raul Castro was appointed President in late February. I wrote that I would love to be on the ground there right now, gathering and then sharing stories about...

Just a few steps from my subway stop is Boris Shoe Store, a dusty, cramped shop stuffed to the brim with outlandish shoes (which one blogger described as "kooky shoe contraptions") that hardly ever sell. The owner is not, as you might expect, named Boris (that's his son, who I don't think has...

"Maybe you don't like your job/maybe you don't get enough sleep/Nobody likes their job/Nobody got enough sleep/Maybe you just had the worst day of your life/But there's no escape/There's no excuse/So just suck up and be nice..." -Ani Difranco

We dragged our bags and bodies into Union Station and...

Everywhere we go gets compared to the places we know.

Washington, we've decided, is a bit strange. No one looks happy, Francisco observes, and he's right. Everyone looks hurried, but it's a different kind of hurried than New York hurriedness. Here, people seem to hunch their shoulders up, tuck their...

There's a lot of history, of course, in any nation's capital. I've visited Washington, D.C. at least six times, and each time I've learned something new about the country that began as a bold social and political experiment. Undoubtedly, each new discovery is influenced by what interests me at the...