Today I must sign off, as we head back in the States to research and interview on the homeland, take a hot shower and visit an ATM.

Just when it was getting exciting. Don't worry, we'll be back soon with more great stuff for the next leg. A few cliffhangers for you...

The Saltwater Cowboy and Captain Chavez survived deserted islands and open seas to appear out of nowhere in Mexico. Will they survive Spring Break Cancun 2007?

Castro is back on his feet, to everyone's surprise. Will he survive to see the brothers? Will he don his cowboy hat one last time?

Jack and Ed discovered the first person in Havana who remembers their father. Will this lead them down a path of wonder, or will it, like many things in Cuba, be a confusing dead end.

I'd tell you if I knew, but this is real time folks. Or at least as soon as I can find an internet connection to update the blog.

Hope you enjoyed,
-Ed

I suppose you can chalk it up to his superman complex—I’m starting to believe he just might be.

Castro up and talking in new Cuban video

The Saltwater Cowboy looks pretty damn good.

We have a new crew member, Tom, who sailed with Capitan Chavez up from Belize, successfully, a 45 hour trip. This leg of the adventure is almost over, but next season, you will find out if the Saltwater Cowboy is really up to the test.

I am excited. Until then, Captain Chavez has decided to charter her out for day sails during Spring Break. Perhaps he has found his calling. Instead of Captain Chavez we will have to call him, Captain Cancun. [shout it like "Captain Caveman" to truly understand]

“Al pasar por Houston (Texas), Fidel se encontró con Raúl Castro, que le esperaba para mantener una conversación privada. Era inminente una crisis en el Caribe. Un grupo de expedicionarios había sido capturado al desembarcar en las costas de Panamá con el plan de provocar una rebelión, y entre ellos había varios cubanos.”

That’s all it says about Texas, just one sentence in the life of Fidel. Hopefully we can prove that it deserves at least three or four sentences, perhaps even a full paragraph. That would make me happy.

Word is that he is confined to a bed, with tubes in him. He is not in a coma, but cannot communicate, as the wounds did not heal. He will die any day, perhaps any hour.

He had a surgery to remove a section of intestine, and had a replacement from China. It did not work. The second replacement, the one he currently has, is from Spain, and was the result of the recent surgery by the Spanish doctor. However, many people who have this surgery, need to have a piece of the intestine outside of the abdominal wall connecting to a bag which collects waste matter. Fidel refused this, believing he is different than the normal human, and that was his mistake.

When he is gone…

I had to get rid of him. Very sad. Hope Spuds makes his way in the world.

I never thought I’d say it, but it was nice to see commercials again. I haven’t seen a commercial in two months.

We hung out with Fiff and her grandson, Abdul, who prefers Apples to PCs.

Verera lays it out when he sings. He tells about the bad as well as the good and has been thrown in jail for it twice. This is where we have an advantage over Communism—we tend not to throw our musicians or artists in jail. Once we start to do that, we will lose our advantage.

Verera wears only black and sings about the downtrodden. Sound familiar? He certainly isn’t an MTV pretty musician. He is not skinny and he is not tall, and you would recognize him in the crowd if I told you to look for the gnome.

This banner is at the Museum of the Revolution, which chronicles the obvious with abundant information, however spotty or untrue that information sometimes seems—the museum contradicts itself in areas and tends to gloss over incidents like the Cuban Missile Crisis—but the amount of information and interesting photos makes it worthwhile.

Hats! Camilo Cienfuegos’ hat and Che’s beret.

We met with the rice researcher. He had not heard of Blue Ribbon, but did know quite a bit about the rice industry in the US, and had in fact visited Beaumont, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Sacramento California, which is apparently a big rice producer. He was more on the research of agriculture than the business side, which is perhaps why he didn’t know. Funny thing – the researcher has a chauffeur but not a telephone, so he gave us his chauffeur’s home phone in case we need to get in touch.

Then we went to Lazaro and Christina’s for Red Snapper, or Pargo, as they call it here. It was tasty.

Today for breakfast, I am eating frosted flakes, orange soda, and coffee. It is quite scrumptious.

An online article from a US paper says young Cuban-Americans are becoming more liberal in their view towards Cuba / US relations. By “liberal,” the journalist means that they want to share cultures and open up the trading between the countries...

“Azucar,” I asked at a market. The sent me to a bodega. “Azucar,” I asked there. No. Six places later and nobody had sugar. This is Cuba, the land of sugar, which makes rum, which makes mojitos, which makes more Cubans. Hershey used to have a large factory here, and the sugar cane harvesting time is a national event. But nobody has sugar, and if even if we found it, it would be from the “bolsa negro,” the black market.

What we get in the States, refined sugar or, white sugar, is more expensive here. They have raw sugar, which ironically is in style in the US coffee craze, so more expensive there. Each family gets a bit of sugar on their ration card, but not much. Nothing on the ration card could support the diet of one person, let alone an entire family, and each family gets one ration book, whether they are three or thirteen. And don’t expect meat, especially cow meat, which is reserved for the tourist restaurants and paladars - prohibitively expensive to Cubans.

In the end, we actually borrowed a cup of sugar from our neighbors.

Some people might say, well, if they eat the chicken then I guess it’s ok. But they don’t eat the chicken. “We put it on the corner of an intersection,” says Osvaldo, 30, the Santaria priest, “for cleanliness.” This seems counterintuitive, throwing a dead bird on the sidewalk to clean it. Among the other diseases birds carry, the recent “bird flu” comes to mind. Which brings up the question, listen to the science, or believe in the magic?

The chicken was oddly peaceful throughout the affair, which I will refrain from describing in detail because you might stop reading and I don’t’ want to spoil the film. Though we will not be able to appease the animal rights activists by putting, “no chickens were harmed during the making of this film,” because one chicken was. Harmed to death. But this is their belief, so in this case, siding with the animal rights activists is small minded and ethnocentric. Though you do have to draw the line somewhere, as one cannot help but be disturbed by the clitoral removal surgeries in certain cultures. Personally, I draw the line somewhere between chicken and clitoris, closer to the chicken side.

The Priest chanted in rapid Spanish, I couldn’t quite understand what he was doing, but it sounded like he was stating one of those chain of decedents, “so and so begot so and so begot so and so etc.” He lit candles and spoke with the gods, of which there are four main ones. He spoke with his main god, and threw four little coconut discs, cut from a coconut. Depending if how many landed with the white meat part up versus the brown wood part was the god’s response.

“The gods will not put things in your hands,” his wife said, “but they can lead you in the right direction.”

The ritual we did was to ask the spirits for help with our project. Did it help, well, today, one day later, we found help from a rice historian, and a woman who ran the national archives here in Havana for 38 years - a self labeled “raton archivo,” or, “archive rat.” These are hopeful breakthroughs after a bit of a drought. I’m not saying they are because of the ritual, but the timing is interesting, no?

I won’t tell you what became of the ritual, because that would also be a film spoiler. All I will say is that it was very surprising, even goose bump raising. Below Jack and I pose with our Santería hats on.