Cuba and Obama

Read about continuing racism in Cuba and how Obama's victory has already brought change abroad: "Cubans are dizzy with excitement at Obama’s victory. 'I still feel my heart skip a beat,' Victor Fowler, a black Cuban, told Spain’s El Pais newspaper last month. 'I listen to Barack Obama … I look at my skin, I look at my children’s skin, I cry and I smile.'"

Plus, there is a practically unanimous chorus from Latin America calling for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba.

Now then. Will Cuba policy change?

November 10, 2008

Dear Cuba Policy Advocates,

November 4th marked an historical change for the United States of America. President-elect Barack Obama represents CHANGE on many levels, and many people expect CHANGE in a great many things: the economy, two wars, a planet in peril, etc . . . you know the list by now.

As in every post-election, there exists a window of opportunity to take our country in a new direction. And how fitting that we call for change in U.S.-Cuba policy by a president-elect whose campaign, at its very core, called for change.

There are several articles we'd like to recommend to you:

* An article in the British newspaper, The Guardian, on the hope of reconciliation between the United States and Latin America, starting with Cuba.
* An article reporting Brazilian President Lula's call to President-elect Obama to end the blockade on Cuba. His voice is part of a growing chorus from Latin America.
* A Wall Street Journal article detailing the open door for changes in U.S.-Cuba policy.
* A more sobering article in which Frank Sanchez, Obama's Latin America foreign policy advisor, reiterated the president-elect's Cuba policy: " …as president the candidate will move quickly 'within [the] possible and practical bounds of his authority' to lift the family travel and remittances restrictions. Anything more than that, Sanchez told the Miami Herald, will have to wait."

For the first time in recent history a President will take office on January 20, 2009, owing no political debt to the hard-line Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County. After all, President-elect Obama won Florida without the hardliners' help which is an historic feat in itself and one we must use to finally change our policy towards Cuba.

President-elect Obama has several steps available to him. He can work with Congress to end the travel ban, change some travel regulations to the extent of his executive authority, while engaging diplomatically with Cuba in a way that respects its sovereignty as a nation. If we can achieve this, than we can expect that the impact on all of our Latin American neighbors will be profound. It would truly signal a new day for U.S.-Latin America policy.

This message is not a full presentation of strategy and actions, but rather a glimpse of hope and of the progress that we have yet to make. We will be back to you in the coming weeks with requests for your participation in efforts to call on the president-elect and Congress to do the right thing and open up our policies towards Cuba. This will signal that we are ready to chart a new course with the entire region.

Thanks for your partnership!

Sincerely,

Mavis Anderson
Paulo Gusmao
Latin America Working Group
www.lawg.org

Real v. Fake America

Nothing says 4th of July quite like "Confederate Amputation"

In our continuing quest to visit the strangest roadside attractions in the area, Jen and I made a pilgrimage to visit the burial site of Stonewall Jackson's left arm. Could I make this up?

Here is a dramatic diorama photo of the arm being shot up during the battle of Chancellorsville:


Here is a choice shot of one of the monuments (there are two, but the first one is just a big boulder) put up by reverent ex-Confederates near (but, as it turns out, not exactly on) the site where the shooting took place. (The bit about "mortally wounded" isn't exactly true...he died of pneumonia.)


Here is a photo of the roadside sign near the spot where the arm was amputated, in a field hospital a couple of miles from where Stonewall was shot:

Here are some photos of the bucolic spot where the arm forever rests in peace:




Okay, so it hasn't really rested in peace. They say (that's my favorite way to cite dubious historical information) that Union soldiers dug it up in 1864 when they were back near the Chancellorsville site again. They also say (even more dubiously, apparently) that Smedley Butler, a marine major general, had it dug up in 1921 when his troops were in the area, because they didn't believe it was really there (apparently it was). Some naysayers (poo on you, National Park Service guy) claim that there is little historical or archaeological evidence that the arm is still there, at least on the site where the stone is. I choose to believe.

All in all, a quality bit of quirky historical nonsense.

Blossoms and Edibles

I bought all these pots with the idea that I would grow food in them. But I just keep finding flowers that I like. Also, it occurred to me that it's important to have some attractive things among the utilitarian things in the garden (not that edibles are unattractive, but blooms are different). The latest is the salvia:

The Gerbera daisies are doing well.


Plus, my African violet inside has gone crazy with the blooming. I think it likes the direct morning sunlight in the window.


On to edibles. We did lose the cucumber, for reasons that are unclear (at least to me). The plant bible says that cucumber seedlings are susceptible to cold temperatures, even those above frost. So perhaps the cool weather got to them--although they seemed to just up and die after we got three days of rain, when it wasn't too cold at all. Hmmm. So anyway, since Kathy is a cucumber fiend, we went ahead and bought new seedlings over the weekend. There are two lemon cucumber seedlings ("lemon" apparently refers to their yellow color--they don't have a weird lemon taste or anything) and one normal bush cucumber, all in the same pot. I hope they get along.


The monstrosity below is a broken plastic planter that came with the apartment. It's all cracked on one side, but being too cheap to throw it out, I fixed it all up with duct tape so that it doesn't leak too badly. Now it is home to sage (back) and spinach (front) seedlings, as well as a whole mess of lettuce seeds that I just planted today.


I also planted a sage seedling indoors, to see which one does better. Hooray scientific method!


Speaking of indoors, I now have three rosemary seedlings going. You thought I was kidding when I said that rosemary was slow-growing. No, my friends. This is six weeks of growth.

Maybe I'll have rosemary in October. (This, I think, is why they sometimes sell rosemary in little Christmas-tree shapes for the holidays. Everyone plants them in the spring and has to wait until December to get anything out of them.)

Tomatoes, on the other hand, grow about an inch per day. Here is the beefsteak, with his accompanying basil:

And a nice close-up of the happy basil:


Both tomatoes are getting this weird dry-looking brown spot thing on some of their older leaves. I hope this is normal (transplant shock, perhaps) and not some perilous bug or disease. Anybody know?


We also bought, at the farmer's market, a few supplementals. A red bell pepper, complete with first blossom [there are also new lettuce seeds planted in there with him]...

...some mint, which I assume will soon bully the surviving pansy to death...


...and a ridiculous amount of dill. If you can believe it, I gave away at least half the dill that came in the original farmer's market pot.


The strongest spinach got his very own pot. In another experiment, three of the spindlier cousin spinaches got dumped in a pot together.


The cilantro is also doing well. I learned that cilantro will quickly go to seed, so I'll have to use this soon. In preparation, I planted four more seeds in this same pot, and also transplanted another seedling to another pot. Of course, cilantro seed is just coriander, so if some does go to seed, I'm not going to be too upset about it. I'll just have to learn what to do with fresh coriander (dry it?).


The combo lettuce-green onion pot is looking very promising. Lettuce loves this cool, wet weather.


But I am, of course, proudest of the poblano pepper. Look at how big and strong he is. If only I had planted him a month earlier, he might be as big as the bell pepper. I also planted a bunch more green onion seeds around this pot. I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me to do this earlier. Oh well.


Someday I'll write more about my archival life. I've got a whole diary about it just for myself, so maybe that's why it's been absent from the blog lately.

Some links

My good friends Versha and Jason just had a baby, Kiran. He's extremely cute, I think.

I wasted a few hours this week setting up my site on Ravelry. I'm not quite sure what the purpose of it is yet, but now I have a nifty spreadsheet-type thing of the knitting needles I have (size, color, bamboo v. aluminum, etc.), which could be useful.

Garden update coming soon. I think we lost the cucumber, which is very sad. I'll have to do a postmortem.

Dead-on Onion video

It's so much fun to parody "living history" museums.


Historic �Blockbuster� Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

It's starting to resemble a garden

I bought four enormous pots, and need to get more dirt. However, I did manage to put a tomato, a cherry tomato, and a poblano pepper in three of the pots. In my new love affair with companion gardening (among other things), I have also put an herb or something in each of the big pots, so that the two plants can help each other.

Poblano (center) and green onion (tiny, front left):


Cucumber (complete with bamboo trellis and cone for watering):


Tomato, with basil in front, and cone-bottle contraption for watering:


Cherry tomato (haven't decided about his companion plant yet. Maybe sage or more basil):


I haven't decided about the cone contraption for watering, either. Mostly it seems to seep out really fast, while I thought the point was to seep out slowly so as to combat midday dryness. But what do I know.

I also got some gerbera daisies, which are my new favorite flower. They're so happy and bright.

Seedling update; also cherry blossoms and the pope

First, the tulips.


Next, the seedlings. The tomatoes (in the front two rows are beefsteak and cherry tomatoes) are enormous; everything else is doing pretty well. At this point we've also got spinach, basil, poblano, cilantro, oregano, chives, rosemary, sage, and green onion inside. I gave up on the idea of growing mint from seed (mine were really, really small, and then I read somewhere that growing mint from seed is really hard) and bought a little plant from the farmer's market this weekend. Also, the green onion doesn't appear to be doing so hot, and I threw out the lettuce I had planted in peat pots, because it got a bit moldy. One of the cilantro plants got upgraded to a big pot. The lovely little terra cotta planter in the center is a nice self-contained herb garden, an Easter gift from dad. That's where the oregano and chives live.


Last weekend I planted green onion, lettuce and cucumber outside, figuring that we are probably past the last frost (knock on wood). The seed packet tells me that one is supposed to plant cucumbers in little 4-inch hills. I have no idea why. But, having never grown cucumber before, I just followed the directions:


I must have done something right, because today there was a little cucumber seedling! Luckily I already have a nice bamboo trellis all ready for it to climb on. I would have posted a picture, but it poured rain all day, and my dedication to blogging doesn't run deep enough to suffer through wet shoes. Maybe later.

Lessons learned: pack the little seedling pots full of dirt (of whatever variety), sans the paper wrapper if you use pellets. This is because eventually you will plant the seedling pots directly into the ground or container, and you don't want a gap. I'm not sure why this didn't occur to me earlier. Oh well. And for things that like cool weather (so far: lettuce, onion and cucumber), just wait to plant directly outside.

Finally, some DC-specific pictures. A few from the cherry blossoms--apparently they bloomed for two full weeks this year, which was a record. They're quite pretty, even when one goes on a cloudy and slightly windy day.



Here's my favorite memorial, the D.C. World War I memorial. It's so forlorn.


Who knew that DC occasionally hosts loons?!?!? I was very excited. [There are two in this picture; they are very small, but that's an unmistakable loon profile, and they were diving in the tidal basin, just like they do. I hope they didn't eat any scary fish.]


And here's a picture of the pope in the popemobile.


Sometimes I also go to the archive.

Spring

Today is seed-planting day!


The ivy is an old friend. The norfolk island pine and the lavender (not really visible in this picture) are new acquisitions. And the thing on the right is like a seed incubator. The plastic top keeps in humidity.


I got these little pellets that you put in the tray cells, instead of peat or dirt. Then you dump some warm water over them and they expand, and you push a few seeds down in them. Not sure if I was supposed to tear the paper wrapping off them or not (the directions didn't say). The paper didn't seem very harmful, though. I'm sure the little roots will tear right through it.

I planted tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, spinach, green onions, cilantro, mint, and basil. I bought poblano pepper seeds too, but can't find them, which is very depressing since I was looking forward to both chiles relleno and ancho paste. But all that means is that I will be forced to make another trip to the garden center! I found a good one, luckily, and it's not too far away.

There's the lavender on the back right. He needs a transplant.

Seed-planting is a very good thing to do on a depressingly cold and rainy day.

Other signs of spring.

Dome Tour

Kevin and Laura invited me to go with them on a tour of the Capitol Dome. It was pretty fun, if you like climbing a 30-story building before lunch. Luckily, I discovered that I do.

For background, here's the Architect of the Capitol site about the dome. A few interesting tidbits: the dome is made of cast iron, not stone, although it is made to look like stone. Cast iron is lighter, fireproof, and, in the 1860s, was cheaper than stone/marble/granite. The big outdoor columns that hold it up are also made of cast iron, and are hollow, so that some of them act as downspouts. Brilliant.

If you look at this 1859 drawing, you'll see that the dome is actually two domes, one set inside the other. The inner dome houses the rotunda. We climbed up between the two domes, occasionally emerging for looks at either the view or the pretty stuff in the rotunda.

This picture, although slightly fuzzy, gives you a good idea of the space between the two domes.


We first emerged to see the inside of the rotunda, and the pseudo-frieze that shows heroic- looking scenes from American history. Naturally, it starts with Columbus and ends with the Wright brothers.


Next we climbed up to be close to the fresco at the top of the inner dome. The acoustics up there are incredible.


The fresco depicts George Washington as a god, and the 13 original states as fair maidens. Gotta love the 19th century for shameless nationalistic melodrama.


From there we climbed up some more, and emerged outside into the wind. From up there, the whole L'Enfant plan of streets as spokes actually makes some sense. [Side note: I enjoyed this uncited little gem about L'Enfant from what looks to be an unofficial website about Arlington Cemetery: "As chief designer of the new national capital, L'Enfant quickly antagonized the three commissioners in charge of making sure the place got built. When they complained, he alienated his principal supporters, including George Washington, who reluctantly fired him. He spent the rest of his life dunning Congress for back pay, as lean and ragged as the dog that trailed him through the streets." Poor L'Enfant.]

The Mall, with Washington Monument at its other end, and Pennsylvania Ave radiating off to the right:


The Supreme Court on the left, East Capitol Street (with RFK Stadium at the end), and the Library of Congress to the right:


The U.S. Botanic garden in the foreground, a slice of the Potomac in the back left, and the beginnings of the Mall to the right:


The new [underground] Capitol visitors' center, under construction:


And finally, our view of the tholos, on top of which the Statue of Freedom (not to be confused with Liberty) stands:


We also enjoyed the graffiti scratched in the dome's windows. Some of it was dated 1861 (supposedly). Unfortunately my picture of that didn't come out. This one, however, is pretty good: you can see the graffiti in the clouds.


Dome tour: highly recommended.