The longer you live , the more you realise that everything is connected and anything is possible ….If you wait long enough….
Anyone growing up as a child in the 1950s was on the cusp of experiencing some of the most traumatic and dramatic social experiences of any generation. In Norneverland you would have entered your teens in time to become a “real” first generation proper teenager with all new fashions, magazines and music instead of your father and mother’s hand -me-downs .You would also have grown up through the Cold War and the Space Race and would have seen a man landing on the moon for the first time, live on television.Most homes had one of those boxes in the living room by that time.Of course we were teenagers just in time to experience the mad beginnings of “the Troubles” too. That wasn’t too pleasant and sort of happened live on the streets alongside normal everyday life . It became almost normal after a while as reality was gradually twisted out of shape. We almost got used to it.
Before all that though, we saw the Russians getting Sputnik into space and we craned our necks to watch for the shiny satellite passing overhead.Yuri Gagarin became a world hero but the Russians were feared, mostly.When John F .Kennedy , President of the USA faced down Nikita Khrushchev over the Cuban Missile Crisis,we held our collective breath.It was a formative moment for a generation, hardly forgotten over fifty years later , when the lot of us believed we were on the very edge of the Last World War. …..ever…People really were very afraid.
I can still remember, as a ten-year old , being instructed at school to pray for help in this crisis. Obviously we were all told to pray for JFK. He was a “Good Irishman “, almost a latter-day saint ,back then, so we were on his side.It made perfect sense .If all these adults were squeezing their buttocks in fear , it must be serious .They couldn’t figure it out with politics , so they’d resorted to prayer and the more praying …well …the merrier.The idea of the Russians launching missiles from Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba , a mere ninety miles off the coast of America, had certainly concentrated minds .
it turned out to be a false alarm but the fear was real enough.It was real enough to produce some of the best anti-war songs of the decade from Mr Bob Dylan , for example.He wasn’t on his own either.It was the beginning of youth mistrusting their elders with the levers of power.
That was it for Cuba for fifty years , though.There was talk of a plot to assassinate Fidel with an exploding cigar.Rumours were afoot that the Cubans had killed Kennedy in 1963.Generally Cuba was left to wallow and simmer in its own juices.It produced great cigars , music and culture but it was left to rot away under communism and America made sure investment and help were not going to be on the agenda.
Now there is rapprochement .History was made today as President Obama declared that this Cold War was officially over.The cynics might say that it’s hardly coincidental that with the war on terrorism in full swing , America needs to have a friendly neighbour at its back door but look what ‘s happening in Russia too.As sanctions begin to bite and Putin ‘s power base is squeezed, the lesson being put forth is that it is better to be America’s friend and ally rather than its foe. I wonder is the timing coincidental . These things are rarely accidental.Watch out for American investment money being pumped into Cuba in the coming days while Russia is squeezed even further.
It only took fifty years for Cuba to be invited back into the fold, so anything is possible, eventually.Maybe even a proper solution to the problems of Norneverland .It only takes a little patience .In the meantime , sit back, relax….. have a cigar….
Soon be a playground for rich Yankees again with all the trappings of drugs, brothels and corruption. Batista is dead. Viva Batista.
Just like everywhere else then, fiosrach?
‘Watch out for American investment money being pumped into Cuba’.
Jude, have you already forgotten about the Trojan horse?
Or should we beware of Yanks bearing gifts?
The trade embargo and sanctions are still in place, and if the US gets round to lifting them, there will be a price to pay. As you say, they will be glad of a friendly country 90 miles off their coast which they may need to use as a shield.
You can also bet that Cuba, which has been denied so much for half a century, will find itself flooded with US manufacturers and suppliers, possibly with conditions that they get to cherry pick any international trade possibilities.
One good thing Cuba produced as a result of their isolation is their health system, which is admired all over the world, despite America’s attempts to play it down. So hopefully that will not be destroyed by the influence of capitalism.
Sherdy – kindly address all harsh words to Harry – non mea culpa…
Which harsh words are those, Jude? I never felt a thing…
Mea culpa – I am hypersensitive, as all readers here know…I read the first few lines and then my name and immediately assumed the crouch position…
Ha ha!!
The photo today, Esteemed Blogmeister, withdraws a sumptuous little sum from the ATM of the Memory Bank.
It also involves a Havana cigar and a woman. Even if it wasn’t in the woman’s mouth the cigar happened to be but rather in the mouth of perhaps the greatest stogie puffer of them all, one Mr. Marx.
It would have been, more or less, contemporaneous with the American Missile, pronounced Missal, Crisis (also known, for some reason, as the Cuban one) and the sublime Groucho (for it is he!) was the host of a new kinda show on the block of neo-barbarism, the TV Game Show. It was so long ago all shows went out live.
After this particular contestant – call her Mrs. Apple-pie of Dogpatch, USA – had boasted of being the proud Mom of fourteen kids, the host did a double take and blinked his eyes beneath those shrubbery eyebrows of his, before slowly removing his trademark cigar, to say:
-Ma’am, I Iike to smoke my cigar but I also like to take it out now and again.
Suffice to say Groucho was in the doghouse for a spell afterwards in Mid-America.
But of course Cuba has been exiled to a somewhat more enduring kind of Caribbean Coventry since that time. In cowboy terms they have been compelled to wear the black hat while Washington has seen to it that white hats are de rigeur in the White House.
In Dublin sur Liffey back in the time of Jonathan Swift the imagination of the Dean devised its own system of designating who where the goodies and who were the baddies: the Lilliputians liked to break their hard boiled eggs at the small end while the Blefuscans preferred the big end. Hence the battle of the Big Enders and the Small Enders.
There are Cuban Exiles and then, there are Cuban Exiles. One particular Cuban Exile here in the Free Southern Stateen, although a Big Ender, was shamefully treated like a Small Ender.
That would have been el senor estupendo who happened to share the same initials as the National Concert Hall.
Introducing, in the green corner, Nicholas Cruz Hernandez. To say that NCH was treated rather shabbily by the Spin Doctorate which decide these matters would be to suggest that Johnny Forty Coats was the main man-model for Armani during the course of his long and less than distinguished life on the parkbench.
The managerial careers of NCH and that of JC coincided. No, not that JC, the other rude mechanical, the rough hewn son of Geordieland: Jack Charlatan. While NCH’s career in the green corner also coincided with unprecedented gold-coloured glory for Ireland in the ring, the curious thing about Jack Charlatan was that he and his FSS charges won, as he might put it so fetchingly himself, ‘bugga all, lad’.
Which, of course, was not quite true. In fact, St. Jack, Patron Saint of Charlatans, won the greatest laurel of them all: the hearts of the fans. And not just any fans, but (gulp) The Greatest Fans in the World.
Thus, it was roses all the way for the Little Ender in the White Hat while the Big Ender had to be content with the Black End. NCH’s path, far from being rose-strewn, was, like that of Kathleen Ni Houlihan’s, a thorny one.
In the Free Southern Stateen we like, under the steerage of the Spin Doctorate, like to do things arseways. Little wonder that Wrong Way Corrigan who flew from the Floyd Bennet Airfield in Brooklyn to Long Beach, California in 1938 – and landed in Baldonnel Aerodrome in Dublin, the same year, was of Irish, erm, descent.
Perkie’s outer bureaucrat, who was in the throes of his stellar career in the civil service around the time of the simultaneous Bainisteoirecht of NCH and JC, the early 90s, had a ringside view of how the Bees that were in Power i(oops, the Powers that Be) adopted approaches to the bevy of Bainisteoiri rather at odds with the realities of their respective IABAchievements/ FAI-lures.
Whereas it took a quantity of hint-dropping not to say a volume of arm-twisting from one so influential as even Perkie lui meme to get the Spin Doctorate in situ at the time to invite M. Carruth and W. McCullagh into Government Buildings, at last it was agreed, with the utmost reluctance, to deign to have the winnners of gold and silver on the Olympic Sock Exhange at Barcelona received.
-This is the way in to the Weigh In, Wayne.
That was one of Perkie’s most contrived off the cuff comments during his star-spangled time as a Garlanded Greeter in Government Buildings.
No such coaxing or convincing required, where the the all-conquered heroes returning from World Cup USA 94 were concerned. Though the venue was not Upper Merrion Street, Dublin 2 this time but rather the VIP Lounge in Terminal 1 at Dublin Airport.
Where not only the Taoiseach but the Tanaiste at the time in tandem were on hand to present St. Jack, as he touched down for his connecting flight back to Blighty along with the maj of his fellow Blights with a set of high-end fishing flies englassed in an upmarket cedarwood case.
We’re talking about the Triumph of F.A.I.lure here, folks. Wouldn’t have done to discommode the in-transit Blights on their way home, by dragging them through the syringe-carpeted streets of Dublin at rush hour.
Curiously enough, on that particular self-abasing occasion, Perkie engaged one of the Blights, the boy McAteer on a topic to do with fisticuffs rather than footie. To wit, Jason’s uncle, Les. Les McAteer was a tidy middleweight from Birkenhead in his time, he were.
One encounter more than all others,however, was the epitome (it rhymes with ‘home’ on RTE) of how the Spin Doctorate of the FSS treated one particular Cuban exile like, well, a Cuban exile.
It was around the time The Charlatan was being feted with the Freedom of the City in the Mansion House on Dawson Street, when one ran across Nicholas Cruz Hernandez while sauntering down the most Hogartian of Dublin streets, Camden Street.
There we engaged in a spot of verbal sparring about Fidel, fighters and the fairness or otherwise of the FSS in token English and broken Spanish. Although a chilly day with an airmail east wind which contained a Siberian stamp, NCH was garbed in a track suit whose natural habitat would have been a steamy gym.
The Cubanisation of Irish sport or rather the treatment of same, continues apace.
While boxing is still essentially a working class (did one hear, a non-working class?) sport, the celebration of Katie Taylor’s success indicates more than anything the ‘arrival’ of the influence of the Dworkin Class. Those who maintain that southpaw stance are the same begrudgers who hanker after the days when the sine qua non of a female fight was a hand bag and a spot of the old hair drag.
Exclude Perkie, por favor, from that antedeluvian lot of sexists.
To conclude: mention has already been made of Baldonnel Aerodrome (see above). It has since been renamed Casement aerodrome. A name which has also been in the news of late, for unsporting reasons. When the orange rather than the green light was given to the redevelopment of Pairc Mhic Easmuinn/ Casement.
The reaction in the Free Southern Stateen to that judicial decision on, erm, environmental grounds, was such that reassured the disinterested observer that Cubanisation is indeed alive and w. south of the Black Pig’s Dyke.
Were the noses of the sporting scribes put out of j. at the non- prospect of all those pulsating battles between Down and Derry or those torrid set tos twixt Tryone and Armagh not to mention, erm, epics between Antrim and Fermanagh or even run of themills idir Monaghan and Donegal?
Well, no,not exactly.Rather that the bid of the Big Enders of the Egg-chasing Fraternity might now be put in jeopardy for the (gulp) World Cup in 2022. Games involving Romania and Georgia,or Japan v Samao, something along that homeric design.
What, then, about another Belfast venue: Corrigan (see above) Park?
Or is that too configured too in the, erm, wrong way?
Close, but no Havana chance.
Yes Mighty Perk…You’ll be best pleased to hear that I contemplated illustrating this piece with a delightful portrait of the aforementioned cigar munching supremo El Groucho…but in the end I thought that the lady above gently eeking erotic smoke might light a fire in the eye of our esteemed Blogmeister and put a fillip in his step…..
Confucius Marx say: ‘Anyone say can see through woman, miss a lot’.
For anyone interested in reading about Cuba.
http://www.therealcuba.com/