The PENguin Blog

Final Days First my apologies for letting this last Cuba post take so long. I’m not sure why, other than the fact that February and March seemed to be very busy with both random personal stuff and lots of pen sales. And maybe I just didn’t want to let go of this final phase of our Cuba adventure. February 10 was our final day in Cuba. We would depart from José Marti Airport on the morning of the 11 th . Neither Jim nor José, our group leaders, made any secret of the fact that they wanted us to go out with a splash, that they were going to make that last day extraordinary. Spoiler alert: they did. But let’s start. We began, as we did, with a lecture. This one nominally on architecture and preservation, but the lecturer ranged much more broadly into demographics and the problem of a declining and aging population.   I did not record it but it was quite interesting and gave us a lot to think and talk about. From there we went to the La Cabaña fortress, mostly to see...

View of the house from the back 9 February 2017 We began the day in the Road Scholar way with a superb lecture by Dr. Carlos Alzugaray, one of those scholar/diplomats that represent, in one way and another, the best of any nation. This presentation resonated for me, given my background having taught American foreign policy for so many years. The presentation rather brilliantly combined a tour d’horizon with a constructivist theoretical approach. Then we were off to the fine arts museum, a most interesting excursion. They do not, of course, allow phgotography inside the museum, which is unfortunate. The guide, a curator, gave us a historical tour of Cuban art. What struck me most was the degree to which protest art was hung, here on the walls of the official national museum. If the building looks vaguely familiar, it was built in the mid-1950s and patterned on Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Guggenheim Museum in New York.   Our curator...

It has been a while since my last post, not sure why, though it is hard to choose from among more than a hundred images I shot that day. 8 February 2017 Our second day in Havana began with another lecture on the complex subject of religion in Cuba, this time by Dr. Maritza Corrales a member of Cuba’s small Jewish community and a leading expert on the subject. She spoke not only on Jews in Cuba but Cuban religion and culture in general. After that we were off to old town Havana and a tour of the city’s plazas led by our own guide, José.   We were already familiar with Cathedral Square, so we began with the oldest plaza, Plaza de Armas, followed by the Plaza Vieja and finally the Plaza de San Francisco. Join us as we ramble the streets and squares of Habana. We started where we left off, near Cathedral Square The Castillo Real Having not taken notes, I am not able to identify all these buildings. This is, I think, part of the archeological museum. What'...