Category Archives: Rants and More

A Small Slice of Pisa

July 25, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I spent one hour and forty-five minutes in Pisa.  I know this because that’s how much time I could buy on the parking meter with the Euro coins I had in my pocket.

I was unwilling to be the only person in 500 years to go through Pisa, Italy without touring the town’s tilted Tuscan Torre.  The strikingly slanted stone spire is the belltower of Pisa’s 900 year old major Duomo.   The cathedral’s conspicuously canted campanile has been plauged by that famous foundational flaw since its construction in the 11th through 13th centuries.  I had no city map, but assumed (correctly) that I could just follow the flow of tourists to the area’s awkwardly angled axis of attention.  (Okay, I’ll stop.)

These pictures are misleading — especially the first one, above.  When you use a wide angle lens and point the camera upward to take a picture of, e.g., a tower, everything looks like it’s leaning inward.  (Click here for another example).  In fact, the tower actually leans away from the adjacent (perfectly upright) cathedral, as you can sense in the pictures just above, and at bottom.

The line to go up in the tower was exceeded only by the line to buy a ticket to get you into that other line, so I decided to stay at ground level.  It’d be hard to see the tower from the tower anyway.  The goofiest part of the experience was the number of people (a hundred or so at any given moment) posing for pictures that would give the illusion that they were holding the tower up (Google “funny pictures leaning tower pisa”).

 

 

There’s a famous story that Galileo — the Renaissance-era physicist/astronomer who was born in Pisa and started his scientific work there — dropped two cannonballs of different weights off the Tower of Pisa (already tilting back then) to test his theory that they would fall at the same speed.  What’s interesting is the reason that story is probably not true:  Galileo “proved” his theory not by experiments, but by just thinking about it.  I love that.

(Here’s the thought process.  Imagine two same-size blocks being dropped – one ten pounds and the other two pounds — connected by a very short string.  If the heavy block was prone to fall faster, the tether to a slower-falling two-pound block would slow the fall of the heavy one, making the pair fall slower than the ten-pounder by itself.  But if that short string has effectively tied the two tightly together, they are a twelve-pound unit, and if heavier things fall faster, the now-twelve-pound unit should fall even faster than a ten-pound block by itself.  It can’t be that both these things are true, so the assumption – about heavy things falling faster – can’t be correct.) 

Galileo was a stud.  Maybe da Vinci was smarter, but Galileo changed the world.  When earlier scientists encountered evidence inconsistent with what the Roman Church taught them about an earth-centered universe, they just puzzled over why their evidence must have been in error.  Galileo changed all that — gathering and sharing the telescopic observations and thereby ushering in a Scientific Revolution.  He was darn-near burned at the stake by the Church for doing so.  One historian has suggested that the astounding scientific and technological progress of the last few hundred years — and thus the ensuing prosperity of the modern Western world — would have been greatly delayed without him.   (Two good books on these topics:  Galileo’s Daughter and The Birth of Plenty).

For a while, at least, Pisa was the center of Galileo’s universe.  So it was fun to imagine that Galileo himself had wandered around Pisa’s Tower Square just about like I did — only five-hundred years earlier, and with a lot “weightier” things on his mind.

 

Cuba (Part 9) El Bloqueo

April 13, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

A brief, mostly-nonphotographic post before I finish the Cuba photography series.  It’s impossible to spend a couple of weeks thinking about Cuba in the year 2012 without some focus on the 50-year-old American trade and travel embargo.

The most popular and controversial topic in American-Cuban relations is of course the U.S. “embargo.”  American laws put in place mostly by President Kennedy still bar much trade and travel with Cuba.  The Cubans call it “El Bloqueo” (“the blockade”).  Castro complains about it regularly, using it to demonize the U.S.A. and to justify his own harsh policies.  As you leave the Havana Airport, the Cuban government has a big billboard that says, “Bloqueo.  El genocidio mas largo de la historia,” which means “The longest genocide in history.”  The second “o” in Bloqueo is a noose.  Though this is obviously ridiculous hyperbole, a lot of the world has taken Castro’s side – criticizing America for keeping the embargo in place.  Even the Pope recently popped off about it, feeding Castro’s Communist propaganda machine by criticizing the American laws as “unfairly burdening” Cubans.

The U.S. (including our current President) has consistently said the embargo will remain in place until the Castro regime yields to a democratic system.  There is much legitimate debate about its effectiveness, its rationale, its continued relevance and its potential counter-productive effects, but at this point we are at least standing behind our word on this.

Importantly, whatever you think about the continuing rationale for a 50-year-old embargo, it is not to blame for Cuba’s economic woes.  In the 21st century, it should be painfully obvious that the sources of Cuba’s problems are its socialist economic policies and its un-democratic political system.  As The Economist recently reported, “The American embargo is an irritant, but the economy’s central failing is that Fidel’s paternalistic state did away with any incentive to work, or any sanction for not doing so.”  (Let this be a lesson to us here, too.)

Remember:  Cuba can and does trade freely with every other country on earth, and the U.S. actually does provide much-needed food to Cuba (we’re already its biggest source of food).  So scapegoating America for Cuba’s situation is mostly a Castro-regime P.R. strategy (for which many America-bashers and socialism sympathizers have gladly fallen).  It’s not as though Cuba has lots of surplus goods to sell the U.S. – or lots of money with which to buy American goods.  The reason Cuban people do without lots of basic items is because their government jobs pay them almost nothing, and their government-run stores won’t sell many foreign goods anyway.  Otherwise, Cubans would be buying Chinese-made goods just like we do.  Cuba already has a tourist industry servicing Canadians and Germans and Brits.  If American tourists were allowed to go, they’d soon learn that the Cuban-government-operated hotel facilities did not compare favorably against the many other options in the Caribbean.  It’s Cuba’s own Communist/socialist policies that prevent, e.g., Spanish-based Iberostar Hotels or Canada-based Four Seasons Group from opening hotels and resorts there.  Unless Cuba changes its own policies – including allowing foreign investors to own and develop resorts, factories, stores and commercial farms — removing “El Bloqueo” wouldn’t make much difference.

The best argument for lifting the blockade may be simply that its continuation gives Castro and other eager America-bashers a convenient, misleading scapegoat for Cuba’s socialism-induced economic quagmire.  But compromising one’s plans and principles because one’s foes have condemned them seems to be a ludicrous foundation for foreign policy.  Of course Cuba is no longer the security threat it was in the 1960s, but the leadership and the political and economic systems in place there haven’t really changed.  Lifting the embargo might help make Cuba’s Communist Socialist system a bit more palatable to its citizens, but that may actually prolong the regime’s existence.  Changing Cuba is going to be Cuba’s responsibility; we just need to make it very clear that we’ll gladly change our policy when they change theirs.

Cuba (Part 7) Education and “Patriotism”

April 9, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

No. 7 in a series that started here. 

Basic education in Cuba is pretty good (at least by developing-world standards).  The school buildings aren’t great, but since labor is cheap and other opportunities are limited, there are plenty of teachers.

In some senses, education – specifically medical education – is now one of Cuba’s biggest exports.  A deal with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has sent about 30,000 Cuban doctors and healthcare workers to oil-rich Venezuela; in exchange, Cuba gets $3-4 billion worth of oil every year.  Cuba pays those doctors around $300 per year and Venezuela pays Cuba $100,000 or more each for their services.  It’s a big part of what’s keeping the Cuban government and economy afloat.  Unfortunately, Cubans can make more money peddling cokes or souvenirs to tourists in the streets than they can by becoming doctors, so it’s hard to imagine how this setup will survive.

_JJC0646.jpg_JJC0624.jpg_JJC0697.jpg_JJC0470.jpg_JJC6533.jpg_JJC9217.jpg

I got lots of pictures of school kids.  The big green doors are a Havana school.  The two boys sitting in a schoolhouse doorway are in Trinidad (notice the all-too-typical gaping hole in the building right at the entrance).  That little girl with no uniform is a preschooler, standing in front of a two-room rural schoolhouse (you can see the edge of it on the right side of the frame).  The close-up shots with pale blue backgrounds are on the porch of that school.

The uniforms are in fact “uniform” across the entire country.  Those “neckerchiefs” seemed to be a nice touch, but my inquiries about the significance of the different colors revealed that the scarves signified the kids’ enrollment and participation in the “Pioneers” group.  Their slogan (which the school kids have to chant as their “pledge of allegiance”) begins:  “Pioneers for Communism.”  Suddenly the neckerchiefs weren’t nearly as endearing.

 

 

Actually, the long form of that slogan is “Pioneers for Communism; we will be like Che.”  “Che” is Che Guevara, who was a key leader in the 1950s revolution that put the Castros and Communists in power.   Lots of propaganda and patriotic discourse in Cuba focus on “La Revolucion,”  which seems to frame Cubans’ political thinking as “Are you better off now than you were fifty-four years ago?”  Contrasting the Castro regime to the 1950s Cuba with an even-worse previous leader/dictator (Batista) yields far more favorable comparison than comparing the current regime against all the progress and possibilities of 21st-century capitalism and democracy.  That focus is reinforced with the ever-present iconic image of  Che Guevara.  That picture is everywhere.  Everywhere.

Other government slogans and billboards (often painted on the sides of buildings — even residential buildings) refer to “Defendiendo Socialismo” (defending socialism), or to the evils of capitalism.  The Castros apparently don’t see the irony in the fact that those signs mostly stand amid dilapidation and squalor brought about by 50 years in a system that saps all signs of initiative, effort, ambition or personal responsibility.

There are also a lot of signs about the neighborhood “CDRs” – Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which serve the happy purpose of monitoring every person on every block to ferret out any potential “counter-revolutionary” activity.

Another pervasive “patriotic” theme is the slogan:  “Patria o Muerte.”  See, for example, the billboard in the picture below.  “O Muerte” means “or death.”  Literally, “Patria” means “homeland” or “motherland,” but the term seems synonymous with patriotic loyalty.  Someone remarked that the phrase arguably paralleled American slogans like “Live free or die,” or “Give me liberty or give me death.”  But the Cuban version says nothing about freedom or liberty, and when the phrase is paired with images of a military-clad leader who ruled the country under a one-party Communist regime for 50 years, the message seems completely the opposite.

_JJC0367.jpg_JJC3048.jpg_JJC3064.jpg_JJC3236.jpg_JJC1935.jpg

(Yes, that’s me in front of the Patria o Muerte billboard, so No, I didn’t take that picture.   That last image — with Che Guevara’s face on the side of the building — is at Revolution Square, which is the area that’s the center of the federal government.  You’re not supposed to take pictures of government buildings, but this one is an exception.  In the process of trying to get some basic, touristy pictures of the big monument in the Square and of the big Che and Fidel portraits, though, I had three different police officers blow their whistles at me.  Apparently the rule (that day) was that I had to be standing across a street from whatever I was taking a picture of.  I wound up with only crappy pictures, but at least I’m not sleeping in a Cuban hoosegow.)

 

The Phoenix Rises!

December 14, 2011 by Jeff C | Comments Off

If I remember my mythologies correctly, the phoenix is a creature that rises triumphantly from the ashes of its predecessor.

Recall that my car recently (and spectacularly) burned to a crisp.  Ouch.  With insurance check in hand, I set out to find a replacement — generally looking for one of similar vintage, color, mileage, etc., because I had loved the old one and hoped to keep it forever.  Well, I’m back on the road.  Crazy part?  The replacement I found is the hotrod version (SL55), so I’ve got (pointlessly) 493 horsepower raring to go, which will really come in handy with my drag racing.  I guess I’ll name it Phoenix.  (Are cars supposed to have girl names like boats?  And is Phoenix a boy name or a girl name anyway?)

Costa Rican Streets

November 22, 2011 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I was in rural Costa Rica recently.  Driving the roads, you can’t help but notice the basic and primitive transportation often used by many of the locals:  Old, stripped-down cars, kids holding grocery sacks and riding on the handlebars of their parents’ bikes, motorcycles with no lights, and “worse.”  That’s all far from ideal, but despite what we would view as evidence of poverty, the country seems happy and vibrant and is making progress.  I suspect our roads (maybe our country more generally) looked and felt about like this 80 years ago.

That kind of transportation would be illegal in the U.S. today.  We effectively tell our poor people that if they can’t afford a car with three-point seatbelts, emissions controls, liability insurance and a government-certified infant carseat, they’ll just have to stay home or walk.  And then we’re frustrated that the poor have trouble “getting anywhere” in America.