Casa del Sol, Arizona

Amid snowstorms, desert rain, a wake, drowsy U.S. Customs officers and a grieving family, I am back in the States. There's a lot to tell, and a lot of time to tell it. Just about a week ago I was still La Habana--Cuba being "the great unknown" of my farewell post almost a month ago. For those who worried when my "three weeks" stretched on & on, I don't apologize. We must get used to trusting each other again, even if I don't have a cell phone number. I'll arrive. And then I'll leave again.

Goddamn there are a lot of cars in this country. In the next few days I'll be hitting the keyboard hard, transferring many of these cuentos out of the notebook and out into internetlandia. There's several gigs of pictures to post as well.

Cuba? Well, Castro's Cuba is a crapshoot, the hardest traveling I've ever done in my life. Bartek was right, I wrote more in three weeks than I had in a month and a half up to that point, I think. I had to write small to make it fit. There's a lot to say. I'll be posting a series of articles on Cuba very soon, along with the fotos. I'm also working on melting down the 24 hours of audio I recorded on the road into the "ambient mixtape:" street sounds, church choirs, footsteps, horsesteps, street musicians, poems, interviews, stories, shouting, evangelical preaching, arguments, waterfalls, ocean whispering, it's all there.

I'm back a little earlier than expected, that's true. My grandmother passed away while I was still living in La Habana, I got out of the country as soon as I was able and rushed back for our family's wake. She is the last of my elders to go. It's up to us to continue the story now. Read about this amazing woman, the kind that's rare to find anymore.

Hasta pronto.