The Kid Explained

Sharing a table in Cuba, the Day of The Kid, we were sitting in a restaurant called La Redacción, formerly a Bautista-days newspaper office in 400-year-old Trinidad. The Kid and the salt & pepper shakers propped up the napkins on our table. The Kid stared me down. I saw “LA REDACCIÓN” upper-cased across his typewriter’s paper table. Out loud, I said I liked that. The Kid beat us home to Oregon.

So Cuba: in 2015, the government provided everybody free food, free education, free healthcare, a free roof over la cabeza, and a monthly stipend worth about $24 USD. Working for a living optional.

The Cuban government also provided a good-as-free ferry across Havana Bay. At the Havana-side terminal, three uniformed men guarded with machine guns, collected fares and served as ferry deck hands. The ferry was a steel barge about 40’ X 30’wide. We boarded through a single-wide steel door which was locked behind the 100 or so Cubanosand touristas with whom we took the 5-minute ride. Looking back at Havana through heavily-screened windows, we realized our ferry was – no question - a death trap.

Returning from the Hershey Train side of the bay, the uniformed man who unblinkingly extorted from tourists a greatly exaggerated return fare, stuffed the bills in his shirt pocket fast as he could.

So the machine guns on the Havana side. The story is, some years earlier, that same scary ferry’d been hijacked to Miami.

Tourism is going nuts in Cuba. Huge capital is being invested by somebody to restore all the crumbling pre-Castro Spanish Colonial architecture in Old Havana. In 2015, there was virtually no crime and not much more spoken English. But The Kid. Maybe someday, somebody in The Cloud will tell me who The Kid is.