Blog Entries

Imagine This

aurora@historica.us — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:00:00 +0100

Imagine you live in a country that has broken free from five centuries of being ruled by others, where the mansions and country clubs have been turned into schools, hospitals, research centers, a country run, at last, for the people who live there. A place where, in the rich soil of solidarity, of all being in it together, creativity flourishes and solutions are found for problems that go unsolved in all those much wealthier countries that are run for profit, because in your country you have the [...]

Shock

aurora@historica.us — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:00:00 +0100

Coming back to capitalism is like walking into a brick wall. It’s like being hurled into the middle ages. It’s like returning from the future to a place where everyone thinks it was just a dream you had and you say, “No really, I was in a country without advertising, where all the doctors are free and anyone who wants to can go to graduate school without going into debt, and people say ‘we’ a lot more than they say ‘I,’ [...]

Don't Worry

aurora@historica.us — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:00:00 +0100

I'm having internet access issues and have been unable to upload text from my laptop. But all is very well. More as soon as I can.

July 5, 2009

aurora@historica.us — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:00:00 +0100

July 5, 2009

Late afternoon, with heavy rain. Everyone within hearing is tuned into Mesa Redonda, the national political commentary program, which is having all day special coverage as we await President Manuel Zelaya's arrival in Tegucigalpa, within the next half hour. In recent days the heat has felt like being hit on the heat with a hot frying pan, a physical weight of heat and [...]

July 1, 2009

aurora@historica.us — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:00:00 +0100

July 1, 2009

Today I met Conchita Campa, director of the Carlos Finlay Institute, inventor of Cuba's meningitis vaccine, one of two women in the politburo and a passionate advocate of natural medicine—also a friend of my father's. She came to fetch me at CIREN in order to bring me to the Institute, where she had arranged for me to eat in their macrobiotic cafeteria. After weeks of atrocious food at CIREN, slabs [...]

June 25, 2009

aurora@historica.us — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:00:00 +0100

June 25, 2009

This week the hardships, the logistical hassles and scarcities that are part of Cuban life have been a big part of our lives. A week ago I flushed the toilet and sewage came up through the shower drain. The septic tank for the building is full, and our bathroom is closest to it--but there's only one sewage removal truck for the entire city of Havana, and it's sent according to the priorities that are dec [...]

Progress Reports-- June 16, 2009

aurora@historica.us — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:00:00 +0100

June 16, 2009

Well fed turns out to be an exaggeration. At night, in the warm, damp air, I listen to the nurses talking about how they can't do birthday parties for their kids, how one mother made macaroni salad for her son, and then he invited people over and they ate up a whole bow [...]

Progress Reports-- June 16, 2009

aurora@historica.us — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:00:00 +0100

June 16, 2009

Two Weeks Worth of Blog!

aurora@historica.us — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:00:00 +0100

May 30, 2009
We start the day at 6:30 AM, in a lovely accessible bed and breakfast in Cambridge, Mass, and by 7:30 are loading all our nine bags and my power wheelchair into taxi for our Air Canada flight to Montreal.� Our driver is a laid off hotel manager turned taxi driver, the fourth Moroccan to help us on our journey.� When we get to Air Canada's desk, they ask if we'd like to go on an earlier flight with a larger cargo bay for my chair, so we take off for the 38 minute flight over New [...]

Report from Cuba

aurora@historica.us — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:00:00 +0100

Hi folks. I've been having some technical problems, but have emailed my posts to my brother to see if he can post them for me.� I am near the end of a week of medical testing, and have also visited both ACLIFIM the association of� disabled people, and CENESEX which does work on sexuality and gender, HIV prevention,� sex education and powerful work on "sexual diversity" including very powerful lesbian, gay, bi and� trans liberation work.� It's been absolutely amazing.� Lots of Venezuelans here [...]

Cuba Blog 1

aurora@historica.us — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:00:00 +0100

Monday, May 4, 2009

10:45 am. Social Security Office, Berkeley, CA

It takes an hour and half, even with the help of a very friendly social worker, to fill out all the paperwork on my application for disability benefits and Medicare.� I turned fifty-five in February and the premiums on my already costly insurance shot up to $1200 a month.� Even with all my papers in order and clear evidence that I have not been able to wor [...]

Memorial

aurora@historica.us — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:00:00 +0100

(This poem was written in 2003 for the Middle East Children's Alliance. I reposted it in response to todays news from Gaza.)�

Memorial

In my grandmother's village there were no olive groves.

When the soldiers came, it was through fields of wheat�

that the children ran, and my young cousins bloomed

like a sudden crop of red poppies among the pale stalks. May, 1942.

Among the crimes of war, what a tiny handful of deaths that was.�

[...]

My first published poem

aurora@historica.us — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:00:00 +0100

The island of Mona is in the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. �It's a lima-bean shaped piece of coral seabed that got lifted 200 feet into the air, it has a plateau full of sinkholes and riddled with caves, covered with aromatic brush full of lizards, wild goats, birds and giant iguanas. �Sand has piled up over the millennia and made a slightly moister lowland of palms, shade trees and clouds of butterflies, where the single brackish spring rises. In the sparkling, [...]

A Travelers' Guide to OtheRico

aurora@historica.us — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:00:00 +0100

(Introducing the OtheRicans Anthology at the Puerto Rican Studies Association meetings in San Juan. PR, Oct 2, 2008)

�� I was born where Barrio Rubias of Yauco meets Barrio Indiera Baja of Maricao, where half a century before my birth, hurricane San Ciriaco ripped t [...]

Resurrection: Louisiana Wetlands, 2005

aurora@historica.us — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:00:00 +0100

for Kerry St. Pé

Polypodia, the many-footed fern
stands on the broad limbs of the live oaks
like armies, like breadlines
waiting for rain.
Bent, brown, dead-looking,
thirsty at the side of the road,
no-one looks at them.

But when the rain comes,
resurrection fern
springs up in a green mass
of strong backs and arched fronds
making leaf out of water
and the reservoirs of hope
hidden in their wiry root [...]

Wings

aurora@historica.us — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:00:00 +0100

Cuba y Puerto Rico son Cuba and Puerto Rico
de un pájaro las dos alas. are the two wings of one bird,
Reciben flores y balas receiving flowers and bullets
en el mismo corazon. into the same heart.

Lola Rodriguez de Tió

Two wings of one bird said the exiled poet
whose words burned too many holes of truth
through the colonial air of a different iron-toothed occupa [...]

Three Messages from my Body

aurora@historica.us — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:00:00 +0100

JUNE 30TH

My wheelchair is an exoskeleton protecting the soft body offatigue. I get out of bed, walking slowly on my curved foot and my overworked one; the foot that cramps and aches and curls inward onto its edge trying to figure out where it is, to reconnect, and the foot that does more than its share and gets tired, the heroic and sullen foot that steps in to carry the limp. My whole body aches and trembles with what people call fatigue as if it [...]