. . . . Got home about 8 PM mid-last week, later than expected, since the transfer flight back to JFK from Havana, got delayed in Fort Lauderdale, while passengers sat enplaned on the runway for an hour. But otherwise things were fine.
So interesting: in Cuba nobody among the multitudes with whom interaction was inevitable, had even heard of anyone who had covid in the last year +. It was quite different in the first year and a half, which also had a strict curfew all that time. By now everybody has been vaccinated, though supposedly their own vaccine isn't as good as 'ours' -- but Cuba wasn't allowed to get 'our' vaccines. Shoot, the previous made certain Cuba wasn't even allowed to purchase syringes. Also all interaction was outdoors. All of it, except the occasional restaurant meal (with very little available -- forget 'choice' -- and in the room to sleep.
Everyone was more than pleasantly surprised -- and so pleased -- to see Tierra Sagrada -- which they, no more than el Vaquero -- had any idea was going to happen out of those spiritual events of January, 2020.
Though things are tougher than one can even begin to imagine there, it was also energizing, despite the determination of every Cuban to get out of dodge however and whenever they can.
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. . . . Something else that happened due to Cuba, is that I finally found it impossible not to retire forever and completely from the flip fone universe and enter that of the smart phone. El V's had his iphone forever -- but it was second hand -- gifted -- in the first place, so he way, way upgraded, despite his dislike of Apple ... but he's had one long enough he's now comfy with it, at least as iphone ios universe. At the same time he was doing that he got me a Samsung Android, so we both could communicate via whatsapp from Cooba, which is the only way. Surprising to me, I liked the phone a lot -- intuitive in a way I never could parse the Tablet, which is still sitting here doing nothing for a year. Maybe I'll give the Tablet another shot. But ultimately, if I have now gone so far down the constant surveillance and sale of my personal data to have a smart phone, I see no reason for the Tablet, which is a whole lot more awkward to hold and handle than the phone is. I dunno.
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. . . . The 4th we went uptown to mourn the End of Democracy USA and welcome in our SCOTUS 6 Opus Dei Oligarchy. It's official. We are Russia. Mourning together in company, with delicious food and terrific company, was better than cowering at home. The young white cadres have made all public life a risk, to put it mildly, whether on the subway, at a theater, in school, a nightclub, a park, in church, a parade, just walking on the sidewalk, sitting on one's stoop. It's worked so well in tandem with weaponizing covid to keep us all terrified and hiding. Easy to take over now, right-o.
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Best solo reading this last week: Tom Holland's Persian Empire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (2005). It's going so well with our recently completed read aloud to each other Landmark edition of Histories of Herodotus, and the embarkation of the Landmark Xenophon Anabasis. Kind of getting a handle on these eras. This is when Greece, particularly Athens, was embarking on the new thinking for which it has been lauded ever since, from philosophy, to history, to science, to art, poetry and theater.
Maybe ... it was that of Persia into Greek settlements along Lydia, the islands and even excursion into hinterland, that did this? Along the other hardly to be comprehended Persian conquest of Egypt, seldom occupied by a foreign power, and never held held by one.
Well, in the end, in not many centuries Egypt will be ruled by the Hellenes themselves, in some form, the successors of Alexander -- even if the Athenians considered the Macedonians as much barbarians as the Persians -- and everyone else who wasn't a Hellene. Why yes, in Hellene eyes, the Latins were at least as much barbarians as everyone else. Even if they occupied Greece.
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