Common Sense and Whiskey

Churches - Wednesday HDRs

It's gotten to be a little project lately. Anytime we're visiting somewhere new I try to pop into a local church and get enough shots to put together an HDR photo. Since churches aren't places to be big and brash and American, coming in, taking over and spreading out with a tripod, these usually have to be hand held brackets and some are more successful than others. They all seem to require substantial processing.

Here are some from a few of our last trips. Click them all to make them bigger. They're from Havana, Cuba, St. Helena Island, Panama City, Panama and Riga, Latvia.

See them all, along with 380 other HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And if any of them catches your fancy you can see more photos in the Cuba, St. Helena, Panama and Latvia galleries. All these were shot with Nikon cameras, processed in Photomatix with various Nik plug-ins and finished in Photoshop.

 

Antique Trains - More Wednesday HDRs from Havana

It's not just old cars that Havana's famous for. Check out these trains. Click 'em to make 'em much bigger, and see all the Cuba photos at Earthphotos.com.

A Catholic Wednesday HDR

Il Papa is in Havana today to celebrate mass at Revolución Square in the Vedado neighborhood outside downtown. Revolución Square is dominated by a graceless 358 foot tall monument to Cuban independence hero Jose Marti. It's safe to say that the Catedral de la Virgen María de la Concepción Inmaculada de La Habana on Cathedral Square is a lot prettier.

Click it to make it much bigger. From the Cuba Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Gee, Nowadays Everybody’s Going to Cuba

Over the weekend there were features on CNN, BBC and in the Financial Times about Cuba, and now MSNBC has a live hour from Cathedral Square in Havana all this week.

A couple of weeks ago our local paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran a story in its sports section about a trip to a baseball game in Havana. Oh, and the Pope is in town.

Here's a banner welcoming the Pope that hangs ouside the Catedral de la Virgen María de la Concepción Inmaculada de La Habana (Cathedral of The Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception) in Old Havana.

And below, the Cathedral itself.

Check out the Cuba Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. We're populating it with photos from our trip earlier this month. There are something around forty there now.

 

 

Stuck in the Sixties - Wednesday HDRs from Havana

These Havana photos have been a lot of fun to work on. Click each to make them bigger. There are three dozen photos up now in the Cuba Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Probably will be another dozen or so. See also the HDR Gallery.

The Revolucion, 2012, Havana, Cuba.

The Cuba photos are coming, a few a day. They're in the Cuba Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. There are around twenty there now.

In case you prefer, they're also going up on in a new set on Flickr. They'll appear more slowly there than on EarthPhotos, though.

Wednesday HDR - Back from Havana Version

There's just about no internet in Cuba. No internet cafés, no internet in private homes. There's slow internet in hotel public areas, but we opted not to spend the time squeezing photos through the wires, so we have lots to catch up on about Cuba.

And there's lots to say, but I'd rather not be hasty. I want to let all our impressions steep for a few days before I make my inevitable brash and presumptious generalizations about the lot of the Cuban people. It'll come, over time.

For today, here's one of the first photos I've posted to the new Cuba Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Keep an eye on that gallery. It'll grow steadily over the next few weeks.

We've all heard there are old cars like this in Hanava. What's surprising is how many there are - just hundreds upon hundreds. Many, many more than I expected. Click this photo to get a much bigger version.

This shot comes from multiple exposures of a single RAW, shot with a Nikon D-700, combined in Photomatix & finished in CS5 with Nik tools, including my new favorite, Viveza 2. If you like this, you might check out 365 other HDRs in theEarthPhotos.com HDR Gallery.

Just Back from Cuba. Photos Coming....

Click it to make it bigger.

Not Getting Enough Mail? Join a Trip to Cuba

Let's pretend Google didn't already have all 10,467 searches I've done, listed day by day, back to February 2006. How else might I disclose personal information to strangers?

Consider a trip to Cuba.

Here's what came in the mail when we signed up to join a Person to Person exchange trip to Cuba. You'll get things like a Participant Profile Check-List and questionnaire, agreement and release forms, travel affidavit including liability release statement and air travel application.

Send those, money and various photocopies of passports, and you'll get back more goodies:

 

You'll get a visa, air charter tickets, a license to travel to Cuba from the Department of Treasury, a letter of authorization to travel to Cuba, hotel reservations and the booklet Cuba: What you need to know about U.S. sanctions against Cuba from the U. S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

I've set this to publish on Monday, which is a travel day back to the farm for us. We ought to have much more from Cuba, including photos, any time now.

 

Imagining Our Tour Group to Cuba - South Beach Edition

We're lurking here at dusk tonight on a trendier-than-we-are South Beach in Miami, imagining the people we'll be with for our group tour to Cuba. Due to the restrictions I've written about, we'll be two of a party of nineteen for a weekend in Havana, starting tomorrow.

We're due to meet in a pre-dawn queue at concourse G Level 2 at the Sky King charter desk. Since we're new at the group tour thing, it's fun to consider how our group will get along. Here are my predictions, and we'll see how they stack up when we get back.

The short version is, all of us will become BFFs, compete in bitter high school personality politics, or something in between. I bet against the BFF scenario. Really, this group travel thing is so new to us that I don't know. Heading for our 106th country tomorrow, we've never once traveled with an organized group.

We've snickered alongside them, mind you. Especially at the little Asian packs that huddle together at every monument worth its salt anywhere in the world.

Besides us there will be seventeen. So I'll say, oh, seven of the seventeen will be somehow Cuban-related. No more, because relatives of Cubans have other avenues to visit the island. So the Cuban-related ones will be people, maybe, whose late mother or best friend was Cuban. The rest of us will be Americans, or mixed Latino/American couples. Of these remaining ten, all will be fairly well traveled, since Cuba takes some determination for Americans to see.

None of these people will be from anywhere besides America, since everybody from anywhere else in the world can already go to Cuba and needn't go through this Person to Person process. The Americans may come from anywhere across the country, all funneled through here in Miami, and no one will be on their first trip abroad. This package is priced to rule out youngsters, so our seventeen new friends will be mostly 40-plus.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio calls these trips "outrageous tourism, which, quite frankly, borders on indoctrination of Americans by Castro government officials." He may have my tender, indoctrinatable mind in mind. But I doubt it.

Anyway, I'll bet there will be at least two or three who will be acolytes of the revolucion. And the Castro fans - well, it's too late for the Senator to reach them. I suspect they'll thrill to the iconic Che signs and come back laden with revolutionary memorabilia.

Not saying there's anything wrong with that. I may do the same, especially if I spy a nice Che beret kind of thing. It'll go well beside my small collection of Afghan pakols, those caps that look like rolled up burlap that you'll find on the discerning Talabani, and which required determined hunting in the Istanbul Grand Bazaar.

Did you know they're adjustable to head size, by the way? I bought my collection of three in the shop of a gentleman who explained how to make your pakol larger or smaller. He assured me the finest pakols are made in Kandahar, where all his were from. You truly can buy anything in the Istanbul bazaar.

But I digress.

I imagine our indoctrinee(s) as female, and we'll have to see which of the other leftish stereotypes they'll display. While we're political, here, there will surely be at least a couple of crusty old conservative bastards and their wives, since our country is full of them nowadays, and it'll be fun to try to surreptitiously set up conflict between them and the Che girl(s).

In any group of seventeen I guess there are sure to be one or two complainers. Somebody will be too hot because, by George, it's 84 degrees. Somebody else will be on the trip unwillingly.

"George was determined to come down here. I told him he was crazy. They don't have toilet paper down here! Didn't I George? I said, who wants to go to Cuba? But did he listen? Did you George? George never listens."

So this will be fun. Maybe. Our plan is to be quiet, and be nice. And see what happens. Check back.

Weekend in Havana

Individual, get-on-a-plane-and-go-to-Cuba travel isn't yet available to Americans. But along with seventeen people we haven't yet met, we're off on Thursday to Havana.

flightstats.com listed arrivals at Jose Marti airport (HAV) yesterday from Canada, Mexico, Panama City, Peru, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Argentina, Russia, France, Venezuela, Italy, Spain and Germany. In fact, a Cuban American with family in Havana wrote me, "We were in Old Havana for Christmas and I felt my cousins were the only Cubans walking around in the city! Everyone else was either European or Chinese!"

It's a long-lasting legacy of 1960s politics that Americans can't travel freely to Cuba. More precisely, Americans can't spend money there without an Office of Foreign Assets Control license from the U.S. Treasury Department, as codified in the Treasury Department's Cuban Assets Control Regulations.

A small Treasury Department booklet subtitled "What you need to know about U.S. sanctions against Cuba" came with our travel documents.

•••••

The Obama administration has resumed a program of "Person to Person" exchanges begun in the Clinton administration and suspended for the Bush years. Charter flights resumed last August.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control issues "Person to Person licenses" to organizations.  Individuals may then travel with these organizations under their licenses.

But not merely for a few days at the beach. These licensed tour groups must develop "a full-time schedule of educational exchange activities that will result in meaningful interaction between the travelers and individuals in Cuba."

There's never been a time when you couldn't visit Afghanistan or the Axis of Evil countries of Iran, Iraq and North Korea, if you could get a visa. Never mind that. The anti-Castro community, led by Florida Representative Iliana Ros-Lehtinen (who was born in Havana and represents Miami and the Keys), and Florida Senator Marco Rubio (who wasn't), is adamant about keeping Americans out of Cuba.

In trying to limit American travel, the anti-Castro lobby keeps the pressure on about that "full-time schedule of educational exchange activities," apparently on the theory that for Americans, a vacation without quality beach time isn't worth taking.

So Cuba travel providers must stick to itineraries that, in our case for example, take us to "Sociocultural Project Cabildo Quisicuaba" and the Literacy Museum, among other places. One email gently reminded us to "please remember that full participation on your program is required."

It's the price of seeing Cuba before the arrival of American mass tourism, and we've judged that it's worth paying. We'll just have to see if we're right.

This whole travel-to-Cuba exercise may have more allure than it ought to for Americans, to whom it's so long been forbidden. We may just turn up to find a decaying revolucion helped along by the usual torpor of the tropics, and not much more.

But I hope there's more. My Cuban American friend wrote, "Just to get a glimpse of Havana is worthwhile - you can still see her beauty."

In any case, we've got to go and see, and we'll report here. After a day of educational exchange activities on Thursday, when the full moon rises over Havana's Malecon on Thursday night, you'll find me on the terrace of the Nacional Hotel enjoying one more little forbidden thrill - a hand-rolled Cuban cigar.

(One note, though - online reviews suggest the internet is maddeningly slow in Havana. So CS&W may be forced into temporary radio silence for four days starting Thursday.)

This'll Be Fun. No Really....

I could have killed an entire group of feeble old people. I mean, grabbed them, walkers and canes and all, and tossed them one by one over the side. It was on the Norwegian coastal steamer, the Hurtigruten, and all I wanted was a  cup of morning coffee before we left the ship.

No big deal. I'll take that in a paper cup. Don't need a stirrer. I don't need a top or one of those insulating grips for the side. Just a single bloody cup of black coffee.

But I was queued behind 39 elderly group tourists who, God bless 'em, had SAVED ALL THEIR LIVES FOR THIS, and who, for some reason, because they weren't in Toledo, or Wichita, or wherever it was they came from, but on their TRIP OF A LIFETIME in A FOREIGN LAND, were way beyond their abilities in a cafeteria line.

They had the same keen grasp of logistics and situational awareness as the guy in front of you in the grocery checkout who doesn't help bag the groceries, so the poor old bent over clerk does that while he stands there and stares out into space all entitled and bored-looking, and then once it's all done and the clerk says it's $73.19, only then does he think to get out his checkbook.

At the checkout end of the cafeteria line it was like all these people saw these FOREIGN COINS in their hands for the first time and they WEREN'T NICKELS DIMES AND QUARTERS. And one by one, all 39 froze. What were they possibly to do?

Election Year Politics

"This President has taken a very dangerous course with regards to Cuba, saying we're going to relax relations, we're going to open up travel to Cuba. This is the wrong time for that…."

- Mitt Romney in the NBC Debate, 23 January, 2012

Since anything is liable to be said in an election year, and since this remark was tailored to the Florida Latino community, it remains to be seen how fervently Mr. Romney believes what he said, but a couple of questions:

- What's dangerous? Is Governor Romney concerned that Americans might adopt the Cuban revolution as a model for our politics? The Cuban economic model as ours?  Maybe if we talk to the Castros they'll, what, invade? Or maybe if we just give our sixty year policy of economic sanctions and travel restrictions a little more time, it'll work?

- Why is this the wrong time to open up travel to Cuba? Would it have been better ten years ago? Will it be better ten years from now? (In fact, best I can tell, the current "people to people" program was instituted by President Clinton in March 1998, and later restricted by President Bush. The Cubans were even wary of the program at first.)

Governor Romney said it. I'm just asking.

You'd think denying American business access to the Cuban market would rile up the business wing of Mr. Romney's party. And then there's the matter of denying Americans their freedom to travel, for political reasons.

We're going to take advantage of the President's 'dangerous course' while it's available, with a trip to Cuba in March. Watch for reports here on CS&W.

People to People to Cuba

Most of my email after the radio interview Friday was about Cuba. I mentioned that in a couple of months we’ll visit Havana and stay at the venerable Hotel Nacional.

As I understand it, the Clinton administration instituted a “people to people” exchange program, which was suspended by the Bush administration and has now been reinstated.

Certain travel agencies have been approved to conduct these tours and trips resumed last August. In general, the idea is that each trip should include engagement with the Cuban people, so no just-lay-on-the-beach trips are allowed.

•••••

I think sometimes our American hubris leads us to think that because we embargo Cuba it must be neglected, an outcast and a wastrel.

Not so. Flights landed at Jose Marti airport last Saturday from Santiago, Caracas, Cancun, Mexico City, San Salvador, Milan, Moscow, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid (3), Toronto and Panama City (2), among other places.

An American with family in Cuba wrote: “It is unfortunate Americans are the only ones who cannot freely travel to Cuba. We were in Old Havana for Christmas and I felt my cousins were the only Cubans walking around the city! Everyone else was either European or Chinese.

I have reservations about traveling with a group (could be up to 16). That's something we’ve never done. But we ultimately decided seeing Cuba while it’s still free of American cars and Chick-Fil-As has enough caché to try it.

We’ll see if we’re right.

Government Sanctioned Photo Trip to Cuba

Photographers who fancy a trip to Cuba: Painet, the picture resource service for photo buyers, sends this, which I pass along in its entirety:

"Successful travel and stock photographer Bill Bachmann will be directing another Cuba Photo Mission from March 28th thru April 9th, 2010. This trip is Bill's third 13-day directed trip with the opportunity to see time stand still in Cuba from the 1950's before the embargo started. This will be a wonderful opportunity to take photos of all the old Classic 50s autos, colorful people, colorful music, and fabulous old buildings before the embargo gets lifted and Cuba changes forever.

His group will have a special Humanitarian Visa to fly directly via 45-minute charter American Eagle flight to/from Miami to Havana. Bill has traveled extensively throughout Cuba four times and several Painet shooters just returned from a wonderful adventure with his last trip in October, 2009. The price is right and we also will bring much-needed medical supplies to this colorful country and people.

This trip will fill up quickly, so for more information, look at Bill's website www.billbachmann.com . Bill is on assignment this month in Tunisia in the Sahara Desert, so if you want all the information about the trip, email him at his traveling email billbachmann@yahoo. com and he will get back with you with the itinerary, pricing, and all other information. This is a rare opportunity, so don't pass it up."

Havana in Pictures

The folks at Painet have made me aware of a photographic trip to Cuba in October that's apparently okay with the U.S. government. Florida based photographer Bill Bachmann leads the trip. His portfolio. The offer.