Cuba Impressions

In 2009, Will and I went on a trip which changed us.  It put things into perspective.  When living here, one can easily slip into the idea that this is the reality.  However, less than 100 miles of the coast of the United States is an Island Country, Cuba, which still exists free of the colonization of Spain, France and the United States -- the latest being the sugar industry and mobsters turning Cuba into their playground.  Cuban people have seen the worst of the worst empires have to offer.  In the Sixties, I remember the Cuban Missle Crisis, hearing about it in my Government Class.  Later in the late Sixties, I began to study about Cuba.  It became a role model country as America began to reveal itself in the youth revolutions around the war in Viet Nam.  It was a role model because it successfully waged a revolution and freed themselves from the bonds of colonialism.  Cuba is intriguing to our generation.

In 2009, we learned through Steve Wake's Documentary Film about a Nikkei group which visits Nikkei in Cuba.  Check out "Under the Same Moon."  That is a Japanese phrase which alludes to family, or deep friendships, separated by miles, and the steadfastness and longing of that separation, to be together, gazing up at the moon, and comforted, and hopeful for reunion -- under the same moon.

Will and I are going to be talking about our Cuban experience and our Cuban familia in our friend Jim Garcia's class.  At the same time, our good friend Noboro Miyazawa, has invited us to Cuba in 2014 to celebrate with the nation the first Japanese to reach Cuba, 400 years ago before it was blasted open and forced to live in a Western dominated era. 

Here is Cuba Expressions, and if you peruse earlier blogs, I have written about Cuba with longing and love.

vimeo.com/9090821